What can I say? That is a great essay, Louis. Allow me to add whatever I can.
I am fairly certain that it's not at all obvious how art functions in society and how its practice, products, and distribution system effects and reflects its socio-political context--its embedding space. It is probably even less obvious and probably more controversial, more hotly debated, how a Marxist perspective, or a Marxist influenced art history can be written that helps reveal the social functions of art--beyond just acknowledging it composes the visual ideology of the dominant class in power. So, the best I have found comes from Arnold Hauser and more recently Timothy Clark.
While both these art historians concentrate on the visual arts, these are merely part of a larger and more comprehensive domain of general symbolic activities: music, literature, theater, dance, and grandest of all mass media--the electronic merging of all of it altogether simultaneously, running in continuous real time--that apparently seamless envelop and mirror of our collective consciousness.
In order to get a handle on the nature of symbolic activities from a more general perspective and how these comprise both a form of socio-cultural consciousness and a more concrete socio-cultural context at the same time, I think Ernst Cassirer is still the best, despite the age of the work, the volume of it and its numerous errors, and mistakes. Cassirer manages to link a theory of symbolic forms with the western philosophical tradition of Kant and to a lesser extent Hegel. But it is old, mostly written between the 1920-45. Cassirer represents a modernist alternative to the major branching in philosophy that seems to split directions crudely between the sciences and humanities, or between empiricism and metaphysics, between say Bertrand Russell in one camp and Martin Heidegger in the other. For the empirically minded out there, Cassirer began as a philosopher of science and his early work was devoted to the modern giants of physics.
I am bringing these writers up because it is too easy to just dismiss the history presented in Louis's post as some kind of obscure controversy that took place in the upper stratosphere of advanced art and politics. It is of course true, it was obscure, it did take place among an elite, and may appear to apply to nothing of consequence outside the reaches of NYC art and political circles. What Cassirer, Hauser, and Clark add is the 'how'; how these kinds of activities become constituent cultural themes that are both manifestations and expressions of a dominant class ideology. From an absolutely materialist view, the answer is these cultural elite simply got their views and works propagated into dominant positions through money and connections, just as all elite have in the past. Well, there is no argument there. But then the materialist explanation leaves off, just when the questions become interesting: why are such forms compelling and influential beyond the obvious reaches of money and power? And more importantly, how do such forms not merely propagandize as is their public role, but also comprise important aspects of our world view?
Any way I look forward to reading Part II on revolution and art.
Chuck Grimes ----------------------------
For those interested here are works from Hauser, Clark and Cassirer taken from Melvyl at:
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Catalogs/
Hauser, Arnold, 1892-1978 Uniform title: Philosophie der Künstgeschichte. English title: The philosophy of art history. Publisher: Cleveland; New York : World, 1963. Description: vii, 410, xvi p.; 21 cm.
Hauser, Arnold, Title: The social history of art. Publisher: [London] Routledge & K. Paul [1951] Description: 2 v. (1022 p.) illus. 25 cm.
Hauser, Arnold, Uniform title: Soziologie der Kunst. English Title: The sociology of art; translated by Kenneth J. Northcott. Publisher: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Description: xxi, 776 p.; 24 cm.
Clark, T. J. (Timothy J.), 1958- Title: The absolute bourgeois: artists and politics in France, 1848-1851. Publisher: London, Thames and Hudson, 1973. Description: 224 p. illus. (some col.), facsims. 25 cm.
Clark, T. J. Title: Image of the people: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. Publisher: London : Thames and Hudson, c1973. Description: 208 p. : ill. ; 26 cm.
Clark, T. J. Title: The painting of modern life: Paris in the art of Manet and his followers. Publisher: New York : Knopf, 1985, c1984. Description: xv, 338 p., [31] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 24 cm.
Cassirer, Ernst, 1874-1945 Uniform title: Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. English Title: The logic of the humanities. Translated by Clarence Smith Howe. Publisher: New Haven, Yale University Press, 1961. Description: 217 p. 21 cm.
Cassirer, Ernst, Title: The myth of the state. Publisher: New Haven:Yale University Press, c1946 (8th printing, 1967) Description: xii, 303 p. ; 24 cm. Notes: Edited by Charles W. Hendel. cf. Foreword.
Cassirer, Ernst, Title: The philosophy of symbolic forms; translated by Ralph Manheim. Pref. and introd. by Charles W. Hendel. Publisher: New Haven, Yale University Press [1963-66, v. 1, 1964; c1996] Description: 4 v. 24 cm. Contents: v. 1. Language.-- v. 2. Mythical thought.-- v. 3. The phenomenology of knowledge -- v. 4. The metaphysics of symbolic forms, including the text of Cassirer's manuscript on Basic phenomena. Notes: Vol. 4. edited by John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene; translated by John Michael Krois.
Cassirer, Ernst, Uniform title: Philosophie der Aufklärung. English Title: The philosophy of the enlightenment; translated by Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove. Publisher: Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1951. Description: xiii, 366 p. 25 cm.
Cassirer, Ernst, Title: Symbol, myth, and culture : essays and lectures / edited by Donald Phillip Verene. Publisher: New Haven : Yale University Press, 1979. Description: xii, 304 p. ; 25 cm. Contents: The concept of philosophy as a philosophical problem.-- Critical idealism as a philosophy of culture.-- Descartes, Leibniz, and Vico.-- Hegel's theory of the State.-- The philosophy of history.-- Language and art I.-- Language and art II.-- The educational value of art.-- Philosophy and politics.-- Judaism and the modern political myths.-- The technique of our modern political myths.-- Reflections on the concept of group and the theory of perception. Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.