o que te os deuses dão, dão no começo

W. J. T. Mitchell. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. UCP (1986)

Perhaps a simpler way of saying all this is just to note that æsthetics is Marx's blind spot, the one major philosophical topic that remained relatively undeveloped in his writing, the one topic on which his opinions tend to be conventional and derivative. Lessing, Diderot, Goethe, and Hegel were his aesthetic mentors, and however much he might quarrel with their idealism in the sphere of political economy, his fragmentary opinions on the arts reflect basic agreement with the Enlightenment idealization of art. That is why æsthetics and the Marxist tradition have always confronted each other in a state of mutual embarrassment. Marxism is embarrassed because, if it follows the logic of Marx's economic thought, it seems inevitably to fall into a vulgar reduction of the arts to mere commodities, or to "mechanical reflections" in the camera obscure of ideology. If it follows the idealism of Marx's actual opinions about the arts, sustained by the humanism of his early writings, then "Marxist æsthetics" seems to become soft, neo-Hegelian, and un-Marxian.