Modernity and complicity: A dialogue

Abstract

'Art is not among the ideologies.' That famous pronouncement by Marx, which declares the aesthetic realm free of false consciousness, has funded most forms of 'radical criticality', so called, down to this day. But is that proverb of the left a persuasive idea, or even a genuinely critical idea? That is the central question addressed by Drucker and McGann in this wide-ranging conversation about the art and literature of the past 150 years, the period that saw the emergence of Baudelaire's painters and poets of modern life.