Nice to see your posting on the subject. I first started looking for a Marxist staement on the nature of art some years ago, but I found very little of interest. Years later while working on a Ph. D. at the Florida Stae University I renewed the search and found a number of anthologies, mostly in Spanish, although I did find John Bowlt's interesting "Russian Art of the Avant-Garde" in which he reprints a lot of materials published by Russian futurists just after the revolution.
I have been interested in Dickie's social institutional theory of art which seems to be a nicely generalized model of the relationship of works to their social setting. I find it a perpetual problem that those in the literary, visual, and musical domains seem frequently to be talking at cross purposes as if there is an entirely different history to the various arts. I think that that is why I find the highly absracted model appealing. Such a model would, further, be fairly amenable to a marxzist model for the arts in that it specifically looks at the relationship of a the arts and specific groups (classes, for example).
Anyway, I look forward to reading your posting at leasure. I should have time because we are currently frozen and snowed in here in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)