7 Ideology and art Ideology and art VIRVE SARAPIK and ANDREAS VENTSEL Introduction The term ‘ideology’ was irst introduced in the 18th century by the French politician and philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who used the word idéologie to signify the science of ideas. Although an academic discipline by that name never actually emerged, various disciplines did start delving into the meaning of the concept, in search of an answer to the question of what the thing called ideology actually was. The original use of the word envisioned ideology primarily as a science that stud- ied the formation of ideas in the human mind – a view that had a clear emancip- atory dimension – but this sense began to fade in the late 19th century, at which point ideology began to be associated with false consciousness or processes by which power relations were reproduced. The universality of ideology (inspired by Enlightenment thought, laws governing the study of ideology were seen to hold true universally for all ‘intelligent creatures’: in other words, people) thus regressed to a set of ideas held by a particular politically consolidated class or group and used to legitimise social power relations and hierarchies. In the writings of many 20th century authors, the normative dimension of the concept of ideology took a back seat, and it has started to be viewed in less evaluative terms – as a uniied code that shapes the creation of meaning or a world-view that makes social identiications possible – culminating in the 1960s in discussions of the end of ideology and an ideology-free society. 1 The relationship of art to the central categories of social life, such as power and ideology, has been multifaceted. The view of the autonomy of art has been under- mined by the imputation that art often serves certain political interests (ideologised art), and by the fact that art practices have been considered a way of subverting the hegemonic ideological discourse. In this light, we need to compare phenomena that 1 Cf. D. Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Glencoe: Free Press, 1960.