Liberals, fascists, and communists all tend to have different artistic preferences. Fascists like Duck Dynasty, liberals like Harry Potter, communists like Parasite. I know people are going to jump down my throat with that last one and there are subjective exceptions but I think you know what I mean. I loved the movie Us, for example, but a lib friend of mine said he "didn't get it." I felt the same after I watched the movie Snowpiercer back when I was a lib. The obvious class politics in that movie repelled me. (I haven't seen it since.)
I also have another idea I want to test out here. I think that the farther you get from the imperial core, the less interested people are in Star Trek / Star Wars. Both of these are basically outgrowths of the Western, so it probably applies to superhero movies too, since these are also just westerns with different costumes. The bad guys in cowboy movies are always the indigenous, and the indigenous are the ones who live in the Global South. Living in South Korea, I was fascinated at the seeming total lack of interest people there had in Star Wars and Star Trek. They also have no interest in Kurosawa movies, at least in my experience, since they aren't really too fond of samurai (and I know Kurosawa didn't just make samurai movies).
I'm out of time, so I'll just reiterate my question: are artistic preferences just another expression of politics / class? If you like or dislike a work of art, is that entirely because of your class or are there other factors?
There is a lot going on here and I think it might be helpful to separate some of it out to see the question better.
Artistic preference has been tied up with media consumption. These aren't exactly the same thing. The idea that Harry Potter is art is a product of how culture and pop culture have become exactly the same. The fact that people define art so broadly to include any written work is also a product of consumerism. You can kind of start talking about post-modernism and post-post-modernism, but I think the mode of production plays an important role in the success of those movements. Therefore the prevalence of how we talk about art and what we consider to be art. So just the way we discuss art is affected by the mode of production.
The next part is that everyone is inundated by media from a young age. Conservatives, reactionaries, and even nazis liked Harry Potter at one point. We're all in a soup of the same ingredients. We all get into something and some of us grow up and move on to other things. Some don't. I don't think that's particular to one's personal politics. Plenty of the left and right are into very childish things. Younger generations suffer arrested development because at some point we never had to give up cartoons or childish things. The market kept offering the same shit to us as we aged. Harry Potter is a good example. All the adult cartoons are another. When you grow out of a cartoon for kids you can get into an edgy animated sitcom. If you want something more deep, you can watch the horse program. If you want to feel smart, you watch Rick and Morty. You get comic book movies that have blood and cursing. You get toys that are vinyl collectables. The line between childhood consumption and adult consumption has blurred for everyone.
Then you have the conscious choice to consume political media because of what you think it says about who you are. People like Parasite because they feel it has a correct or important message about capitalism. Of course they can like it because it's well written or directed too. But people still pick things to like because of its political content. Then you have people who pick stuff to like not because it has the actual political content they think. American History X is a good example. A lot of right wingers like it but it has the opposite message of anything they believe. So you can't categorize something as belonging to a political ideology just because fans of it belong to one.