The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Marcuse and Art

Marcuse and Art
Posted by Marcello (Guest) georgiomalik@yahoo.com - Sunday, February 27 2011, 23:35:03 (UTC)
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Marcuse and Art
(and why I don't like mass-produced images of "Che"... though I own a few)

"The nwo-conservative critics of leftist critics of culture ridicule the protest against Bach as background music in the kitchen, against Plato and Hegel, Shelley and Baudelaire, Marx and Freud in the drugstore. Instead, they insist on recognition of the fact that the classics have left the masouleum and come to life again, that people are just so much more educated. True, but coming to life as classics, they come to life as other than themselves; they are deprived of their antagonistic force, of the estrangement which was the very dimension of their truth. The intent and function of these works have thus fundamentally changed. If they once stood in contradiction to the status quo, this contradioction is now flattened out.

"But as much assimilation is historically premature; it establishes cultural equality while preserving domination. Society is eliminating the prerogatives and privileges of feudal-aristocratic culture together with its content. The fact that the transcending truths of fine arts, the aesthetics of life and thought, were accessible only to the few wealthy and educated was the fault of a repressive society. But this fault is not corrected by paperbacks, general education, long-playing records, and the abolition of formal dress in the theater and concert hall. The cultural privileges expressed the injustice of freedom, the contradiction between ideology and reality, the separation of intellectual from material productivity; but they also provided a protected realm in which the tabooed truths could survive in abstract integrity -- remote form the society which suppressed them.

"Now this remoteness has been removed -- and with it the transgression and the indictment. The text and the tone are still there, but the distance is conquered which made them 'Luft von anderen Planteten'(Stephan George, in Arnold Schonberg's Quartet in F Sharp Minor). The artistc alienation has become as functional as the architecture of the new theaters and concert halls in which it is performed. And here too, the rational and the evil are inseparable. Unquestionably the new architecture is better, i.e., more beautiful and more practical than the monstrosities of the Victorian era. But it is also more "integrated" -- the cultural center becoming a fitting part of the shopping center, or municipal center, or government center. Domination has its own aesthetics, and democratic domination has its democratic aesthetics. It is good that almost everyone can now have the fine arts at his figertips, by just turning the knob on his set, or by just stepping into his drugstore. In this diffusion, however, they become cogs in a culture-machine which remakes their content."

Herbert Marcuse "One-Dimensional Man" (1964)



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