FLASH
Shkruar nga Roland Lami
In the West, the artist can survive without politics because there is a market, industry, professional management, and the economic autonomy of culture. In Albania, many artists know that the market is small, cultural institutions are weak, and success is often seasonal. As a result, power is seen not only as a political influence, but also as a social survival mechanism.
From Plato to modern thinkers, art and politics have been seen as two different ways of exerting influence on society, but often using the same language: emotion, symbol, and the ability to shape the way people perceive reality. For this reason, many scholars have argued that the artistic act is in itself political, because art produces not only aesthetics, but also consciousness, revolt, identity, and new ways of thinking. Likewise, politics has been seen as a form of art, because it does not rely only on laws or institutions, but also on performance, rhetoric, scenography, and the ability to create collective emotions. The politician builds roles just as much as the artist builds characters, and the artist gains fans just as much as the politician secures supporters. This is precisely where the boundaries begin to blur, as the artist often becomes a political figure without even declaring himself as such, while the politician behaves as a performer who seeks not only votes but also applause.
Today, this combination has become even more complex. The politician has realized that he needs the spontaneity, charisma and emotional magnetism of the artist, while the artist understands that politics gives him amplification, attention and symbolic power. Thus, a relationship has been created where both parties use each other to the point where it becomes difficult to distinguish where art ends and politics begins. A concert can become a political manifesto, while a political speech is constructed as an artistic performance with rhythm, dramaturgy and emotional effect.
The public is no longer influenced only by rational argument, but also by image, identification and the ability to produce emotion. In this reality, the artist and the politician share the same public stage and often the same techniques of influencing the crowd, so much so that from time to time it seems as if politics seeks to become art, while art seeks to exercise power.
Of course, this phenomenon in the Albanian context appears more brutal than in the West. Here, the artist does not approach politics only for media protagonism, but often for survival. The art industry in Albania is so fragile that talent rarely guarantees economic stability or stable social status. In the absence of a consolidated cultural market, the artist often seeks proximity to power as a way to compensate for what the industry does not give him, access, support, promotion, financing and symbolic security.
On the other hand, the Albanian politician needs the artist to compensate or rehabilitate the perception of him as abusive, clientelist, corrupt, mediocre and distrustful. It is here that the artist becomes valuable to the politician because he gives power that emotional closeness and that popular credibility that politics can no longer produce on its own. Thus, a relationship of mutual interests is created, where each uses the other's absence: the politician uses the artist's fame to emotionally enter the public, while the artist uses his closeness to power to compensate for the structural weakness of the Albanian art world.
This is why the relationship between them in Albania often seems more intimate, more personal and sometimes even more awkward than in other countries. In the West, the artist can survive without politics because there is a market, industry, professional management and the economic autonomy of culture. In Albania, many artists know that the market is small, cultural institutions are weak and success is often seasonal. As a result, power is seen not only as political influence, but also as a social survival mechanism.
This is precisely where the paradox of this relationship lies. The moment politics seeks to dress itself in the emotion and spontaneity of art, it risks becoming a performance curated more for effect than for content. Meanwhile, art, once it enters the orbit of power to secure support or survival, gradually loses the critical distance that gave it moral authority in front of the public. In the end, a role reversal is created where the politician seeks authenticity through the artist, while the artist seeks security through politics. And the more each tries to take something from the other, the more they risk losing their own identity.
Lini një Përgjigje