This is a friendly reminder that we’ll be getting together to talk about the new book 9.5 Theses on Art and Class by Ben Davis. I hope all of you have a copy of the book by now. It’s a quick read but took sometime to arrive in the mail.
Elizabeth, Miranda and I are excited to welcome you in our home on Saturday, October 12th at 2 pm. If you’d like to bring something, then I recommend bringing what it is that you like to drink.
Here is a link to what I found to be an excellent review of this book. The comments, as online comments often go, mostly lack insight. I thought this might be helpful as a starting point once we are all together.
Let me know if there are any questions and I’ll really looking forward to this!
Thank you for joining us,
Eric
Here’s a few follow-up ¢ from me:
Possible reading? :The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, Grant Kester
“…The One and the Many is concerned with works that are not strictly political or artistic, but rather function within the constraints of a given site to effect social change through creative collaboration. For Kester, these projects resist neo-liberal capitalism and promote the ethical and creative values of the left, despite their pragmatism.” http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-91/cole
This might be an interesting way to expand our discussion of Dinh Q. Lê’s work and as well as go further with issues of artistic labor production, activism, social justice, and artworks/commodities. The “global context” for me is also interesting given the geographic breadth we have as a group…. We perhaps don’t need to read the whole book and I’m happy to scan and share chapters from my copy if we choose to look at it. You can see some images of the work by Dialogue, a collaborative working in Kopaweda, India (described by Kester) here: http://www.ipublicart.org/IAPA/en/al_10.html
The entrepreneurs of East New York cashing in on the Banksy piece that showed up in their neighborhood: http://gawker.com/these-men-are-now-charging-people-to-look-at-banksys-l-1443562694
The article I mentioned about the slippery term “middle-class”: Why Americans All Believe They Are ‘Middle Class’: A taxonomy of how we talk about class and wealth in the United States today
“… among the most common words…co-occurring with “middle class” we find “emerging,” “burgeoning,” “burdened,” and “squeezed.” These tell us what happens to this grouping. Absent are quantitative terms or descriptors for what life is like within this category. In fact, in common usage, we rarely hear about actual people named within it; middle class may as well describe a grouping of potted plants or pop cans. There’s little here tied to income or lifestyle.”
Herb & Dorothy, trailer: http://youtu.be/vma2T5luy08
Herb & Dorothy 50×50, site: http://herbanddorothy.com/