“Motivated by self-censorship, and by the strategic understanding that making explicitly political art lessens the chances and the magnitude of professional success, this kind of implicitly political art is an expression of imprisonment within the bounds of political conflict, rather than an escape from it. These artists make a reasoned decision that voluntarily cramping their own scope of self-expression and confining their investigations within free-market capitalist conventions is well worth the trade-off in professional success. They thereby sacrifice freedom of expression for the material rewards of institutional legitimacy. They knowingly subordinate the self-expressive function of their work to its function as a currency of market exchange; and — like artists and writers in the former eastern European countries under Communism — exchange clarity for ‘subtlety’, forthrightness for ‘understatement’, and political protest for ‘irony’.”
— Adrian Piper, “Political Art and the Paradigm of Innovation” in The Life and Death of Images: Ethics and Aesthetics.