Marxist aesthetic theory

The thought relating to the arts in Marxist countries. Early Marxists saw art as a means of communicating socialist ideals to the masses, covering subjects relevant to their everyday lives (‘proletarian art’). In the USSR, socialist realism became dominant 1932, ousting Formalism, which emphasized form over content. Modernism, with its emphasis on abstraction and the individual artist's personal feelings, was dismissed as decadent by socialist critics such as Georg Lukács.

The term also refers, albeit differently, to Marxist artists working in Western Europe. The Frankfurt School championed modernism and saw art as portraying reality only indirectly. Critics such as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer believed in the autonomy and creativity of art as an antidote to repressive ideology. Walter Benjamin was interested in the way that technological developments made art accessible to the masses, challenging the elitist nature of art. Other Western Marxist theorists include Lucien Goldmann (1913–1970) and Louis Althusser.