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3 documents
Three Tendencies of Future Art
Ben Davis
As spatial segregation becomes almost complete in the twenty-first-century nation, the wealthy wall themselves off in hyper-policed gated zones. The lavish entertainment spectacles of Big Fun Art may provide more than enough on the entertainment level for both the tiny ruling class and its proximate servant class. But they do not fulfill the classical art object’s other remaining purpose: symbolizing, through its uniqueness, a ruling class’s unique status atop the social pyramid of society. The individual contemporary artist, therefore, lives on, but more in the mode of aesthetic lifestyle coaching and bespoke mythmaking.
e-flux Journal
Posted: March 7, 2018
Category
Contemporary Art, Technology
Subjects
Futures, Mass Media & Entertainment
Connoisseurship and Critique
Ben Davis
Why return to the history of connoisseurship, and why now? Its particular virtues—deep looking, an eye for subtle markers of historical merit, and an obsession with the “hand of the master”—seem rooted firmly in the past at a time when art is ever more obsessed with the present. An essay on “Marxism and Connoisseurship” today is likely to seem both ridiculous and dubious, like proposing a political recuperation of dressage. Yet I think that theorizing where we stand in relationship to the…
e-flux Journal
Posted: April 1, 2016
Category
Aesthetics, Marxism
Subjects
Art Criticism, Art Market
On Art and Investment
Ben Davis
e-flux Criticism
Posted: March 25, 2014
Category
Economy
Subjects
Money & Finance, Freeports, Art Market, Wealth & Inequality