The book of Jane 6

ti on Art:

"What is referred to as the 'art world' is not a thing apart from the art market. The latter has long been heavily influenced by a small number of moneyed personages like Huntington Hartford, John Paul Getty, Nelson Rockefeller, Paul Mellon, and Joseph Hirschorn, who have treated artworks not as part of our common treasure but, in true capitalist style, as objects of pecuniary investment and private acquisition. They have financed the museums and major galleries, the art books, art magazines, art critics, university endowments, and various art schools and centers- reaping considerable tax write-offs in the doing.* As trustees, publishers, patrons and speculators, these wealthy few and their associates also exercise an influence over the means of artistic production, setting implicit ideological limits to creative expression. While they cannot always predetermine artistic output, they exercise much control over its distribution.

Artists who move beyond acceptable boundaries run the risk of not being shown. In most high-toned art circles, political art that contains radical content is treated as an oxymoron and labeled "propaganda." Art and
politics do not mix, we are told...which would be news to such great artists as Goya, Daumier, Picasso, and Rivera. While professing to keep art free of politics ("art for art's sake"), the moneyed gatekeepers impose their own politically motivated definition of what is and is not art.
For years, the art they bought, showed, and had reviewed was usually Abstract Expressionist and other forms of "non-objective" art, a genre that is sufficiently ambiguous to stimulate a broad range of aesthetic interpretations, having a sufficiently iconoclastic and experimental appearance while remaining politically safe in content... Or lack of content.

In more recent times as artists have reverted to a more realistic form, their art is still usually devoid of critical social themes. One need only visit our museums and galleries to find confirmation of this point."




Excerpted from The Culture Struggle with the permission of the author, Michael Parenti.

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