"What good are the arts? Why should we care about the past? For millennia, humanity has sought to understand and transmit to future generations not just the "know-how" of life, but the "know-why"--the meaning and purpose of our existence, as expressed in art, architecture, religion, and philosophy. This crucial passing down of knowledge has required the radical integration of insights from the past and from other cultures. In Culture, acclaimed author,...

The history of modern art is often told through aesthetic breakthroughs that sync well with profound cultural and political change. Monet's riotous landscapes, Picasso's fractured forms, Pollock's insolent splatters, Warhol's proliferating soup cans - these examples track with the disruptions of industrialization, fascism, revolution, and war, among other influences. But filtering modern art only through catastrophic events cannot account for the...

Artistic labour was exemplary for Utopian Socialist theories of 'attractive labour', and Marxist theories of 'nonalienated labour', but the rise of the anti-work movement and current theories of 'fully automated luxury communism' have seen art topple from its privileged place within the left's political imaginary as the artist has been reconceived as a prototype of the precarious 24/7 worker. Art and Postcapitalism argues that art remains essential...

To the question of what is art', it is often simply responded that art is whatever is produced by the artist. For John Molyneux, this clearly circular answer is deeply unsatisfying. In a tour de force spanning renaissance Italy and the Dutch Republic to contemporary leading figures, The Dialectics of Art instead approaches its subject matter as a distinct field of creative human labour that emerges alongside and in opposition to the alienation and...

"Pop culture is often maligned as fleeting, but history shows that sometimes what is pop in one culture has time-honored resonance in later ones. This book is an attempt to show that pop culture, especially as seen through the lenses of design, illustration, satiric and political art (and other things), is integral to a broader understanding of who we are and where we are going."-Steven Heller, from the Introduction. How do popular culture and graphic...

9. 5 Theses on Art and Class seeks to show how a clear understanding of class makes sense of what is at stake in a broad number of contemporary art's most persistent debates, from definitions of political art to the troubled status of "outsider" and street art to the question of how we maintain faith in art itself. Ben Davis currently lives and works in New York City where he is Executive Editor at Artinfo.

"Uncovering the legacy of Richard Bellamy, one of the most influential tastemakers of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art."--

"A bristling and brilliant memoir of the mid-twentieth-century New York School of painters and their times by the renowned artist and critic Edith Schloss"--

An inside look at the organizers and artists on the front lines of political mobilization and social change. An artist's mural of George Floyd becomes an emblem of a renewed movement for racial equality. A documentary film injects fuel into a popular mobilization to oust a Central American dictator. Freedom songs course through the American civil rights movement. When artists and organizers combine forces, new forms of political mobilization follow--which...

Futurism was Russia's first avant-garde movement. Gatecrashing the Russian public sphere in the early twentieth century, the movement called for the destruction of everything old, so that the past could not hinder the creation of a new, modern society. Over the next two decades, the protagonists of Russian Futurism pursued their goal of modernizing human experience through radical art. The success of this mission has long been the subject of scholarly...