Is good art considered good propaganda?

        On September 11, 2001, there was a coordinated attack on the United States.  The U.S. was hit with a terrorist attack that killed over 3,000 people.   According to Encarta, United States citizens, feeling their country under attack, rallied behind their leaders in a display of national unity, patriotism, and generosity unseen in decades. The country celebrated anew the values of courage and heroism, exemplified by the New York firefighters and rescue workers who unhesitatingly rushed into the World Trade Center towers to save as many people as possible.  After, the attack on our country, President Bush announced a war with the Arab states.  In this photo, the men of the Iraq war can either be portrayed as propaganda or art.  Is this considered good art? Or is this considered good propaganda?  The artist who take these pictures, or draw these paintings, are trying to portray to the people around the world that the men of war are our heroes.  Or is the artist trying to present information in order to influence society?

                Propaganda is a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behavior of large numbers of people. Instead of impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense presents information in order to influence its audience. Art refers to a diverse range of human activities and artifacts, and may be used to cover all or any of the arts, including music, literature and other forms. It is most often used to refer specifically to the visual arts, including media such as painting, sculpture, and printmaking.

            Ono, narrator and main character of “An Artist of the floating world,” suddenly changes the way he paints.  Ono states, “An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it… If the Okada-Shingen is as your claim it is, then it seems to me ill-conceived.  It seems to be founded on a naïve mistake about what art can and can not do’” (172). Ono paints pictures that portray an image of the courtesans. Matsuda, one of Ono’s colleagues, says to him, “It just so happens that some of us care deeply about art and wish to see it responding to the world of today” (173).  One says “my conscience, Sensi, tells me that I cannot remain forever an artist of the floating world’” (180).  Ono is feeling that he is being swayed to change his old way and capture a new way of painting.

        I would say Ono is compromising his integrity to a certain extent.  Ono is being persuaded by Matsuda to change the way he paints.  Matsuda is trying to change Ono’s mind, to make him believe that this is the way of the world now.  He telling him that it is the thing to be patriotic. Matsuda is building the Okada-Shingen to be a place of survival.  It makes it seem, as if, the Okada is where young artist go to open their eyes and create paintings that portray value, that the artist, such as Ono is are responsible for portraying art such as this.  However, it is Ono’s decision if he wants to stay with the Takeda firm or join the Okada-Shingen society.  Ono departs as an artist of the floating world and becomes a member of the Okada-Shingen Society, a society that portrays the heroism of World War II.   I would say that because, Ono is so easily swayed to leave the Takeda firm, he is a man that has can not hold his ground.  Obviously, Ono wasn’t confident that living as an artist of the floating world was right for him, so he decided to paint in which represented his countries best interest. 

         As an artist, I believe that Ono is making the right decision by painting pictures that portray images of propaganda art.  He is sending a message to society that this is what Japan went through, and we are seen as heroes in our eyes, work that can be seen as patriotic.  He wanted to have meaning behind his paintings, and he thought that patriotic painting could send messages to the Japan. Ono believed that by changing the way he painted, he could create some kind of change.  Ono was sending a message to society that good propaganda can be good art.