The Industrialized Transformation Of Artistic Production:in The View Of Das Kapital

To analyze artistic production, we must return to the profound understanding of Marxist theory of spiritual production as well as the rich connotation of the Marxist concept of production. Apparently, it is too constricted to treat "production" as a concept only in the economic field. We should analyze artistic production on the basis of the unique value which the economic and philosophic connotation of the Marxist concept of production has. Discussed by Marx in his critique of political economy,"Artistic Production", in fact, the modern form of artistic production, which can also be called modern "productive labor", is a sort of "productive labor" in the field of arts, which actually constitutes the main part of "cultural industry" which we call today. Whether from the productivity or the relations of production point of view, the birth of cultural industry has its own historical inevitability. Just like Marx, who accepted the historical inevitability of capitalism but spared no effort to criticize capitalism all his life, Western Marxism scholars, especially the Frankfurt School, criticized cultural industry for a long time, in the field of artistic aesthetics, sociology, and political economy. However, as this utopian criticism lacks the action force at a practical level, it is only a sort of linguistic critique ultimately. Understanding and analyzing the industrialized transformation of cultural industry and artistic production, it is necessary to find the truth through the interaction between productivity and relations of production as well as the relationship between economic base and superstructure. From the perspective of historical materialism, all the aesthetic conflict focusing on the cultural industry can be attributed to the conflict between the historical inevitability of arts, which is regarded as a "free spiritual production" from its own, and its actual impossibility to achieve, which basically lies to the prevalent conflict between labor and capital under the capitalist relations of production. The disappearance of this conflict, the liberation of artistic production, does not become true merely in the fields of arts and aesthetics. To sum up, only eventually comes the change in the field of the relations of production, the so-called aesthetic conflict would really come to the end, which performed as the superstructure of the relations of production.