Many a soul has perished at what the critic Lionel Trilling called the bloody crossroads where art and politics meet – Trilling spoke of literature and politics, but for our purposes we shall broaden the term. It is an irony of history that a great many, perhaps the majority, of those casualties occurred under revolutionary regimes to the left of the junction. Capitalism, outside times of crisis and convulsion, regards art either as a pretty plaything or a generator of exchange commodities, while for Marxism, art – real art, that is, not kitsch – is always potentially a tool of counter-revolution, and is treated as such.
The author of the essay collection Those Passions, TJ Clark, is one of the most intelligent, perceptive and, yes, passionate contemporary art critics. Born in Bristol in 1943, he is professor emeritus of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an avowed Marxist but an anti-Leninist. He seems to see no anomaly in this position, but it is something of a puzzle for those of us who do not share “those passions”, or do so in moderation. For surely a man of the left who cleaves to Marx but repudiates Lenin is putting himself in the position of a committed Christian who reveres Jesus but rejects St Paul and the Church he founded.
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