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Book Synopsis
Bertolt Brecht once worried that our sympathy for the victims of a social problem can make the problem's beauty and attraction invisible. In The Beauty of a Social Problem, Walter Benn Michaels explores the effort to overcome this difficulty through a study of several contemporary artist-photographers whose work speaks to questions of political economy. Although he discusses well-known figures like Walker Evans and Jeff Wall, Michaels's focus is on a group of younger artists, including Viktoria Binschtok, Phil Chang, Liz Deschenes, and Arthur Ou. All born after 1965, they have always lived in a world where, on the one hand, artistic ambition has been synonymous with the critique of autonomous form and intentional meaning, while, on the other, the struggle between capital and labor has essentially been won by capital. Contending that the aesthetic and political conditions are connected, Michaels argues that these artists' new commitment to form and meaning is a way for them to depict t

Beauty of a Social Problem Photography Autonomy

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    A Paperback by Walter Benn Michaels

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      Book details

      Publisher The University of Chicago Press
      Published 10 April 2016
      ISBN-13 9780226421186
      978-0226421186
      ISBN-10 022642118X
      Also in:
      Photography and photographs Theory of art

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      Bertolt Brecht once worried that our sympathy for the victims of a social problem can make the problem's beauty and attraction invisible. In The Beauty of a Social Problem, Walter Benn Michaels explores the effort to overcome this difficulty through a study of several contemporary artist-photographers whose work speaks to questions of political economy. Although he discusses well-known figures like Walker Evans and Jeff Wall, Michaels's focus is on a group of younger artists, including Viktoria Binschtok, Phil Chang, Liz Deschenes, and Arthur Ou. All born after 1965, they have always lived in a world where, on the one hand, artistic ambition has been synonymous with the critique of autonomous form and intentional meaning, while, on the other, the struggle between capital and labor has essentially been won by capital. Contending that the aesthetic and political conditions are connected, Michaels argues that these artists' new commitment to form and meaning is a way for them to depict t

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