The Work (of Art): Putting Art at the Service of the Urban

This chapter continues to think through the fundamental question posed by Henri Lefebvre: “How can we make the transition from fragmentary knowledge to complete understanding?” (Lefebvre 2003a, 56). One way to answer this question is to see how alienation structures the way in which we divide the social world into so many isolated areas that communicate insufficiently with one another, if at all. Understanding how alienation plays out with regard to both artistic and critical experiences, specifically, is crucial if we are to realize a future reconciliation of capital with culture. My reading of Lefebvre’s work suggests that the formulation of an urban cultural studies method requires an aesthetic theory as its base—one that can account for the overlapping but distinct roles of the thing, the product, and the work of art. The French philosopher’s late text La présence et l’absence (1980) provides lengthy and nuanced meditations on the relationship of these terms, in the process building on his previous discussions of art and the urban. As such, it provides a way of thinking through the value of aesthetic questions while also remembering that, from a Lefebvrian-Marxian perspective, culture is not at all a realm separate from the various other areas of contemporary life (Lefebvre 2005, 16; Léger 2006, 143), even if it may appear as such an autonomous space due to ideology, alienation, and the structure of the modern university, which reinforces and aids in naturalizing this perspective.