ABSTRACT
A work of art can become an element of the ideological, i.e. it can be inserted into the system of relations which constitute the ideological, which reflects in an imaginary relationship the relations that ‘men’ (i.e. the members of social classes, in our class societies) maintain with the structural relations which constitute their ‘conditions of existence’. Perhaps one might even suggest the following proposition, that as the specific function of the work of art is to make visible (donner à voir), by establishing a distance from it, the reality of the existing ideology (of any one of its forms), the work of art cannot fail to exercise a directly ideological effect, that it therefore maintains far closer relations with ideology than any other object, and that it is impossible to think the work of art, in its specifically aesthetic existence, without taking into account the privileged relation between it and ideology, i.e. its direct and inevitable ideological effect.
