9.5 Theses on Art and Class by Ben Davis

Abstract

Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses on Art and Class argues from a Marxist perspective that art and politics should be understood as distinct fields. In a collection of essays on different aspects of contemporary art, Davis attacks the tendency towards ‘aesthetic politics’ and the prevalence of Frankfurt School and post-operaist Marxism in contemporary art. Davis affirms that an understanding of class allows the relationship between art and politics to be correctly gauged, and excessive claims for art to be moderated. While it contains some useful observations, his argument often misrepresents recent art theory and deploys militant populist arguments in support of a conservative notion of the art critic as arbiter of artistic value. Davis’s hostility to work that blurs the boundary between art and politics is part of this conservatism. His argument is contrasted to rigorous analyses of the relation between art and class that emerged from the Art & Language collective since the mid-1970s. The work of this collective demonstrates that a thorough class-analysis always tends to destabilise the field of art, rather than clarifying it.