ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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A class analysis
MIKE QUILLE is impressed by the rigorous Marxist approach to be found in a new book on the dialectics of art
DEVASTATINGLY EFFECTIVE: Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War, 1863
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
The Dialectics of Art
by John Molyneux
(Haymarket Books, £17.99)
GROUNDED in a solidly Marxist perspective, John Molyneux’s book is a very fine contribution to writing on art.
Carefully argued chapters on what art is — how we evaluate it, how it changes and develops and the dialectical nature of modernism — are illustrated by case studies of artists including Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Tracey Emin, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and others.
The central strength of these theoretical and case-study strands is the recognition of the dialectical tensions that are generated and expressed in artworks which are produced in class-divided societies like our own.
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