Artistic communism – a sketch

This essay proposes a contribution to the critique of contemporary capitalism, particularly with regard to its entwinement with culture and, thereby, its creeping subsumption of life more generally – a formation it nominates ‘artistic capitalism’. This is confronted by an attempt to reconstruct the deep affinity between the modern ideas of art and communism, especially in the unspoken correspondences between post‐Kantian aesthetics and Marx’s early writings – the essay formulates the idea of ‘artistic communism’ to grasp this affinity. But this reconstruction also has the aim of revealing how contemporary capitalist culture comes to appropriate and invert artistic communism, something elaborated through reflecting on the diagnoses of ‘culture industry’ (Adorno and Horkheimer), ‘society of spectacle’ (Debord) and labour as ‘virtuosity’ (Virno). The contention of the essay is that the anti‐capitalist re‐imagination of communism and art needs to negotiate this appropriation and inversion.