This interconnection between society, art and design needs closer consideration.

Interviewee: Roger Behrens

It is precisely in the debate on the actuality of Benjamin’s demand for a politicizing of art that this interconnection between society, art and design needs closer consideration. The question would be: had art not in any case already dissolved into diverse forms of practically useful art, as it was called back then, and become a component of cultural industrial design? To answer this question, and indeed to be able to formulate it in the first place, it seems to me to be unhelpful to limit oneself to the aesthetic, to conceive of a new aesthetic and add another version to the proliferation of aesthetics. That’s just cheap academism, far removed from the real world and politically blunt. At the same time though, it is important to insist on the political significance of – as Marcuse called it – the “aesthetic dimension”: in art and beyond art.