The Industrialized Transformation Of Artistic Production

To analyze artistic production, we must return to the profound understanding of Marxisttheory 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. Weshould analyze artistic production on the basis of the unique value which the economic andphilosophic connotation of the Marxist concept of production has. Discussed by Marx in hiscritique 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 ofarts, which actually constitutes the main part of "cultural industry" which we call today. Whetherfrom the productivity or the relations of production point of view, the birth of cultural industry hasits own historical inevitability. Just like Marx, who accepted the historical inevitability of capitalismbut spared no effort to criticize capitalism all his life, Western Marxism scholars, especially theFrankfurt 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 apractical level, it is only a sort of linguistic critique ultimately. Understanding and analyzing theindustrialized transformation of cultural industry and artistic production, it is necessary to find thetruth through the interaction between productivity and relations of production as well as therelationship between economic base and superstructure. From the perspective of historicalmaterialism, all the aesthetic conflict focusing on the cultural industry can be attributed to theconflict between the historical inevitability of arts, which is regarded as a "free spiritualproduction” from its own, and its actual impossibility to achieve, which basically lies to theprevalent conflict between labor and capital under the capitalist relations of production. Thedisappearance of this conflict, the liberation of artistic production, does not become true merely inthe fields of arts and aesthetics. To sum up, only eventually comes the change in the field of therelations of production, the so-called aesthetic conflict would really come to the end, whichperformed as the superstructure of the relations of production.