Art changes the world by puncturing everyday ideological reality, not by winning battles

Evidence

Some museumgoers who had seen the piece came back to tell them that afterward everything outside had looked different from what they were used to. Specifically, the de Young is not far from the San Francisco Botanical Garden, and those who visited it directly afterward found that Hockney’s piece had trained them to look a certain way—a notably slow, broken-up luxuriating in textures. They saw the garden anew, in all its kaleidoscopic beauty. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 364 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

If the “older” popular culture, however commercially organized and crude in its appeals, seemed less of an “assault from the outside,” this was not because it was an authentic product of that culture, but because it was closer to—mirrored more faithfully or, better, worked more “authentically” along the groove of—the habits, attitudes, and unspoken assumptions of its working-class audience, and had more fully “indigenized” itself, by long cohabitation, as it were, within the complex history of the formations of an urban-industrial corporate class. If the new forms of mass culture were effecting change, it could only be because they too addressed themselves to the lived textures and complex attitudes of the culture in which they sought to embed themselves, working along its grooves, while at the same time inflecting and disconnecting them, dislodging them from within and attaching them to new modes of feeling, habits, and judgments—“unbending the springs of action.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 149 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The fact that (works of art) seem to be growing more indifferent cannot be explained merely by a decrease in their social effectiveness. There is some evidence that the works lose their coefficient of friction, an element essential to them, when they turn towards their own pure immanence: that they are also becoming more indifferent in themselves. The fact that radically abstract paintings can be hung in official reception rooms without causing offence does not, however, justify any restoration of a representationalism that is pleasant a priori, even if Che Guevara is selected for the purposes of reconciliation with the object. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2731 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Capitalist commodification displaces the aesthetic value of art — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 69; Art’s violation of nature is liberation from an oppressive apparatus — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 836; Avant-garde art depends on concrete political conditions, not just aesthetic logic — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 243 (+4 more)

Related

• A single artwork can permanently retrain how a viewer perceives the ordinary world (similarity 0.84)
• Art loses its critical friction when it becomes purely self-referential. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• A single artwork can permanently retrain how a viewer perceives the ordinary world #exemplifies (0.80) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 364
• Cultural change works by inflecting existing attitudes, not by assaulting them #corroborates (0.80) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 149
• Art loses its critical friction when it becomes purely self-referential. #corroborates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2731
• Art’s violation of nature is liberation from an oppressive apparatus #qualifies (0.78) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 836
• Capitalist commodification displaces the aesthetic value of art #complicates (0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 69
• Avant-garde art depends on concrete political conditions, not just aesthetic logic #qualifies (0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 243