In the mid-twentieth century, when American art first became internationally significant, Marxist-based theorizing was extremely important. The two leading critics, Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Shapiro, the most important art historian who took an interest in contemporary art, all came from the depression-era New York communist milieu. And often their successors also adopted leftist theorizing. In the 1970s, T. J. Clark, the most influential young art historian, was a member of Guy Debord’s Situationalist International. And the very important academic journal October, founded in 1976, which was named for Eisenstein’s film about the October Soviet Revolution, extended Greenberg’s influence.
One influential Octoberist presented a stark opposition between the ‘good’ politically critical works and the ‘bad’ conformist art. But the curators and collectors made no such distinctions. And so inevitably these critics’ political worldviews appear safely isolated from practice, the Marxist theorizing just a way to promote works which they admired. Since much admired contemporary artworks inevitably became property of the very wealthy or the best endowed museums, there was an obvious conflict between this leftist politics and art world life. For several generations, new artistic movements appear, and the canon was repeatedly radically revised, but these basic ways of thinking were not revised. On reflection, that’s maybe unsurprising, for isolation of criticism from commercial practice meant that it had no consequences.
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