Either isn’t art or it is art and cemented in the political, social forms it was created from and thus isn’t “art for art’s sake.”

I do not usually talk about my own family background, but on this occasion I will do so. I will just say one word about my grandfather, who was fine man - a Welsh steel worker and a communist. I was brought up in his house in a proletarian area of Swansea. In that house, there were always books, including Marxist books like Engels’ Anti-Dühring. There was also classical music, especially Italian opera, which the Welsh workers, who were usually good singers, were very fond of.

My grandfather, who introduced me to Marxism when I was still at school, once said something that I have never forgotten. He said: “Nothing is too good for the working class”. Personally, it makes me furious when I hear people, usually middle class people, saying that workers are not interested in culture. The whole of history shows that that is false, and particularly the history of revolutions as I will show.

But you see, this alienation, this division between real life and art this huge separation, which makes many ordinary working class people suspicious of art. “I don’t like this, I don’t like this music, I don’t like opera.” That is because they don’t understand it, and they don’t understand it because they haven’t had the opportunity to get to know it. They have had little or no access to that art. Yet this division between art and life was not always the case. In early society, art was a part of the life, part of the every day life of every man and woman and an important at that.

Let me deal with one idea, one very wrong idea put forward by the bourgeois and petty bourgeois artists: the idea of “art for art’s sake”. This is a very common idea, which considers art as if it was something in the stratosphere, nothing to do with real life, something that exists for itself, in splendid isolation from real life and society. As the great Russian materialist philosopher Chernyshevsky pointed out, that statement is a nonsense. It makes no more sense than “carpentry for carpentry’s sake”.

https://www.socialist.net/art-class-struggle.htm

My post is sarcastic, though mostly commenting on how common political graffiti is but also how graffiti itself is rooted in social forces that prove it can’t exist in a vacuum or be appreciated in a vacuum.