Socially conscious artwork, both historical and contemporary, is clearly on the minds of curators, too. Recent provocative traveling exhibitions include “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” a survey organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and, at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, “Brave New Worlds,” a consideration of the state of political consciousness in the U.S. and abroad. In Robert Storr’s “Think with the Senses—Feel with the Mind” section of the 2007 Venice Biennale, there were a large number of politically inflected works, from the tortured faces hanging from chains and ribbons in Nancy Spero’s Maypole/Take no Prisoners, to Paolo Canevari’s video of a teenager kicking a skull like a soccer ball outside a bombed-out Serbian building. Also notable was Emily Jacir’s Material for a Film, 2005, an ongoing text-and-photo project about the assassination of the Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter, for which the artist received a Golden Lion award.

Despite the increased visibility of political art, its relationship with the marketplace remains complicated. When asked how he would describe the interaction, Chan says wryly, “Think Iran-Contra.” Few of those who make such pieces—and obviously even fewer of the dealers who represent them—would characterize selling it as trading with the enemy. But there is general agreement that political art does present certain marketing challenges, not the least of which is the designation itself.

“I’m not sure political art is a term that’s all that useful,” says Mary Sabbatino, the vice president of the New York branch of Paris’s Galerie Lelong, “even though we understand that certain works obviously fall under that rubric more than others do.” The gallery has long relationships with several artists whose oeuvres consistently address social and political issues, including Alfredo Jaar, Spero and Krzysztof Wodiczko. For the Boston–based Wodiczko’s last show at the gallery, in 2005, he presented “If You See Something … ,” a large indoor projection-and-audio installation that gave voice to victims of civil-liberty abuses after 9/11. “Krzysztof is always discussing his work in terms of public space and the access to public speech,” Sabbatino says.

Political art is a heterogeneous entity, and any attempt to define it, much less to gauge its market temperature, is difficult. In the United States in the late 1960s, a time of student uprisings and the civil rights movement, opposition to the Vietnam War and to racism was expressed within the art world via activist organizations such as the Art Workers’ Coalition, GAAG (the Guerilla Art Action Group) and WAR (Women Artists in Revolution). Efforts to bring about reform went hand in hand with new art forms that explicitly took on political issues: the social critiques of such first-generation feminist artists as Judy Chicago, Suzanne Lacy, Miriam Schapiro and Martha Rosler; the 1970s interrogations of image and language by Jenny Holzer, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince and others; and the probing of sexual and identity politics in the works of Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley, Andres Serrano and David Wojnarowicz, which ignited the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s—remember Jesse Helms and the ousted National Endowment for the Arts chairman John Frohnmayer? All these forms rose, had an impact and then were, to varying degrees, brought into the mainstream by a fluid cultural marketplace always able to transform itself to accommodate ideas and things that had previously been outside its structure.

The art world has changed in many ways since those movements emerged. Some might argue that its increased pace and professionalism—not to mention the massive expansion of the audience for contemporary art—have tended to favor less contentious work. Yet the growth in the market has also, perhaps paradoxically, made it possible for efforts that might once have been relegated to the street to find their way into high-end commercial galleries. Think of Thomas Hirschhorn’s searing 2006 “Superficial Engagement,” which confronted viewers with arrays of gruesome photographs of Iraq War victims sharing space on stagelike platforms with headlines clipped from newspapers and nail-studded mannequins. The show was installed not at an alternative space, as it likely would have been in the ’70s, but at the blue-chip Gladstone Gallery, in Chelsea. Or consider Zwirner’s show last fall of Pettibon’s irate zinelike drawings, texts, wall paintings and collages—including one of Bush closing himself inside a flag-draped coffin—which was merciless in its attacks on the administration’s foreign policy.