Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics

This volume will attempt to analyze the aesthetic ideas of Karl Marx, little known and studied, and examine several questions vital to a Marxist aesthetic. Aesthetic problems are of increasing interest to Marxist thinkers.
There is a general need to go beyond, in this field as well as others, the dogmatic and sectarian conceptions which were prevalent during the years of the Stalinist deformations—theoretical and practical—of Marxism. We must not forget that those deformations were particularly grave in the realm of artistic theory and practice. Furthermore, as aesthetic problems have become increasingly important, the content of Marxism has been enriched, and its humanist character—which includes the essential aesthetic relationship—has increasingly been emphasized.
There is also the need to overcome old, onesided views of the artistic phenomena of our time. Modern art, apart from the place we assign it socio-historically—as part of an ideological superstructure—and regardless of the value we attribute to it on an aesthetic plane, is a rich, complex, and contradictory phenomenon which cannot be approached with the schematic and simplistic criteria that dominated Marxist art criticism until recently.