Paint Won’t Stop Him, But That’s Not the Point

Dear Trump, the letter begins, then lays out the fear plainly: that in office he’ll roll back legislation protecting women, that America will take a step backward it may never fully recover from. The signatories are a group of American artists—Nikki Pecasso, Mike Cockrill, Morgan Jesse Lappin, Courtney Frances Fallon, Savannah Spirit, Alexandra Rubinstein, and Annique Delphine—and their answer was an exhibition called Hands Off My Cuntry, which ran in New York in January 2017.

There’s a well-worn argument that art can’t stop anything—that no painting has ever blocked a piece of legislation, that the most powerful protest images in history didn’t prevent the things they were made against. That argument is probably right, and it also misses the point entirely. Art doesn’t stop the tank. It documents that the tank existed. It says: we saw this, we named it, we refused to behave as if it were normal. Sometimes it reminds the people doing the refusing that they aren’t alone.

Revolution begins in the head—I’ve always believed that, or at least wanted to. The work these artists made is confrontational and explicit, the kind of imagery designed to make comfortable people uncomfortable, which is about as much as art can realistically do in a political emergency. Whether it moved anyone who wasn’t already moved is impossible to know. But the impulse to respond rather than just absorb and scroll feels necessary. Especially when what you’re absorbing is an orange man with the nuclear codes who seems genuinely delighted by the fear he causes.