An Excerpt from INDIVIDUALISM: Art for Art’s Sake, or Art for Society’s Sake?
by Suzi Gablik
True art, Marxists argue, examines the social and political reality behind appearance and does not represent it abstractly, divorced from appearances and in opposition to appearances. Marxist aesthetics demands that art illuminate social relationships and help us to recognize and change social reality. For art to be a social force, it must have a wide audience, and it must pass judgment on the phenomena of life. It must have as its subject the social world. Marx constantly stressed that art has a human social reality and must be integrated in a world of meanings–it is not a separate reality.
Both these positions–art as the expression of the individual or as the fulfillment of social needs–seem equally intelligible, but their conflicting demands at this point frame a major crisis in our culture: truth to the self or truth to the values of society. The sensibility of our age is characterized by this dilemma.
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