Krispin Joseph PX
May 5, On This Day
Marxian intervention
Everybody knows who Karl Marx is and what his intervention is into human society and culture. On May 5, the human community remembered one of the significant members of our intellectual history, Karl Marx, and celebrating his 205th birth anniversary today. Marx, born in 1818 in Trier, Germany, was a revolutionary philosopher, economist, and political theorist whose views and writings have profoundly influenced political thought and social movements worldwide.
When we read Marx and the Marxian critique on beauty and aesthetics, the world seems more complicated than we imagine. Marx talks about art in 19th-century society and how capitalist modes of production changed the definition of society and art. Now we are living in a postmodern society. What is art for now, according to Marxian ideas?
The ideology that Marx brings into this world is highly arguable and impacts every subject of human interactions. When discussing the element of beauty or aesthetics in Marxian doctrine, commodity fetishism is the core of that debate. According to Marx, art happens only when we open to society through the window of social realism and confront the realities of existing society. Marx brought some element into the art world: he never wrote anything about art; both Marx and Engels repeatedly commented on questions of literature but never wrote about visual art or architecture. In his ‘Marx on Ideology and Art, art historian Werckmeister writes about the Marxian idea of art (1973). He says, ‘By contrast, official communist aesthetics conceives art as a cultural institution relevant to bringing the classless society about (p502). Marx believes art is so strong that humans think and will bring many unnoticed things into the human culture, reflecting our interactions.
Werckmeister mentioned the scarcity of statements about art in Marx’s writing in his essay. When we go through the Marxian idea of art, we reach Two contradictory notions of art, one idealistic-utopian. Marx writes about the concept of art in e Critique of Political Economics (1857-58): It is known that certain heydays of art are not at all related to the general development of society and neither, therefore, to the skeleton, as it were, of its organisation (p502). What is the role of art in the formation of holistic development of society? Who are we, and how can we confront the romantic world of art and culture?
And Marx can always be sure about the realm of art and how the various art genres will help the general development of society. When Marx talks about art, he brings classical Greek works to discuss the socially realistic things in art. Marx thinks that art is a matter of organic development of the human individual and the history of humanity as a whole. For this topic, where do we place art? What we understand from Classical Greek art and its development as a culture and civilisation. As a culture, Indus Valley Civilisation carries a glimpse of modern Indian society in a very subtle way. Only we can understand these elements through objects and artefacts from the Indus Valley, and they unfold the artistic practice of ancient Indian culture.
In the essay’ Aesthetics and the Economic Beauty of Socialism’ (2019), Linan Li, deputy dean of the School of Marxism, Xiamen Institute of Technology, wrote about the economic value of beauty and used Marxian theory to understand the contemporary notion of Marxian idea of art. Aesthetic judgement, for Li, is a value judgement based on more subjective factors. Li writes, ‘The aesthetic subject is human, and the aesthetic object is external and has countless connections with the aesthetic subject (p361). According to Li, art for Marx is labour centred; ‘labour creates beauty, and ‘the essence of beauty comes from the practice that is the unity of material and spirit (p361); why Lin brings economic value to her essay because everything is brought by money after monetising the social world. Without a purchasing capacity, no one experiences art in this modern time. What capitalism has done in the case of art, we committed to purchasing art experience through different channels. No one can watch a movie without spending money or experiencing the food taste. Sometimes, art experience is wholly based on the spending capacity of one who experienced it.
Marxian thought of art related to the production of his life and the dominion over nature; as Werckmeister writes ‘there is only “art production,” that is, art produced following organised, feudally repressed or capitalistically alienated conditions of life (p504). We need to discuss the early formula or art in Marxian criticism, which is the fetishism of the commodity; ‘human images contrary to their true meaning, as fictitious deities, tools for dominating men. Marx considers art to be having the quality of fiction and ambiguous. ‘Art, according to Marx’s original conception, is by implication free of any social purpose, an object of contemplation or enjoyment, writes Werckmeister. When art becomes more relevant, it narrates human nature directly; that is why Marx praised Greek art as classical and ideal.
Art or literature manages the people, time, engagements, dreams, imaginations, fantasy, collectiveness, and attitude toward human culture, beauty and the ugly. Art always depends on material production, so Marx talks about the labour elements of art. According to Marx, an artist is a labourer doing their job well. Now we know how this money and market work in the art world, as a fuel of encouraging each other.
Li writes about art and beauty from a Marxian perspective, ‘Beauty has characteristics such as sociality, historicity, and value’, and the main beauty category is harmony. The connotation of harmony includes symmetry and balance’ (p362).
What happens between art and the audience when we encounter artwork in a gallery or theatre (artwork, music, drama or movie)? Artwork and audience interactions are an economic engagement; they go through a hierarchical order between people, paintings and their expressions. Marx always thinks true art is essentially not ideology, but it’s about the truth of capitalism, either a critique of capitalism or patronage, then that work becomes radical and revolutionary.
Who is the artist for Karl Marx? The artist is aware of the value of ‘art’ and uses that medium to contend with the capitalist attitude of society and rage with potentiality. Art is placed in the centre position in the Marxian social structure. But that’s not mean the whole idea of ‘art’ is free from the capitalist thinking of society. According to the Marxian argument of money and labour production, art is for changing the world. Much literature, art, movies, and music are produced according to the Marxian versions of society everywhere.
Reference
- Werckmeister, O. K. “Marx on Ideology and Art.” New Literary History 4, no. 3 (1973): 501–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/468532.
2) Li, Linan. “Aesthetics and the Economic Beauty of Socialism.” World Review of Political Economy 10, no. 3 (2019): 360–76. https://doi.org/10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.10.3.0360.
