9.5 Theses On Art And Class

Just when it seemed that contemporary art writing and the subject of real-life politics had permanently parted ways, along comes the young New York critic Ben Davis with a book that brings them together. No cheerleading here, no swoony prosody, no easy kiss-offs; just smart, ardent, illusion-puncturing observation and analysis on the intersection of art, commerce, and -- the elephant in the art fair V.I.P. lounge -- class. None of this would matter much if he didn't tell us why we should care, but he does. Under all his excoriations lies a faith in art as an agent of transformation toward a post-neoliberal, post-greed society that could be, should be. --Holland Cotter, art critic, New York Times <br> 9.5 Theses on Art and Class is the first book I've read by an art critic that spoke to the world I lived and worked in as an artist. Incisive, irreverent and intellectually fearless. A truth-bomb of a book. --Molly Crabapple <br> Bracing, provocative, exasperated and good humored, Davis is skillfully committed to getting the best out of art and art theory - and the world. --China Mieville <br> Among excellent younger critics now is Ben Davis. --Peter Schjeldahl (art critic for the New Yorker), Frieze Magazine <br> Ben Davis's 'On the Age of Semi-Post-Postmodernism' engaged directly with the complexity of the present moment, refusing a flight into this or that idea of the contemporary while his '9.5 Theses on Art and Class' gave an apparently un-publishable voice to an unarticulated, if widely held sentiment about the economic reality of the art market. --Stephen Squibb, on the Best Art Writing of 2010, Artlog <br> 'Postmodernism, ' my fellow art scribe Ben Davis wrote in paraphrase of the cultural critic Fredric Jameson, 'is the cultural logic of neoliberalism.' No truer sentence has been penned in the past decade; no more radical idea has been elevated from beneath the collective proboscis. --Christian Viveros-Faune, Village Voice <br>g