It does make me sad how the only time there's a great number of comments about art or philosophy is in the monthly struggle session about whether all Western culture is just a tool of the CIA.

I would say that it's generally true, which is why you should seek out art and philosophy that doesn't come from the Western tradition. The West has been ideologically cooked for a long time. This shouldn't be unexpected since capitalism and liberalism was birthed in the West and thus, had much more time to completely seep into the social and cultural life of the West. This is really obvious in the Global South where there's an almost one-to-one correlation between how liberal someone is and how Westernphilic someone is.