Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

As Arjun Appadurai usefully points out in “Modernity at Large and History as Cultural Fact” aesthetics are no longer to be simply understood as the practices of the artist, a maverick citizen creating self-referential images about the past, present and the future of human existence. But aesthetics are linked to the work of imagination of ordinary people and connected even more earnestly to the work of capitalism and its reorganization on a global scale. Contrary to the neo-Marxist tradition, aesthetic practices are at the epicenter of lived experience and the institutional practices of modern societies. These practices, as CLR James alerted us to in American Civilization, constitute a great window on contemporary life revealing central contradictions, tensions, and discontinuities. In this analysis, I call attention to the following. First, I explore the aesthetic dimensions of the diffusion of modernization theory to developing societies. Second, I point to the deepening role of aesthetics in the organization of capitalism in late modern life. Third, I will discuss briefly the crisis of language that the aestheticization of everyday life has precipitated in neo-Marxist efforts to grasp the central dynamics of contemporary society. The latter has led to a depreciation of the value and insightfulness of neo-Marxist analysis in our time—old metaphors associated with class, economy, state (“production,” “reproduction,” “resistance,” “the labor/capital” contradiction) are all worn down by the transformations of the past decades in which the saturation of economic and political practices in aesthetic mediations has proceeded full scale.