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Herbert Marcuse Quotes about Art

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The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.

Herbert Marcuse
Art, Real, Lying
Herbert Marcuse (1979). “The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics”, p.9, Beacon Press

Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.

Herbert Marcuse
Art, Men, World
Herbert Marcuse (1978). “The aesthetic dimension: toward a critique of Marxist aesthetics”, Beacon Pr

One will only be free when one plays and one's society will become a piece of art.

Herbert Marcuse
Art, Play, Pieces

Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.

Herbert Marcuse
Art, Reality, Law

[Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

Herbert Marcuse
Art, Order, Long
Herbert Marcuse (2013). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.65, Routledge

If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator -- the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value, counts.

Herbert Marcuse
Art, Philosophy, Communication
Herbert Marcuse (2012). “One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society”, p.57, Beacon Press

Inasmuch as art preserves, with the promise of happiness, the memory of the goal that failed, it can enter, as a 'regulative idea,' the desperate struggle for changing the world. Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions: the freedom and happiness of the individual.

Herbert Marcuse
Art, Memories, Struggle
Herbert Marcuse (1978). “The aesthetic dimension: toward a critique of Marxist aesthetics”, Beacon Pr

The truth of literature and art has always been granted (if it was granted at all) as one of a "higher" order, which should not and indeed did not disturb the order of business. What has changed in the contemporary period is the difference between the two orders and their truths. The absorbent power of society depletes the artistic dimension by assimilating its antagonistic contents. In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.

Herbert Marcuse
Art, Order, Two
"One-Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse, (pp. 60-61), 1964.

A work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation).

Herbert Marcuse
Art, Fate, Reality
Herbert Marcuse (2007). “Art and Liberation: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse”, p.62, Routledge

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