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komponisto comments on The Affect Heuristic, Sentiment, and Art - Less Wrong
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I can't remember where I read this anecdote, but it pertains to a student who became obsessed with the Implicit Awareness Test to the point where he completed it on a daily basis. One day, out of nowhere, it came back with a net positive association with black faces. He struggled to account for this until he realised he'd been watching coverage of the Olympics that morning.
As for expressing points with non-argumentative methods, the general idea makes me a little uneasy. Some time ago, after attending a folk festival, I came to the conclusion that music shouldn't be the dialectic of politics. It's too easy for the uninitiated to conflate a good piece of music with a good argument. Artistic flair is both a useful and fun tool for presenting ideas, but too much flair and you have to start wondering if the ideas could stand up by themselves
Add to that the danger of a corrupting effect on art itself, whose primary value does not derive from extra-artistic "ideas" it "presents".
It is notable how little of the greatest music (to take the art form I know the most about) is explicitly political.
I suspect it works both ways. Art with an explicit political message (i.e. something sophisticated enough to be able to disagree with) is less likely to gain widespread appeal than something politically ambiguous.
I've recently been thinking about notorious graffiti artist Banksy lately, who's a pretty good example of this. He does have widespread appeal, in spite of his work being considered political, but his art doesn't present a coherent enough political stance for anyone to actually disagree with.
Sure. I'm a fan of folk music, and it definitely suffers at the more didactic end. (I have a pretty high tolerance for explicitly political music -- I'm a Phil Ochs fan -- but there does reach a point where it isn't music anymore, it's an editorial set to a tune.) Art does its work below the rational level -- that means that good art is pretty much amoral, and it'll always take some wrangling to corral art into serving a purpose.