Here and Now: From 'Aestheticizing Politics' to 'Politicizing Art'

Abstract

The fusion of art, law, and politics achieved critical mass in the 1930’s—one need only think of the calculated exploitation of aesthetic forms of authority in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy; but Soviet Realism, despite its radically different ideological orientation was not far behind in cultivated the inter-relationship of political, aesthetic, and legal discourses. As will be seen, in Mexico, too, a post-revolutionary nationalist ideology recognized the work of artists as a crucial tool of its legitimacy. It hardly comes as a surprise then, that Walter Benjamin, whose ability to detect the faintest breeze of the zeitgeist was so uncanny and so keen, should choose to write on the subject Show more