In his erudite and penetrating Painting and Experience in Fifteen Century Italy, Michael Baxandall writes: A fifteen-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship. On one side there was a painter who made the picture, or at least supervised its making. On the other side there was somebody else who asked him to make it, provided funds for him to make it and, after he had made it, reckoned on using it some way or other. Both parties worked within institutions and conventions — commercial, religious, perceptual, in the widest sense social — that were different from ours and influenced the forms of what they together made (Baxandall, 1988, 1). Baxandall's historical sketch highlights that in the fifteenth century paintings were made to order. Ready-made paintings hardly existed except for those of the Madonna for example that were made by mediocre painters. It was common for a customer to order a custom-designed painting, an altarpiece, or a fresco from a painter. Mostly this led to a legal contract between the customer and the artist.
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Further Reading
On marxistic aesthetics in general:
Fredric Jameson (ed.), Aesthetics and politics, London, Verso, 1980 (Originally published by New Left Books in 1977).
This is a remarkable reader on debates between Bloch, Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin and Adorno about expressionism and realism. Fredric Jameson has provided the different debates with excellent introductions, both historical and theoretical. He also concludes this concise anthology with a series of reflections in which the Marxist debates are put in a proper perspective. This reader is highly to be recommended from a didactical point of view.
See for a much more extensive, but also a very useful anthology:
Maynard Solomon (ed.), Marxism and art. Essays classic and contemporary, Detroit, MI.: Wayne State University Press, 1979 (Originally published in 1973).
Some of the many introductions to the field of Marxist aesthetics which are recommendable:
Dave Laing, The Marxist theory of art, Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press; Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1986 (Originally published in 1978).
Eugene Lunn, Marxism and modernism: an historical study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984 (Originally published in 1982).
Pauline Johnson, Marxist aesthetics: the foundations within everyday life for an emancipated consciousness, London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.
Andrew. Benjamin, Problems of modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, London and New York: Routledge, 1991 (Originally published in 1989).
Clint Burnham, The Jamesonian unconscious: the aesthetics of Marxist theory, Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
Tony Bennett, Formalism and marxism, London/New York: Routledge, 2003 (Originally published by Methuen in 1979).
More spefically on literature:
Raymond Williams, Marxism and literature, Oxford, in Oxford University Press, 1977.
Terry Eagleton, Marxism and literary critism, with a new introduction by the author, Berkeley, CA, Routledge, 2002 (Originally published in 1976).
Francis Mulhern (ed.), Contemporary Marxist literary criticism, London/New York, in Longman, 1992.
Lukács' writing which is relevant for this chapter:
Georg Lukács, The meaning of contemporary realism, London: Merlin Press, 1963.
Georg Lukács, Realism in our time: literature and the class struggle, New York, in Harper and Row, 1971.
Georg Lukács, Studies in European realism. A sociological survey of the writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, Gorki and others, New York: Howard Fertig, 2002 (Originally publishrd in 1950 by Hillway Publishers).
Georg Lukács, ‘Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline’, in his: Essays in realism, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980 (76–179) and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981.
Georg Lukács, The destruction of reason, London: Merlin Press, 1962 and Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.
Georg Lukács, The historical novel, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 1983.
Georg Lukács, The theory of the novel, London: Merlin Press and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.
For a convenient reader on Lukács, see:
Arpad Kadarkay (ed.), The Lukács reader, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell Publishers, 1995.
About the life and work of Lukács see:
George Henry Radcliff Parkinson (Ed.), George Lukács: the man, his work and his ideas, London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977.
George Lichtheim, Georg Lukács, New York: Viking Press, 1970.
Béla Királyfálvi, The aesthetics of György Lukács, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Judith Marcus and Zoltán Tarr, Georg Lukács: theory, culture and politics, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989.
Arpad Kadarkay, Georg Lukács: Life, thoughts and politics, Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.
Agnes Heller (ed.), Lukács Revalued, Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1983 (This reader is very useful for further research on Lukács).
On the young Lukács:
Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The young Lukács and the origins of Western Marxism, New York: Seabury Press, London, 1979.
Lee Congdon, The young Lukács, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1983.
Jay M. Bernstein, The philosophy of the novel. Lukács, Marxism and the dialectics of form, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Relevant for the debate between Brecht and Lukács see:
Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst, Band 2: Über den Realismus (Writings on Literature and Art, Vol. 2, About Realism), Frankfurt am Main, in Suhrkamp, 1967.
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Against Georg Lukacs’, in: F. Jameson (Ed.), Aesthetics and politics (see above), 1977 (68–85).
Werner Mittenzwei, ‘The Brecht-Lukács Debate’, in: Gaylord Le Roy and Ursula Beitz (eds.), Preserve and create, New York: Humanities Press, 1973.
Relevant for the debate between Adorno and Lukács:
Theodor Adorno, ‘Reconciliation under Duress’, in: Fredric Jameson (Ed.), Aesthetics and politics (see above), 1977 (151–176).
Works of Adorno of particular interest for this chapter:
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, London/New York: Verso, 2005 (Originally published by New Left Books in 1974).
Theodor Adorno, Negative dialectics, London/Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. New and more recent translation: London and New York: Continuum, 2004.
Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic theory, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, London/New York: Continuum, 1984 (Originally published by Seabury Press in 1973).
Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of modern music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
For his critique on the culture industry:
Theodor Adorno, The culture industry: selected essays on mass culture, edited with an introduction by Jay M. Bernstein, London, in Routledge, 2001 (Originally published in 1991).
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of enlightenment: philosophical fragments, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
The most recent and complete work on Adorno:
Gerard Delanty (ed.), Theodor W. Adorno, 4 Vol., London/Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2004. On Benjamin and Adorno see Vol. 3, Part 3: Popular culture and capitalism.
Accessible introductions to the work of Adorno are:
Rose Gillian, The melancholy science. An introduction to the thought of Theodor W. Adorno, London: Macmillan; New York: Columbia University Press, 1978.
Martin Jay, Adorno, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.
Brian O'Connor (ed.), The Adorno reader, Oxford and Malden, MA, Blackwell, 2000.
Specifically on Adorno and aesthetics:
Karla L.Schultz, Mimesis on the move: Theodor W. Adorno's concept of imitation, Berne, Switzerland and New York, in P. Lang, 1990.
David Roberts, Art and enlightenment: aesthetic theory after Adorno, Lincoln, NE/London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno's aesthetic theory: the redemption of illusion, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
Jay M. Bernstein, The fate of art: aesthetic alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.
Christoph Menke-Eggers, The sovereignty of art: aesthetic negativity in Adorno and Derrida, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
Works from and about Benjamin in reference to this chapter:
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: essays and reflections, edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968.
Gary Smith (Ed.), Benjamin: philosophy, history, and aesthetics, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.
Rainer Rochlitz, The disenchantment of art: the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, New York, Guilford Press, 1996.
Lutz Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the aesthetics of power, Lincoln NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1999.
Hans U. Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan, Mapping Benjamin: the work of art in the digital age, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
David S. Ferris (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Walter Benjamin, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
For the work mentioned in the introduction, see:
Michael Baxandall, Painting and experience in fifteenth century Italy: a primer in the social history of pictorial style, Oxford and New York: Oxford Unversity Press, 1988. (Originally published in 1972).
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(2009). Art and Society: A Neomarxist Perspective. In: Thinking Art. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-5638-3_8
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