Ben Davis is the national art critic for Artnet News and the author of Art in the After-Culture and 9.5 Theses on Art and Class.
Issues of inequality, class, and exploitation have come to the forefront within the art world in recent years. Marxist art critic Ben Davis believes that the politics of culture are changing as a result.
In the United States today, as in 1990s Russia, for a lot of intellectuals, total nihilism seems more plausible than hope for even modest reform.
The GI Bill is proof: if people have access to education and the means to live, they’ll create meaningful art.
The communist Charles White created images of dignity to portray America’s working class. Now, forty years after his death, his art is back in the mainstream.
We hear throughout mainstream culture that we are permanently doomed to a squalid future. Artists should insist otherwise.