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PARTISAN REVIEW
in the modern planned society, a society owned by the state, will art
achieve such an exalted stature. This aesthetic, which is the basis of
state culture, has evolved almost imperceptibly. Previously the
social aspect of a work of art would have been no more important
than any other. Today only the work that expresses a social meaning
is artistically valuable.
From the point of view of the aesthetics of censorship , this
achievement is more than a fashionable idea; it is a turning point:
artistic pleasure, once a private affair, is now the means for social in–
sight, itself complicit in the transformation of society . The idea of
commitment, a small, seemingly innocuous step in late bourgeois
art, is culturally an enormous leap. Without it, the directed art of
state socialism could hardly have come into being, let alone flour–
ished.
I do not have to glorify Party and state, the soul and body of the
common good. I need not even celebrate the corporate society as the
triumph of intellect and sentiment .
It
is sufficient that I do not reject
the idea of the planned common good and do not preclude the possi–
bility that the planners of the common good might ultimately suc–
ceed. I may express my discontent, even my unhappiness, as long as
I do so constructively. I may utilize any possible means to achieve
the publication of my works, the exhibition of my paintings, and the
showing of my films .
But if the expression of my artistic consciousness is made pub–
lic, this will have happened only because I have employed a
coauthor : the state . My audience knows that I am a permitted
author with a permitted message. The expression of my aesthetic
sensibility can be neither imagined nor acted out in any other way. I
am a painter, sculptor, signwriter, chronicler of the pharaoh: even
my most personal discovery or insight is used only to decorate the
pyramid of socialism. All my creations are based upon a set of ax–
ioms ; my aesthetic explorations are variations of acknowledged
truths. I have been given a magic flute, out of which flows one un–
changing tune : "I owe my soul to the company store ."
It
is vanity of vanities to believe that artists and audience are
smarter than the state's administrators as victims of old-fashioned
censorship might have hoped . We contribute to the co-optation of
our audience with our art and , for its part, the co-opted public's ears,
eyes, and taste buds further co-opt our art. Nationalized conscious–
ness speaks to nationalized consciousness. Even the unhappy con–
sciousness is nationalized, as is the lonely one .
It
was not a mistake
