Routledge Companion to Marxisms in Art History

Karl Marx understood that capitalism had gone beyond any other society before it, in terms of economic growth and scientific and technological progress, but he also believed that these were only achieved through compromising human interactions and relations. In capitalism the economic situation determined all situations and ideas in society. It changes people's opinions on aesthetics depending on the current economic state of affairs. Similarly in capitalism commodity fetishism skews the public's opinion of the value of an object which can in turn create opinions on aesthetics and artistic value. This is how capitalism can distort artistic pursuits from being an intellectual endeavour into a careerist endeavour, thus placing importance not on human contemplation but on consumerist aesthetics.

Third Text, 2011

Page 1. Third Text, Vol. 25, Issue 2, March, 2011, 199–210 Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2011) http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/ 09528822.2011.560635 Scattered (Western Marxist-Style) Remarks about Contemporary ...

The Art Bulletin, 2016

In this paper, I focus on the question “What kind of a relation exists between Marxism and art, and how this relation evolves through different Marxists scholars?” In order to answer the first part of the question, I divided my paper into two sections, Marxist Socialist Realism and Marxist Critical Realism. This differentiation enables us to go into details of ontology, epistemology and methodology of Marxist perspectives. For the second part of the question, I will firstly refer to Lenin, Plekhanov, Bukharin and Trotsky in the Socialist Realism section. Secondly, I will apply to Lukacs (on art as science) and Marcuse and Adorno (on art as ideology) in the Critical Realism section.

Open Cultural Studies

To reflect on the relationship between "cultural studies" and "aesthetics" is to master the art of holding two opposing insights in mind at once. In theory, at least as set out by some of cultural studies' leading lights, the aesthetic is bound up with forms of privilege, mysticism and elitism that are anathema to the key critical currents in the field. In practice, however, aesthetic engagement and aesthetic evaluation remain popular tools of the critical trade. Cultural studies, it seems, does not "do" aesthetics-except, of course, when it always does.1 And this constitutive inconsistency has deep (inter)disciplinary roots. While clearly a function of cultural studies' repudiation of philosophical aesthetics and received notions of high culture, cultural studies' fraught relationship with the aesthetic is also a legacy of the field's fraught relationship with Marxist cultural theory, a diverse body of scholarship with a long history of politically-and historicallyengaged forms of aesthetic analysis. The theme of 'capitalist aesthetics' that frames this issue, then, is dual in its critical affordances. On the one hand, it points forward, providing a glimpse of what cultural studies might look like if it more explicitly embraced aesthetic attention and aesthetic discrimination. On the other, it points backward, inviting us to trace existing histories of contact and divergence between cultural studies and an array of critical practices that have acknowledged the significance of form, sensation and judgment in shaping the political and social meaning of everyday cultural experiences. Parallel Histories "Aesthetics" has not always been a pejorative term in cultural studies circles. For Raymond Williams, a foundational figure in the field, the aesthetic named a key area of critical concern that spoke to both the experiences of everyday people and the political possibilities of form (Bérubé 9-16; Gilbert, "Cultural Studies and Anti-Capitalism" 181-4; Williams, Marxism and Literature 151-158). Yet at least as early as the 1980s-that moment when cultural studies made its "full appearance on the intellectual scene [as] an important, ongoing approach to the study of culture" (Szeman et al. xx)-a clear anti-aesthetic position began to crystallise. The position was on full display by the late 1980s and early '90s, with the formative Urbana-Champaign conferences and the influential mega-anthologies to which they gave rise. In the first of those anthologies, 1988's Marxism and Interpretation of Culture, the term "aesthetic" receives only passing mention from Franco Moretti and Fredric Jameson, while Michèle Barrett's contribution foregrounds the term only to forsake the concept, characterizing the rise of cultural studies as the "marginalization of aesthetic questions in the interpretation of culture" (701). By the time of the field-defining second anthology, 1992's Cultural Studies (Grossberg et al.), just four years later, this indifference towards aesthetics 1 While recognising that cultural studies has diverse and complex origins, we are focusing exclusively on the Birmingham and post-Birmingham manifestations of the field as the key loci for discussions regarding aesthetics, Marxism and cultural studies.

In the introduction to his book, Icons of the left, O.K. Werckmeister (1999: 1-2) argued that the problem Marxists faced after the collapse of the Soviet bloc concerned not so much the validity of their ideas, but whether they could have any lasting organic relation to effective political organizations and action in capitalist society. Any claims to a revival of Marxist thought in a globalised capitalist economy must therefore not revert simply to historical scholarship on the subject, or worse, hagiographic and nostalgic writing, the types of which Werckmeister sought to critique. Instead, it must have a clear-sighted relevance to contemporary politics and culture (Werckmeister, 1999: 156-57).

Historical Materialism, New York , 2017

to Zizek, the most influential Marxist aestheticians have tended to assume the legitimacy of an analytic outlook in which art shows up as noteworthy primarily as a bearer of sensuously enformed cognitive or semantic significance-roughly, what Arthur Danto has called "embodied meaning." Disagreements among these theorists (which are numerous and often bitter) tend to center on whether this or that artwork has significance that is utopian, critical, revolutionary, reactionary, or whatever. But underlying these disagreements is the shared presupposition that art's meaning is what's centrally at issue, and that, moreover, this meaning is least partly latent or veiled, and thus awaits disclosure by a penetrating critic and due appreciation by a duly enlightened audience. Let "Marxist hermeneutics" serve as a label for this broad current. Our aim is to demonstrate some of the inherent limitations of form-, content-, and reception-centered (broadly: meaning-based or "semanticist") Marxist hermeneutics by arguing against the importance, relative to Marxism's defining emancipatory aims, of art-as-enformed-meaning. Dethroning hermeneutics as the core of Marxist art theory is necessary if we are to attain a clearer understanding of both the role of art in revolutionary practice and the role of revolutionary practice in the development of humanity's artistic powers. We focus here on music. In this sphere, Marxist hermeneutics is something of an exegetical carnival. Adorno demonstrates how serial music is an index of totalitarian rational administration; Bloch teaches us to hear utopia singing to us in the tonal masterworks of the western canon; Zizek defends the experience of the "Wagnerian Sublime," an experience in which, allegedly, "We BECOME (identify with) the OBJECT which we were deprived of, so that our subjective identity is a repository of the traces of our lost objects"; and practitioners of Cultural Studies have deciphered the manner which the sub-cultural politics of representation is operative on the sonic surface of punk rock. The sheer variety and inconsistency of widely-circulated claims about musical meanings (and, characteristically, about the impact these meanings have on something called our "subjectivity") is bewildering. Worries about meaning occasion much hand-wringing. Is jazz reactionary/regressive (as Adorno thinks) or progressive/liberatory (as many members of the Birmingham school of cultural studies think)? We are made to think that much hinges on the answer to this question. Before rushing to take sides in these Marxist family feuds, we should pause to consider the commitment to which all the feuding parties subscribe: the view that the semiotic and referential relationships in which a given artwork participates are to be taken as the primary factors by which to situate the artwork in a normative framework that is authoritative in, and regulative of, the society that produced it. For example, to cite another of Adorno's celebrated theses, popular songs are enmeshed in the normative framework of commodity production

2012

As the notion of “world art history” becomes a major disciplinary focus in the history of art, we need to be careful not to repeat the hierarchies, presumptions, and prejudices that have long plagued “western” art history. In particular, we should avoid subsuming those histories that used to be called “peripheral,” “marginal,” or “non-western” within canonical narratives if we want to recognize the importance of those “peripheral” histories. This paper turns to the work of several contemporary art works to examine how artists themselves have proposed alternative models for reimagining global art histories. These are models based not on the subsumption of one history or discourse into another, but on their contiguity. Indeed, the articulation and aesthetic of contiguous histories may prove an important means for retracing the connections, rather than simply the differences, between post-communism, post-colonialism, and art histories

2020

This chapter offers a detailed analysis of two very significant documents, “Draft of the Policy Principles of Indian People’s Theatre Association” (1951), which originally was drafted by Ritwik Ghatak and Surapati Nandi wherein Ghatak presents his entire understanding of both national and international culture and On The Cultural “Front”: A thesis submitted by Ritwik Ghatak to the Communist Party of India in 1954. In the Thesis, Ghatak formulates his basic thinking around Communist art and the need for the Party to become more open to the experimental possibilities of art practices within the Communist groups so that the art emerging from the Communist movements may be more mature and inclusive of diverse forms. He argues that it is only when the Communist artistes will learn from other humanitarian artistes, who work with a high sense of quality that the art of the Communist artistes will develop, as they too will then help in radicalising other art practices prevalent in India. It...

Third Text, 2011