and Analysis
Zeke Kramer
Senior Thesis | 2025

The Revolutionary Potential of Postmodern Aesthetics: A Historiography and Analysis
Zeke Kramer March 2025
The history of all hitherto existing art is the history of material conditions manifested through visual representation.1 The social production of material life is the defining feature of the human species, with the material base of society leading to art as a product of society's form and content. Artists produce art from material conditions rooted in the economic base of society, with the content being shaped by social relations that give rise to its production. Through this process, all art is created: a manifestation of the society from which it emerged. As the base of society has changed, new materials and social relations have rapidly redefined the artwork society produces. The advent of oil paint, in combination with the emergence of early capitalism in the Renaissance, produced art situated in Christianity and an individualistic view of man, as opposed to medieval art, which grew out of the late Roman Empire and the early Christian church, utilizing tempera paint.2 As the form of capitalism and the social conditions of individuality continued to progress through the Reformation, artwork shifted to reflect the ideology of predestination and the resulting Protestant work ethic.3 As the base of society continued to progress into the Modern era, social relations shifted accordingly, further changing the manifestation of art. The most recent shift in base towards neoliberal capitalism following WWII has produced the most significant shift in the
1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Books, 2015), 219. Reference to the opening line of the Manifesto.
2 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Penguin Books, 1936), 5.
3 Max Webber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Vigeo Press, 1905).
work of art since the Renaissance by redefining the relationship between base and superstructure.4
In this essay, I will argue that the societal value (or role) of art under capitalism should be to further the proletarian cause by standing in contradiction to the real5 as a critique, while avoiding becoming spectacle and resisting commodification. To do this, I will begin by outlining the foundational philosophies of Hegel and Marx, who provide the framework of base and superstructure to understand how society’s economic and social conditions influence the art that it produces. I will then look at the philosophy of Georg Lukács, who adheres closely to orthodox Marxism, arguing in favor of artistic formalism as the manifestation of society’s base and the most effective medium for political messaging. Then, examining the Frankfurt school, I will look at the meaning of Postmodernism and late capitalism, setting up the work of contemporary postmodern aesthetic theory. I will present the philosophies of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who argue that base and superstructure influence each other, so art should stand in contradiction to reality to further its political message. Benjamin also writes about the liberation of art from its aura in modern capitalism, a significant shift from Renaissance and early capitalist art. Further, I will address the arguments of Guy Debord on art under capitalism as spectacle and its commodification, followed by Fredric Jameson’s analysis of postmodern society and Peter Osborne’s theory of contemporary art. Finally, I will look at the Our Literal Speed movement and the theory of Everythingism.
4 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (Duke University Press, 1991).
5 Adrian Johnston, “Jacques Lacan,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford.edu, (2013), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/. Real referring to reality in its unmediated form.
Through an analysis and critique of these philosophies, I will argue that under the base of neoliberal capitalism, while liberated from its aura, much of artistic production has become spectacle: serving as a commodity fetish that reinforces neoliberalism rather than a vessel of political meaning. Instead, art’s role under neoliberal capitalism must be to stand as a dialectical contradiction to reality, as a critique of it, to shape the social and economic base, enabling it to resist commodity fetishization. In this way, the value of contemporary art is rooted in its ability to shape the base of society through a dialectically motivated political message, not in exchange value as a commodity fetish or its representational ability.
The function of art in modern society is more consequential than ever before. As we continue to slip further and further into late-stage capitalism, the feeling of capitalist realism that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism becomes more and more consuming.6 One of the distinguishing features of capitalist realism is the inability to imagine alternatives to the current system: the holes in the system grow smaller, preventing self-consciousness, let alone resistance. If, as I will argue, art were able to hold political meaning through past epochs and stand as a dialectical contradiction to reality, then, in contemporary society, art has the potential to create holes in the system by uncovering its inherent contradictions. While the methods must change with the society it is attempting to transform, if contemporary art can shape the base of society through a dialectically motivated political message, then it holds revolutionary potential, possibly more so than traditional means of resistance. Where the means of proselytizing a proletarian
6 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), 2.
revolution through the production of class consciousness was once done through physical rebellion, today, contemporary art has the potential to provide an even stronger catalyzing force.
As we move deeper into the darkness of postmodern capitalism, the systems of power that have traditionally been visible targets of resistance, from the robber barons of the 19th century to the multinational corporations of the 20th century, have become more abstract and all-encompassing. While always unknowable, the real has become indistinguishably conflated with reality the conceptualization of the real. 7 Capitalism has become a naturalized reality to justify its existence: presenting itself as the real, telling you what to see and think, without presenting a centralized power structure through concrete manifestations. As such, traditional means of resistance, from political violence to union organizing, are less effective than ever before. No longer is there a king to behead or a corporation to break up; resistance must come from inside the system, revealing its contradictions by pointing out where the real is in contradiction with reality. Today, art must serve as the weapon of resistance by revealing the internal contradictions of the system and breaking society out from the false consciousness propagated by capitalism’s all-encompassing control. The weaponization of revolutionary art against the capitalist system is the only way forward. There is no alternative.
Providing an analysis of the power of art, the foundation of contemporary aesthetic theory is Hegel’s dialectical method of analysis. Hegel’s dialectics places two contradictory objects or ideas together, which are then resolved in a synthesis, overcoming their opposition. Hegel saw the progress of history as being driven
7 Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? 10, and Johnston, “Jacques Lacan.”
by this eternal process of contradictions.8 Marx expands Hegel’s dialectic, dividing the material world into two groups: the base and superstructure, which continually contradict each other, driving historical change. For Marx, the base of society is the economic system, or the means of production, and the people’s relationship to the means of production. On the other side, the superstructure is everything that does not directly have to do with production, including art, culture, religion, law, science, and education.9 As a part of the superstructure, art is a product of the economic base of society, shifting to reflect changes in the base. Art, specifically, is a product of the combination of form and content. The form is dictated by the material conditions and tools available to artists, rooted in the economic base of society and forces of production. On the other hand, the content is the social condition and consciousness of the society in which the art is created.10 The difference in artistic styles and movements is a product of different form and content, with a shifting economic system changing the materials available to artists, altering the form, and a shifting culture modifying the content of the artwork produced.
The application of dialectical thinking to artistic analysis did not originate with Marx or Hegel, but with the members of the Frankfurt School.11 Arguably, the most orthodox member of the Frankfurt School was Georg Lukács, who asserted that critical realism was the sole means to artistic excellence in the
8 Julie Maybee, “Hegel’s Dialectics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford.edu (June 3, 2016), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hegel-dialectics/.
9 Jonathan Wolff, and David Leopold, “Karl Marx,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford.edu (August 26, 2003), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/.
10 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and John Murphy, “Art and the Social World: The Frankfurt School,” Jstor.org, (2024) https://www.jstor.org/stable/20u099280.
11 Murphy, “Art and the Social World: The Frankfurt School.”
contemporary West.12 Although he focused primarily on literary aesthetics, Lukács believed that only realist artwork could produce a political message because of its unique ability to expose the contradictions of the society from which it arose. Lukács separated realism into critical realism and socialist realism. The first, critical realism, was the ideal form of art in a capitalist society, exposing the contradictions of capitalism while still being a product of the capitalist economic base. The second, socialist realism, was art based on the struggle for socialism, using its content not just to expose the contradictions of the society but explicitly call for socialism as the means of progress. Writing in the context of the Soviet Union, Lukács believed that critical realism would be a valuable element in the culture of transitional (socialist) workers’ states and would slowly become socialist realism as art was produced as a product of a socialist economic base, grounding the artwork in a concrete socialist perspective.13 Not falling into either category of realism, Lukács condemned modernist art as the antithesis of realism. He believed that modernist art did not correctly reflect the economic base of society, so it was neutered in exposing societal contradictions. The lack of historical perspective and social grounding leaves modernist art as apolitical and unable to advance humanity.14
Although also a member of the Frankfurt school, one of Lukács’ most prominent critics was Walter Benjamin. While they agreed on the aesthetic Marxist foundations that art was a product
12 Titus Stahl, “Georg [György] Lukács,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford.edu, (2013), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/Lukács/, and Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Bertold Brecht, Georg Lukács, and Fredric Jameson, Aesthetics and Politics, (Verso, 2020), Adorno’s Critique of Lukács and Brecht.
13 Stahl, “Georg [György] Lukács”
14 Adorno, Bloch, Brecht, Lukács, and Jameson, Aesthetics and Politics, Adorno’s critique of Lukács and Brecht.
of society’s economic base and its purpose was to hold a political message, the two philosophers disagreed on how to define revolutionary art, specifically related to realism, modern art, and the new medium of film. Benjamin’s most notable contribution to aesthetics is his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which he wrote in 1935 during the rise of Nazism in Germany. The rise of fascism and the new medium of film are the driving motivations behind his essay, providing a new economic base from which to analyze the value and purpose of art. Benjamin begins by restating the Marxist claim that art is for “the formulation of revolutionary demands” and adds that it is not for the “uses and purposes of fascism”: a product of fascism’s rise in Germany in the 30s.15 Looking at the shifting form of art as a product of the latest iteration of capitalism, Benjamin notes that the mechanical reproduction of art is new, citing the earlier invention of the printing press and the recent invention of photography and sound film. He argues that these reproductions lack presence in time and space, dividing reproduction into two groups: process reproduction and technical reproduction. Process reproduction, such as photography, brings out aspects of the original that are only accessible through the medium, in this case, the lens. In contrast, technical reproduction moves the copy into situations that are out of reach of the original, which depreciates the quality of the presence in the original. He uses the term aura to explain what qualities mechanical reproduction strips from the original, most significantly the detachment of the art from the domain of tradition. Historically, the basis of art is ritual, which creates its value as unique; however, the shift in the economic base in the Renaissance shifted the value from ritual to the secular cult of
15 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 4.
beauty, weakening the religious basis. The new secular cult of beauty gave rise to the idea of pure art, denying any social function of art, instead categorizing it by subject matter.
In reference to his epoch, Benjamin argues that because mechanical reproduction has emancipated art from its dependence on ritual, art has become designed for reproducibility. Because authenticity is no longer applicable to artistic production, the function of art is reversed: instead of being based on ritual, art becomes based on politics. Through mechanical reproduction, art has been liberated from its aura, which tied it to tradition and ritual, instead being able to effectively hold political meaning and act in dialectical opposition to the economic base of society.
Benjamin sees the value of art divided into cult value a product of fetishization and exhibition value, with the emancipation from ritual increasing exhibition opportunities. The new invention of photography enabled exhibition value to completely replace cult value for the first time in history. Where the painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the photographer can deeply penetrate reality, exposing the economic and social realities and effectively contradicting them by holding a political message. While painting once was able to present an object for a simultaneous collective experience and effectively hold a political message under past economic bases, the latest iteration of capitalism has made painting ineffective as a tool for political change for its inviolable connection to cult value. The contemporary futility of painting is solely a product of mechanical reproduction, itself a product of the shifting economic base. Benjamin sees photography and film as the highest form of art in his historical epoch for their ability to resist cult value through their liberation from aura as a product of their reproducibility. Writing during the rise of fascism, Benjamin sees the danger of
painting as fascism’s ability to depoliticize visual art in order to “reorganise the newly proletarianised masses without affecting the property structures which the masses strive to eliminate,” which he labels the “aestheticisation of politics.”16 Benjamin leaves us with the imperative to shift the superstructure through politicized art that is liberated from its cult value and instilled with revolutionary demands, with the intention of shifting the economic base.
Benjamin’s writings provide the first analysis of the newly emerging neoliberal global economic order. Through his application of Marxist dialectics, he identifies the death of traditional visual arts such as painting due to their inability to resist commodification under the new economic order, fundamentally shifting the field of Marxist aesthetics and redefining the work of art in the second half of the twentieth century. Benjamin’s analysis of fascism a product of capitalist society adds a new dimension to the possible pitfalls of artistic production that cannot resist commodification. No longer does the work simply fail to hold a revolutionary message and shift the economic base of society; it actively works in the interest of reorganizing the newly proletarianized masses without a corresponding reorganization in property structures.
Benjamin’s contributions to aesthetic theory are limited to the prewar epoch, as he was killed by the Nazis in 1940 trying to flee from fascist Germany. A contemporary and fellow member of the Frankfurt school, Theodore Adorno began developing his aesthetic theory in the prewar period, collaborating and critiquing Benjamin’s work; however, he escaped to the west, surviving the war and returning to develop further his philosophy in the new era of postwar capitalism, or the beginning of late capitalism. The
16 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 22.
basis of Adorno’s aesthetic theory is the Hegelian question of whether art can survive in a late capitalist society and the Marxist question of whether art can contribute to the transformation of the world. He retains the Kantian belief that art is characterized by formal autonomy and Marxist emphasis on the embeddedness of art in society, applying these beliefs to the new economic base in a way that Benjamin never got the opportunity. Looking at modern visual arts, Adorno argues that the work’s unavoidable tension expresses the inescapable conflicts within the larger sociohistorical process and economic base from which they are constructed. These tensions in the artwork are meant to be worked through and resolved, exposing the conflicts in the base by acting as a revolutionary critique of the real. 17 Adorno uses the terms import and function to describe the form and content from which the artwork arises and the purpose of the artwork in relation to society. He argues that these concepts must be understood in terms of each other, on the one hand being diametrically opposed, and on the other, enabling the artwork’s significance to give a proper account of its social function. The artwork’s import embodies the work’s social function, which illuminates the potential relevance in various social contests. Adorno prioritizes a work’s import over its function, as the import is socially mediated and explains the work’s social significance or meaning.
For Adorno, the best works of art reconcile their own internal contradictions in order to expose the hidden contradictions in society, so they can no longer be ignored. Centering the dialectical purpose of art is Adorno’s theory of truth content, which is the way in which art challenges the current social and economic conditions by suggesting how they could be better through internal
17 Johnston, “Jacques Lacan.”
reconciliation. As each artwork has its own import derived from an internal dialectic between form and content, the theory of truth content invites judgement about the truth or falsity of a work of art. This judgement must grasp the work’s complex internal dynamics and the dynamics of sociohistorical totality to which the art belongs. As such, the artwork has an internal truth content to the extent that the import can be found internally or externally, either true or false. For Adorno, the best piece of art is “the negative knowledge of the actual world:” an image that stands in contradiction to the real as a critique of it.18 His analysis fits squarely with the society from which he was writing. As the economic base began to shift towards late capitalism, Adorno’s theory explains the origins, along with the purpose and place of abstraction and modernist art as originating from the new economic base and serving as a contradiction to the new real of post-war society. Adorno builds on Benjamin’s analysis of the prewar period and earlier Marxist foundations to create the most comprehensive analytical aesthetic framework for the period in which he wrote.
Building on Benjamin’s “aestheticization of politics” and Adorno’s postwar aesthetic analysis, Guy Debord presents a critique of the growing power of images in explaining social relations in late capitalism. He was a member of the Situationist International, a neo-Marxist movement of intellectuals that presented a comprehensive critique of contemporary capitalism. Written in the context of revolutionary 1960s Paris, Debord published Society of the Spectacle in 1967, which soon became the movement’s most influential work. Debord’s central proposition is the concept of spectacle: the complete control of the market
18 Adorno, Bloch, Brecht, Lukács, and Jameson. Aesthetics and Politics, Adorno on Lukács and Brecht, 158.
economy, creating a social relation mediated by images. He identifies how the society of the spectacle has resulted in an impoverished quality of life, destruction of authenticity, and creation of an internal present, preventing revolutionary action through the destruction of temporality. Debord’s thesis originates in the Marxist theory of commodity fetishism, or the mystical quality and value that particular objects accrue independent from their practical use value, causing us to place their exchange value over their use value. For Marx, in (his) contemporary society, we come to worship inanimate objects because of their exchange value, giving them supernatural powers the modern equivalent to religious idols. Similarly, we are separated from the production of the objects we consume, alienating consumers from producers. The consumers cannot see the conditions in which the producers toil, while the producers are prevented from developing an emotional relationship with the product they are creating. Although existing to some extent since early industrial capitalism, heightened alienation is one of the distinguishing features of the late capitalism from which Debord writes. A product of rampant alienation is societal reification or the transposition of a subject into an object: a means becomes an end. In late capitalism, people are dehumanized through social relations which priorities the exchange of capital, relegating human beings to their value in commodity exchange. This late capitalist society is what Debord attempts to explain.
Debord argues that capitalism has shifted from having to appearing, with having needing to derive its value from appearances. The value in objects is no longer in the object itself but rather in its social relations and value as an image. As such, in contemporary society, “life is presented as an immense
accumulation of spectacles.”
19 The consequence of value being tied to aesthetics in art is the destruction of Adorno’s truth content, leaving a society marked by politically empty imagery produced as an end in and of itself, not a means for political change. Debord connects the prevalence of spectacle to capitalism through Marxist dialectical historicism, highlighting that spectacle is “nothing other than the economy developing for itself.”20 Spectacle is merely capital that has accumulated to the point that it becomes images: yet another manifestation of power perfected for contemporary capitalism to effectively manage social relations and placate dissent through the manufacture of alienation. Debord also notes the rise of inauthenticity and falseness as a product of spectacle, saying: “the loss of quality that is so evident at every level of the spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence.”21 As a product of excess copying, Spectacle destroys the quality of material goods produced, especially art, as a result of a mode of production that is antithetical to truth and representations of the real. As a result of this reification, material culture becomes mere simulacra, preventing art from standing in contradiction to the real and neutering the political power of art.
Debord’s description of contemporary society through spectacle explains the purpose, or lack thereof, in the art of his epoch. One of the most enduring visual artists of the ‘60s is Andy Warhol, whose body of work encompasses the mass society and culture of the era. His screenprint Marilyn Diptych, created soon after Marilyn Monroe’s death, consists of two grids comprising
19 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, (Black & Red, 1967), 7.
20 Debord. Society of the Spectacle, 5.
21 Debord. Society of the Spectacle, 14.
repeated images of the actress’ face.
22 Warhol was drawn to the mass subject, understanding the power of employing recognizable yet apolitical images in his creations. Many of his works are based on mass culture, including notable public figures from Jackie Kennedy to Mao Zedong. Marilyn Diptych engages directly with celebrity, which Debord describes as “superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented

productive specializations that they actually live.”23 Celebrities, as dictated by mass culture, are commodities that people become attached to as simulacra for the life late capitalism forces them to strive for futilely. Rooted solely in mass culture and holding no critique of the real, Marilyn Diptych acts as the modern equivalent to religious idols, furthering the society of the spectacle. Where religious art was once able to hold political value, under Warhol’s economic base, artistic production appealing to mass culture
22 Tate, “‘Marilyn Diptych’, Andy Warhol, 1962,” (2019), https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/warhol-marilyn-diptych-t03093.
23 Debord. Society of the Spectacle, 24.
cannot resist commodification. Warhol’s use of silkscreen printing a mass-production method of creating his works deliberately sacrifices technical quality as the commodification of his works “reduces everything to quantitative equivalence.”24 As such, the pervasiveness of spectacle means that the individual qualities of the objects in and of themselves can be ignored once they become commodities, excusing the inferior quality of Warhol’s prints. Debord’s theory of spectacle explains the incorporation of mass culture into Warhol’s works and the resulting commodity fetishes he created. Unable to hold political meaning, reconcile its internal contradictions, or act as a dialectical contradiction to the real, Warhol’s creations reveal themselves not to be art, acting as nothing more than empty reified commodities of late capitalism.
Following the work of Debord, Jameson begins to build the foundations of his later theory of postmodernism. He begins with the importance of historicizing, arguing that works are read through layers of previous interpretation and one should study the interpretations rather than the original work: “The retrospective illusion of the metacommentary allows us to measure the yield and density of a Marxist interpretive act against other interpretive methods.”25 Looking at Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, which he believed encompasses his era, Jameson argues that the issues of older philosophical aesthetics need to be radically historicized, which may transform them beyond recognition in the process. Following in the Marxist tradition, Jameson highlights the priority of the political interpretation of a work, as the antiquarian relationship to the cultural past has a dialectical equivalent in the
24 Debord. Society of the Spectacle, 14.
25 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, (Routledge, 1981), 10.
tendency of contemporary critical theory to rewrite historical texts through its own aesthetic. As such, only a genuine historical philosophy can respect the specific and radical distinctions of the social and cultural past while enumerating the solidarity of its forms, structures, and struggles with those contemporary to the present era. As a result, “apolitical works are a symptom and reinforcement of the reification and privatization of contemporary life,”26 reinforcing the gap between the public and private spheres. The only effective liberation is the recognition that there is nothing that is not social and historical and that, in the last analysis, everything reveals itself as political. The last analysis is the product of the proposition of a political unconscious, which proposes that we undertake a final analysis to explore the paths that lead to the unmasking of cultural artefacts as socially symbolic acts.
As a product of the two-decade divide in their works, Jameson and Debord disagree about the political nature of cultural artifacts. Where Debord does not explicitly argue that everything is political, Jameson’s analysis of the political unconscious through the last analysis argues that through a systematic unmasking, all cultural artefacts including all artistic production are political in nature. Jameson, however, does not argue that these cultural artefacts are created to shift the economic base in response to the societal conditions; rather, all cultural artefacts are simply products of their respective societies. Debord’s argument that a work of art must hold a political message to shift the economic base and resist becoming spectacle is not weakened by Jameson’s proposition, it must simply be understood with additional context for a different epoch.
26 Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 20
Building on his theory of the political unconscious as a socially symbolic act, Jameson provides a framework for analyzing art in contemporary society through his analysis of Postmodern society. Jameson defines postmodernism as “an attempt to think the present historically in an age that had forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”27 He looks specifically at the changes in representation as society shifts and identifies the variations between societal epochs, arguing that culture has become a veritable second nature in postmodern society. For Jameson, culture has become a product in its own right and the market has become a commodity in and of itself to the same extent as the goods within it. Whereas Modernism was still the critique of the commodity and made an effort to transcend it, Postmodernism has become the consumption of sheer commodification, calling back to Marx’s theory of fetishization and Adorno’s culture industry. Postmodern theory attempts to measure the temperature of the epoch without instruments in a situation in which we are not sure there is such a thing as an epoch or system.
Postmodernism is not a new social order replacing the preceding modernism; rather, it is the reflex and concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself in the search for more productive exploitation. For Jameson, the latest iteration of capitalism falls under the theory of late capitalism, originating in the Frankfurt School of the post-WWII era. Late capitalism proposes a vision of the world distinct from older forms of imperialism. Rooted in the philosophies of Wallerstein’s world system and Marx’s world market, late capitalism identifies the new international division of labor as a result of increased globalization, arguing that the base in this new third state of capitalism generates
27 Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Introduction.
its superstructures with a dynamic distinct from preceding states of capitalism. For Jameson, while theory is necessarily imperfect and impure, the task of postmodern theory is to coordinate new forms of practice and social organization in response to the new forms of economic production resulting from the modification of capitalism, simply the production of postmodern people.
The case for the existence of postmodernism as a break from modernism can be traced back to the late 60s or early 70s. During this period, Jameson identifies the destruction of the separation between high culture and mass culture. He argues that postmodernism should be seen not as a style, but a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of distinct, yet subordinate features.
Looking towards works of art, contemporary aesthetic production has become one and the same as commodity production,

assigning a structural function to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. To illustrate his claim, Jameson presents an analysis of two unique works of art from different eras. First, he looks at an oil painting of a pair of well-worn boots by Vincent Van Gogh.28 To Jameson, the work reconstructs the initial situation from which the work emerges, creating a reified end product and a disclosure of truth. In contrast, he presents a silk print of shoes by Andy Warhol, which he argues lacks immediacy and does not speak to the viewer.29 The work is a fetishization of the object, existing centrally around its role as a commodity, becoming a mere simulacrum.

28 “A Pair of Shoes, 1886 by Vincent van Gogh,” www.vincentvangogh.org, https://www.vincentvangogh.org/a-pair-of-shoes.jsp.
29 “Andy Warhol, Shoes, 1980 FS II.254, Screen Print (S),” Www.masterworksfineart.com, https://www.masterworksfineart.com/artists/andy-warhol/screen-print/shoes1980/id/W-6277.
In another analysis, Jameson examines the iconic expressionist work The Scream by Edvard Munch. He argues that the work subtly yet elaborately separates its aesthetic of expression while remaining imprisoned within it because its contents are incompatible with its medium. The incompatibility of the work suggests that concepts such as anxiety and alienation are no longer appropriate in the postmodern world. With the end of the bourgeoisie ego comes the end of style, liberating art from every kind of feeling. The feelings that remain are free-floating and impersonal, solely dominated by euphoria, resulting in a decentering of the formally central subject of psyche where expression requires the category of the individual monad.
A natural successor to Jameson, Peter Osborne follows in the Marxist and Adornian tradition, examining the crisis of modernism by analyzing Adorno’s aesthetic theory in contrast to Clement Greenberg’s. Osborne pins the origin of the crisis of modernism on Greenberg, arguing that it is an aesthetic reaction to the growing social conservatism of formalist art. Only in Adorno’s work is the equal essence of art something that is socially determined and autonomous. Although Adorno and Greenberg appear to have similar aesthetics based on artwork’s autonomy, aesthetic material, and relationship of modernism to tradition rooted in historical realities, where Greenberg conceived of the autonomy of the artwork at the level of its meaning, Adorno conceived of it at the level of the social relations which constitute art as a social phenomenon. Adorno conceives of art as a social and aesthetic phenomenon where the contradictions between these constitute the Dual Essence of modern art. Art is a social product, and the object posits itself as autonomous, so the social processes through which art is produced appear within the work itself through its aesthetic form. For Adorno, “It is in the form of a
contradiction between its status as a commodity and an autonomous aesthetic object that the contradictory essence of art in capitalist society manifests itself.”30 The history of modernism is the history of aesthetic strategies that enable art to resist its own social form to reveal the true meaning of the social order.
The autonomous nature of a work must be analyzed by its ability to resist the power of the market through which it must acquire its social reality. The three senses within Adorno’s work in which modern art is autonomous are theoretical, social, and immanent, whereas, for Greenberg, autonomy is based on the degree to which a work has rejected any aesthetic content outside the formal properties of the medium. In contrast, for Adorno, that purification is impossible and undesirable because the Truth Content of art can only be social in form. For Greenberg, the aesthetic meaning of abstraction is an essential formal component of a work’s autonomy. At the same time, for Adorno, it is a reflection of the growing abstraction of social relations under the capitalist system and a historically specific aesthetic for the “critical expression of reification” that embodies a distinctive social content of its own.31 Osborne concludes that the aesthetic value of art is inseparable from its relation to the dialectics of social development. Modernism is an aesthetic expression motivated by dialectical social development that acts as the basis for applying Adorno’s aesthetics to postmodernist works.
Osborne builds on Adorno and Jameson’s analysis of art and society in their era by attempting to provide a philosophical
30 Peter Osborne, “Aesthetic Autonomy and the Crisis of Theory: Greenberg, Adorno and the Problem of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts,” New Formations, no. 9 (1989): 31-50, 40.
31 Osborne, “Aesthetic Autonomy and the Crisis of Theory: Greenberg, Adorno and the Problem of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts,” 42.
account of contemporary art. Osborne argues that recent events in the visual arts have made contemporary art post-conceptual art. He cites the acceptance of diverse material usage, conceptualism, and the idea that the reconciliation between these two points produces their transcategorical nature. Still, he believes that the abstract and theoretical quality of contemporary art is what makes it misunderstood, posing the guiding question of what kind of discourse is required to “render the idea of contemporary art as critically intelligible,” as past theories of representation have shown themselves to be unable to grasp the problematic character of the experience of contemporary art.32 As such, art’s authority and critical function remain problems within contemporary culture for which “art’s critical and metaphysical dimensions are a conceptual condition.”
33 In contrast to past epochs, Osborne argues that contemporary art lacks a pure aesthetic because contemporary art is not an aesthetic art, supported by Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, which enables us to distinguish between art and aesthetic as distinct entities.
As a successor to Jameson, Osborne argues that the critical theory of postmodernism that emerged in the mid-1980s has been discredited as a coherent critical concept. As a replacement, Osborne puts forward the theory of contemporaneity, where the present is increasingly characterized by the consolidation of different but equal present temporalities. To historicize his theory of contemporaneity, Osborne identifies three periodizations of contemporary art. The first, roughly beginning after the Second World War, was geopolitically epochal in character. This period includes Lukács’ belief that 1950s socialist realism in actually
32 Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso, 2013), 2.
33 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, 7.
existing socialist states was contemporary realism and that in Eastern Europe, modernity was considered an ideological misrepresentation of the historical time of capitalism. The second period, asserting that contemporary art began in the early 1960s, focuses on tightening its framing terms inherent to artistic practices and their institutional recognition, with contemporary becoming the art-institutional successor to modern. In this period, contemporary art is post-conceptual art because the "radically dispersed materially distributed character of the art associated with its incorporation of non-traditional means often from mass media is the unifying principle of the periodization enacting a break with what went before.”34 In the third period, the Western postwar definition of contemporary excluded the actually existing socialist states of Eastern Europe, only recognizing artistic dissidence based on the continuation of past modernist legacies. Because the increasing integration of autonomous art into the culture industry has imposed an immediate and pragmatic sense of historical time onto the institutional framing of the contemporary art, contemporary works are no longer displayed in terms of the historical consciousness of the avant-garde. Osborne argues that this is not an outright negation of autonomy through commodification and political rationality, but a new system of autonomy itself, or a new affirmative culture. To remain contemporary, art must incorporate these new contexts into its procedures.
Because the idea of contemporary as existing together in time requires specification as a differential historical temporality of the present, “the concept of the contemporary produces a single historical time of the present, as a living present,”35 where the
34 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, 20 35 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, 22.
contemporary is then another way of referring to the historical present. The concept of the contemporary thus projects into the present a temporal unity that is in the future, or anticipatory. As such, the contemporary is a utopian idea with both negative and positive aspects, marking the point of indifference between historical and fictional narratives that have been associated with the notion of speculative experience intern. Because of its temporal unity in the historical present, the contemporary is an “operative function that regulates the division between the past and present within the present.”36 Because modernity projects a present of permanent transition extending beyond itself, the contemporary fixes that transitory nature within the duration of the present moment. Such presentness, then, finds its representational form in the destruction of temporality by the image, as it is through the photographic and post-photographic culture of the image that the contemporaneity of the contemporary is most clearly expressed. The contemporary marks both the moment of divorce within the disjunctive unity of the historical present and the “existential unity of the distinctiveness of presentness itself”37 where the disjunction is both temporal and spatial. The idea of the contemporary also poses the problem of the disjunctive unity of spacetime, where the fiction of the contemporary is necessarily a geopolitical fiction, leaving the contemporary with the “transcendental status of a condition of the historical intelligibility of social experience.”38 Today, the contemporary is transnational because the economic base of global capitalism dictates our modernity. Osborne concludes, claiming:
36 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, 23.
37 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, 25
38 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, 26.
It is the convergence and mutual conditioning of historical transformation in the ontology of the artwork and the social relations of art space a convergence and mutual conditioning that has its roots in more general economic and communicational processes that make contemporary art possible, in the emphatic sense of an art of contemporaneity.39
Like the philosophers before him, Osborne identifies the foundations of art’s meaning in the shifting economic base and social relations, applying it to his era through the lens of the contemporary. Unique from past epochs, contemporary art is necessarily post-conceptual due to the increased acceptance of diverse material usage and conceptualism, leading to the death of the aesthetic and the necessity of a new critical lens to analyze the art of the current era.
Like Adorno, Osborne focuses his analysis of artworks on a few paradigmatic works that can embody the most stringent demands placed on the work that originates in their contemporaneity or their ascribed aims to embody the important aspects of contemporary life.
One school of art that Osborne sees as paradigmatic and chooses to focus on is The Atlas Group. Active between 1989 and 2004, The Atlas Group was a contemporary art movement that attempted to bring attention to the contemporary history of Lebanon, focusing on the Lebanese wars from 1975 to 1990. One work by the group is a video display called We Can Make it Rain But No One Came to Ask, which begins by showing fictional Joseph Bitar, the only explosive expert in the city. The footage that plays above the image
39 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, 28.
of Bitar is disconnected footage from a camera at an intersection in Beirut that documents the everyday passing of cars in front of a bomb-damaged environment. The placement of the two distinct images causes the work to appear to us through Bitar’s eyes, transforming the documentary material into art through the fictionalization of Bitar’s gaze while posing as fact through the documentary format. The Lebanese history of the war thus appears both within and through the art, the reconciliation between the documentary form and fiction, where fiction acts as the guiding hand. Another work by The Atlas Group that mirrors this methodology is Already Been in a Lake of Fire, 145 cut-out photographs of cars that correspond to the make, model, and color of every car used in a car bombing during the 25 years of war

40
combined with annotations, with the character of Fakhouri being established as the compiler and annotator of the collection.
Fictionalization works of art engage in the fictionalization of artistic authority and the documentary form. In the works by the Atlas group, dual fictionalization elucidates the fictitiousness of the contemporary itself while making clear the general fictitiousness of the post-conceptual artwork as an effect of the counter-factuality inherent in its conceptual dimensions. The dissemination of the fictionalization of the artist-function is dependent upon The Atlas Group’s pseudonymity through the ‘group’ form and the exploitation of the documentary format, relying upon a general ambiguity in the relationship between historical and fictional narratives to achieve philosophical and political force. Only through the relationship between anonymous collectivity gained by the group’s fiction and national specificity can the contemporary, global, and transnational character and political meaning be constructed. The fictional collectivity of The Atlas Group is a proxy for the missing political collectivity of the global transnational, despite being proposed and negated by capital itself. It is only capital that manifests a global subject structure, yet capitalist sociality is abstract: “it is a matter of form, rather than collectivity.”41
In reality, collectivity is produced by the interconnectedness of practices as the interconnectedness that capital produces exhibits the structure of the subject in their product, separated from the individual subject and collective of labor. As such, the work of The Atlas Group and other collectives that reconcile the fictive with the historical represents the continuation of the intellectual tradition of
40 “The Atlas Group | Art Gallery,” (2025), Sfeir-Semler.com, https://www.sfeirsemler.com/galleryartists/atlas-group/work.
41 Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, 34.
Marxist Internationalism through its connection to the philosophical history of capital: presenting this new artistic representation as a First Transnational. The transnational is not the inverse of national but morphs the status of the national through the fictionalization of the national, which was only ever a social construct.
Similarly, the fictionalization of the national acts as the denationalizing of trans-nationalization. This fictive denationalization provides the possibility of radical democratization as a replacement for the conventional authorial function of the individual, which is tied to the ownership of property central to capitalism.
The Our Literal Speed movement follows in the Marxist tradition, building on Osborn’s thesis that contemporary art is postconceptual art. For the movement, Modernism never disappeared as we entered the post-modern era; instead, it mutated into other forms like text and installations. So, the art of the modern era will challenge the conventional forms of presentation and distribution. Art and Language have become “constellations of value and desire" below our everyday society, manifesting in unstable forms and genres that embrace material and conceptual contradictions that become self-destructive.42 Art and Language present works that arise from social practices and aim to preserve independence from the industry’s logic. Today, contemporary art “preserves alienation and deflation as forms of picturesque abjection” while changes within art practices are eliminated due to the risks that diversity brings to sales.43 For the movement, in the current era, art should recall a mutually shared reality between the artist and
42 Matthew Jesse Jackson, “‘If You Were Art & Language, Then You’d Be a Fucking Decent Contemporary Artist,’” 2.
43 Jackson, “‘If You Were Art & Language, Then You’d Be a Fucking Decent Contemporary Artist,’” 5.
viewer and establish independent values and exist in accordance with its own laws.
We are seeing a Kuleshov Effect in contemporary art: the derivation of more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots in a film than a single one. It is no longer the content that is most important, but how the images are combined. Artwork functions as the actor’s face under the Kuleshov Effect, where works are juxtaposed to stories about the creator. The work of art then becomes a memorable face that is edited within the metanarratives within a society at large. Although technical innovations are happening today, they are not in the works of art. Because artists gain popularity in the public consciousness, the primary medium of art today is not the canvas but the social media platforms that interact with the art industry. Everythingism is the artist using the art world as a medium. The media is the crucial ground through which contemporary art yields its value,

which demands an analysis by the art historian between the formal control of the art practice instead of the work.
One artist whose work falls under the framework of Our Literal Speed is Theaster Gates. A visual and performance artist, Gates creates works highlighting the importance of Black cultural forms through traditional installations and performances. One notable work by Gates, titled Flag, is a canvas covered in black tar, inspired by his father, who was a roofer. “Theaster’s tar paintings are representative of his expansive view of abstraction and what it might mean for a Black artist using that language today.”44 To actually understand the painting, you must see the painting as only one part of the message, which is only understood when seen in conversation with the artist’s identity. For Gates, all traditional works are done with a sense of irony, as the meaning in the work is not derived from the materials and forms; instead, the social media world of information distribution becomes the ground in which the artwork accrues meaning: the Everythingism of the Our Literal Speed movement. Through his work, Gates forces us to confront forms that speak to our current world of abundant consumption and desire.45 Opposed to traditional aesthetic analysis, Everythingism demands a comparison from the art historian where they contrast the maneuvers of an art practice rather than artwork. Works can no longer be understood in isolation the new canvas is the social spaces where meaning is accrued.
While Osborne argues the necessity of anonymity in postconceptual art, the Our Literal Speed movement suggests the
44 Jacoba Urist, “Theaster Gates’s Most Important Works, from Pottery to Real Estate,” ARTnews.com, (2023) https://www.artnews.com/list/artnews/artists/who-is-theaster-gates-1234651543/black-chapel-2022.
45 Nasher Sculpture Center, “Nasher Prize Graduate Symposium 2018: Matthew Jesse Jackson,” YouTube, July 17, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRQa0X_IkyE
opposite, arguing in favor of recentering the work of art on the individual. The distinction between the two philosophies becomes even more apparent when looking at paradigmatic works held up as the practical embodiment of the respective doctrines. The Atlas Group was created an artistic movement without a clear leader, with the connection between art and artist being as close to eliminated as practically possible, enabling the political power of the art to exist in isolation. In contrast, Theaster Gates’s work is an embodiment of him as an individual, with the political power of the art only existing in the context of the artist. While the schools of contemporary aesthetics disagree in a seemingly fundamental way, they are both rooted in the Marxist tradition both agree that the purpose of art under capitalism must be to further a revolutionary cause and shift the base of society while resisting commodification.
The Marxist tradition of aesthetics has always held the political as its central principle. Beginning with Hegel’s dialectical method of analysis and expanded on by Marx’s theory of base and superstructure, a framework for analyzing art a product of society’s base began to form. One of the first philosophical applications of Marxist philosophy to aesthetics was Georg Lukács’ defence of critical realism. Writing in the early 20th century, Lukács argued that only realist artwork could produce a political message because of its unique ability to expose the contradiction of the society from which it arose. As a result, he believed that modernist art did not properly reflect the economic base of society, causing its ability to expose societal contradictions to be neutered. Although a contemporary of Lukács and fellow member of the Frankfurt school, Walter Benjamin was one of his most prominent critics. Benjamin argues that the advent of mechanical reproduction is the defining feature of art in the
contemporary epoch, positing that mechanical reproduction has liberated art from its ties to tradition and ritual, enabling it to hold political meaning effectively. Writing during the rise of fascism, Benjamin sees the danger of fascism’s ability to depoliticize visual art in order to “reorganize the newly proletarianized masses.”
46 The imperative Beniamin concludes with is to shift the superstructure through politicized art that is instilled with revolutionary demands in order to shift the economic base of society. Killed by the Nazi’s in 1940, Benjamin’s philosophical successor was Theodore Adorno. For Adorno, a work of art must reconcile its own internal contradictions in order to expose the hidden contradictions of contemporary society so they can no longer be ignored. For Adorno, the best piece of art is one that stands in contradiction to the real as a critique of it, acting as the negative knowledge of the real world.
Building on both Benjamin and Adorno, Guy Debord presents a critique of the growing power of images in explaining social relations in late capitalism. Writing in the context of revolutionary late 1960s Paris, Debord proposes the concept of the spectacle: the control of the market economy creating a social relation mediated by images. He argues that the values in objects are no longer in the object itself, rather than its social relations and value as an image. As such, spectacle is merely capital that has accumulated to the point that it becomes images, destroying the quality of goods produced, especially art. As a result, all material culture, including visual arts, becomes mere simulacra, preventing art from standing in contradiction to the real, pacifying the political power of art. Building on Debord two decades later, Jameson proposes the theory of postmodernism: an explanation of the
46 Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 22.
cultural logic of late stage capitalism. Jameson looks specifically at the changes in representation as society shifts, identifying the variation between societal epochs, arguing that in postmodern society, culture has become a veritable second nature. Whereas modernism was still the critique of the commodity and made an effort to transcend it, postmodernism has become the consumption of sheer commodification, calling back to Marx’s fetishization and Adorno’s culture industry. The task of postmodernism for Jameson is to coordinate new forms of practice and social organization in response to new forms of economic production resulting from the latest form of capitalism the production of postmodern people.
One of the most contemporary aesthetic analyses in the Marxist tradition, Peter Osborne builds on Adorno and Jameson’s analysis of art and society by attempting to provide a philosophical account of contemporary art. Osborne argues that recent events in the visual arts have made contemporary art post-conceptual art. In contrast to past epochs, Osborne argues that contemporary art lacks a pure aesthetic because contemporary art is not an aesthetic art. As a contemporary replacement for the theory of postmodernism, Osborne proposes the theory of contemporaneity, where the present is increasingly characterized by the consolidation of different but equal present temporalities. Unique from past philosophies, Osborne argues that the postconceptual nature of contemporary art has led to the death of the aesthetic and to the necessity of a new critical lens to analyze the art of the current era. Paralleling Osborne, the Our Literal Speed movement builds on the thesis that contemporary art is post-conceptual art, proposing the concept of everythingism: the artist using the art world as its medium. Our Literal Speed argues that the media is the crucial ground through which contemporary art yields its value, which demands an
analysis by the art historian between the formal control of the art practice instead of the work.
As we continue to descend deeper into the darkness of latestage capitalism, our tools of resistance become fewer and weaker. Art, however, presents itself as the single remaining lifeboat on the sinking ship of a blinded and brainwashed society. Today, we must embrace art for its revolutionary potential. Both Osborne and Out Literal Speed provide thoughtful and historical analysis of art under the contemporary economic base. While including some disagreement, both hold the value and revolutionary potential of art as central tenets, cumulatively reaffirming the existence of a path forward. While that path may not be immediately evident and may be constantly changing it exists. Its existence, however, is not a sign to be hopeful or to underestimate the impossibility of the road ahead. The realization of a path forward is only the beginning of the journey: the attainment of lucidity does not negate the reality of our world today or the direction it is currently heading. Revolution is a Sisyphean task. Like Sisyphus’ rock rolling back down the hill, each time our economic base develops, bringing a new iteration of capitalism, we too must begin again, reaffirming our past successes while channeling our energy into the newly present struggle. Yet, “the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”
47 Our task may be absurd; nevertheless, we must embrace the absurd, pushing on in determination, like Sisyphus embracing again his eternal rebellion. Through the Marxist tradition of aesthetic theory, the political has stood as a central tenet. Today, the societal value (or role) of art under capitalism should be to further the proletarian cause by standing in contradiction to the real48 as a critique, while
47 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, (Penguin, 1942), 120-123.
48 Johnston, “Jacques Lacan.”
avoiding becoming spectacle and resisting commodification. However, as the economic base of society continues to shift as our descent into late-stage capitalism inevitably continues, aesthetic philosophy will have to adapt accordingly. Where Adorno’s aesthetic was no longer applicable in Jameson’s epoch, and Jameson’s aesthetic is no longer applicable in Osborne’s epoch today, soon Osborne’s aesthetic will no longer be able to analyze a future economic base. Aesthetics must resist the tendency to attach itself to concrete factionalism; instead, it must grow and develop in dialectical form, while continuing to historicize everything. Only through this continuous revolt may we truly change the world: there is no alternative.
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