Marxism (or ‘the Left’), Art & Aesthetics: A Select Bibliography

Here is a link to my latest bibliography: Marxism (or ‘the Left’), Art & Aesthetics.  

“’Stupid people often accuse Marxists of welcoming the intrusion of politics into art,’ John Berger once wrote, with his customary pugilistic elegance. ‘On the contrary, we protest against the intrusion. The intrusion is most marked in times of crisis and great suffering. But it is pointless to deny such times. They must be understood so that they can be ended: art and men will then be freer.’ Presented in this way, art and artists don’t just have a moral interest in political struggle. Anyone who is interested in art has an interest in struggling for a more equal world because equality is a condition for creativity to realize its full potential in our lives. At this point, however, we begin to transcend the question of artists as a professional group. In fact, we begin to see that making the distinction between art in a narrow sense and art in its broad sense is already political, in that it forces us to interrogate the conditions that create this separation, which confines our aspirations for our creative selves to one particular niche career.”—Ben Davis, in his collection of superb essays, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2013): 181.