Sigrid’s Reviews > The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx > Status Update

is it good?

So far I would just describe it as “worth reading”! Lifshitz (writing 1933 in the USSR) wants to make the case that Marx would have rejected modernism, abstraction, expressionism, etc., since these forms represent (for Lifshitz) a retreat into idealism and idealism-individuality. This is plausible—and Lifshitz undertakes an intriguing close reading of Marx’s comments on aesthetics, starting as early as 1835 (iirc) and stretching at least to grundrisse, in order to prove it. But as an artist I have a personal stake in it all, so I will need quite a bit of convincing. And Lifshitz has yet to address the work of the Russian constructivists, who challenged both traditional representational painting AND the retreat into abstract individuality. (I have always really admired this work.) Perhaps he tackles this challenge in ‘The Crisis of Ugliness’, I’m really not sure.

The argument he makes requires a fair bit of reaching and extrapolation, as he admits—but his work is a welcome rejoinder to those who would pass off Marx’s aesthetic commitments as merely tangental or derivative, or worse: those who would turn Marx into a liberal representative of freedom or freedom of expression.

The reason I’m reading it today has little to do with my interest in defending socialist realism, the movement with which Lifshitz has been identified. Nor am I particularly interested in recovering abstraction from his critique. But I am very curious about how the tensions which Lifshitz identifies remain present in contemporary art, and particularly in how they impact participatory or “social practice” New Genre Public Art — tendencies which arguably embody the ideals of socialist realism more fully than even S.R. itself. If you’re also interested in some of these questions, you might read Boris Groys’ “Between the Medium and the Message...”, published earlier this year in e-flux. Lifshitz isn’t the focus of the article but he is briefly discussed.

thanks for the reply and the recommendation. it's nice to hear that lifshitz is being discussed at all in contemporary art criticism. i've liked the essays from boris groys i've read, so i'll check that out.

i thought The Crisis of Ugliness was really interesting, and representative of a unique political position that lifshitz was able to take as a citizen of a socialist society. i think that there's also something to the argument that the wholesale condemnation of modernism is regressive, but i do agree with adorno that there are fundamental aspects of aesthetics and questions of form can be understood as having political valences. i find the whole debate around modernism / realism with adorno on the western side, and lukacs & lifshitz on the eastern side, to be incredibly fascinating, challenging, and of great contemporary relevance. the question of whether of not abstract art is in some way inherently bourgeois is a really interesting question to me, and i'm still looking for an answer.