Why is This An Art? / The Love Thermometer

by Margaret Hawkins

July 1, 2025

Julien Creuzet, Venice Biennale installation, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Recently a six-year-old girl named Sophie was taken to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago for the first time. Standing in front of a hanging sculpture by French artist Julien Creuzet, she asked the question that must ring most often in the minds of museum goers everywhere: “Why is this an art?”

The question is brilliant, always appropriate. Its brilliance is two-fold. Fold 1: Why do we regard some objects art and the same or similar ones we do not? Aesthetics, you might answer, but that would be a dodge. Why is Tracy Emin’s unmade bed art and mine is not? Is it more beautiful than mine, or rather, more aesthetically ugly? Ditto, readymades? Is art only art in context and isn’t that terribly classist while pretending not to be? And haven’t we agreed by now that art is for the people? Is every site of disarray involving swirling sheets potentially a work of art? Is everything art, placed in the proper well-lit venue?

Tracy Emin, “My Bed,” 1998. Courtesy of the Tate, London.

Here's another question. Can something that is not recognizable as an expressive interpretation of something else be called art? The answer in the world of visual art is yes, of course. We agreed on this well over a century ago.

But definitions vary from form to form. Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Wolcott was also an accomplished painter, albeit a traditional one who favored seaside views of his native St. Lucia. He clung fiercely to the idea that the job of art is to represent and interpret the real world. For him, mainly a poet and playwright, this meant representing events, ideas, and emotions with words. Which makes sense, for a writer. To most writers, beautiful words without meaning and subject are pointless. So, Fold 2: Intuitive expert at grammar that she is, six-year-old Sophie placed an article in front of her noun, thereby managing also to interrogate the idea of meaningful distinctions between forms. 

Robert Rauschenberg, “Bed,” 1955, oil and pencil on pillow, quilt, and sheet on wood supports, 75 1/4 x 31 1/2 x 8”. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

I am glad these thoughts are being entertained by the youngest generation of Americans. I’m grateful they have enough energy to think about art, and not only about whether there will ever be anything for them to eat, as children today must in some parts of the world. Which brings us to the thoughts of the oldest generation and Donald Trump, art critic, invader, and butcherer of international aid. Our president, who recently celebrated his 79th birthday with a military parade and has established himself a master of public spectacle, has decreed himself arbiter of art. He now decides what plays at the Kennedy Center and what hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. He has expressed a strong preference for realism and patriotic subject matter, in paintings (especially of himself) and in sculpture (as in the parade of statues he has ordered up with NEA money).

It’s amazing to some that Trump is so interested in art, but he at least feigned such interested as far back as when he hung out at Studio 54 and earned a one-line dismissal from Andy Warhol. But it shows how much he knows and cares about gaining power over people’s thoughts. He senses correctly that art, and the freedom it confers, is a powerful rival for hearts and minds. He wants to win, and to do that he’s trying to control human imagination. 

Fortunately, in the long run, that’s not possible. Forcing ideas on people is the exact opposite of art. The whole point of art, as much as, indeed more than beauty, is freedom. Freedom plus beauty equals art. To rein in national art institutions and hobble them with capricious rules about what they can and cannot display is not only bad and dangerous. It’s stupid. Stupid because it’s boring and will not hold our attention. Add imagination to freedom and beauty, though, and you get good art, art that people actually want to look at and think about. Add a bunch of laws and policies and bureaucrats and tanks in the streets and old-timey tropes and you get art that is devoid of substances and complexity — you end up with propaganda.

What is Trump’s motivation for trying to control our imaginations? What does he want to win? Our love! He wants to make us love him. It’s why he’s so slippery. He’ll do anything to keep us paying attention to him. He keeps changing tacks, changing sides, alternately surprising us with roses and threats.

Tim O’Brien, best known as the author of the Vietnam War-themed novel “The Things They Carried,” wrote about the psychology of politics in his fifth novel, “In the Lake of the Woods.” He tells the story of a charismatic but troubled veteran whose fast-track political career craters when secrets emerge about his involvement in the My Lai massacre. Summarizing the psychology of those who run for office, O’Brien writes this: “Politics is a love thermometer.”

The book was published in 1994, but that line could have been written about our current president in 2025. It explains his erratic behavior, based not on principle or pragmatism but on personal need. He’s betting that leading us to the brink of war, then snatching us back, will make him a hero. Everybody loves a hero.

Still from “In the Lake of the Woods,” 1996 film based on Tim O’Brien’s book of the same title.

O’Brien’s book is sad and gruesome, not only for the victims. The grunts conscripted to fight a war staged by cynical politicians lost their lives, too, if without literally dying. Now here we are at risk of entering another war.  

I keep returning to Sophie’s question, which implies another: Why does art matter? The answer is that it may be the most freeing form of resistance.

Margaret Hawkins is a writer, critic and educator. Her books include “Lydia’s Party” (2015), “How We Got Barb Back” (2011) a memoir about family mental illness, and others. She wrote a column about art for the Chicago Sun-Times, was Chicago correspondent for ARTnews, and has written for a number of other publications including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Art & Antiques and Fabrik. She teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Loyola University.

Visit Margaret Hawkins’ website.