Sam Gindin: Today, an activist art needs to have an ambitious agenda. It must assimilate a critique of capitalism’s impact on human possibilities. It must challenge capitalism’s restriction of the scope of who initiates and purchases artistic production. And it must work to broaden the audience of people who have been trained in the skills needed to appreciate art. When art refuses to be a shill for the status quo and thereby opens spaces to go beyond what exists, it takes on its crucial political role. Such art makes the invisible visible, the implicit explicit. It reveals the individual as social by showing or suggesting common hopes and frustrations. It explores – without shying away from complexities – the relationship between the local and the international, the particular and the universal, the static and the dynamic. It questions everything and engages in constant exploration.