Description
Book SynopsisArt History as Social Praxis: The Collected Writings of David Craven brings together more than thirty essays that chart the development of Craven s voice as an unorthodox Marxist who applied historical materialism to the study of modern art. This book demonstrates the range and versatility of David Craven's praxis as a 'democratic socialist' art historian who assessed the essential role the visual arts play in imagining more just and equitable societies.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements
List of Sources
Introduction: David Craven, Democratic Socialism and Art History
Artists
1 Mondrian De-Mythologised: Towards a Newer Virgil
2 Charles Biederman and Art Theory
3 Marcel Duchamp and the Perceptual Dimension of Conceptual Art
4 Robert Smithson’s ‘Liquidating Intellect’
5 Richard Serra and the Phenomenology of Perception
6 Hans Haacke and the Aesthetics of Dependency Theory
7 Norman Lewis as Political Activist and Post-Colonial Artist
8 René Magritte and the Spectre of Commodity Fetishism
Art Critics
9 Ruskin vs. Whistler: The Case against Capitalist Art
10 The Critique-Poésie of Thomas Hess
11 John Berger as Art Critic
12 Meyer Schapiro, Karl Korsch, and the Emergence of Critical Theory
13 Clement Greenberg and the ‘Triumph’ of Western Art
14 Aesthetics as Ethics in the Writings of Robert Motherwell and Meyer Schapiro
Critical Theory
15 Prerequisites for a New Criticism
16 Herbert Marcuse on Aesthetics
17 Corporate Capitalism and South Africa
18 Popular Culture versus Mass Culture
19 Hegemonic Art History
20 Art History and the Challenge of Post-Colonial Modernism
21 C.L.R. James as a Critical Theorist of Modernist Art
22 Present Indicative Politics and Future Perfect Positions: Barack Obama and Third Text
Latin America
23 Formative Art and Social Transformation: The Nicaraguan Revolution on Its Tenth Anniversary (1979–1989)
24 Cuban Art and the Democratisation of Culture
25 The Latin American Origins of Alternative Modernism
26 Post-Colonial Modernism in the Work of Diego Rivera and José Carlos Mariátegui
27 Realism Revisited and Re-Theorised in ‘Pan-American’ Terms
Abstract Expressionism
28 Abstract Expressionism, Automatism, and the Age of Automation
29 Abstract Expressionism and Third World Art: A Post-Colonial Approach to ‘American’ Art
30 New Documents: The Unpublished F.B.I. Files on Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb
31 A Legacy for the Left: Abstract Expressionism as Anti-Imperialist Art
32 Postscript. Different Conceptions of Art: An Outline
Bibliography
Index
