Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART
theorist Osip Brik complained that “the basic idea of productional art—that the
outer appearance of an object is determined by the object’s economic purpose
and not by abstract, aesthetic considerations—has still not met with sufficient
acceptance among our industrial executives.” 42 Only a few years later the imposition
of Socialist Realism made it clear that acceptance of such ideas was not
on the agenda.
In the end, as we know, the Five-Year Plans did not produce the transfigured
life dreamed of by the Constructivists, any more than the “new spirit” of rationalized
industry in the West created generalized well-being and social order.
Eighty years later, the true nature of the social realities that inspired the authoritarian
fantasies of Le Corbusier and the revolutionary utopianism of Rodchenko
and his comrades have become visible in the merging disasters of the two modes
of progress, capitalism and Soviet communism. Rationalization in its modern
form has proved to be productive of waste, destructive of life and its natural
basis, and the origin of misery for millions. It is not surprising that the ideal of
rationality itself has lost its earlier power.
At the end of the twentieth century, an American artist again attempted to
close the circuit between art and life by subordinating art to principles of commercial
reason. A different moment, however, brought a different vision. The
public persona Andy Warhol adopted was not that of the virile producer but of
the feminine consumer. He modeled his activity not on the engineer but on the
packager and sign-maker, on the technician of publicity, comparing his products
not to locomotives and steamships but to advertisements, logos, and mass media
images. While Le Corbusier had declared a house to be a machine for living in,
Warhol said he wanted to be a machine. In his work, produced as efficiently as
possible (given the haze of drugs filling his Factory), pretending to impersonality
and absence of expression, the grids, stripped-down surfaces, and elementary
structures of early modernism returned, now to suggest not the possibility of
change but the endless repetition of the ever-same.
This vision seems no more likely to be realized than the transformations imagined
by the artists of the 1920s. While the rationality of modern class society
succeeded in producing neither a bourgeois nor a proletarian utopia, neither has
it achieved the end of history announced after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Capitalism, now the truly global power Marx’s 1848 Manifesto predicted it would
be, still drives forward the “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” of modern
social life. Just as art has not been “liquidated,” it is not life that is aestheticized,
as some postmodernist theorists suggested, but only certain of its appearances.
While rationality continues to be redefined, the fiction of art’s uselessness has
already lost much of its force.
42 Osip Brik, “From pictures to textile prints,” in Bowlt, Russian Art, p. 249.
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