Everyone is a critic.

Abstract

People have certain biases that are usually correlated to their own personal backgrounds. When pushing for policies, lobbies, think-tanks and policy makers use vehicles of rhetoric in order to serve particular interests. By deploying this rhetoric through the media to push their own agendas, policymakers have a platform available to them that enables a push for particular narratives that may be disguised as public interest. In the United States, Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan are among the entertainers-turned-presidents that have found a way to teeter the line of showmanship between entertainment and policymaking. By studying political tactics used in the past and present world, we can begin to uncover the narratives that shape how we perceive reality. Perhaps in moments of media-spewed ‘public interest’ we were momentarily under the spell of policymakers. Where once the public perceives their interests were served, a retrospective view allows the revisiting of the moment to perhaps spot an unseen blind spot. By uncovering the biases that have been constructed through the media, only then can we prevent the repetition of catastrophic events, such as a future war. In testing a sample of perception from an audience in an experiment conducted at an AUB art exhibition; propaganda, psychology, sociology and the arts via entertainment were observed in an evaluation of public bias. By giving the audience artwork that is label-less, containing no information about the artist whose work was being observed, I used my audience’s psyche to test it as a “label-making” machine. Furthermore, an examination of political propaganda is evaluated in comparison to the experimentation conducted at the exhibit. The exhibition was used a platform to mirror that of mass media. In using the exhibition as a smaller sample size to illustrate bias, I intended to mirror mass media in presenting information to an audience as objectively as possible.