"Admittedly, some regimes have been explicitly anti-aesthetic: examples would include all the Marxist dictatorships. Marx himself treated the arts as epiphenomenal: a mere twisted reflection of an underlying economic reality. However, this posture itself has myriad aesthetic entailments. Communist architecture has often been pointedly ugly, as a way to emphasize its sheer utility. Well, this is an actual aesthetic approach that remakes whole environments and has been massively influential. The great American housing projects of the early sixties, now belatedly being imploded all over the country, participate in this sort of leftist anti-aesthetic aesthetic, a pointed ugliness that beautifully reflects the bureaucracies that produced it. That is, there is no getting rid of aesthetics, even in a case where it is consciously rejected: rejection of beauty as a bourgeois plot, for example, is itself a design style expressing the essence of the regime. And while the texts may lie, the building or cityscape or industrial wasteland cannot lie, or at least cannot merely lie. It is real: the actual intervention of the actual regime in the actual world."

13 notes - 2 June, 2012

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