Aestheticization of politics
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The aestheticization of politics was an idea first coined by Walter Benjamin as being a key ingredient to Fascist regimes. In this theory, life and the affairs of living are conceived of as innately artistic, and related to as such politically. Politics are in turn viewed as artistic, and structured like an artform which reciprocates the artistic conception of life being seen as art. This has also been noted as being connected to the Italian Futurist movement and postulated as its main motivation for getting involved in the Fascist regime of Italy. Alternately, the term "the politicization of aesthetics" has been used as a term for an ideologically opposing synthesis, associated with the Soviet Union, wherein art is ultimately subordinate to political life and thus a result of it, separate from it, but which is attempted to be incorporated for political use as theory relating to the consequential political nature of art. The author Emilio Gentile has stressed that these two ideas are not mutually exclusive, and both regimes had a large degree of the other.
See also
- Aestheticization as propaganda
- Aestheticization of violence
- Art for art's sake
- The arts and politics
- The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
- Relations of production
