Artists should make work that speaks out against society’s ills, argues Bob and Roberta Smith RA

I know what people mean when they say artists should be “more political”. They mean people should address politics more directly in their art.

The times we live in are so horrible, the news so unbearable, that it seems strange that so little contemporary art deals with the shocking imagery of our age. For the RA’s 2014 Summer Exhibition, I transcribed onto canvas an interview between BBC Radio 4 presenter Eddie Mair and Dr David Nott that had discussed the surgeon’s efforts to save lives in Syria. I was trying to say something about the gap between the average Summer Exhibition-goer’s experience of enjoying life and David Nott’s experience of saving life.

But sometimes I think that to draw a lemon or a landscape can be deeply subversive in a time when our Education Secretary Nicky Morgan declares that “choosing the arts in school can hold children back”. I believe it has been a terrible time for art education – so much so that I am now standing as an independent candidate against Michael Gove in Surrey Heath – and one could argue that the last thing we should be doing is placing more prescriptive demands on people who call themselves artists. “Let people do their thing,” I can hear my inner hippy cry.

But great art is always political. Great art has to say something, and that something is often mind-bending, earth-shaking and epoch-altering. Take, for instance, Goya’s The Horrors of War, Picasso’s Guernica, Louise Bourgeois’ Cell or John Heartfield’s collages that warned of the rise of Nazism. Or Tracey Emin RA’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, her piece where the names of people she had slept with were embroidered on the inside of a tent – the embodiment, in nylon, of the idea that the personal is political. Or J.M.W. Turner RA, who showed us not only dying slaves thrown from ships to drown close to port, but also wives picking through the corpses of their husbands killed on the plains of Waterloo.

Politics should not dominate art, argues critic Kelly Grovier

Art with an agenda is rarely good art. The only obligation that art bears is to enable its audience to reflect more profoundly on what it means to be here in the world. If one thinks of the most moving examples of political art from the Western tradition – Picasso’s Guernica, say, or David’s The Death of Marat – their success lies less in the particularities of the social conflicts they chronicle than in the timelessness of their comprehension of what in 1950 the American writer William Faulkner called “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself”. These “alone”, Faulkner said, are what makes the act of creating “worth the agony and the sweat”. What makes Picasso’s and David’s masterpieces moving is precisely that which deepens the countenances of less obviously political works, such as Rothko’s diaphanous veils or the world-weary blossoms of Van Gogh’s sunflowers: the poignant grasp of the contours of human anguish and soulful travail. Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa are not great works of art because they are political, they are great works of art that happen to be political.

Politics, at best, can only be incidental to the achievement of a great work. At worst, it risks miring an object in the ephemera of transitory context, diminishing the work’s meaning to something didactic and disposable. Insisting that art should be more political is surely as arbitrary as asserting it should be more scientific or philosophical or theological. Such an insistence suggests an impatience with the power of art as art to be significant – that it requires an auxiliary cause to justify and elevate it.

Fortunately, we live in an age of agile artists, adept at deploying politics as an invigorating texture in their works – one that agitates subliminally from beneath without capsizing meaning. Indeed, politics is everywhere in today’s art if we know how to detect and decode it.