In “When Drama Becomes Propaganda,” an interesting long-form essay over at OpinionJournal.com, Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal’s drama critic, wonders “Why is so much political art so awful?”

Instead of seeking to persuade—to change the minds of its viewers—[today’s political art] takes for granted their concurrence. It assumes that everyone in the audience is already smart enough to hate Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and, above all, George W. Bush, and thus does not need to be reminded of their underlying humanity, or of the possibility, however remote, that their intentions might be good. By extension it also takes for granted that no truly creative artist could possibly think otherwise, that good art is by definition liberal (or, to use the term commonly preferred by such artists, “progressive”) in its view of the world, and that only progressive thinkers are truly creative. Conservatives are generally thought too repressed or narrow-minded for creative activities.