ABSTRACT
The review L'Art Decoratif has recently published a touching book filled with a vague, impetuous enthusiasm and with affirmations that are daunted by nothing. It is entitled Economy and Aesthetics. Its author, M. Maignan, took the trouble of summing up its message in these words: "The social question will be solved by aesthetics." M. Maignan's main idea is that art has a social origin and therefore a social function, that by allying itself with science and a sort of vague mysticism, it can regenerate a people, and conversely, that it can flower with perfection only in a society reorganized along the socialist ideal. The artist can do nothing to regenerate society or to better the fate of the unfortunate, for he stands beside them and is like them; he is working on a task parallel and equivalent to theirs. He is just as oppressed, just as tightly enslaved, sometimes just as restricted as the most enslaved among them.
