I notice that many artists are very idealistic. Is art inherently idealistic or is this phenomenon just another symptom of the idealism that is inherent to liberalism? It should be noted that the art industry largely depends on capitalist donors which means that capitalists have a large say in what type of art becomes successful, which then influences new artists as well.
But I still wonder if thought provoking art needs some level of idealism. Would love to read the thoughts of people who have more knowledge on the topic than me.
Art will always reflect the social conditions of its production. Marxist art theorist Walter Benjamin addressed this in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
He assigns two valuations to art- the cult value (a totem representing a significant virtue to your community) and the exhibition value (a totem taken from its temple to a British museum, its social value to a community replaced by political and economic value tied to its display in an exclusive place). Cultic value is still idealistic in the sense that culture is the stories we tell each other, but it’s tied to things we should value materialistically as communists. It’s individual craftsmanship, socialised community production for social reproduction, and a reflection of the local environment. A cave painting made with local pigments is one of the most beautiful things in the world to me as a Marxist because it’s such a rich display of anthropological information and shows how that complex community navigated their world. I have Van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms on my wall because it’s developing new spatial theory through new trade route crosspollination, a specific historical moment preserved in a new way of seeing that values the individual’s emotional perspective. It’s by Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge because that painting radically undermines all the traditions of European art to show its patrons being killed by a simple shape representing a revolution at its most desperate moment. All three of those paintings are tied to real moments in history, real community exchanges, and reflect values that drive me politically.
Exhibition value is corrupted, especially under right-wing/liberal patronage and industrial capitalism. Now art is a commodity removed from context, a socioeconomic statement tied to global extraction, a propaganda tool, or a distraction from community. Art that reflects a community, its values, and its history through one-off productions still exists but it’s mostly considered indigenous/folk/countercultural art that isn’t platformed by the bourgeois market. I put a lot of faith in early modernist movements, especially art nouveau, because they intellectually countered this specific thing and gave a model to rebel against it.
When we see bad art, it’s all exhibition value. The flashy watch, Thomas Kinkade painting, abstract expressionist, AI slop, Live Laugh Love board, and most art world darlings exist through exhibition value alone. As art they mark the absence of empty space instead of filling it with something that’s more socially enriching over time.
GOOD post 🎨🖌️
Thank you, this is very insightful.
My own experience with art is mostly through music and I started thinking about this topic because one local artist I like is extremely idealistic. He writes about class struggle but from talking to him he sees himself as a messiah who is bringing the important truth to the masses, and frequently mentions that ideas can change the system. It made me realise that most artists I follow are idealists who believe that by putting their ideas and visions in their art they can change the material world. While I think that their art is valuable, I’m still a marxist and believe that real struggle takes place in the material world that those artists try to detach themselves from to some extent.
But you and other commenters made me realise that my frame of reference is limited and that the idealism in current art is very much a product of our time/system. I realise need to start scrutinising my own perception of art and remove the preconceptions I got through my liberal education. Apparently I still haven’t killed the liberal within me sufficiently
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wxRxSfhw6I
This is the real shit. Being an artist today is a very egocentric, professionalised position that we structurally only encourage through for-profit individual efforts. I couldn’t afford the decades or degrees required to be a good cellist. There’s no community role for a mediocre amateur cellist or community support to develop them. If I became a great cellist, the only secure positions for me would be playing the music of aristocrats in exclusive venues with $100 tickets. If I became a great non-classical cellist, celebrity is such a weird thing that it encourages someone to be the worst version of themselves.
For us there are the hard materialistic aspects to value. Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan is so rare in Europe that blue becomes associated with its most venerated icons. A Roman icon of Ceres is a protoscientific understanding of agronomy, the cult and its rituals making sense of nature to survive the year. Japonisme is a rebellion against French academic art that only happens due to packaging from colonial extraction in Japan, Japanese perspective being so radically different that it’s as new as cubism representing 4D subjects. Art nouveau is a cultural language for degrowth that gives us something more enriching than commodities, made locally by local artisans to turn their communities into art venerating the nature greyspace alienates them from. Dada is like if Hexbear existed in the 1910s-20s and we were commenting on WW1 instead of the 2-3 Week War.
There’s also value to critically understanding the idealism, seeing how the stories those cultures tell themselves reflect deeper histories/structures and modes of consumption/production. I don’t have any cultic relationship to a salmon image, but in tribal nations where that’s a staple food it serves the role ecology does for me in formally defining human-natural relationships. I hate NFTs, but I obsessively watched that spectacle because I loved the social psychology of people doing what Walter Benjamin was talking about. Seeing the failures in postmodernist works teaches me why the society they produced fails. For our own work the idealism is rooted in modernism or meta-modernism. The idealistic message is that anyone can create something genuinely new and use that to teach a new kind of beauty to anyone else, with different movements trying different approaches to achieve some form of that. All of my favourite leftist comedians today are absurdists who do unfunny things until they’re funny in a way that subverts the medium. My favourite leftist artists made things that attacked the values of their cultures because those values were wrong, with art being the way to illustrate new values.
you get a few years in school and then that’s it. maybe a church setting can use non-professional musicians and it doesn’t matter if your technical ceiling is low or you’re bad at sight-reading but they won’t develop you.
organists are kinda the opposite where there’s little institutional instruction but the small population also makes for some job security if you can figure out how to do it ok.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Damn this is very interesting stuff! I’m going to save that pdf and give it a read.
I always recommend that, John Berger’s book/documentary Ways of Seeing, and Robert Hughes’ book/documentary The Shock of the New. There’s a lot of Marxist art theory out there which informed me but those three were the most important. Art as a social history and modernist mission against bourgeois art is so much more interesting than the way most museums portray it.