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The Beauty of a Social Problem. Photography, Autonomy, Economy.
Walter Benn Michaels
€ 121.95
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Description for The Beauty of a Social Problem. Photography, Autonomy, Economy.
Hardback. Bertolt Brecht once worried that our sympathy for the victims of a social problem can make the problem's "beauty and attraction" invisible. The author explores the effort to overcome this difficulty through a study of several contemporary artist-photographers whose work speaks to questions of political economy. Num Pages: 240 pages, 8 colour plates, 28 halftones, 4 line drawings. BIC Classification: ABA; ACXJ; AJ. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 162 x 210 x 20. Weight in Grams: 424.
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' 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 portray the conditions that have taken US economic inequality from its lowest level, in 1968, to its highest level today. As Michaels demonstrates, these works of art, unimaginable without the postmodern critique of autonomy and intentionality, end up departing and dissenting from it in continually interesting and innovative ways.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2015
Publisher
The University of Chicago Press United States
Number of pages
240
Condition
New
Number of Pages
240
Place of Publication
, United States
ISBN
9780226210261
SKU
V9780226210261
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-1
About Walter Benn Michaels
Walter Benn Michaels is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Shape of the Signifier and The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality.
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