These three volumes are all concerned with the relationship of aesthetics to politics. That said, it is difficult to imagine three more diverse ways of approaching the problems associated with the various understandings of aesthetics presented by these authors. Each outlines the political assumptions underlying their arguments by relying upon a wide variety of philosophers, political theorists, and literary critics, critical thinkers as diverse as Immanuel Kant, Kenneth Burke, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, John Locke, and Lionel Trilling, to name only some of those invoked. Each author approaches different substantive aesthetic experiences, each pursues different methods of analysis, and each presents different understandings of the implications of the aestheticization of politics within their own realms of study.

Bruce Baum’s The Post-Liberal Imagination is an engaging effort to understand how and why popular culture in the United States operates as a way of allocating values, that is, as expressing and informing the shape of political distributions of such values as representation, justice, equality, and freedom. Inspired in large part by the mid-twentieth century American literary critic Lionel Trilling’s understanding of what Trilling called “the liberal imagination,” Baum wants to rejuvenate and translate that imagination in such a way as to show how various works of art from the realm of popular culture during what he labels the “Bush-Obama era” have worked to advance visions of a more just and equitable American society, in the face of neoliberal forces that serve to undermine those values at the level of everyday life. Baum’s post-liberal imagination, though, in contrast to Trilling’s liberal imagination, operates in an ideological field of conflict far different from Trilling’s post-World War II era of “consensus”—a consensus, of course, that covered over a deeper dissensus in the arenas of rights and equality. He notes four important ideological facets of American life in this era important for understanding the terrain of cultural politics: the general acceptance of homosexuality, of the principles of second wave feminism, of racial equality, and of environmental protection. He also notes, however, that each of these facets is deeply contested by opposing forces, even though, when his book went to press, he understood these as representing the center of gravity of American life. (One wonders how Baum would interpret the recent presidential election and the emergence of a legitimated far right.)

Baum proceeds to investigate a series of what he calls political scenes, employing some of the tools provided by critical theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer, leavened by others, to show how products of the culture industry tend to affirm and naturalize existing political and economic arrangements while occasionally providing ways of offering alternative visions of what may be. His choices, as he opens by affirming, are idiosyncratic, as he pursues both famous and obscure productions, films, music and television programs. Among his choices are blockbuster films such as The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), as well as more obscure films such as Humpday (2009), critical successes such as Lincoln (2013) and 12 Years a Slave (2013), as well as a range of music albums, ranging from rock, to hip hop, to country. He also examines several critically acclaimed television series, such as Breaking Bad (2008–2013) and Mad Men (2007–2015). What one gets from his various insightful analyses of the roles these productions play in the culture is an overview, in the form of a mosaic, of popular culture during this period, whether it be the post-9/11 atmosphere contributing to dystopian tendencies in film or the challenges posed by the rise of Obama and the subsequent racial backlash. In the end, Baum calls for a turning away from the dark visions presented by the post-liberal imagination and a return to a revitalized, more socially conscious and explicitly democratic liberal imagination.

If Baum is concerned with the role that the arts play in shaping political cultures, in Politics and Beauty in America Timothy J. Lukes is concerned with the protection of an aesthetic of beauty from its utilitarian deployment in political projects. Lukes represents the philosophical underpinnings of contemporary struggles concerning the relationship of beauty to meaning in two introductory chapters, the first of which examines in detail various iterations of the legend of Beauty and the Beast, the second of which goes into a detailed discussion of the clash between Lockean and Burkean aesthetics. These discussions are designed to inform his subsequent studies of what he considers to be primary sites of American valorizations of beauty, concerning wilderness, women, and automobiles.

Curiously, Lukes notes how all these categories have been championed by men, and that the categories themselves appeal disproportionately to male tastes, but simply noting this biased terrain does nothing to challenge it. Indeed, he seemingly unreflectively writes, when suggesting that an aesthetic appreciation of food may moderate the sexism of American beauty (even while not reducing its utilitarian bias) that “a beautiful meal, like women, wilderness, and cars, can surely activate the familiarity and comfort of utility” (p. 3). This tactic, mentioning the male limitations of the promotion of this aesthetic, using a neutral voice to describe without explicitly challenging it, renders the broader claims of the study problematic.

Within those limitations, what follows is a series of deeply learned chapters examining the promotion of these various realms of American beauty. Lukes devotes two chapters to P.T. Barnum’s promotion of feminine beauty, the first of which contrasts his promotion of Sasa Baartman—famously (or infamously) known as the “Hottentot Venus”—the second of which concerns Jenny Lind, and how she comes to be the apotheosis of useless beauty. The tension he explores here is instructive. Baartman represents the primitive, powerfully reproductive model of feminine beauty, a model closely related to a utilitarian vision of beauty. Her body is represented as being formed of exaggerated buttocks and genitalia, and her attachment to nature is considered to be deep and inextricably linked to her very being. Lind, who comes to public attention first as a singer, is contrastingly depicted as being beautiful for reasons that are almost ineffable. Her singing is not what attracts, it is her appearance, but what it is about her appearance that renders her beautiful seems to be in almost dialectical opposition to the beauty of Baartman, something far from the primitive nature, something cultivated, yet also still in touch with Nature itself.

Lukes’s treatment of Muir follows along a similar line of comparison between utility and uselessness. He traces these distinctions, in Muir’s case, to internal contradictions within Muir’s appreciation of the utility of natural resources and his understanding of the potential for a disinterested appreciation of nature itself, leading to a hybrid of uselessness and utility. In his study of Harley Earl, who designed both Cadillacs and then Chevrolets for General Motors in the post-World War II era, he notes how the streamlining of the automobile was an attempt to marry the technologies under the hood to the surface appearance of the machine. In this, Earl seemed to be in conversation with the earlier Henry Adams, who in the most famous chapter of The Education of Henry Adams, wrote of the Virgin and Dynamo as two objects of devotion most suited to the age of the cathedral, one the one hand, and the machine, on the other. The centrality of the automobile to post-World War II life makes these observations of acute historical interest, at least, and connects the high era of auto design to the later work of such artists as Andy Warhol (and I would add, Robert Rauschenberg).

Lukes concludes his study with critical appreciations of Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollack, and Ornette Coleman, each of whom, in his own way, restores the “purposiveness without purpose” of a beauty detached from utility. While these studies, especially of Coleman, are interesting in and of themselves, as the conclusion of this book, this chapter is disappointing for reasons that go beyond the analyses of these artists. That his entire book includes not a single woman as an aesthetic actor is telling. The limitation and extent of American beauty, it seems, for Lukes is still shaped by the American man’s imaginary.

Michael J. Shapiro presents a new way of understanding the relationship of politics to time, thinking about critical temporalities that inform the construction of events, assessing, for instance, the radical shift in perceptions of time that attend the displacement of literature as a dominant form of cultural transmission by that of film. Shapiro develops what he calls a critical politics of temporality—using insights, for instance, from Walter Benjamin on the temporal index that appears in those moments of shock that constitute subjective experiences of events, and Gilles Deleuze on the ethics of repetition—as a means of analyzing several different domains of events that are recorded by different modes of artistic expression. In consecutive chapters on the differing temporalities that inform understanding of the event of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the bio-temporalities that shaped reception of the catastrophe of the flooding of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, the temporal rhythms of work and their disruption, and the necro-politics of various biographical forms, Shapiro demonstrates how these arenas of temporal contestation produce different public understandings of events. While sometimes fragile, and ephemeral in their existence, the events Shapiro describes constitute for him a potential politics that would enable the advance of what he might call a Deleuzian ethics of responsibility.

Shapiro’s study is complex, far too complex to be accurately summarized here. And his vocabulary challenges those readers who are not already familiar with the politico-ethical projects of such poststructuralist thinkers as Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Ranciere. But Shapiro’s choice of critical objects, ranging from films such as Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour to Silvia Kolboski’s rethinking of that film, After Hiroshima, Mon Amour to Spike Lee’s After the Levees Broke, to Kara Walker’s haunting silhouettes responding to the flood—simply to give a few examples—does not illustrate his political theoretical approach so much as it shapes his political theory. In this sense, Shapiro is attuned to an approach to the critical study of political culture that is similar to that pursued by Baum. But where Baum swims in the mainstream of American culture, Shapiro seeks the margins that challenge the ethical and political assumptions governing that culture.

What is one to make of these three sophisticated but radically divergent studies of the politics of aesthetics as enunciated in both the history of art and in the critical evaluation of contemporary arts? Many students of political science might be tempted to turn away from the challenge of evaluating the ways in which the aesthetic dimension of politics influences how ordinary denizens of our time respond to the shocks and dislocations of contemporary neoliberal, and yes, neo-fascist regimes of power. These students of politics would ignore these studies at their own peril. For, as each of these books demonstrate clearly in their own unique fashion, there is a dimension of affective response to the politics of our time that is best revealed by a close, assiduous attention to the ways artists of all sorts have tried to give expression to and respond to the ongoing catastrophe that constitutes the present.