Iconoclast! Iconoclastic! Iconoclasm!

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

Official art is the playground of the petit-bourgeoisie in the best of times, and the ideological base of "petit-bourgeois socialism" (fascism) when capital enters its inevitable crises. How do we build a proletarian art?

DRUGS RULE!

[bky1701]

I don't understand what you mean. What?

[redstar2000]

I recall reading a suggestion once that "art" won't even exist in a communist society.

People's lives will be "their art".

Certainly it seems likely that art as a "special sphere" for the production of "venerated objects" as status symbols for the "elite" will probably "wither away".

Who would be interested?

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[encephalon]

Art existed long before the agricultural revolution and the division of society into a class system, and I expect it to last afterwards. Not to say it will remotely be the same as it is today (it's never stayed the same throughout history, except in cases where the ruling class codified the standard, such as in imperial egypt). I imagine it will be far different, and indeed not collected by the ruling class for prestige, but it will remain art nonetheless.

[Shredder]

I'm not sure what you mean by art existing before class society. Paintings existed, for example on cave walls, but these were functional paintings instead of art-for-art's-sake which is the rule today. Poetry was simply speech placed into a form that was easily remembered for the sake of history and storytelling. Was there truly pre-civil society art in the same sense as today?

[Monty Cantsin]

Originally posted by [email protected] 6 2006, 03:04 AM

Certainly it seems likely that art as a "special sphere" for the production of "venerated objects" as status symbols for the "elite" will probably "wither away".

I don’t think so matters of taste are also matters of distinction, of individuality. It’s not as if ‘popular culture’ would become universal in a truer sense then it is now, making it in effect more banal. There will always be people who consider themselves cultured therefore elite - an anathema to the common people or so they would like to think.

[encephalon]

I'm not sure what you mean by art existing before class society. Paintings existed, for example on cave walls, but these were functional paintings instead of art-for-art's-sake which is the rule today. Poetry was simply speech placed into a form that was easily remembered for the sake of history and storytelling. Was there truly pre-civil society art in the same sense as today?

Art is the result of historical circumstances. Cave-paintings are indeed art--any art historian will tell you the same. "Individualist, art-for-art's-sake art" is the product of capitalism, not the sole definition of art itself. Art, no matter what period in which it exists, has always been and always will be functional. It may seem as though it has no function at all, but it builds the mindset of the next generation in the given culture, altering the next generation's material environment.

In the heights of capitalism, art functions primarily to reinforce capitalism. Exceptions exist when the environment slightly alters, but art is largely a social function, not individualist by nature. It's why avant-garde art, visual or otherwise, has always remained underground until the rest of society caught up to it. Then the next movement rejects that particular function and form of art, and revolutionizes the process once again. Except for perhaps 1100 years of the egyptian empire keeping tight control of artistic form and function, this has happened repeatedly throughout history. And it will continue to do so.

Just as art was used to preserve society when it consisted of cave-paintings, so art is used to preserve society in any age and circumstance until that society encounters a revolutionary point in its evolution.

[Zingu]

I have to agree with Redstar2000.

I think today that people admire art so much is because it represents the thing they yearn for! They want a life free of the daily drugdery and repetative boredom in capitalism. And thats what art represents, a freedom of creating what one desires, of manifesting one's will. Art is the form of unalienated labor that we will see in communism.

Alienated art is exactly what was said before, the glorification of individuals or the personification of ideology and/or religous values...or today in its nihilistic "post-modern" art that has no real meaning at all...just like extentialism, one feels empty and floating in an empty world, due to his own alienation.