Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Marx Estranged Labor

Reading listing:
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"
T.J. Clark, "Cloudless Greenberg'due south Theory of Fine art"
T.J. Clark, "On the Social History of Fine art"
T.J. Clark, "Olympia'due south Choice"
Michael Fried, "How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark"
Karl Marx, "The Materialist Interpretation of History"
Karl Marx, "Material Reproduction and Artistic Production"
Karl Marx, "Alienated Labor"
Pierre Bourdieu, "DIstinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Gustatory modality"

The nature of art and its human relationship to its audience has long been a changing perception, but with the advent of photography, lithography and other means of mechanized reproduction, the universal perspective apropos art has transformed into either a social tool for the manipulation of the masses, or a feeble and powerless thing stripped of its potency. The Marxist theory practical to art emphasizes the meaning, authority, "aureola" of fine art that is erased through mechanical modes, while the totalitarian nature of film encourages self-alienation and "a land of distraction." Walter Benjamin argues in "The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" that Fascism and capitalism have managed to brand mankind'due south own cocky-destruction "aesthetic pleasance of the first order." His theory of "reception in a state of lark" comes into its own in movie theater, encouraging the masses to accept tropes pre-determined by previous experience merely. Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1944 article "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception," too argue that the entertainment industry itself resists close inspection and has become a tool of mass command, leading mutual people into the fake belief that they have choice.

Bourdieu's "Distinction," too, cites cultural and artistic hegemony, created through the early on installation of taste in children, as a major gene in class distinction. He asserts that not only is taste a reflection of a person'southward place in society, just conforming to the upper class' ethics of taste is the but manner to accomplish upward social mobility.  This seems to echo Horkheimer and Adorno's commodity that warns "economic impotence" and "intellectual powerlessness" are the fate of the not-conformist.

Marx speaks to this estrangement betwixt classes and within oneself in "Alienated Labor," marker 4 divisions of breach. The worker feels estranged from his product because he does not own it and commercialism appropriates it from him; the act of working in itself is not his ain considering, rather than developing naturally, it is the means of his survival. The worker feels removed from his ain identity, and antagonistic towards the backer who gains enrichment at the expense of the proletariat.

" data-medium-file="https://bethbuckleyarhs.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/olympia.jpg?w=300" data-large-file="https://bethbuckleyarhs.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/olympia.jpg?w=584" class="size-large wp-image-7" alt=""Olympia," Edouard Manet, 1863." src="https://bethbuckleyarhs.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/olympia.jpg?w=584&h=392" width="584" height="392" srcset="https://bethbuckleyarhs.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/olympia.jpg?w=584&h=392 584w, https://bethbuckleyarhs.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/olympia.jpg?w=150&h=101 150w, https://bethbuckleyarhs.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/olympia.jpg?w=300&h=202 300w, https://bethbuckleyarhs.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/olympia.jpg?w=768&h=516 768w, https://bethbuckleyarhs.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/olympia.jpg?w=1024&h=688 1024w, https://bethbuckleyarhs.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/olympia.jpg 1115w" sizes="(max-width: 584px) 100vw, 584px">

"Olympia," Edouard Manet, 1863.

In "A Social History of Fine art," T.J. Clark uses Courbet'south "The Stonebreakers" as an example of the labor of an individual defining him, rather than his concrete characteristics or personality. Clark also returns to the popular example of Manet's "Olympia" to assert the uneasiness one feels when confronted with the oppressed worker while simultaneously buying her product, her body. Manet remakes bones categories of nudity (something classical) versus nakedness (something vulgar). Clark says it speaks to the social space rather than physical space, exposing the fiction of courtesan past exposing the fact of paint. Michael Fried in his "Response to T.J. Clark" asserts, yet, that information technology is the painting's existence in a particular moment in history that gives it resonance and ability, and not the "irreducible essence of all painting" championed past Cloudless Greenberg. Regardless, the choice of subject matter in "Olympia" as well as the mode of depiction– a critique of the space of painting– speak to the ethics of modernism likewise equally to the Marxist dialectic. Olympia holds her power non in the trappings of her form or profession, simply in her torso, in her self.

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Source: https://bethbuckleyarhs.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/week-3-marxism-and-the-social-history-of-art/

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