Hybridity

Hybridity

Introduction

Art is generally understood as any activity or product done by man with a purpose aesthetic or communicative, through which they express thoughts, emotions or in general, a view of the world, through a variety of resources, such as plastics, linguistic, audio or mixed. This paper focuses on the study of the Art market in the society, through the theories and concepts presented by Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin.

Discussion

Karl Marx and art

Several disciples and critics of Marxist philosophy, tried to raise a theory of art, from historical materialism founded by Marx. First, the fact remains that in the various works of Karl Marx, does not exist as such, an aesthetic theory within their philosophical approaches, and more, for a long time refused to deduct, from the thesis fundamental historical materialism, ideas and assumptions about the artistic activity (Marx, 1867).

Art, superstructure and ideology

When the first attempts were made to complete Marx's philosophical thought through a theory of aesthetics, art in the first place was simply characterized as a social phenomenon that only expressed the ideology dominant at the time. From this point of view, the art would be part of the superstructure and as such express conflicts and interests of social classes, especially the ruling elite. In this sense, the work of art would be a simple reflection of the economic and social life of a particular time and society, so that, to a painting or sculpture, a qualified observer would recognize the structures, social institutions, relations between individuals and economic base from which emerged an artistic product (Marx, 1867).

One of the Marxist philosophers, Ernst Fischer, rejected this view ideologizing art, who in his book 'Ideology and Art' said, "the language, color, rhythm, sound, structure, symmetry and asymmetry, harmony and disharmony, not origin or ideological nature and develop, by "rule", out of ideological influences"(Marx, 1867).

Artistic preferences and judgments of Carl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Because of the rigidity, poverty and narrowness of the ideological concept of art, there aesthetes who wanted to deduct a Marxist aesthetics, from the artistic tastes and preferences of Marx and Engels, who felt predilection for classical art and bourgeois critical realism, represented especially in the works of Honoré de Balzac, as they felt that they were truthfully exposing the moral hypocrisy and cruelty that underlay the French bourgeois society of the nineteenth century. It is from this unremarkable observation and literary judgment that certain writers postulated realism as the official artistic style of Marxist philosophy (Marx, 1867).

Man, work and artistic practice

The possibility of bringing an artistic conception from Marxism, without falling into dogmatism or aesthetic fascism, would be as Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, in Marx's early works, specifically “economic Manuscripts - philosophical". In this work, Marx establishes a link between art and work, being both instances where man himself is determined as being practical that transforms nature out of himself, i.e., projecting outwards in the extent that its activity, produces a humanized object, not necessity to survive, but by their desire to reassert itself as a human being, as ...