ART, AND PAINTING IN particular, has always mixed with ideologies of the age. For Western art, the two prevailing ideologies of modern times have been Christianity and Marxism, two polar opposites.
These underlying outlooks have become more like trace elements in the hurly-burly of the modern art markets, art appreciation, and art criticism than like outright doctrines. Yet a closer look shows how they still define most of how we view visual art.
Since Christianity came first, let's look at some of its assumptions about art, creativity, and beauty. Since it was said that humans were created in "God's image," it was assumed that human "creators," like the Creator, had an impulse to make thing that are “good.” This is the idea of co-creator.
Christian thought has had a wide variety of views on the visual arts, some embracing and others that saw art (as did Plato and some Protestant thought) as false imagery, a distraction from transcendent realities or the Word of the Bible. Still, Protestant thought led to a Western emphasis on introspection, individualism, and the conscience. Roman Catholicism, obviously, had a strong pro-art doctrine, as seen in its artistic legacy.
Even as the West became more secular, however, there was a religious tone to the creative act. It was at the least good in itself, and at the most, a kind of worship of a universe infused with diverse kinds of beauty. Religion encouraged introspection, individualism, and conscience, all part of an artistic impulse. Even “art for art’s sake” flourished in this thought world.
When Karl Marx began his career, and later issued his Das Capital, and with Friedrich Engels the Communist Manifesto, art still had a kind of role, but in a very different way. It was not about creativity and beauty, but rather about the "superstructure" and "class consciousness." In other word, since history was driven by the material forces of dialectical and historical materialism, there was no need for transcendent things: All was material, and thus all was political.
True, it has been noted that Marxism picked up some of the traits of the religious movement called "millennialism"—that is, religion that saw a providence of an end period, and end time, working itself out in history in ways bigger than human manipulation.
So it was with Marxism. History, driven by the immutable dialectic of class struggle, was moving towards its inevitable end. All that was needed, Marx said, was for the oppressed class to throw off their "false consciousness" imposed by capitalism, join the vanguard, and bring about a revolution that would produce and ideal world, heaven on Earth.
In all of this, culture was deemed as part of the false consciousness that had held back the next stage of historical development. It was capitalism—the expropriation of extra wealth—that was the core of Western culture, but art had its role, too. Art celebrated the ruling classes, and thus was another kind of opiate of the people.
As it turns out, the breaking-point revolution across Western society never came as Marx predicted. The middle class arose. Art continued to proliferate. Worst of all, the vanguard "working class" got compromised by rising into the bourgeoisie (middle class). Later Marxists had to find out how Marx could still be right in "the late stages" of capitalism.
At this point, they turned to culture, that cloak of false consciousness. Thus, they began to turn to art. The most famous proponent of revolution in culture was the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who said ideological control of art was be important to bring about a new consciousness, putting an end to capitalism for good.
After Gramsci, it was no longer just one economic class oppressing the other—see the first lines of the Communist Manifesto for this list—now it was cultural groups imposing a hierarchy of oppressions. Thus, Marxist thinkers began to say that art must be oppositional to the ruling order.
We end up with Marxist critiques of art in advertising, for example, and later the reported issues of white aesthetic culture as oppressive, or taking art influences from other cultures as a malign "appropriation," an oppression by theft. Central to Marxist doctrine is that humankind must take back “the means of production” stolen by capitalists; thus, we have a vision of everyone being a revolutionary artist, each in charge of the means of production.
One Marxist writer said that in the past, the art of the ruling class favored dull color schemes because they oppressed emotions. Thus, the modern turn to ebullient color was a kind of Marxian revolution against the class structure. Another group has argued that enlightened (i.e. revolutionary) artists making lots of money in the modern art market are, in fact, making ironic criticism of capitalism to achieve its overthrow.
This Marxist current, as with the Christian current, are very below the surface these days. They only appear as ideological arguments in university departments, in ideological journals, and in self-conscious activist groups. Yet the two currents are there and, perhaps unconsciously, artists have adopted one view or the other.
In the Judeo-Christian view, art is about being a co-creator and pursuing something that traditionally has been called "beauty," or at least profundity. Art is introspective, individualistic, and can often be about what is transcendent. Even a bit of mysticism is allowed, and a lot of art for art’s sake.
In the Marxist view, now a kind of soft Marxism, art is a tool of the vanguard to overthrow the ruling order. It seeks to bring a new "historical consciousness" to the masses, who are still waiting to gather for the final millennial event. In short, art is essentially about politics.
Christian thought has its troubles, but it’s no easier for pure Marxism. Today, there are countless "victim" groups arguing that they are being oppressed by other groups. Indeed, the oppression flow chart has become infinitely more complex than Marx's original, simple, series of one class overthrowing another, like dominos across history.
To be banal about it, it’s common today for people to attribute unhappiness to being oppressed by one group or another, or even several groups at once. It is not a stretch to say that now artists must ask themselves if their artwork is oppressing anyone, or indeed is oppressing many groups all at once (see a definition of “Intersectionality” to explain this miasma).
The two art worlds, in many respects, barely talk to each other today. If they did dig down deep, they would find irreconcilable differences, and not a good deal of good feeling. And so art history in the West marches on. There is the Judeo-Christian ethos, and there is the Marxist ethos. Most of the time, neither side realizes that they have fallen into one camp or the other.