9.5 Theses on Art and Class by Ben Davis

2015 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 179-196
Author(s):  
Kim Charnley
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Class Analysis ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Artistic Value ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
The Relationship

Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses on Art and Class argues from a Marxist perspective that art and politics should be understood as distinct fields. In a collection of essays on different aspects of contemporary art, Davis attacks the tendency towards ‘aesthetic politics’ and the prevalence of Frankfurt School and post-operaist Marxism in contemporary art. Davis affirms that an understanding of class allows the relationship between art and politics to be correctly gauged, and excessive claims for art to be moderated. While it contains some useful observations, his argument often misrepresents recent art theory and deploys militant populist arguments in support of a conservative notion of the art critic as arbiter of artistic value. Davis’s hostility to work that blurs the boundary between art and politics is part of this conservatism. His argument is contrasted to rigorous analyses of the relation between art and class that emerged from the Art & Language collective since the mid-1970s. The work of this collective demonstrates that a thorough class-analysis always tends to destabilise the field of art, rather than clarifying it.

scholarly journals What happened to aesthetics and art over the last 100 years?: Contradictions and antagonisms: Theory wars!

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-246
Author(s):  
Miško Šuvaković
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Minimal Art ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

The subject of my paper is the dynamic and transformational relations between aesthetics and art from 1919 to 2019. The first problem to be discussed will be the relationship between art and politics at the Bauhaus and art institutes of the Soviet avant-garde. Next, I will point to differences in Marxist concepts of socialist realism and critical theory on modern culture and art. I will analyse the relationship between the concept of the autonomy of art, especially painting and minimal art. A comparison will be derived between anti-art (Dada, NEO-Dada) and anti-philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Lacan). I will highlight approaches from analytical meta-aesthetics to the interpretation of Duchamp's readymade, deriving a theory of art in conceptual art. Special attention will be paid to the "theoretical conflicts" between phenomenology and structuralism, as well as poststructuralism. I will conclude my discussion by identifying the "aesthetic condition" in relation to "contemporary art" (feminist, activist, political, ecological, participatory, and appropriative art). The aim of my discussion will be to highlight the character of modern and contemporary aesthetics in relation to art theory, by way of diagrammatic reflection on the binaries, differences, and reconstructions of dialectics.

Alterity in Art: Towards a Theory and Practice of Infra-thin Critique

Paragraph ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 356-371 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobhán Shilton
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Aesthetics Of Resistance ◽  
Different Cultures ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores distinctively visual presentations and performances of alterity from the perspective of art theory and practice. It gives particular attention to Marcel Duchamp's notion and practice of the infra-mince. The ‘infra-thin’ is not usually related to postcolonial questions. However, numerous evocations of alterity in contemporary art, this article argues, resonate with Duchamp's infra-thin — not only in their practices but also in the ways in which they present the relationship between different cultures and views of ‘difference’. Focusing on artwork responding to the ‘Arab Springs’ as a striking instance of wider aesthetics of resistance, this article shows how such art can be seen to adapt the infra-thin for the purposes of a multidirectional critique.

Ökonomien der sozialen Medien – Bildpolitik und Gemeinschaftsbildung in den digitalen Netzwerken der Gegenwartskunst

2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 575-587
Author(s):  
Antje Krause-Wahl
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Digital Communities ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Internet Art ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Visual Cultures

Abstract Following debates on participation and the relationship between art and politics as a central question of contemporary art, this essay discusses networked communities in the visual cultures of ‘Post-Internet Art’. For DIS and Juliana Huxtable digital communities are both the topic of their installations and pictures and part of their artistic activities within the internet: the blog DIS Magazine and the tumblr blog Blue Lip Black Witch-Cunt. In comparing their artistic practice with network-like communication in magazines of the 1970s, the essay argues that it is not a central concern of post-internet art how network images may subvert the economy of images in the net. Rather this kind of art demonstrates the effects of networks, in which participation causes singularity instead of community.

Contemporary Art and the Problem of Music: Towards a Musical Contemporary Art

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
G. DOUGLAS BARRETT
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Conceptual Art ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Absolute Music ◽  
Art Form

Abstract This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.

Anarchist, Antisemit, Aufklärer? Vier Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Nietzsches Philosophie und Politik

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 296-311
Author(s):  
Paul Stephan
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Political Commitments ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract Four new publications provide an overview of the relationship between Nietzsche’s philosophical thought and his political commitments. Together they highlight the true complexity of Nietzsche’s politics, since some of his ideas can be adapted to anarchist and right-wing positions as much as, for instance, to Frankfurt School critical theory. At the same time, these contributions underscore the limitations of a strictly positivist, or philological approach, since any assessment of Nietzsche’s politics cannot be detached from the political faultlines of the present.

scholarly journals Homenagem: Remembering the Life and Work of Abdias Nascimento

2021 ◽  
pp. 002193472110115
Author(s):  
Keisha-Khan Y. Perry ◽  
Anani Dzidzienyo
Keyword(s):  
Military Service ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Central Component ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Black Politicians ◽  
Brown University ◽  
Black World ◽  
The Relationship

This essay provides a brief introduction to this special issue focused on the life and work of Black Brazilian scholar-activist Abdias Nascimento. The contributors include, Vera Lucia Benedito, Ollie Johnson, Zachary Morgan, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, and Cheryl Sterling who all participated in a 2015 conference at Africana Studies at Brown University. This group of scholars aptly illustrate that Nascimento had long contributed to the internationalization of Black Studies as a field in US academe and he was crucial in establishing Brazil as a central component of the Black World. The essays have much to teach us about Nascimento’s views on the relationship between art and politics, the role of military service in shaping his activism, the significance of black politicians in the reconceptualization of Brazilian democracy, and the importance of preserving archives and expanding our understanding of the Black radical tradition.

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara E. Scappini ◽  
David Boffa
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
History Of

The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times examines the history of Siena's famous public fountain, from its fifteenth-century origins to its eventual replacement by a copy in the nineteenth century (and the modern fate of both). The book explores how both the Risorgimento and the Symbolist movements have shaped our perceptions of the Italian Renaissance, as the Quattrocento was filtered through the lens of contemporary art and politics.

Tools of Conviviality: Art in the Postcolonial Imagination

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cameron McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Curriculum Reform ◽  
Third World ◽  
Frankfurt School ◽  
Specific Work ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Systems Of Domination ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
First World

Key arguments regarding the relationship between postcolonial art and aesthetics and the emancipatory imagination have implications for pedagogical and curriculum reform in the era of globalization. Postcolonial art, aesthetics, and postcolonial imagination are, and invoke paths through and exceeding, dominant traditions of thought in critical thinking on the status of art. These dominant critical traditions have led us to what Cameron McCarthy calls the “forked road” of cultural Marxism and neo-Marxism: the antipopulism of the Frankfurt School and Habermas and their contemporary affiliates versus the populism of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and those insisting on the nearly virtuous engagement of the First World working classes with contemporary consumer culture. These approaches have tended, McCarthy maintains, to generate critical apparati that silence the historically specific work of the colonized inhabitants of the Third World and the periphery of the First. In beckoning curriculum and pedagogical actors in a different direction, toward postcolonial art and aesthetics, McCarthy argues that the work of the postcolonial imagination dynamically engages with systems of domination, authority over knowledge, and representation, destabilizing received traditions of identity, association, and feeling, and offering, in turn, new starting points for affiliation and community that draw on the wellspring of humanity, indigenous and commodified. Key motifs of postcolonial art (literature, performance art, sculpture, and painting) illuminate organizing categories or new aesthetic genres: counter-hegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and utopic and emancipatory visions. These ethically informed dimensions of postcolonial art and aesthetics constitute critical starting points, or tools of conviviality, for a conversation over curriculum change in the tumult of globalization and the reassertion in some quarters of a feral nationalism.

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