QUOTING RANCIèRE he writes better then me

Art and politics are not two terms that would be linked through some form of representation. They are constituted as such in the same knot of the visible, the sayable and the thinkable, in the same framing of a common space where some practices appear to be named "arts" and some matters to be viewed of as "political".

Art is not political owing to the messages and feelings that it carries on the state of social and political issues. It is not political owing to the way it represents social structures, conflicts or identities. It is political by virtue of the very distance that it takes with regard to those functions. It is political as it frames a specific space-time sensorium, as it redefines on this stage the power of speech or the coordinates of perception, shifts the places of the actor and the spectator, etc.

The first point to understand is as follows: there is art, in general, to the extent that there is a specific regime of identification. I call a regime of identification of art an articulation between three things: modes of production of objects or of interrelation of actions; forms of visibility of these manners of making and doing ; and manners of conceptualizing these practices and these modes of visibility. These modes of conceptualization are not simply added interpretations. They are conditions of possibility of what artistic practices can produce and what aesthetic gazes can see.

Art is "political", in the aesthetic regime of art, insofar as it is identified within an autonomous form of experience. This regime sets the relationship between the forms of identification of art and the forms of the political community in a way that dismisses in advance any opposition between an autonomous and a heteronomous art, art for art’s sake and art committed to politics, art in the museum and art in the street. Because the "aesthetic autonomy" is not, as the "modernist" paradigm has it, the autonomy of the work of art as such. It is the autonomy of a form of experience. And this autonomous form of experience appears as the principle of the self-formation of a new humanity.