ABSTRACT
The concept of ideology, derived from the notion of “false consciousness,” shows striking analogies with the concept of “rationalization” in psychoanalysis. The concept of ideology can be sensibly employed only in relation to a certain social group; to speak of the ideology of a historical epoch, without an attempt to differentiate classes or groups, is sociologically meaningless. The sociology of art history has still to be written; it could make a valuable contribution to the social history of art. Leaving questions of detail aside, it is obvious that each of the various cultural structures, such as religion, philosophy, science, and art, has its own proper “distance” from its social origin; they form a series with many steps, manifesting progressive “ideological saturation.” The problem of ideology, however, takes on a different form in the field of art from that in the sciences, the concept of truth in art being so strikingly different from that of theoretical truth.
