Marx’s Artistic Production Theory Analysis

Artistic production theory is derived from the production theory of Marxism ideological system. As the universality of contradiction resides in the particularity of contradiction, the production theory summarizes the universality of the artistic production, which includes commodity attributes and commercial rules. The particularity of artistic production lies in that it’s the integration of spiritual and material production. Added to that, though artistic production comes from material production, it tends to become more independent from the latter, because the way and degree of the integration is different, even the process of recognition toward the artistic production is diverse. The development of one theory is dynamic, and its value or validity depends on time background and the change between productivity and production relations, but the essence of the great theory is the everlasting wealth for human beings. It’s appropriate and available to capitalize on 2000-year-ago Confucianism to interpret current Chinese political ideology, so as to apply the Marxism’s artistic production theory to demonstrate current artistic production is not proper. The study uses the Marxism’s artistic theory (especially its ideas about why artistic production roots in material production while separates from it and the particularity of artistic production) to explain the status quo of Chinese socialist culture and offer advises to its further development under the circumstances of the internet medias’ emergence in global age. The paper is divided into four parts.The first section makes a literature review upon the Marxism’s production theory, which the author believes belongs to one of the dialectical theories. Dong Xuewen was the earlier one in China to study this theory. Chen Qijia differentiated artistic production from material production, and artistic production theory from traditional material production, which in some extent filled the gap of the Marxism’s artistic production theory. Li Zhongyi studied the directivity change in artistic production’s creation and consumption, also innovatively study the theory with considering the time context. Foreign scholars, like Benjamin and Brecht, regarded artistic production as an action to change the reality and stimulate political revolution and also revealed the practicability of this theory. Based on the review, it is found that there are few researches on how to handle the problems of Chinese artistic production. So it becomes the starting point of this study.The second section reports the theoretical origin of Marxism’s artistic production theory. The author thinks studying traditional ideas upon production is fundamental for exploring the theoretical origin because Marxism’s artistic production theory is born in Mar’s discussion about production, especially the function of human being. The external sources of the theory are investigated, which include the ancient Greek culture and utopian socialism, the origin of the whole Marxism’s system as well; also the internal sources are explained, which refer to the philosophical idea of the Classic German aesthetics. The Classic German aesthetics matters a lot because it is dialectical and thus it contributes to the establishment of Marxism’s artistic production theory. Apart from this, the incredible philosophical thoughts of outstanding and booming German philosopher in Renaissance like Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach are also one of the major sources.In the third section, the logical origin of Marxism’s artistic production theory is discussed. Based on previous explanation, it is no doubt that this theory has splendid sources. However, framework and structure are more important for a theory because they are subject and object that majorly constitute one theory, and the content of the theory is from the inner logic of theoretical characteristics and agents. The object of learning Marxism’s artistic theory is exploring its possible effect and influence on reality. So this chapter mainly talks about the subject, object and intermediary, and also the building blocks of this theory. The author combines the multi-dimensional study (covers politics, economy and culture) with psycho analysis (about religion and ethics) to study the agent. In the end of this section, the major contents, which based on the theory’s inner logic, are displayed.In the final section, the signification of the Marxism’s artistic production theory has been analyzed. Although Marx stated that because of capital’s existence the art producer becomes the employer regard to the capitalist production relations, the proportion of the strategies for artistic production, or commercialization of artistic production is fairly low, and capital exploitation is quite homogeneous. But Marx did not offer detailed explanation on artistic production because of the limitation of the time context. However, with the development of economic and cultural globalization, and the emergence of the third industry, artistic production has increasingly played a significant role. Thus the author reports the influence of this theory on Chinese artistic production on the basis of current dilemma.