Mikhail Lifshitz: Marxist Aesthetics and a Critique of Modern Art
What is important to me is to mark the main features of the worldview we are offered as the lodestar of the future art – the renunciation of realistic pictures, which Picasso sees as an empty illusion, that is, deception, and the affirmation of a wilful fiction, designed to spark enthusiasm, that is, the conscious deception of mythmaking. [...] Let’s just say that the main inner goal of such art lies in suppressing the consciousness of the conscious mind. A flight into superstition is the very minimum. Even better is a flight into an unimaginable world. Hence, the constant effort to shatter the mirror of life or at least to make it muddy and unseeing. Any image must now be given qualities of ‘unlikeness’. In the way, pictoriality recedes, eventually becoming something free of any association with real life. [...] Once it was enough to present a few geometrical figures on the canvas to avoid any associations. Now this is too little. The self-defences of consciousness are so refined that even abstract forms are reminiscent of something real. That requires an even greater degree of detachment. Hence, there appears anti-art, Pop Art, which largely consists of the demonstration of real things, enclosed in an invisible frame. In a sense, this is the end of a long evolution from real depictions to the reality of bare facts. It might seem we’ve already achieved that goal: the life of the spirit has ended, the worm of consciousness has been crushed. Still, that is an empty illusion. The ailing spirit’s attempts to jump out of its own skin are senseless and hopeless. When reflection revolves around itself endlessly, it only gives rise to ‘boring infinity’ and an insatiable thirst for the other. [...] Yes, ‘modern art’ is more philosophy than art. It is a philosophy expressing the dominance of power and facts on lucid thinking and poetic contemplation of the world. The brutal demolition of real forms stands for an outburst of blind embittered volition. It is the slave’s revenge, his make-believe liberation from the yoke of necessity, a simple pressure valve. If it were only a pressure valve! There is a fatal connection between the slavish form of protest and oppression itself. According to all the newest aesthetic theories, art’s effect is hypnotic: it traumatises or on the contrary blunts or calms a consciousness that no longer has any life of its own. In short, it is the art of a suggestible crowd at the ready to run after the emperor’s chariot. Why am I Not a Modernist? - Mikhail Lifshitz
Lifshitz's critique of modern art and its "hypnotic effect" targets modernism's romantic heritage and its animating desire for art to redeem what it sees as a fallen world through acts of a sovereign will possessed by a singular genius (hence the reference to the "emperors chariot"). Its no coincidence the notion of the genius is a quintessentially Roman notion that Walter Benjamin found in the works of none other than Goethe that entailed "the patriarchal idea that every culture, including bourgeois culture, could only thrive under the protection of and in the shadow of the absolute state." (Benjamin - Goethe: the Reluctant Bourgeois) Hitler's status as a failed artist, by now such a trite fact as to be included in the encyclopedia that is middle-brow pop historical consciousness, is a testament to the prevalence of this desire for a despot-as-artist that romanticism, among other things, has left in its wake. Fredric Jameson's antidote to the culture of the crowd seeking a new art school Ceasar is “a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system…” (Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. pg. 54). Lifshitz and Jameson endorse a realism that attempts to allow the masses to understand the world so they may one day change it.