The methodologies of Art 筆記3

Chapter 4 Marxism, Orientalism, Colonialism, and Racial Iconography
1. Marxism
    - read works of art mainly in relation to their political and economic role in society.
    - Karl Marx
          - tying art to the culture that produced it
          - the production of art necessarily depended on its immediate context.
          - art did not belong in an ivory tower inhabited by aestheticians, but rather in the larger context of society and the economic historical process.
          - works of art are made by "workers," but are commissioned, owned, and used for the advantage of the bourgeoisie.
    - Leon Trotsky
          - art —— particularly "socialist art" —— would serve political ends
2. Marxist Reading of History
    - Ernst Fischer
          - art is the work of transforming nature, first by imitation and later by abstraction.
    - Walter Benjamin
          - question of the effects of technology on the value of art.
          - the political value of imagery increased. As it became more feasible to reproduce works of art and to arrange for exhibits, art lost its ritual aura and became a political commodity.
    - Umberto Barbaro
3. Marxist Influence in the History of Art
    - Frederick Antal: Florentine Painting and Its Social Background
    - Michael Baxandall: Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy
    - Arnold Hauser
          - art was sued for the political purpose of magnifying images of gods and kings, which made artists the spokesmen of the ruling classes.
    - Svetlana Alpers
    - T.J.Clark
          - in the middle of the nineteenth century art and politics could not escape each other
4. Orientalism and Colonialism
    - odalisque motif
Further Readings
- Roger Benjamin, Orientalist Aesthetics
- Berel Lang dan Forrest Williams, Marxism and Art
- Frederick Antal, Florentine Painting and Its Social Background
- Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt's Enterprise
- T.J.Clark, Image of the People. The Absolute Bourgeois. The Painting of Modern Life
- Said, Orientlaism
- Lisa E. Farrington, Creating Their Own Image
- Alain Locke, The New Negro: An Interpretation