The Social History of Art: Models, Concepts, and the Antiaesthetic

Vocabulary practice flashcards defining key theorists, concepts, and historical terminology from the social history of art lecture notes.

Francis Klingender (1907-55)

Anglo-German Marxist scholar and early social historian of art who situated cultural representation within society's communication structures and ideological production under industrial capitalism.

Frederick Antal (1887-1954)

Anglo-Hungarian Marxist scholar and early social historian of art who analyzed cultural representation within the field of ideological production under industrial capitalism.

Jürgen Habermas (born 1929)

German philosopher and sociologist who defined the formation of the bourgeois public sphere and cultural practices as processes of subjective differentiation that construct bourgeois individuality.

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Enlightenment philosopher whose concept of disinterestedness provided the overarching philosophical framework for the aesthetics of autonomy.

Aesthetic Autonomy

The concept of experiencing art as a self-sufficient, self-reflexive practice offering pleasure without interest, integral to bourgeois identity and medium-specificity.

Transition from Cult-Value to Exhibition-Value

A fundamental transformation in the experience of the work of art described by Walter Benjamin in his essays of the 1930s.

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69)

Marxist aesthetician who maintained in the late 1960s that artistic independence and aesthetic autonomy could, paradoxically, only be guaranteed within the commodity structure of the work of art.

Peter Bürger (born 1936)

Author of Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), who argued that the historical avant-gardes arose in 1913 to contest autonomy aesthetics, challenge the institution of art, and integrate art with life.

Antiaesthetic

A practice that dismantles autonomy aesthetics by replacing originality with technical reproduction, destroying aura, and emphasizing participatory, utilitarian, and communicative action for collective perception.

John Heartfield

Visual artist known for photomontages such as 'Hurray, the Butter is Finished!' (1935), which served as counterpropaganda against fascism and imperialist capitalism.

El Lissitzky

An exemplary 'artist-as-producer' who developed exhibition design (such as the Soviet Pavilion at Pressa in 1928) situated within the parameters of an emerging proletarian public sphere.

Class

A central premise of Marxist political theory driving the historical process, defined by Karl Marx according to a subject's situation in relation to the means of production.

Clement Greenberg (1909-94)

Postwar critic whose formalist theories represented the doxa of painterly self-reflexivity within the tradition of aesthetic autonomy.