Discursive Construction of Art as a Subject of Politics: Selected Notes on Polish Aesthetic Thought

ABSTRACT The study seeks to capture and explore the dynamic relationship between aesthetics and broadly understood politics as a cultural phenomenon. The entanglement of art in sociopolitical contexts (“politicization of art”) is discussed from the institutional perspective (development of Marxist thought in Poland after 1945) and within the domain of social activity – the structure of the ordinary (realization of aesthetic postulates of Marxism). The main objective is thus to analyze the effect of Marxism on the twentieth-century aesthetics in Poland with a special emphasis on the postwar period (after 1945), when the basic patterns of that school of thinking took shape. The main focus is on the approach to the Marxist concept found in the theory of Polish Socialist realism. The analysis also involves reflections on the reduction of Marxism to the ideology of Socialist realism and the ideology of art which is associated with it.