Art, Marx, and Bill Henson

In the June 2008 edition of Annals Australasia, Robert Tilley discusses Art, Marx, and Bill Henson (p.27)

A Catholic conservative agrees with Karl Marx!

In a famous sentence Marx wrote, "All that is solid melts into the air, all that is holy is profaned..." Marx was talking about the effect of capitalism on traditional social mores and manners. Critics were saying that the Communists were set on destroying religion, family, and property. And so they were. Only, it was Marx's argument that the Communists didn't have to do anything to achieve this aim for capitalism was doing it for them.

Leaving aside the questions of property, it is clear that free-market ideology is very effective indeed in destroying religion and family. But it does so under the name of freedom and not of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.

Following the lead of earlier Christian socialists, Marx argued that capitalism is of the essence of liberalism and thus of the bourgeois state. It works to remove the substance from things like family and religion, replacing that substance with another value altogether: the value of a commodity that can be packaged, sold, consumed and, if we're suitably well-behaved, recycled.

Emphasis Mine

What Tilley overlooks here is that Capitalism is also very effective at destroying the private property of ordinary people. Witness the rising rates of home foreclosures here and in the USA and UK. Also the rising number of business bankrupcies as the capital of the middle is obliterated. The Communists are not this but the Capitalists.

Tilley is correct to point to commodification as the driving force of Capitalism. The production of commodities allows for profits and the accumulation of ever greater profits.

Tilley decries the intrusion of Capitalism into Art:

There may well be aesthetic merit in Henson's work but that is not really the point. Rather have aesthetics become the means to get to the point: the point being that all should be stripped of substance, made into a commodity, and be freely sold and consumed.

Tilley keeps to the standard Catholic position of critising both Capitalism and Communism without proposing any alternative. Although at times, I suspect that some pine for the High Middle Ages.