Does activist art need to be good art?

On aesthetics, ethics and the uncomfortable question of quality

There are some big questions that feel surprisingly difficult to ask out loud.

One of those questions has been following me around since I started the ‘theatre meets activism’ research journey.

Does activist art actually need to be good art?

Hold onto your berets…

At first glance the answer feels obvious. Of course it does. We wouldn’t expect a novel to escape criticism simply because it promoted a worthy cause, nor would we judge a piece of music solely by the virtue of its lyrics. Yet when it comes to activist performance, I wonder if we sometimes suspend those instincts. We care deeply about the politics, we admire the commitment of the artists, and we recognise the urgency of the issues they are addressing. Critiquing the work itself can feel almost disloyal, as though aesthetic judgement somehow undermines political solidarity.

The more time I spend working within and alongside creative activism, however, the less convinced I become that this hesitation serves either art or activism particularly well.

Over the past few years I’ve encountered extraordinary performances within the animal movement. Some have been meticulously crafted works of theatre, music and installation. Others have been participatory workshops, street interventions, vigils and public actions where the emphasis lay far less on spectatorship than collective experience. Some have moved me profoundly through their artistic ambition. Others have inspired me politically while leaving me strangely untouched as aesthetic experiences.

What interests me is not identifying which of these are “better”. Rather, I have begun wondering whether we are asking the wrong question altogether.

‘Blood on Your Hands’ by Grace Joy Howarth (Patch Plays)

Beyond the message

One recent conversation that has stayed with me came during my interview with composer Keane Southard, whose Requiem for Animals confronts humanity’s relationship with other animals through large-scale choral music. We were discussing the challenge of writing about slaughter, grief and industrial violence when he said something that has lingered with me ever since.

He told me he had no interest in writing ugly music simply because the subject matter was ugly. The work still had to be artistically compelling. He still had to believe in every note he wrote. Even when composing music that addressed immense suffering, he wanted audiences, performers and he himself to experience something that remained musically beautiful and artistically truthful.

I found that deeply revealing.

It would have been perfectly understandable if Keane had argued that aesthetics should become secondary once the politics were sufficiently urgent. After all, if the work exists to encourage reflection on speciesism, surely the ethical message ought to take precedence over artistic beauty.

Instead, he quietly refused that separation.

The music was not simply carrying the ethics.

The music was part of the ethics.

Its beauty was not an escape from violence. It became one of the ways violence could be encountered, reflected upon and mourned without reducing either the music or the animals to illustration.

The more I have thought about that conversation, the more I have realised it reaches far beyond composition. It asks something fundamental about activist art itself. Perhaps aesthetics are not the wrapping around political ideas. Perhaps they are one of the ways those ideas become meaningful in the first place.

When ethics become aesthetics

A recent article on posthuman aesthetics in applied theatre pushed my thinking even further. Rather than treating ethics as the content and aesthetics as the form, the authors argue that ethical relationships emerge through aesthetic practice itself. Participation, movement, embodiment, listening, responsiveness and collective creation are not simply techniques used to communicate political messages. They are the spaces in which ethical encounters are produced.

That distinction feels subtle, yet I think it changes everything.

Too often we speak about activist art as though there are two competing priorities. Either the work is artistically ambitious or it is politically effective. Either it is aesthetically beautiful or socially useful. The implication is that one must inevitably be sacrificed for the other.

Increasingly, I wonder whether that opposition is false.

If a performance seeks to cultivate care, then the way bodies move through space matters. The rhythm of an encounter matters. The dramaturgy matters. The invitation to participate matters. The silences matter. None of these are decorative additions sitting alongside the ethics. They are part of the ethics.

Form is never neutral.

Perhaps this is especially true within animal advocacy. If we are asking audiences to reconsider their relationships with other species, then the quality of that encounter cannot simply be measured by the correctness of the message. The experience itself matters. How attention is directed, how empathy is invited, how discomfort is held, how complexity is sustained, all of these are aesthetic decisions that shape ethical possibility.

PETA

The problem with worthy art

This leaves me with an uncomfortable thought.

Sometimes activist art is protected by the importance of its politics.

We’ve probably all experienced work where the issue being addressed feels unquestionably significant, yet the artistic experience remains strangely flat. The symbolism arrives exactly where we expect it. Characters become mouthpieces. The audience already agrees with the politics before the performance has even begun. We leave reassured that our values were correct, yet nothing in our perception has shifted.

Agreement is not the same as transformation.

One belongs primarily to cognition.

The other often belongs to aesthetics.

The performances I continue thinking about months or years later rarely do so because they presented an argument I had never encountered before. They remain with me because they reorganised the way I experienced time, space, grief, beauty or another living being. They made familiar ethical questions feel unfamiliar again.

Perhaps this is where performance possesses its greatest political strength.

Not because it tells us what to think.

But because it changes how thinking itself feels.

Participation as artistic practice

Of course, this becomes more complicated once we move beyond conventional ideas of theatre.

Much of the work I have written about over the past year would look quite strange if judged solely by traditional artistic standards. Community choirs, participatory workshops, installations, processions, vigils and public interventions rarely aspire towards polished theatrical perfection. They deliberately embrace unpredictability because participants, rather than professional performers, become central to what unfolds.

From the outside, such work can appear messy.

Does that make it weaker art?

I am beginning to think we have misunderstood where the artistry lies.

The posthuman aesthetics paper describes applied theatre practitioners not as people who abandon artistic craft, but as artists whose expertise lies in facilitating relationships. Reading a room. Creating trust. Knowing when to intervene and when to remain silent. Designing experiences where participants genuinely shape what unfolds rather than merely carrying out instructions.

None of that happens accidentally.

Participation requires rehearsal.

It requires dramaturgy.

It requires sensitivity.

It requires extraordinary artistic judgement.

Perhaps participation is not the opposite of artistic excellence.

LUSH

Whose standards are we using?

The more I have sat with these questions, the more another problem has emerged. When we ask whether activist art should be “good”, we rarely stop to ask who decides what “good” actually means.

Theatre criticism has developed over centuries around particular ideas of excellence. We value originality, technical skill, dramaturgical coherence, emotional complexity and aesthetic innovation. None of these criteria are unreasonable. They help us distinguish work that is thoughtful, ambitious and accomplished from work that is careless or underdeveloped. Yet activist performance often asks something else of itself. It may prioritise accessibility over formal innovation, participation over virtuosity or political urgency over ambiguity. Judging every activist intervention by the standards of institutional theatre would therefore seem unfair.

At the same time, I am equally uncomfortable with the opposite position, namely that activist art should somehow be protected from aesthetic criticism because its intentions are virtuous. Good politics cannot become a substitute for artistic reflection. If we genuinely believe performance has the capacity to reshape how people understand animals, then surely we should care deeply about how skilfully that performance has been made. Poor dramaturgy is not redeemed by an important message any more than beautiful staging excuses unethical politics.

Perhaps the challenge, then, is not to abandon artistic judgement but to expand it. We may need richer ways of talking about quality that acknowledge the particular ambitions of activist practice. A beautifully crafted participatory workshop should be recognised for the sophistication of its facilitation. A community performance should not be dismissed because it lacks professional actors if its artistry lies in creating extraordinary relationships between participants. Likewise, a visually stunning production should not be exempt from political scrutiny simply because its aesthetic achievements are impressive.

The standards remain.

They simply become more plural.

Art as ethical practice

The posthuman aesthetics article encouraged me to think about this in a slightly different way. Rather than treating ethics and aesthetics as separate categories that occasionally overlap, the authors suggest that ethical relationships emerge through aesthetic encounters. Care is not simply something a performance talks about. It is something the performance does through its organisation of bodies, materials, movement and attention. Ethics is experienced rather than merely explained.

I find this enormously helpful because it dissolves a distinction I have often carried without realising it. I had unconsciously imagined ethics as the destination and aesthetics as the route taken to reach it. The performance carried a political message, while its artistic form simply made that message more engaging. Increasingly, I think that picture is far too simplistic.

If a piece of theatre asks us to care differently about another animal, then the rhythm of the performance matters. The pace at which revelation occurs matters. The atmosphere matters. Silence matters. Humour matters. Beauty matters. Participation matters. None of these are decorative flourishes. They shape the ethical experience itself. They determine whether audiences feel manipulated, invited, challenged or transformed.

This perhaps explains why certain performances continue to haunt us long after we have forgotten their arguments. Their politics have become inseparable from their aesthetic experience. We no longer remember only what the work wanted us to think. We remember how it reorganised our attention.

That feels particularly significant within animal advocacy, where so much campaigning understandably depends upon information. Statistics, investigations and evidence remain indispensable. Yet performance contributes something different. It creates conditions in which knowledge can become lived experience. The facts may remain unchanged, but the relationship between those facts and our own bodies shifts.

The aesthetics of liberation

As I reflected on this, I found myself returning to many of the works I have written about throughout this newsletter over the past year. They are extraordinarily different from one another. A requiem for animals. A theatrical courtroom where animals prosecute humanity. A participatory installation built around an inflatable rasher of bacon. A drag cow disrupting assumptions about gender and species. A film following a hen escaping industrial agriculture. Artists attempting to inhabit the sensory worlds of earthworms, otters and kestrels. At first glance these works seem to have very little in common beyond their concern for other animals.

What connects them, I think, is not simply their politics.

It is their attention to form.

None of them rely solely on telling audiences that animals matter. Instead, they construct experiences through which audiences are invited to encounter animals differently. Sometimes that encounter is beautiful. Sometimes it is playful. Sometimes it is unsettling or quietly mournful. Sometimes it is deliberately unresolved. In every case, however, the ethical force of the work emerges through its aesthetic choices rather than existing independently from them.

That observation has left me wondering whether the animal advocacy movement occasionally undersells its own artistic ambitions. We often speak about creativity as though it were useful because it helps communicate campaign messages more effectively. Perhaps that relationship should be reversed.

Perhaps creativity is not valuable because it serves activism.

Perhaps activism becomes more ethically powerful because it takes creativity seriously.

Those two statements are not identical.

The first treats art as a tool.

The second recognises art as a way of knowing, feeling and relating to the world that politics alone cannot provide.

An unfinished question

I have not reached a settled answer to the question that opened this essay.

Does activist art need to be good art?

I suspect it does.

But not because activist artists should aspire to satisfy every convention of institutional culture, nor because beauty somehow matters more than justice. Rather, I think activist art carries a particular responsibility to think carefully about its aesthetic life because aesthetics shape the ethical encounter itself. The way a performance moves, listens, pauses, invites participation or creates beauty is not separate from its politics. It is one of the places where those politics become real.

Perhaps that is why I continue returning to works like Requiem for Animals. Keane Southard could have allowed the horror of industrial animal agriculture to dictate an equally harsh musical language. Instead, he insisted that the work should remain musically beautiful, that every note should possess artistic integrity despite the suffering it sought to confront. I no longer hear that as an aesthetic preference. I hear it as an ethical position. Beauty does not erase violence. It creates another way of bearing witness to it.

The more I explore performance within animal advocacy, the less interested I become in choosing between aesthetics and ethics. Increasingly, I think they are inseparable. The question is not whether activist art should be beautiful or political, participatory or accomplished. The more demanding challenge is to create work in which these qualities strengthen one another, where artistic excellence deepens ethical encounter and ethical commitment pushes artistic practice somewhere genuinely new.

Perhaps that is the kind of art animal liberation deserves. Not art that is excused because its politics are good, nor art that sacrifices politics in pursuit of beauty, but work in which aesthetics and ethics become impossible to pull apart.