Is Art Actually For Everyone?

Taylor Swift chose to make a song disappear without uttering as much as a word. For those of you who have missed it: the White House posted a video with “I Bet You Think About Me” playing underneath it. Within days the audio was gone. No lawsuit, press conference, or dramatic text you could screenshot and use to demonize Taylor in this scenario. Just silence where art used to be.

This article has been brewing for weeks now. See, since I noticed the first time I cannot unsee it. Obama dropped his summer playlist and next thing we know Noah Kahan is pretending to call him up on stage, thrilled. Zohran Mamdani gets put on the big screen mid-Djo-concert to have a little cameo in the song Charlie’s Garden and the crowd went wild. But when Trump uses a song by Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, or Noah Kahan, it feels like watching your annoying uncle grab the best slice of the pizza, knowing very well he didn’t pay a dime.

All three of these scenarios are politicians reaching for music, so how come two of them feel fine and the other one feels like theft?

Say it with me: context matters !!

Where a playlist is a compliment, a campaign video is more like a hostage situation. When Obama says he’s been listening to Noah Kahan, he’s not claiming Noah agrees with his tax policy. He’s just telling you something about himself and gives credit to an artist where he believes credit is due. Noah gets to decide how he feels about that. He made clear he thought it was amazing by jokingly calling Obama back on stage. Regardless though, the meaning of the song stayed untouched. It just got a little shout out. Mamdani showing up on screen during a Djo performance is basically a copy paste of this. He didn’t hijack Charlie’s Garden, he got invited into it. This just highlights an artist willingness to let someone borrow their stage.

Trump’s situation with Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Olivia Rodrigo works nothing like this. He took the song and attached it to a political message the artist would never sign off on. Luckily, the both Olivia and Sabrina used their voices to call Trump out for using their art over immigration enforcement footage. That’s the main difference from where I’m standing. Where Mandani is being asked, Trump isn’t asking at all.

Music has never just been background noise

What people don’t realize is that ownership within the arts is not just about who legally owns the recording. It’s about who gets to decide what the recording means once it’s being played.

See, music tells your soul how to feel before your brain has caught up. Put a triumphant sound under a rally clip and it will fee like a win. And trust me, this is not accidental. It’s the entire point of picking the song in the first place. The music is doing work the speech can’t do on its own and drawing in a new target demographic in the progress.

Which means when Taylor’s team pulls the audio, they’re not just being precious about their beloved royalties. As a matter of fact, I believe she didn’t speak out because her words would have been demonized, and Trump would gain a whole new group of voters just for the sake of pissing off Taylor Swift. Instead, she (gracefully) pulled the emotional engine out of the video and leaving him standing there with just his own words, which (surprise lol) don’t hit the same without the musical aspect.

Then they came for Spider-Man…

Just when I thought I wrapped my head around the music thing, the White House posted Spider-Man webbing up “criminal illegal aliens” with the caption “your friendly neighbourhood ICE agents,” and I genuinely had to read it twice. I’m sorry but what the actual-

Is America even real at this point?

The image of Spider-Man was never supposed to be used for this message. He’s the hero who gets teased, who struggles to pay rent, who loses the girl because he was busy saving a stranger. Peter Parker is a broke kid from Queens who helps people because nobody else is. Turning him into ICE propaganda a week after the latest movie hit like a billion dollars at the box office isn’t just tone-deaf, it’s a complete hijack of what the character has stood for all this time. Ownership for artistic products is tricky enough as it is, but emotional value cuts even deeper. You can’t just decide Spider-Man is suddenly pro-deportation and expect everybody to just be okay with this. And, luckily, people weren’t. They noticed, fast.

Anywho, let me explain why this is a different kind of theft than the whole music thing. Taylor Swift now owns her masters, so when her song gets pulled from a Trump video, that’s an artist exercising actual control over actual property. Spider-Man, on the other hand, isn’t anybody’s published diary entry, He is owned by Disney or Sony (I lost track at this point, oops). So when Marvel fans flooded the comments demanding a lawsuit and for the post to be taken down, they weren’t defending an artist’s feelings. They were defending a character’s meaning. They were defending the art instead of the artist.

Letterboxd has a mayor now, apparently

Meanwhile, over in a completely different corner of the internet, people are in Letterboxd comment sections (specifically those of Spider-Man: Brand New Day) are looking a little something like this:

And true, Letterboxd is not just a cross section of America. It’s mostly young, online, film-literate people who already agree with each other about most things, cracking the same joke in slightly different words until it becomes a bit. So, I fear this is not as simple as just saying “people who love movies are progressive.”

However, I do think it says something. I think it shows that politics are slowly gaining the trust of younger generations again. I mean, no wonder crime rates are dropping drastically. New York has both Mandani and Spider-Man coming up for its civilians, on-screen as well as off-screen ;)

So, is liking art nowadays just a left thing then?

I’m going to just come out and say what I actually believe (considering it is my article after all): yes, I think so.

Granted, not every genre, not every fan, but the centre of gravity in mainstream art right now leans left, and I honestly believe that’s good news for what happens next.

Take The Hunger Games, for example. Trump announced something called the “Patriot Games” for the country’s 250th birthday (again, is America even real), and within hours Democrats aren’t writing press releases, they’re posting pictures of President Snow. And it wasn’t some coordinated messaging strategy cooked up in a fancy office room with fancy politicians wearing fancy suits. It was instant. See, an entire generation had already spent a decade absorbing Katniss Everdeen as the blueprint for what standing up to corrupt power looks like. Nobody had to explain the metaphor to the general public. We’d already done the reading.

That’s the beautiful thing about growing up on stories like that. You don’t walk away from The Hunger Games thinking the Capitol had a point. You don’t finish it rooting for the districts to stay quiet and grateful. The story only works one way, and an entire generation absorbed that lesson before we were old enough to vote. Same with Spider-Man, honestly. A broke kid from Queens who helps people because the system doesn’t is not exactly Republican propaganda, which is exactly why watching the White House slap “friendly neighborhood ICE agent” on him felt like such a betrayal of the arts rather than just an example of poor media literacy.

If we burn, you burn with us

Sure, there’s country music, there’s the whole conservative Nashville machine, there’s an entire universe of art that skews right and always has. I’m not pretending that doesn’t exist or those artists aren’t just as capable of making it big time. But when you zoom out to what’s actually dominating the culture right now (the franchises everyone’s kid has read, the songs everyone’s algorithm keeps pushing, and the shows critics are obsessing over) it’s leaning one direction, and I think it has been for a while. An entire generation raised on stories where the rebellion is always the good guy for no reason other than common sense. Love is love, love your neighbor, and equality is good level of common sense.

Maybe that’s why I’m not solely worried about the future, even if the news provides very little positivity at times. If the art shapes how twenty-something year olds understand power, corruption, and who deserves protection all points the same direction, that’s not just coincidental or engineering for anyone’s own propaganda. It’s simply what happens when you raise a generation on stories that precisely reflect that the guy in charge is always hiding something and that the underdog can win.

So, who is art actually made for?

Nobody one person, but everybody. Not just the label or the artist. Not just the listener crying to it in their car or the politician who thinks it makes them look cool and more likable.

But there’s a real gap between an artist letting the culture do whatever it wants with their work and a politician grabbing that work and forcing it to say something the artist actively disagrees with. Obama gets to like Noah Kahan out loud. Mamdani gets invited to be part of a performance. That’s culture being shared.

Trump takes a song, points it at a message the artist despises, and waits to see if anyone notices before the internet does it for him. Same goes for Spider-Man, nobody willingly gave him that character, he just took it and hoped to benefit off the current hype. That’s not sharing anything, that’s just plain taking it and trying to privatize the way it can be interpreted.

I choose to believe this lack of support from the arts reflects broader societal indifference rather than causing it.

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