Art writing normally contrasts art with “everyday life.” This book explores art as
integral to the everyday life of modern society, providing materials to represent
class and class conflict, to explore sex and sexuality, and to think about modern
industry and economic relationships. Art, as we know it, is not common to all
forms of society but is peculiar to our own; what art is changes with people’s
conceptions of the tasks of art, conceptions that are themselves a part of social
history. The history of society does not shape art from the outside, but includes
the attempts of artists to find new ways of making art and thinking about it.
The essays in Art in Its Time offer a critical examination of the central categories
of art theory and history. They propose a mode of understanding
grounded in concrete case studies of ideas and objects, exploring such topics as
the gender content of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime and beautiful,
the role of photography in the production of aesthetic “aura,” the limits of political
art, and the paradox by which art, pursued for its own sake with no thought
of commercial gain, can produce the highest-priced of all objects.
Employing an unusually wide range of historical sources and theoretical perspectives
to understand the place of art in capitalist society, Art in Its Time shows
a way out of many of the cul-de-sacs of recent art history and theory.