[HUNGARY-2000] THE AESTHETIC TRADITION
Wally Keeler
Chapter 4
THE AESTHETIC TRADITION
IT IS the paradox of tradition that the social commitment of our early
revolutionary artists created the aesthetic conditions for their later
assimilation. Today's disciplinarians of art did not materialize out of
thin air. The radical artists of the bourgeois crisis of individualism
nurtured the latent desires that later assured support for the
nationalization of culture. Their fate was to preside over their own
domestication. But can a genuine aesthetic culture be built upon such a
tradition? Can commitment have an independent principle of form? And can
the aesthetics of censorship employ that principle for its ideal?
Most histories of art do not list the art of commitment as a separate
entry-partly because art historians' outlook is rarely sociological, and
partly because it was hard to take the legitimacy of "proletarian" art
seriously -
especially since nothing about those aesthetics was in any way created by
the proletariat. Moreover, the intent of this art was clearly
extra-artistic. In the fin de siecle burst of bourgeois art, it seemed
merely one peculiar,
largely tasteless bit of madness among many more interesting, more talented
artistic experiments. It was dismissed as inferior, derivative, or, at best=
,
applied art. Committed art was as worthless as commercial art. Commitment
was castigated as the confession of artists who simply couldn't cut it.
Early Christian art in the sophisticated late Roman era must have been
viewed similarly - if indeed any notice was taken of the Catacombs below.
Those few who did find committed art worthwhile tried to lure it toward
autonomy and away from its love affair with power. Theodor Adorno, for
instance, condemned Brecht's optimism as a retreat into the most bourgeois
kind of happy ending. He demonstrated the compromising element in the cult
of commitment. He
saw Epic theater, which was supposed to banish the consumer mentality, as
even more calculated in its consumerism. Finally, he felt its tone was
didactic in its emphasis on "realism," and its stylized, empty formalism.
Still, he defended Brecht against those of his detractors who said that he
was a brilliant artist in spite of his political commitment. But this
defense did not deter
Adorno from emphasizing, in his appeal to Brecht, the common critical value=
s
of modern art. He did not reckon with the strength of will implicit in
Brecht's kind of commitments commitment that ultimately would prove
incompatible with the ideal of artistic autonomy.
The New Function
Before socialism, the function of art had been simply to preserve its own
autonomy, or, in a wider sense, to preserve the possibility of autonomy
within society at large. In the culture of social commitment it has a new
function: to enlarge, direct, and give cohesion to an organized public, the
nucleus of the future society.
The old demand for autonomy is dismissed as a dogma of self-mutilation, =
a
prescription for irrelevance. The notion of public service is this
culture's guiding principle. Whoever has embraced this liberating principl=
e
will understand that serving the people not only does not spoil but actuall=
y
deepens artistic pleasure. The idea of commitment helps to deliver the work
of the artist to his audience, and gives him the aesthetic basis to mold
this public and to prepare the context and reception of his art. Looking a=
t
the aesthetic of commitment in this way puts the promise of autonomous art
to shame, so retrograde is it where fulfillment and richness are concerned.
Thus, after a short interregnum - called modernism - the artist again
reconciles himself to History and recognizes that, in serving the public, h=
e
serves himself.
The work of art is thus a kind of connective tissue, part of the divisio=
n
of labor, with an internal structure that enables the work of art to fulfil=
l
its new function. That function has changed, of course, but it has not bee=
n
completely severed from its past: rather, the secret of effective beauty ha=
s
been rediscovered. Past art turns out to have been merely a preparation fo=
r
future art, whose mission can be summed up in a phrase: to educate. Just a=
s
history finds its culmination in socialism, so too does art seek its
completion in commitment.
But everything has its price, of course. If art is to be a "true
reflection" of reality, then art's new function conceals a taboo: we must
exclude all art that might suggest that reality is, or sometimes is,
nonaligned, indifferent, aimless, absurd, intangible, deaf, dumb, or blind.
This taboo is a permanent feature of the cult of commitment. If, before th=
e
advent of state socialism, committed art always had to protest reality,
today it must always affirm reality. The dream of a world in which only
positive, life-affirming, and constructively committed art can exist has
been realized. This art neither hates nor worships "reality": it merely
denies reality the chance to be mysterious.
The quality of any particular work of art arises neither from its
interdependent elements nor from unforeseen innovations. The harmony of its
elements is linked to their intent, and this in turn is rooted in their
common purpose. They need be neither unrepeatable nor necessarily original=
.
The socially engaged artist is progressive even when he uses archaisms, or
popularizes, or borrows, for he has the freedom to ransack the whole
treasure chest of past culture. The sign of his originality is his ability
to find ever more suitable and imaginative ways of expressing the socialist
message.
The media are only important as means to an end; they are not themselves
the source of Beauty. It is a counter- revolutionary blasphemy to say that
the medium is the message. To cultivate the media for their own sake makes
the artist a slave of his medium. The message emancipates him from this
tyranny of media, their malleability and adaptability, is proof that the
message is universal. Painters paint, sculptors sculpt, writers write, but
none of them should suffer the vanity of thinking that his medium is
superior to another's. To be sure, no medium is dispensable. All are
needed. All serve the message.
Art is simply one element among many to be used in the creation of the
masterwork - the planned society. The artist's efforts are aimed at
rendering the enjoyment of art indistinguishable from the appreciation of
art's own wish to build society. The mystical heights of aesthetic pleasur=
e
thus take place beyond the particular work of art itself, in the catharsis
of shared social intentions.
The artist is a social planner. He not only inspires but also organizes
his public. Artistic enjoyment is complete, and the work of art judged
healthy, only in terms of History. The aesthetic merit of a work of art is
measured by the extent to which, in its structure, fantasy world, and
passions, it conforms to the needs of concrete social action; otherwise, th=
e
artist's commitment would not be credible. Truly artistic works are those
in which the socialist message is indivisible from the aesthetic means
chosen to express it. The artist must package the message in such a way
that the audience experiences it as a kind of revelation. The best package
for this purpose is the world itself. That is why the socially engaged
artist must "mirror reality." Realism is the most accessible and least
distorting way of encapsulating this message.
The work of art must not become sheer rhetoric. This danger looms larg=
e
for socialist art: it is like the pull of gravity. Socialist art may be ar=
t
only in relation to political rhetoric, but the fact that it is "more" than
mere rhetoric makes it art. This art gravitates not toward autonomy but
toward the message.
Because it is the social influence of such art that this aesthetics
considers quintessentially artistic, the artist needs "outside" direction.
Critics condemn this need as anti-artistic. But they are wrong. For the
first time since the Christian Middle Ages, the public spirit of art is
released by this need. And this is not a step backward. Only in the modern
planned society, a society owned by the state, will art achieve such an
exalted stature. This aesthetic, which is the basis of state culture, has
evolved almost imperceptibly. Previously the social aspect of a work of ar=
t
would have been no more important than any other. Today only the work that
expresses a social meaning is artistically valuable.
From the point of view of the aesthetics of censorship, this achievement
is more than a fashionable idea; it is a turning point: artistic pleasure,
once a private affair, is now the means for social insight, itself complici=
t
in the transformation of society. The idea of commitment, a small,
seemingly innocuous step in late bourgeois art, is culturally an enormous
leap. Without it, the directed art of state socialism could hardly have
come into being, let alone flourished.
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