Art History and Class Struggle

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Abstract
The first definition of style predominates among those who conceive art history as the history of form or of works of art, and sometimes even among those who take a psychological approach to art. The characteristics of a style do not in fact consist of a repertory of ornamental components which in any case cannot be confined to any one period of art: many of them appear over and over again down the ages. An alteration of the 'artistic will', that is to say in style, corresponds to a transformation of the 'ideals' of the social group which sustains that particular style. The substitution of the concept of visual ideology for that of style would seem to deprive everyday language of the notion of aesthetic value as automatically attributed to style, and in so doing to discard what is generally considered to be the essence of art, its aesthetic element.

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