Section C Guernica was the last great history-painting. It was also the last modem painting of major importance that took its subject from politics with the intention of changing the way large numbers of people thought and felt about power. Since 1937, there have been a few admirable works of art that contained political references—some of Joseph Beuys's work or Robert Motherwell's Elegies to the Spanish Republic. But the idea that an artist, by making a painting or sculpture, could insert images into the stream of public speech, and thus change political discourse has gone, probably for good, along with the nineteenth-century ideal of the artist as public man. Mass media took away the political speech of art. When Picasso painted Guernica, regular TV broadcasting had been in existence for only a year in English and nobody in France, except a few electronics experts, has seen a television set. There were perhaps fifteen thousand such sets in New York City. Television was too crude, too novel, to be altogether credible. The day when most people in the capitalist world would base their understanding of politics on what the TV screen gave them was still almost a generation away. But by the end of World War II, the role of the "was artist" had been rendered negligible by looked like bad, late German Expressionism, or the incontrovertible photographs from Belsen, Majdanek, and Auschwitz? It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still believe, in good faith and without bombast, that art could morally influence the world. Today, the idea has largely been dismissed, as it must be in a mass media society where art's principal social role is to be investment capital, or, in the simplest way, bullion. We still have political art, but we have no effective political art. An artist must be famous to be heard, but as he acquires fame, so his work accumulates "value" and becomes, ipso facto (事实上), harmless. As far as today's politics is concerned, most art aspires to the condition of Muzak. It provides the background hum for power. If the Third Reich had lasted until now, the young bloods of the Inner Party would not be interested in old fogeys like Albert Speer or Arno Breker, Hitler's monumental sculptor; they would be queuing up to have their portraits silkscreened by Andy Warhol. It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say, this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese and one Cambodian. Specific books perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculpture. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920s is that they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naiveté that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.

问答题 What does the writer mean by insert images into the stream of public speech in paragraph 1?

问答题 Where do people in the West nowadays get ideas to form their political opinions, according to the writer?

问答题 Why is the word value in quotation marks in paragraph 3?

问答题 According to the writer, what is the principal social role of art today?

问答题 What does the writer say today's political art provides?