Blog Post #4

          To understand the meaning of the word Marxism think of keywords like  “high school” and “hierarchy”. These words help paint an outline to Marxism. There are different schools of Marxism and Marxist thought is constantly changing with the times. In every social situation there is a hierarchy and when reading through the textbook about Marxism I discovered that it has its own special terms to describe each type of person in any group of social beings. To sum it up, there’s a leader (elitist), the individualist, the equal rights person, and the person that believes in luck and opts out of the political system. Celebrities, for example, are the elitist (the ruling class) of the social food chain. Their ideas are the ruling ideas of their years. They set the status quo, or ideology, and shape the ideas of the general public. That being said, the ruling class, to some degree, controls the media and the media influences the consumer society. The consumer society must be driven to consume by the media because their consumption is what maintains the economic system.

          As an art major I, of course, thought to apply this Marxism concept to the art world. This is what I came up with- artists like Jackson Pollock didn’t necessarily have the most aesthetically stunning artwork but he coined a specific style of art. In his time, this was a bold move that made him famous (which made him an elitist) and it shifted the ideology for art at that time. Change is part of Marxist thought and it is the elitists, like Pollock, who make these changes come about.