dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
verfasserin/verfasser: Meyer Schapiro
titel: The Public Use of Art
+: Art Front (New York), November 1936, pp. 4—6, in: Worldview in Painting — Art and Society, New York 1999
«It is necessary, then, if workers are to lend their strength to the artists in the demand for a government-supported public art, that the artists present a program for a public art that will reach the masses of the people, It is necessary that the artists show their solidarity with the workers both in their support of the workers' demands and in their art. If they simply produce pictures to decorate the offices of municipal and state officials, if they serve the governmental demagogy by decorationg institutions courted by the present regime, then their art has little interest to the workers. […] But to win and keep this support, the artists — for the first time free to work together and create for a larger public — must aks themselves seriously for whom they are painting or carving and what value their present work can have for this new audience. […]
It is not a matter of bringing before the whole people the objects enjoyed by the upper classes (although that, too, must be done). These picture and statues are almost meaningless to the people; or they have the distorting sense of luxury objects, signs of power and wealth, and are therefore appreciated, not as art, but as the accompaniments of a desired wealth or status. The object of art becomes an instrument of snobbery and class distinction. Art is vulgarized in this way and its original values destroyed. […]
To create such a public art the artist must undergo a change as a human being and as an artist; he must become realistic in his perceptions, sympathetic to the people, close to their lives, and he must free himself from the illusions of isolation, superiority, and the absoluteness of his formal problems. He must be able to produce an art in which the workers and farmers and middle class will find their own experiences presented intimately, truthfully, and powerfully. […]
A regime that must hold the support of the people today provides conventional images of peace, justice, social harmony, productive labor, the idylls of the farms and the factories, while it proposes at the same time an unprecedented military and naval budget, leaves 10 million unemployed, and winks at the most brutal violations of civil liberty. In their seemingly neutral glorification of work, progress, and national history, these public murals are instruments of a class; a Republican administration would have solicited essentially similar art, though it might have assigned them to other painters. The conceptions of such mural paintings, rooted in naive, sentimental ideas of social reality, cannot help but betray the utmost banality and poverty of invention.»
(excerpts from the article)