Art is bad (Part 1).
In the infamous words of whoever-said-it-first, capital subsumes all critiques into itself. My introduction to this idea was the same as many of ours, Disco Elysium, but I didn't internalize it until I read (the first 30 pages of) Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. If you have somehow not come across this idea before, the gist is that capitalism has the ability to defang and criticism of it by, essentially, buying it up. The example that Mark fisher uses is Wall-E, but a good one from this year is One Battle After Another.
One Battle After Another follows a group of left-wing terrorists (non-pejorative) as they attempt to survive a military takeover of a small town, spearheaded by a neo-nazi (there's more to it than that, but you can go to wikipedia if you must know). The ties between the villain and the state are explicit, and in at least one scene the racist and anti-democratic sympathies of various important real-world statesmen are pointed out. Basically, the movie says in big, bold, flashing letters "fascism and capitalism are bad." Some, including yours truly, are skeptical to what degree the movie actually "believes" this, but on the surface level the commentary is unmissable.
And yet, the movie was released by Warner Brothers on over 3000 screens to rapturous praise and (modest) box office success. It was named the best movie of the year by such radical publications as The Guardian, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Rolling Stone. This story which, on the surface at least, is genuniely radical was marketed and sold by a multinational corporation whose total assets add up to over 100 billion dollars (wikipedia, hehe) and applauded by a gaggle of centrist seals. In essence, Warner Bros was able to cut the legs out from under the movie by owning it, by saying "we're hip, we get it, capitalism IS bad! Now buy a ticket."
How, you may ask, does this make One Battle After Another (and art more broadly) bad? This is where my opinion on the subject may seem extreme. One Battle After Another exists within the dominant style. It is edited in the "invisible" Hollywood style, it's exciting and fast paced, and, crucially, it is satisfying. As time passes I become more and more convinced that being "satisfying" is the worst sin a work of political art can commit. It creates the illusion of finality, of having accomplished something. Speaking from personal experience, I left the theater with a smile on my face, feeling as though some important statement had been made. I even remarked to my friend how impressed I was that something so radical had been produced in the first place. Uh-oh! I fell for it!
What I'm trying to say is that good political art must try and be un-subsumable. It must be confrontational, unpleasant, and (not un- but) anti-satisfying. It could also just be so bad that nobody would ever want to pay for it. That might work too.