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"The artwork as commodity"- such a title would seem to designate an approach to art that is particularly well suited to theories within the Marxist tradition as it is broadly conceived. In fact, however, it was not until the early 1930s that elaborate commodity analyses of art began to appear in this tradition. It was primarily Brecht and Adorno who tried to show that the commodity's form not only affects its potential recipients and fundamentally influences its content, but also determines the fate of art under capitalism. For these writers, what was important were the conditions of modern capitalism under which works of art appeared as marketable goods of a specific type.
Marx's own views concerning art, however, were deeply embedded in the humanist aesthetics of German Idealism. Marx regarded the progressive commodification of all products of human activities as constituting an aspect of capitalist production, which made it "hostile to art and poetry" in general. 1 The commodity form of aesthetic productivity proper, however, appeared to be an externally imposed, aggravating, and restricting condition that necessarily remains alien to the products' own logic and norms. Actually this condition is already implied by the central notion of "socially necessary labor time." In the Marxian analysis of commodity, "socially necessary labor time" determines the objective value of a commodity. Since it can only be applied to products which are socially reproducible, it has no meaning for genuine works of art as strictly individual and irreplaceable objects of human creativity (characteristics Marx accepts as self-evident). The artwork as universal human value can thus have no economic value in the proper sense, only an irrational, both economically and aesthetically accidental, price. And this means that the "laws" of capitalist commodity production cannot explain the historical evolution of modern art, beyond positing the general conflict between these two.
1. Marx-Engels, Werke 26.1 (Berlin: Dietz) 257.
In fact, beginning from the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx's oeuvre tends to treat artistic production as the prototype of unalienated human activity. 2 Thus he evokes in the Grundrisse musical composition as the existing example of "genuinely free laboring." 3 Then, in the manuscript of 1865 (the so-called "seventh chapter of the Capital"), he contrasts the paid scribbler to the...