Aesthetic Materialism

  I have gone back and forth many times on the question of whether we are entering a period of fascism.   If it is indeed true that we are entering a period of fascism, then we should focus all of our energy on defeating fascism.  That means that we have to build a democratic (small d) coalition large enough to defeat fascism.  This means that we have to put aside all of our other political disputes, embracing people we otherwise might not, in order to win them over to the side of democracy.  We have to accept them as they are, not try to change them, and make ourselves appealing to them. So, for instance: if there are people who are anti-vaxxers, or people who question the origins of Covid and think it may have been intentionally designed in a lab, or who perhaps just think that people should be free to make their own medical choices, we have to welcome them into our movement.  If there are conspiracy theorists, in general, we have to welcome them into our...

    There are a lot of ways to look at Donald Trump.  One useful way is to think of Donald Trump as a member of what I like to call the lumpenbourgeoisie.  As far as I know, I made that term up.  I don't know if that is a term that other people have used before - if they have, I am probably using the word differently than they did. As I see it, there's the actual class that has monopolistic control over the means of production - the bourgeoisie - and then, somewhere below that, there is the lumpenbourgeoisie.  But I am not using this terminology in a crude, vulgar, mechanical, economistic sense.  It's not as if there's some number which divides the bourgeoisie from the lumpenbourgeoisie, as economic income brackets.   To understand the difference between the bourgeoisie and the lumpenbourgeoisie, one must understand the concept of class formation .  Marx wrote about this complex and fascinating topic, though his remarks are brief and sca...

  Like almost all of the great works of the 20th century, Pop art is a joke.  Pop art, at its best, is a witty articulation of the paradoxical - indeed, contradictory - conditions of the commodification of art.  For instance, there's the work by the MSCHF art collective in which they bought an original Andy Warhol drawing for $20,000, then drew 999 high-quality forgeries of it, shuffled them together, and sold them for $250 a pop.  Or, for that matter, Maurizzio Cattelan's famous banana duct-taped to a wall, sold for $120,000.  Or Salvatore's invisible statue, "Io Sono," which sold for $18,000 .  Of course, that's not a new idea: Yves Klein's "the Void," (1958) - an empty space - recently sold for a million dollars .  Or what about Andy Warhol's own pranks, from his prints of Campbell's Soup cans to his art that he didn't touch, manufactured in his factory by unnamed underlings, to his "oxidation" paintings (1977) - blocks o...