Arvatov was involved with the Institute of Artistic Culture (INKhUK) when it was founded in 1920 and was an active theorist and ideologist of the Proletkult.
Here he met fellow theorists Osip Brik, Boris Kushner and Nikolai Tarabukin with whom he developed the productivist approach to the role of the 'artist', which they wanted to be orientated towards a more industrial approach aimed at producing socially useful objects.
[1] In 1923, he was diagnosed with psychological disorders linked to his experiences at the front, and interned in a psychiatric clinic.
[2] Nevertheless, Arvatov continued to publish assiduously throughout the 1920s, including Art and Production in 1926, his best-known work.
An amended version translated into German as Kunst und Prodiktion was published in Munich in 1972.