Ben Davis was born in Seattle, Washington.
He currently lives and works in New York City
where he is Executive Editor at Blouin Artinfo.
New book out in July!
9.5 THESES ON ART AND CLASS
Publication date: July 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60846-268-1, Trade Paper, $16
Contact: Jim Plank, Publicity, Haymarket Books
773-583-7884, Jim@haymarketbooks.org
Cover image: William Powhida, Relational Wall, 2009, watercolor
Find it on Amazon.com
9.5 Theses on Art and Class seeks to show how a clear understanding of
class makes sense of what is at stake in a broad number of contemporary
art's most persistent debates--from definitions of political art to the
troubled status of "outsider" and street art and the question of how we
maintain faith in art itself.
"Among excellent younger critics now is Ben Davis."
--Peter Schjeldahl (art critic for the New Yorker), Frieze Magazine
"Ben Davis's 'On the Age of Semi-Post-Postmodernism' engaged directly
with the complexity of the present moment, refusing a flight into this or that
idea of 'the contemporary' while his '9.5 Theses on Art and Class' gave an
apparently unpublishable voice to an unarticulated, if widely held, sentiment
about the economic reality of the art market."
--Stephen Squibb, on the Best Art Writing of 2010, Artlog
"'Postmodernism,' my fellow art scribe Ben Davis wrote in paraphrase of
the cultural critic Fredric Jameson, 'is the cultural logic of neoliberalism.' No
truer sentence has been penned in the past decade; no more radical idea has been
elevated from beneath the collective proboscis."
--Christian Viveros-Faune, Village Voice
"His aptly named weekly column, 'Interventions,' comes out Wednesdays. It
tackles the big questions, blending theory-based eggheadedness with an
insistence on real-world events and concerns outside the presumed confines of
art. Davis is also a really fine writer."
--Jen Graves, the Stranger
"Final thought: class, as in social class, is the elephant in the art fair V.I.P.
rooms, in the art school studios and in Chelsea galleries. Please, can we
talk? Yes we can: Friday at 2 p.m. in the gallery, the estimable art critic
Ben Davis will present his '9.5 Theses on Art and Class.'"
--Holland Cotter, the New York Times,
touting the text that became the basis of this book