Thierry de Duve. Sewn in the Sweatshops of Marx: Beuys, Warhol, Klein, Duchamp

  • Year2016
  • LanguageRussian
  • Edition3000
  • Pages112
  • BindingPaperback
Garage publishing program in collaboration with Ad Marginem Press

The political economy of Marx as applied to 20th century art.

This book focuses on the intersection of aesthetics and political economy—a phenomenon that de Duve believes to be definitive of modern art. Picking out four artists (Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, and Marcel Duchamp), de Duve maps their aesthetic views onto Marx’s political economy. In Beuys, who imagined a new economic system where creativity, not money, was the true capital, he sees “the last proletarian.” Warhol is the perfect machine of mass production of art; Klein is “the dead dealer” of the non-material; and Duchamp is a financier who holds the secret of artistic exchange value.  

Author

Thierry de Duve (b.1944) is a Belgian professor of modern and contemporary art theory, an art critic, and a curator. He studied at the University of Leuven and has taught at the Sorbonne, MIT, and Johns Hopkins University. He curated the exhibition 100 Years of Contemporary Art (Brussels, 2002) and the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2003), and has written extensively on modern and contemporary artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, and Jeff Wall, among others. He teaches aesthetics and art history at Université Lille III.

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