"Joseph Beuys", "Andy Warhol", "Yves Klein", and "Marcel Duchamp" form an unlikely quartet, but they each played a singular role in shaping a new avant-garde for the 1960s and beyond. Each of them staged brash, even shocking, events and produced works that challenged the way the mainstream art world operated and thought about itself. Distinguished philosopher Thierry de Duve binds these artists through another connection: the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy. Karl Marx provides the red thread tying together these four beautifully written essays in which de Duve treats each artist as a distinct, characteristic figure in that mapping. He sees in Beuys, who imagined a new economic system where creativity, not money, was the true capital, the incarnation of the last of the proletarians; he carries forward Warhol's desire to be a machine of mass production and draws the consequences for aesthetic theory; he calls Klein, who staked a claim on pictorial space as if it were a commodity, "the dead dealer"; and he reads "Duchamp" as the witty financier who holds the secret of artistic exchange value. Throughout, de Duve expresses his view that the mapping of the aesthetic field onto political economy is a phenomenon that should be seen as central to modernity in art. Even more, de Duve shows that Marx - though perhaps no longer the "Marxist" Marx of yore - can still help us resist the current disenchantment with modernity's many unmet promises. An intriguing look at these four influential artists, "Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx" is an absorbing investigation into the many intertwined relationships between the economic and artistic realms.

About the Author
Thierry de Duve is an art historian, critic, and curator. His publications in English include Kant after Duchamp and Clement Greenberg Between the Lines. Rosalind E. Krauss is University Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.

Reviews
"Thierry de Duve's is a crucial and utterly distinct voice in the field of modern art. Delightfully original and engaging, Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx combines the author's inimitably bold thinking with an unusual sensitivity to the ways that particular works articulate the convergence of aesthetics and economics. Its gorgeously constructed essays tell this art's stories so well, they often read like the best biographical fiction." (Darby English, University of Chicago)"



Book Information
ISBN 9780226922386
Author Thierry de Duve
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 170g
Dimensions(mm) 22mm * 14mm * 1mm