Aesthetic Materialism

  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 scattered, and require interpretation. 

  Like many of the great works of the 20th century, Pop art is essentially 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 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