At the confluence of the internet age and the #MeToo movement, revisiting John Berger's book Ways of Seeing and its discussion of nakedness verses nudity is a conversation that needs to be had. Not only because he articulated the predominance of the male gaze and discussions of power, but because he referenced Walter Benjamin's Art in the Mechanical Age. Namely that, through reproduction, when art is removed from its intended location of contact with the public, it takes on different meanings through recontextualization, -- the intrinsic location of artwork lending some of the meaning overall (part of the psychological pilgrimage to approaching art).
Read moreWriting Marxism Out of Art History
Gustave Courbet, The Stone Breakers, 1849
While there have been strides to widen discussions in art history to include issues like gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, the corporate marketing of pricey art-history textbooks to American college students produces materials that glaringly omit and/or deemphasize Marxism as an analytical catalyst. In addition, examples of historical experiments with self-described "real-existing socialism" tend to be so grotesquely abbreviated as to distort context and content and preclude understanding.
Read moreWhat's Next?
Artists today are also caught in the Neo-Liberal expectations of competitive self-promotion, which generally exclude the disabled, economically-disadvantaged, lower-classes, aging, female, gender and/or identity non-conforming. The expected commodification of an artist's work and life is profoundly alienating to anyone who doesn't fit, into either mainstream society or mainstream artists' societies. But there have to be spaces for all art; as there has to be a place at the table for all peoples, or it is no longer art (but an extension of imperialism).