soulless, technical avant-gardism, full of assertive self-importance but empty of
any expressive clarification of emotion in relation to the actual. Art made from
this technically avant-gardist, provocative stance is too confident in its own
rectitude in indicting social actuality skeptically rather than constructively.^19
Or it may take the shape of political art, in presenting one or another didactic
but implausible recipe for fulfillment in social actuality: in the closed society of
Stalinism, for example, a boy-meets-tractor story; in the Gilded Age of 1890s
rapaciously expansionist America, a Horatio Alger story; in the present a par-
able of the preeminence of the virtues of niceness and self-respect. These shapes
of almost-art are likewise unlikely to win art many friends.
Luka ́cs, Marcuse, and Adorno
Beginning from what he calls Schiller’s“correctand profound insights”into the
infinite task of modern art in relation to social actuality, Georg Lukács provides
a powerful and plausible account of how a number of artistic movements have
confronted and then fled from the problem of genuine artistic making.^20 In the
earlynineteenthcentury, perhapsmostexemplarilyin the worksofJaneAusten
andHonorédeBalzac,itseemedthatthe infinitetaskofartasSchillerconceived
it might be satisfied. Realist attention to social actuality might be combined
with an account of deeper longings for a sensuously meaningful social life. It
was possible to conceive of a plot–ending, typically, in a happy marriage, albeit
with qualification–that might both be realistic and yet present deeper longing
as largely satisfied. (Marcuse remarks aptly here that“the [unmixed] happy
ending is‘the other’of art...Authentic works of art are aware of this; they
reject the promise made too easily; they refuse the unburdened happy end...
Where it nevertheless appears...it seems to be denied by the work as a
whole.”^21 That is to say, happy endings in authentic works of art will leave
Malvolio in his dungeon at the end ofTwelfth Nightunjustly unintegrated into
social life, or the marriage of Darcy and Elizabeth inPride and Prejudicewill
remain shadowed by the second-best, grim happiness of Charlotte Lucas alone
(^19) Compare Marcuse’s criticism of merely technical avant-garde art that lacks“authenticity
and truth”in Marcuse,Aesthetic Dimension,p.x.
(^20) Georg Lukács,“Art and Objective Truth,”(1954), reprinted inCritical Theory Since 1965,
ed. Adams and Searle, pp. 791–807.
(^21) Marcuse,Aesthetic Dimension,p.47.
Art and society: some contemporary practices of art 261