The general culture industrialisation of life is mirrored in the art scene and business: political art is not immune from this and also follows the logic of culture industrialisation. Apart from very few forays by the Russian avant-gardes and very marginal, scatted interventions, \u201cpolitical art\u201d is an artistic practice \u2013 and not a critique of the relations of production which an artistic practice is dependent on. And that\u2019s what\u2019s hawked around by the museum establishment, and that\u2019s what\u2019s taught at the academies and colleges. But political art is then paradoxically unpolitical because it withdraws itself from \u2013 its own \u2013 political relations, i.e. the relations of production, omits these relations and indeed ultimately masks them over with aesthetics. And what\u2019s more: the aesthetic itself now seems to be a genuine practice of art, as the genuine artistic production and thus as the specific field of the political in art, or as the politics of art. But that\u2019s nothing more than an extension of the aestheticizing of politics through art: i.e. aesthetics as ideology, as necessarily false consciousness. Art is integrated into society, people are accustomed to art \u2013 Marcuse described this in his reports on Nazi society for the US Office of Strategic Services at the beginning of the 1940s; this corresponds to the critique of the culture industry which Adorno and Horkheimer were formulating at the same time in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"