Clic The Technology

Posts Tagged ‘art’

There were essentially four components, the relationship between use value
and exchange value, the uneven development between art and the economy, the goal of a classless society, and the place of realism in history. A society based on use value, it was argued, was likely to produce a higher form of art than one more economically advanced in which exchange value or the market predominated.

The polarization of use value and exchange value was at its most extreme in capitalist society, where unprecedented freedom entailed unprecedented saleability, a contradiction which only a communist order could dissolve by dismantling the market and putting production under public control.

Capitalism, as Marx declared, presents the greatest threat to art. From this perspective the significant art of the past can be seen as an anticipation of communism where ‘useful work’ is the norm. Significant art, according to Leftist, is always realistic and flourished in societies where use and exchange value were in relative balance. By realism Leftist means an art that plumbs the depths of its time, which transcends temporary class dominations and prefigures the still-hidden motions of social development.

It is to be distinguished from naturalism, which is only of its time and is concerned with the average rather than the typical. Nor is it a style, limited to certain novels of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, it is a rounded conception that goes back to the beginnings of civilization, and represents the world faithfully by contending both with its opponents and its own illusions.