RUTH AYLETT appreciates the rich blend of poetry and music that accompanied the launch of the Morning Star’s anthology of poetry, Who We Are
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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
WANJA KIMANI explores the many bonds of community experience expressed in in the bold and colourful imagery of a new mural
New releases from Keeley, Lucinda Williams and Ye Vagabonds
JAN WOOLF ponders the works and contested reputation of the West German sculptor and provocateur, who believed that everybody is potentially an artist
PAUL DONOVAN enjoys a brutally honest rags to riches memoir of the actor’s life, even if it clearly lacks any political insight
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely biography of a contemporary of Marx and Engels who advocated revolutionary socialism
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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