I promised I would write a blog entry to give some additional insight about what the communists thought about "bourgeois art." Be sure to re-read "En Avant Dada" and "The Art Scab" too.
The first point we can make is pretty literal. A bourgeois (i.e. middle class) economy is based on a fluid exchange of commodities, and the person who controls the most commodities has the most social power. Art has thus been reduced to a commodity, like coal or shoes. Albeit a "fine" or "valuable" commodity that gives great social distinction to those individuals who possess it (it's worth a lot of shoes!). This makes the bourgeois usage of art different from the medieval/feudal usage, where works of art were created by and for the entire community. (The Renaissance began this process, but I'm sure Alberti, Shakespeare, Descartes et. al would be horrified by how it turned out.) Obviously the medieval economy isn't egalitarian... I mean they have kings and popes for crying out loud. But that community is nonetheless a whole rather than an aggregation of individuals, and the art is meaningful for the whole community, and they can access it. In the bourgeois world of the late 19th century & early 20th century, art (specifically paintings) is largely owned by wealthy individuals and displayed privately. And you have to have a special education to appreciate it, because it's either historically alien (e.g. 15th century Italian painting), referent to things historically alien (e.g. classical mythology, or imitations/modifications of 15th century Italian painting), or weird and avant garde (e.g. like impressionism and then expressionism when they first came out.) This makes art a private world, a world that is only accessible to the eyes and the minds of a certain set of people. And if these people gain power as a result of this access, then art is a tool of exclusion REGARDLESS OF ITS CONTENT. It creates a system where the new urban working class is stupid for not appreciating it, and inferior because they spend their time shoveling coal and making shoes instead of making and appreciating "art."
The second point is a bit more difficult, because it has to do with content of the art in question. The communists believe that the bourgeois class is essentially parasitic, since they do none of the work but take most of the profits. They live in a kind of dreamworld. So it figures that the content of their paintings very often relates to fantasies, particularly highly individualized ones (e.g. impressionism), ones that pine nostalgically for the past (e.g. agricultural scenes, or a love of classical and renaissance art and themes). Anything but what is actually happening, because what is actually happening is the exploitation of the working class, mainly in the cities, where the factories are. Indeed, it could be said that late bourgeois paintings really have no substantive content, in the way that medieval paintings and renaissance paintings did. How could parasites have anything substantive to say? Look at what the parasites think about real art from those earlier periods... they don't get it. They either think it's a bunch of technical rules, or something witty to reference at their cocktail parties. They've lost the reality of it.
On the other hand, and this is the really tricky part, communists do believe that bourgeois art has real content. Its content is the exploitation of the working class. Because that's the real shit that's really going on. This is never its stated content, because its stated content doesn't show this at all; it shows classical mythology, or curvy sunflowers, or whatever. So its content is hidden or beneath the surface. The trouble with the bourgeoisie, like any dominant ruling class in any political/economic situation, is that it won't admit that its dominance is a big deal. It pretends that its dominance is normal, the way things should be, always have been, and always will be. This is what I mean by a false universal. Any ideology has a false universal. This is why when you ever hear someone use the word "ideology" or the word "rhetoric," they are always talking about someone else's ideas. Someone else's ideas are lies. My ideas are the truth, so they're not really my ideas, they're just the way things are. They're real, they're normal. Recall the way that the ideology of racism functions through movies and advertising images in The Bluest Eye. Remember the Dick and Jane passage? (which is very dada, incidentally) The book doesn't say people with blonde hair and blue eyes are racially superior (as the Nazis would say... hey didn't we just fight a war with the Nazis?). It doesn't say anything about that at all. It just shows us that these people, this life, is normal. It's universal. This is just the way things are. Why, for instance, do we hear models described as "ethnic"? Is white not an ethnicity? No, because it's just normal. Suppose I say, I'm making a movie about a person who goes on an adventure in outer space, close your eyes and tell me what that person looks like. In all likelihood, based on all of the other movies you've seen, you're imagining that the protagonist is a white male. Because that's "normal"... that's the false universal in this case.
So to the communists, bourgeois art, which includes all of the styles and periods of art that win approval from the bourgeois (who are actually rather stupid and, for all of their rules and labels, can't really understand what they're about), is a false universal. It pretends that it's the only sort of art there is, can be, should be, and will be... that's what the term "human culture" means in the Kokoschka quote, say Grosz and Heartfield. It doesn't mean human culture in the universal sense... it means middle class culture. And that's a very dangerous lie when you take into account this art's aforementioned tendency to be private or exclusive. So that's what the dadaists mean when they say they reject aesthetics. They reject this false universal. Our job is to figure out what they're trying to do about it... for the sake of comparison, you might try reading this article about a recent New York subway vandal/artist.
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