Political Tomato

But that's what I mean - I just replaced "political" by "tomato soup", I coulsd have replaced, "art" by "tomato soup". If everything is called political, you have to eat it, if you like it or not. So you can not have a shit whithout being political. The word loses meaning because it has no definition. Political becomes the overwhelming everything and you can not act politically anymore, it becomes an art market fancy (therefore I found the "overidentification" discussion quite interesting). I repeat, every word changes meaning in its history, but allround use is loss of meaning. I join an image to illustrate abusive use of words (if Stalin is peace, what is peace? If bombs on Iraq are freedom and democracy, what are freedom and democracy?) . I think it is a danger to fall in the trap of authoritarian political discourse by not reflecting words - though the authoritarian discourse does it on purpose.

For me, "political" continues to mean a strategy to defend or regulate a group's or individual's interests inside a given society - whitout any evaluation on the first level -, it means purpose, interest, pragmatics; doing things for political reasons means not doing them for their own sake (political sex could be "make children for the Führer", not for the pleasure of love making, though an also political "love in" is maybe the adequat form of protest against moral restriction).

I also mention that one the most influent artists of the 20th century, Joseph Beuys, did not consider art as political ("Political art is illustration"),  though he was kicked off the academy for a political action. He, on the other hand, brought up the the very idealistic "erweiterter Kunstbegriff" - "the enlarged conception of art", which should have been considered in the discussion (what doesn't mean that I would subscribe that) - and which kind of caused the abusive use of the word "art". One should beware of misunderstanding his mostly wrong quotated "every human is an artist" by omitting "of the social sculpture".