Last week, the Icelandic pop star Bjork ended a show in Shanghai with "Declare Independence", a song she wrote for the Faroe Islands and Greenland, urging those countries to follow Iceland's lead and break away from Denmark.

The song itself is innocuous enough, but when she began chanting "Tibet! Tibet!" towards the end, audience members were aghast. The reactions since Sunday have ranged from supportive to hostile, even though most reports are coming from Western sources.

Chinese media are forbidden to discuss the matter, presumably hoping it will just go away. The little bits of news that have leaked through, however, are that Bjork will be banned from performing in China if she does it again, and that the Chinese public's "feelings were hurt" by her gesture.

Tibet has been under Chinese control for 58 years, and unlike much of the Western world, the Chinese government does not view this as problematic. Rather, it views Tibet as part of China, and any claims to the contrary -- i.e. that Tibet is being oppressed and held against its will -- as derisive and wrong.

In the West, liberal media like the Guardian are sympathetic to Bjork's sentiment, while more conservative outlets like FoxNews indicate a clear bias, calling it an "outburst."

Bjork claims that she is not a political person, and maybe she isn't. But aesthetics and politics are not mutually exclusive, and the two often bleed together. This is a telling example, don't you think?