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9.5 Theses on Art and Class
In 9.5 Theses on Art and Class and Other Writings Ben Davis takes on a broad array of contemporary art’s most persistent debates: How does creative labor fit into the economy? Is art merging with fashion and entertainment? What can we expect from political art? Davis argues that returning class to the center of discussion can play a vital role in tackling the challenges that visual art faces today, including the biggest challenge of all—how to maintain faith in art itself in a dysfunctional world.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
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About the author
Ben Davis
3 books17 followersThere is more than one author with this name
Ben Davis is an art critic living in New York City. His writings have appeared in Adbusters, the Brooklyn Rail, Slate, the Village Voice, and many other publications. He is currently executive editor of Artinfo.com.
Ben Davis is an art critic living in New York City. His writings have appeared in Adbusters, the Brooklyn Rail, Slate, the Village Voice, and many other publications. He is currently executive editor of Artinfo.com.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
February 18, 2017
like most marxists ben is like slightly allergic to talking about race And Class BUT also given that i am pretty theory-light i also feel like I can't say anything intelligent about whether his use of trotsky or engels or gramsci are coherent? At first I read this really slowly (see Start Date) because I was like I don't UNDERSTAND what is meant by the Middle Class Nature of Art ?!?!? But then I was on a plane for six hours so I couldn't not ya know
it seems most of these essays are post-2008 and he's particularly fixated on post-occupy inequality (ie class inequality as envisioned by occupy wall street), particularly what that inequality means for how we should Look At & Think About Art. e.g., does the museum really need a new wing or is that just Rich Trustee's dream to have her name on a building, and what does that mean for how contemporary art gets displayed to The Public? Is making art for art's sake Political Enough or is that just an excuse to not Occupy Goldman Sachs? (ben: probably the second one) how can you See Through BS Political Statements in half-hearted/provocative-for-provocative's-sake """Political Art""" ???? (similar critiques have been written e.g. about Kenneth Goldsmith re: Michael Brown, or see this: http://www.artnews.com/2016/07/11/bla...)
i enjoyed the following essays the most: (1) hipster aesthetics (2) art + inequality (3) how political are aesthetic politics? (4) in defense of concepts and (5) collective delusions. As it turns out, 9.5 theses doesn't refer to the number of essays in the book (there are 16) but instead refers to a manifesto-ish pamphlet (the text of which is included in the book) that is honestly like 90-93 theses, but he cheats by going "1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4" and so on.
some of davis's favorite words: cachet, righteous, Jeff Koons
things to google: boots as admission to see Guernica, Tropicalia & Oiticica & the problem of viewer interactivity, AsylumNYC & White Box Space, Bilbao effect, Dennis Dutton, French Situationists, Stimson and Sholette, Fourth Internationalist/Ernest Mandel, Waiting for Hockney, Ai Wei Wei Remembering (2009)
it seems most of these essays are post-2008 and he's particularly fixated on post-occupy inequality (ie class inequality as envisioned by occupy wall street), particularly what that inequality means for how we should Look At & Think About Art. e.g., does the museum really need a new wing or is that just Rich Trustee's dream to have her name on a building, and what does that mean for how contemporary art gets displayed to The Public? Is making art for art's sake Political Enough or is that just an excuse to not Occupy Goldman Sachs? (ben: probably the second one) how can you See Through BS Political Statements in half-hearted/provocative-for-provocative's-sake """Political Art""" ???? (similar critiques have been written e.g. about Kenneth Goldsmith re: Michael Brown, or see this: http://www.artnews.com/2016/07/11/bla...)
i enjoyed the following essays the most: (1) hipster aesthetics (2) art + inequality (3) how political are aesthetic politics? (4) in defense of concepts and (5) collective delusions. As it turns out, 9.5 theses doesn't refer to the number of essays in the book (there are 16) but instead refers to a manifesto-ish pamphlet (the text of which is included in the book) that is honestly like 90-93 theses, but he cheats by going "1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4" and so on.
some of davis's favorite words: cachet, righteous, Jeff Koons
things to google: boots as admission to see Guernica, Tropicalia & Oiticica & the problem of viewer interactivity, AsylumNYC & White Box Space, Bilbao effect, Dennis Dutton, French Situationists, Stimson and Sholette, Fourth Internationalist/Ernest Mandel, Waiting for Hockney, Ai Wei Wei Remembering (2009)
January 18, 2019
Great collection of essays around the diverse ways in which art and the broader socio-economic realm interact. The first chapter is very clarifying on the notions of the social class of "fine-art" artists. Other essays were more incidental, on themes which maybe the non-American audience finds a bit lame (e.g., Occupy Wall Street). It has a nice Marxist approach, without any extremist or outdated feel to it.
May 22, 2019
This is truly the first text on art criticism I've read, and it is an excellent place for anyone to begin. As art has moved from the center of cultural media to what often amounts to mostly a market for the superrich over the last century and a half, so too has the unspoken issue of social class been inscribed in its operations. Ben Davis tackles how these forces have coalesced with clarity and concision; considering the excessive theory or obtuse rhetoric or most art writers use to make their points, it is a relief to find little that felt intellectually inaccessible. I really enjoyed when Davis connected class, politics, culture and economic shifts to other aesthetic matters, as in his excellent Hipster Aesthetics essay.
Davis is able to so clearly paint a picture - however bleak - of how economic shifts have done more to change our relationship to art and culture than most any other phenomenon of the last century in a way that feels both novel and inarguable. I particularly enjoyed, in no particular order, (6) Art and Inequality, (10) Hipster Aesthetics, (12) Crisis and Criticism, (9) White Walls, Glass Ceiling and (4) Collective Delusions. Read them all, though; there's not one you can afford to miss.
Davis is able to so clearly paint a picture - however bleak - of how economic shifts have done more to change our relationship to art and culture than most any other phenomenon of the last century in a way that feels both novel and inarguable. I particularly enjoyed, in no particular order, (6) Art and Inequality, (10) Hipster Aesthetics, (12) Crisis and Criticism, (9) White Walls, Glass Ceiling and (4) Collective Delusions. Read them all, though; there's not one you can afford to miss.
February 21, 2021
Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses on Art and Class reads like a breath of fresh air in its clarity and conviction. The constant acceleration of crises has soured me to the grandiloquent claims of art discourse, including my own. Over the years, I’ve watched many of my students balance on a knife’s edge between the lure of art’s secular theology and a knee-jerk anti-intellectualism. I would recommend many of these essays for students seeking to benefit from a writer who is simultaneously rigorous while also skeptical of writing that makes self-satisfied claims for the art profession. The opening two chapters on art and class could stimulate productive debate with students as they struggle through their own encounters with the contradictions in the art world. The essay, “Art and Inequality” detailing the contemporary art world’s position within neoliberal capital accumulation and wealth inequality should be required reading in art schools.
Davis’s essays remind us that art signifies two different meanings. In its general sense, “art” signifies a general disposition to creativity that permeates all forms of labor and human activity. Then there is “Art” in the sense of a “professional classification” (177). At times, these terms are collapsed or the one becomes an alibi for the other in the service of ideological or even moral ends. For example, art professionals and their patrons rebuff the critical observation on the role of “Art” in urban gentrification as an attack on “art” as a human necessity.
Throughout the book’s sixteen essays, Davis develops the thesis that artists occupy a middle-class position in relation to capitalism. Creative labor for independent artists (versus workers in any of the creative industries) is defined by its individualism and self-determination. This observation allows Davis to unpack the contradictions at work in the claims of artists and the judgments made by art critics. In the world of universal proletarianization of workers and the subjection of workers to ruthless precarity, Davis argues, notions of “personal fulfillment and professional ambition” seem achievable for few except through artistic labor. Davis writes, “Our globalized capitalist world is dominated by corporate colossi, a reality that gives middle-class autonomy a glow of rarity and preciousness” (177). This helps to explain why when art professionals dig into the material firmament of the middle-class life through private property ownership and landlordism, they encounter the class conflict inherent in that social position.
For Davis, if classes exist in relation to capital, then the control over one’s own labor defines the very meaning of the middle-class, situated midway between the laborer who has no such control and the capitalist who controls the labor of others. Of course, the image of the middle-class artist serves a useful purpose for bourgeois interests that naturalize and valorize this material autonomy, even though, in fact, it describes the economic prospects of very few artists. In fact, as Davis notes, the few artists who achieve material autonomy due so by incorporating themselves with a small army of studio assistants who have no control over their labor. Tat reality raises some questions about the extent to which the artist as middle-class is more an ideological construct, perhaps even an imaginary self-image, versus a material reality. Nonetheless, Davis’s analysis is especially useful given that class is all too often reduced to an essential identity or simply a marker of personal wealth or education, thus mystifying the material and historical basis of class.
In another intervention that unfolds through-out the book, Davis delineates the function of art criticism that asks us to situate artworks within its historical conditions. This is different than historicization or even different from sociology. Over and again Davis unpacks the specific aspects of the rising patron class with the specific developments of neoliberalism. Albeit written in years immediately after the 2008 crash, Davis is describing a dynamic between financial capital and culture that will only increase in subsequent crises.
Through-out the essays, I found it refreshing to see an art writer forthrightly name their political framework and its translation into critical method. Art writers all too often invoke the political with no clarification of the term outside the dominant liberal framework. Interrogating the dialectic between art and class allows Davis to wield specificity when analyzing the terms. The forthrightness of the author’s politics allows the reader to refine their own critical relationship to the political framework that Davis asserts. For example, it’s fair to ask: What is Trotskyism as a political strategy and as a set of tactics? Here Davis advances two claims, largely as implicit responses to that question. Citing Trotsky, Davis asserts the importance of a non-instrumentalized approach to art. The critic most refrain from reducing artistic judgment to a correct political content or correct aesthetic tactics. Rather, the Trotskyist art critic prizes artistic autonomy while analyzing the work’s material and historical conditions. Davis repeatedly insists that the problems of those material and historical conditions can only be resolved politically and not within art. For that reason, Davis reminds the reader of the need to participate in protest campaigns and activism.
If we were to synthesize these positions, alongside the notion of visual art as inherently middle-class, we arrive at something of a specific praxis. If the art profession grants middle-class autonomy, then aren’t we talking about the same middle-class that began providin fresh recruits for the rightwing populism through the rise of the Tea Party during the Obama era? This tendency does not exist in the abstract but sits within the larger crises of capitalism and the rise of rightwing reaction to explain the crises of stagnation and historic wealth inequality. And what of the conservatism amongst art professionals? When Davis argues that an engagement with context and political conflict makes for better art (in the professional sense), then we can already hear a creeping conservatism at work. For working-class artists attending American art schools, professionalization entails (1) aspiring to a middle-class position that leaves one’s working-class family and community behind and (2) exploiting one’s own lived experience in poor and working-class communities as the content of art for middle-class audiences. Isn’t this the very definition of alienation, an alienation that is not only normalized in arts institutions but enforced in the assessment of competency in art discourses and values. Is middle-class autonomy really the master signifier of “personal fulfillment and professional ambition” for the artist?
Davis further elaborates the problem when he defines political practice as delineated within protest campaigns, symbolic occupations, and in a loyal opposition to the bourgeois state. There’s no awareness of an entirely different constellation of pedagogical practices for organizing and mobilizing popular power—practices invented by artists that do more than grant the artist control over his or her own labor. The experiments of popular power in Crown Heights and the Corona neighborhood in Queens exist in different universes from SoHo and Chelsea.
We know from numerous radical traditions in the U.S. and around the world that poor and working-class activists define their own politics. Such politics do not have the liberty to alienate protest from mutual dependence. Such politics do not have the class standing to divorce aesthetic judgment from conflicts with private property and real estate speculation. As Luis Camnitzer argued, artists in the global south have long viewed abstract concepts and concrete situations as dialectically linked. In contrast with Global Conceptualisms, the norms Davis proposes seem parochial to the fixations of a small island of capital accumulation and monopolization.
In the introduction to his massive volume, Ethics of Liberation, Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel draws a distinction between the ethics of the European-American center versus that of the global periphery. Such ethics have historically found articulation in competing theological paradigms. For the cosmopolitan center, the primary ethical question fixes on what systematization of religious knowledge and ethics follows the challenge of enlightenment, science, global war, and the bomb. For the global periphery, Dussel argues, theology and ethics pursue a fundamentally different question; that is, what is the praxis of liberation from colonial and neocolonial subjugation? The contrast between these two questions has profound implication for inquiry not to mention worldviews.
I often recall Dussel’s intervention, particularly when the truth-claims of an American cultural critic, artist, or activist reveal the hegemonic assumptions of the cosmopolitan center—even coming from a Trotskyist intellectual embedded in the Empire City. Perhaps those assumptions say something about the American art critic in the Obama era. The last four years, and in particular amidst the COVID-19 catastrophe, statements about middle-class autonomy becomes harder to hold onto in the face of fascism’s death cult. Likewise, as witnessed during the recent election cycle, we might surmise that the same assumptions have provoked new bulwarks when the only alternative to rightwing authoritarianism is restoring neoliberal dominance. The poor of the global south and of our own barrios remind us that in the Manichean division between neofascism and neoliberalism, another politics must be possible. Throw them all out!
In response to comrade Davis, we might posit that an aesthetics other than middle-class autonomy is similarly possible and already underway.
Davis’s essays remind us that art signifies two different meanings. In its general sense, “art” signifies a general disposition to creativity that permeates all forms of labor and human activity. Then there is “Art” in the sense of a “professional classification” (177). At times, these terms are collapsed or the one becomes an alibi for the other in the service of ideological or even moral ends. For example, art professionals and their patrons rebuff the critical observation on the role of “Art” in urban gentrification as an attack on “art” as a human necessity.
Throughout the book’s sixteen essays, Davis develops the thesis that artists occupy a middle-class position in relation to capitalism. Creative labor for independent artists (versus workers in any of the creative industries) is defined by its individualism and self-determination. This observation allows Davis to unpack the contradictions at work in the claims of artists and the judgments made by art critics. In the world of universal proletarianization of workers and the subjection of workers to ruthless precarity, Davis argues, notions of “personal fulfillment and professional ambition” seem achievable for few except through artistic labor. Davis writes, “Our globalized capitalist world is dominated by corporate colossi, a reality that gives middle-class autonomy a glow of rarity and preciousness” (177). This helps to explain why when art professionals dig into the material firmament of the middle-class life through private property ownership and landlordism, they encounter the class conflict inherent in that social position.
For Davis, if classes exist in relation to capital, then the control over one’s own labor defines the very meaning of the middle-class, situated midway between the laborer who has no such control and the capitalist who controls the labor of others. Of course, the image of the middle-class artist serves a useful purpose for bourgeois interests that naturalize and valorize this material autonomy, even though, in fact, it describes the economic prospects of very few artists. In fact, as Davis notes, the few artists who achieve material autonomy due so by incorporating themselves with a small army of studio assistants who have no control over their labor. Tat reality raises some questions about the extent to which the artist as middle-class is more an ideological construct, perhaps even an imaginary self-image, versus a material reality. Nonetheless, Davis’s analysis is especially useful given that class is all too often reduced to an essential identity or simply a marker of personal wealth or education, thus mystifying the material and historical basis of class.
In another intervention that unfolds through-out the book, Davis delineates the function of art criticism that asks us to situate artworks within its historical conditions. This is different than historicization or even different from sociology. Over and again Davis unpacks the specific aspects of the rising patron class with the specific developments of neoliberalism. Albeit written in years immediately after the 2008 crash, Davis is describing a dynamic between financial capital and culture that will only increase in subsequent crises.
Through-out the essays, I found it refreshing to see an art writer forthrightly name their political framework and its translation into critical method. Art writers all too often invoke the political with no clarification of the term outside the dominant liberal framework. Interrogating the dialectic between art and class allows Davis to wield specificity when analyzing the terms. The forthrightness of the author’s politics allows the reader to refine their own critical relationship to the political framework that Davis asserts. For example, it’s fair to ask: What is Trotskyism as a political strategy and as a set of tactics? Here Davis advances two claims, largely as implicit responses to that question. Citing Trotsky, Davis asserts the importance of a non-instrumentalized approach to art. The critic most refrain from reducing artistic judgment to a correct political content or correct aesthetic tactics. Rather, the Trotskyist art critic prizes artistic autonomy while analyzing the work’s material and historical conditions. Davis repeatedly insists that the problems of those material and historical conditions can only be resolved politically and not within art. For that reason, Davis reminds the reader of the need to participate in protest campaigns and activism.
If we were to synthesize these positions, alongside the notion of visual art as inherently middle-class, we arrive at something of a specific praxis. If the art profession grants middle-class autonomy, then aren’t we talking about the same middle-class that began providin fresh recruits for the rightwing populism through the rise of the Tea Party during the Obama era? This tendency does not exist in the abstract but sits within the larger crises of capitalism and the rise of rightwing reaction to explain the crises of stagnation and historic wealth inequality. And what of the conservatism amongst art professionals? When Davis argues that an engagement with context and political conflict makes for better art (in the professional sense), then we can already hear a creeping conservatism at work. For working-class artists attending American art schools, professionalization entails (1) aspiring to a middle-class position that leaves one’s working-class family and community behind and (2) exploiting one’s own lived experience in poor and working-class communities as the content of art for middle-class audiences. Isn’t this the very definition of alienation, an alienation that is not only normalized in arts institutions but enforced in the assessment of competency in art discourses and values. Is middle-class autonomy really the master signifier of “personal fulfillment and professional ambition” for the artist?
Davis further elaborates the problem when he defines political practice as delineated within protest campaigns, symbolic occupations, and in a loyal opposition to the bourgeois state. There’s no awareness of an entirely different constellation of pedagogical practices for organizing and mobilizing popular power—practices invented by artists that do more than grant the artist control over his or her own labor. The experiments of popular power in Crown Heights and the Corona neighborhood in Queens exist in different universes from SoHo and Chelsea.
We know from numerous radical traditions in the U.S. and around the world that poor and working-class activists define their own politics. Such politics do not have the liberty to alienate protest from mutual dependence. Such politics do not have the class standing to divorce aesthetic judgment from conflicts with private property and real estate speculation. As Luis Camnitzer argued, artists in the global south have long viewed abstract concepts and concrete situations as dialectically linked. In contrast with Global Conceptualisms, the norms Davis proposes seem parochial to the fixations of a small island of capital accumulation and monopolization.
In the introduction to his massive volume, Ethics of Liberation, Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel draws a distinction between the ethics of the European-American center versus that of the global periphery. Such ethics have historically found articulation in competing theological paradigms. For the cosmopolitan center, the primary ethical question fixes on what systematization of religious knowledge and ethics follows the challenge of enlightenment, science, global war, and the bomb. For the global periphery, Dussel argues, theology and ethics pursue a fundamentally different question; that is, what is the praxis of liberation from colonial and neocolonial subjugation? The contrast between these two questions has profound implication for inquiry not to mention worldviews.
I often recall Dussel’s intervention, particularly when the truth-claims of an American cultural critic, artist, or activist reveal the hegemonic assumptions of the cosmopolitan center—even coming from a Trotskyist intellectual embedded in the Empire City. Perhaps those assumptions say something about the American art critic in the Obama era. The last four years, and in particular amidst the COVID-19 catastrophe, statements about middle-class autonomy becomes harder to hold onto in the face of fascism’s death cult. Likewise, as witnessed during the recent election cycle, we might surmise that the same assumptions have provoked new bulwarks when the only alternative to rightwing authoritarianism is restoring neoliberal dominance. The poor of the global south and of our own barrios remind us that in the Manichean division between neofascism and neoliberalism, another politics must be possible. Throw them all out!
In response to comrade Davis, we might posit that an aesthetics other than middle-class autonomy is similarly possible and already underway.
December 23, 2019
the first time i read anything by ben davis was at the end of 2017 when i read a year-end piece he did on major trends in art over the past year. at this point i honestly cannot remember anything about it besides that for some reason i loved it so much that i had to look up the writer and read whatever else he had written. i found this book online but more or less forgot about it until i saw it at the bampfa bookstore the following summer. i bought it, of course, and started reading it but didn’t make much progress at the time.
i picked it up again late this year because i’m trying to finish every book i currently own before buying new ones (i already know that this is not going to work out) and also because i recently decided to start riding the bus every day and decided that i should read something that makes me look cool and smart so that either someone hot is impressed by me or everyone thinks i’m gross and leaves me alone.
i really, really enjoyed this book. davis’ writing helped me gain a really solid grasp on concepts that i’d previously thought of as simple, but that i myself would never have been able to coherently explain. it was also really refreshing to read something that engages with art as a product of labor that’s subject to the same realities of economics and exploitation as any other endeavor. does this make sense? i dont know im not that smart. above all i really liked it because it felt like davis has a deep and very earnest love for both art, of course, and of art criticism and that he really wants to push it to be as genuinely well-thought and convincing as it can be. it made me want to be a better, more critical writer which is obviously very silly because i am nowhere near the level of anyone davis talks about. but i can dream ok.
the book is from 2013 so it’s a little dated (it talks a lot about occupy wall street, for example, and the arab spring protests which had just happened at the time but feel very faraway now), and i would love to read a book of essays by davis on what’s changed between then and now. i also would love to read expanded versions of some of these essays.
overall a great book. i would recommend it to anyone who i thought was equally dumb to me or dumber but probably not someone smarter (most people) because i would be scared they would tell me all the reasons they think it’s bad and think less of me for it.
i picked it up again late this year because i’m trying to finish every book i currently own before buying new ones (i already know that this is not going to work out) and also because i recently decided to start riding the bus every day and decided that i should read something that makes me look cool and smart so that either someone hot is impressed by me or everyone thinks i’m gross and leaves me alone.
i really, really enjoyed this book. davis’ writing helped me gain a really solid grasp on concepts that i’d previously thought of as simple, but that i myself would never have been able to coherently explain. it was also really refreshing to read something that engages with art as a product of labor that’s subject to the same realities of economics and exploitation as any other endeavor. does this make sense? i dont know im not that smart. above all i really liked it because it felt like davis has a deep and very earnest love for both art, of course, and of art criticism and that he really wants to push it to be as genuinely well-thought and convincing as it can be. it made me want to be a better, more critical writer which is obviously very silly because i am nowhere near the level of anyone davis talks about. but i can dream ok.
the book is from 2013 so it’s a little dated (it talks a lot about occupy wall street, for example, and the arab spring protests which had just happened at the time but feel very faraway now), and i would love to read a book of essays by davis on what’s changed between then and now. i also would love to read expanded versions of some of these essays.
overall a great book. i would recommend it to anyone who i thought was equally dumb to me or dumber but probably not someone smarter (most people) because i would be scared they would tell me all the reasons they think it’s bad and think less of me for it.
July 21, 2014
Give me a lever, said Archimedes, and a place to stand, and I will move the world. More or less.
Point is, one can only approach a question from some position or another. The more clearly you understand that position, the more focused is your approach.
Davis's position is laser-engraved. He commands it from strength and secure knowledge. His commentary is accordingly sharp and meaningful. At points, it begs for us to demand meaning from matters we take as trivial.
I do not share his position, but I treasure what he has used it to do.
Point is, one can only approach a question from some position or another. The more clearly you understand that position, the more focused is your approach.
Davis's position is laser-engraved. He commands it from strength and secure knowledge. His commentary is accordingly sharp and meaningful. At points, it begs for us to demand meaning from matters we take as trivial.
I do not share his position, but I treasure what he has used it to do.
September 21, 2018
A Marxist take... I thought this book had some good nuggets, and its ability to cover a broad range of topics including identity, economics, aesthetics was impressive to a point. But the book felt like it ultimately lacked a main thesis. Futher, Ben's actual insights in the art he discusses seem to be thin.
August 17, 2019
A surprisingly good read and one of the clearest descriptions of artist's place in the economic system - also applies to the nonprofit industrial complex. Really appreciate the thinking about all of our creative potential and how constrained we are by the system we are in. Will be thinking about this book for a bit. (Ill overlook his somewhat dismissive tone towards anarchists at times.)
February 18, 2014
This is the best thing I've read on art in forever.
June 3, 2020
Initially, I thought this book was exactly what I was looking for. The first two essays and their analysis of the labor of art felt truly powerful and applicable to the work I want to be doing.
Unfortunately, many of the other essays fell short of my expectations, falling into traps of circular ambiguity, with a lot of summarizing the points of other scholars and fewer concrete new ideas. Davis is strongly grounded in his Marxist critique, which I appreciate, but more and more in the last week I have been seeing the limits of this viewpoint as Davis fails to be intersectional in any way. His handling of gender in particular feels like mansplaining 101—his entire essay on gender seems to be a rehashing of Nochlin's 50-year-old arguments.
I saw a lot of merit in Davis's dichotomy of "working-class" vs "middle-class" art labor, particularly as it might relate to dichotomies of "individual" vs "collective" that arise in discussions of genius, canon formation and the star system. However, I was deeply disappointed that Davis only examined the "middle-class" dynamic at play.
I will surely go back to reread select essays from this collection, but my initial expectations were not sustained.
Unfortunately, many of the other essays fell short of my expectations, falling into traps of circular ambiguity, with a lot of summarizing the points of other scholars and fewer concrete new ideas. Davis is strongly grounded in his Marxist critique, which I appreciate, but more and more in the last week I have been seeing the limits of this viewpoint as Davis fails to be intersectional in any way. His handling of gender in particular feels like mansplaining 101—his entire essay on gender seems to be a rehashing of Nochlin's 50-year-old arguments.
I saw a lot of merit in Davis's dichotomy of "working-class" vs "middle-class" art labor, particularly as it might relate to dichotomies of "individual" vs "collective" that arise in discussions of genius, canon formation and the star system. However, I was deeply disappointed that Davis only examined the "middle-class" dynamic at play.
I will surely go back to reread select essays from this collection, but my initial expectations were not sustained.
April 1, 2020
Great book. The first time I’ve read a theory book and felt like I’ve actually learned something. Ben Davis has this ability to cut through a lot of BS and actually say something meaningful about issues surrounding art and politics.
May 20, 2020
Articulated many of the issues and contradictions with art, taste, class, politically engaged art vs activism as methods.. just wish it was current so political references factored in events of last few years
December 27, 2021
This really dug deep into the history of how the art market functioned and how we consumed art. Davis talked about how artists exist under capitalism, how we create art under a financial tier system, exclusivity, and a lot of other things relevant to artists. I liked it a lot lol
January 17, 2022
Fun academic read that expounded the details of what's wrong with the modern art world. It's a bit dense but overall enjoyed the writing and found it interesting to think about this space I don't normally think about.
February 4, 2022
I get it - this book is about contemporary art. However, I felt that its insights suffered from a profound lack of historical perspective. It would be relevant to its theses to explore how the dynamics of art and class changed over time and across different cultures.
August 29, 2023
i really liked the conclusion, i felt like it laid out davis’s views in a very clear and conerent way. but i definitely struggled to get through this, it’s very dense and i felt like i did not have enough knowledge of studio art to fully grasp it.
July 2, 2018
An essential book about art, class, privilege and power.
August 7, 2018
So good! My new favorite book of art criticism.
April 23, 2019
Simply: if you are an artist, read this.
June 13, 2020
First couple of chapters and a few proceeding were some of the best art theory I’ve ever read; however, a few of the chapters weren’t as interesting. Overall, though, a great read.
February 20, 2025
It is a good read for the ones who like to read on the theory of art. It gives you a lot of insights into the real world of art. What does it mean to be a working or middle-class citizen who has to transform its passion into an economical character and a lot on the survival of the art in a capitalist world. You can give it a try. It is a short and easy read.
May 11, 2016
I cannot say enough about this book. In fact it has inspired me to produce a piece of art work based on the themes raised by the book. My coppy is FULL of notes, scribblings, dissent, and general interaction with the text. Ben Davis is that rare kind of art critic - one who is more fond of - in fact loves - ideas rather than being right. He sticks his neck right out there where others would pussyfoot around making statements that fail to clarify anything. This is without doubt THE best book I have read on contemporary art and one that everbody involved as an artist or art school student should definetly read. Combine it with Professor David Harvey's lectures at LSE and Harvard and you have the tools to change the world to a better place..... if only.
November 23, 2014
Thoroughly enjoyed this exploration of the relationship between art and political activism, which in this analysis is fraught with contradiction because of the class position of art and those who produce it. Ben Davis is an art critic and an activist, approaching this critique of art, art markets, art criticism, and their relationship to the present historical stage of capitalism, from an unabashedly Marxist framework. The book takes its title from a pamphlet he appended to the door of an art gallery, and includes several other essays on a range of related topics.
July 18, 2025
Just one of those books that lifts the scales from your eyes. Each of these essays is an absolute gem. Davis offers a patient and rigorous materialist framework to resolve all sorts of problems and contradictions of art and society. There is such a beautiful confidence and consistency to his approach, and reading him provides such clarity of insight that I wanted to thank him for just for putting these thoughts to paper. This book made me smarter. It helped me better understand myself as an artist in the world, and it allowed me to imagine the better society that we will build.
August 31, 2015
This is a terrific book for engaging crucial questions about art & activism in the post-Occupy era. I emphasize *engaging,* because a lot of Davis's own answers (as well as some of the ways he poses those questions in the first place) are not especially satisfying. But the book is an excellent starting point for a conversation that needs to be pursued.
March 14, 2014
Worth it for the chapters on audiences and Hipster Aesthetics.
December 27, 2014
Great essays. Will read again and again.
March 21, 2015
CANNOT RECOMMEND ENOUGH.
August 19, 2015
Ben Davis makes very useful and timely arguments within the scope of what he is willing to address. His view is somewhat limited by racial and regional insularity.
March 15, 2017
Forget Sarah Thornton, this is one of the most lucid and illuminating books on the place of contemporary art in society you'll find.
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