Full Description
This companion is an essential contribution to the study of historical materialism in general and the social history of art in particular.
Each chapter in the collection focuses on a key figure, concept or historical epoch. Increasingly, scholars adopt an array of Marxist methods intertwined with a host of other theoretical practices, particularly the historiography of key issues regarding hegemony, ideology and identity. Ideological issues of connoisseurship, patronage and analyses of the artwork as a form of labor and leisure are essential to the practice of Marxisms in art history. This collection spotlights a plurality of Marxian theories in which the ideas of such figures as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord and T.J. Clark are debated and developed through analyses of the socio-historical conditions that impact how art is produced, circulated and received. This ultimately underscores that the historical contextualization of artworks and their "markets" within a class-based society is crucial for writing socially engaged art history.
This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, visual sociology, communication studies and the sociology of art.
Contents
Introduction PART 1 Key Figures 1. Karl Marx's 1857 "Introduction" to the Grundrisse and the Social History of Art 2. Arnold Hauser: The Social History of Art and Beyond 3. Ugly and Out of Sight: Reconsidering the Irrational in Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory 4. Meyer Schapiro and the Value of Modern Art 5. Georg Lukács: Marxism and Politics of Form 6. Henri Lefebvre and Marxist Art History 7. Herbert Marcuse's "Repressive Desublimation" and Richard Hamilton's "Healthy Vigo 8. Guy Debord and Marxist Art History 9. Different Marxist Histories of Art Post-1968: T.J. Clark and O.K. Werckmeister PART 2 Key Terms 10. Concepts of Labor in Marxist Art History 11. "Time's Carcass": Art History, Capitalism and Temporality 12. Artistic Use Value: Art, Aesthetics, Culture and the Commons 13. Deskilling 14. Romantic Anticapitalism 15. Marxism, Feminism and Art History 16. Do It Yourself: Objective Form, Territory of Critical Struggle PART 3 Marxisms Applied 17. Magritte, Marxism, Modern Art 18. "No Environment" Modernism: Harold Rosenberg's Theory of Uneven and Combined Development 19. Bureaucracy and Charisma: Chris Burden and the Figure of the University Artist 20. Equipo Comunicacion: Marxism, Avant-garde and a Collective Publishing Venture for Late Francoism to the Spanish Transition (1969-1979) 21. Affect, Attachment, and Loss: The Material Objects of Art History and Psychoanalysis 22. Of Rocks and Phantasmatic Hard Places: Art Criticism in the 1970s and 1980s 23. Soviet Thaw-era Marxism: Revision of Stalin-era Discourse on Aesthetics and Art History 24. Bogdanov, Prolekult, and Working-Class Culture in Revolutionary Russia 25. Realism and the Politics of Emancipation in the 1920s and 1930s Yugoslavia 26. How to Follow Marx with Class? Transformation and Marxist Analysis of Post-Communist Art in a Post-Communist Europe 27. Invisible Art Work, or Until When Will We Reproduce the Exploitation of Labor in the Arts? 28. Contemporary Art and the Neoliberal Global Art World: The People's Republic of China and Palestine as Exemplars 29.Museums After Value-Form Theory 30. The Vision and Practice of Zapatismo and the Zapatista Murals in Chiapas PART 4 Marxist Methods in the Digital Age 31. The Courbet Conundrum, and the Phantom Archive of Activist Art 32. Intermediality in Action: Tracing Invisible Processes in Socio-Critical Video Art 33. The Visual Culture of Gaming 34. Speculation
