Bad Moon Rising: Racism, Anti-Semitism + the Toxic Bernie Bro Trope

Yet “toxicity” is not a floating signifier. In the era of Covid-19 and anxious preppers, virus metaphors having become part of the everyday parlance of information technology with its disposability of human beings through the logic of the social industry. “Toxicity,” on one hand, could be shorn of meaning. On the other hand, it can be seen as going beyond de-humanization in order to render a human being as a walking contagion…

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A Worker Reads Graphic Novels

“Normie” socialists, having largely lost recent political arguments in the new socialist movement – particularly in the righteous backlash against Angela Nagle – seem to be redoubling their efforts on the cultural front. Jacobin recently posted two highly questionable articles along these lines; John Halle’s “In Defense of Kenny G” and Alexander Dunst’s “Graphic Novels Are Comic Books, But Gentrified.”

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Born Again Labor Museum (HM London)

This presentation on the “Born Again Labor Museum (BALM)” by Adam Turl (read here by a robot) was given, along with papers from artists Anupam Roy and David Mabb, at a workshop on different strategies for salvaging the “utopian impulse” in contemporary art, at the Historical Materialism conference in London (November, 2019).

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Erasing Arnautoff

A false narrative has been produced pitting “aging white male art historians” against “young people of color.” This narrative is doubly false as some of the murals’ most prominent defenders are not white; and there is evidence that many students do not want the frescoes removed.[3] Moreover, this narrative creates a false choice between art and the needs and aspirations of the exploited and oppressed. The question to be examined here is (at least) twofold: why has this false narrative come to dominate and, secondly, what lessons do these dynamics hold for contemporary socialist artists.

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La Trompestad

The comic “La Trompestad”  by Michelle Sayles is the perfect illustration of what it feels like to live in the first week of Donald Trump's America. Although we may feel defeated, we must remain vigorous in our fight against Trump and his administrations' spectacle of  “alternative facts”. Michelle Sayles is an artist and community organizer living in Burlington, Vermont. You can find more of her work on her blog. – Craig E. Ross

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The Return of the Crowd (Call for Submissions)

We are looking for essays, papers, reviews, short stories, poetry, visual art, comics, and other submissions that deal with some of these questions. What does the return of crowds mean for an insular art world and its weak avant-garde? What are the aesthetics of anti-capitalist totalities? What are the aesthetics of today’s neo-fascists? What is the difference between socialist and fascist aesthetic leveling? What lessons for contemporary art and culture can we take from the Russian Revolution – and its artists and writers? What about lessons from other key revolutions – the Mexican Revolution for example? What about the aesthetics of anti-fascist struggles – in Spain, in Italy, in Germany, in occupied France? What are the aesthetic relationships between class and other identities in trying to build militant anti-fascist resistance as well as counter-narrative to neoliberal capitalism? What do the crowds of art history and past literatures – Zola, Courbet, Brecht – have to tell us about making socialist art today?

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Dollar Art House Sells Out

These are hard times. These were hard times before the ascendancy of Donald Trump; before the fascist human dust of the United States became emboldened; before the incoming administration started planning a series of social policy arsons. Times are even harder now. To pay for these hard times the Dollar Art House is selling out; or rather we are selling artwork and putting on some first rate poetry and musical performances. From 5pm to 11pm on Friday, December 9, the “Dollar Art House Sells Out” will feature music and performances by Poet X, IndyBlack, Sunni Hutton and Jesa D’Or, along with artwork by Craig E. Ross and Adam Turl.

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Hard Times at The Dollar Art House

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Dollar Art House and its first exhibition, “The Hard Times Art Show.” The Dollar Art House is a DIY project, based in St. Louis, Missouri, of Red Wedge editors and artists Craig E. Ross and Adam Turl. Dollar Art House aims to provide a platform for a popular avant-garde; experimental art that is connected to popular concerns and audiences.

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Lucy Parsons at the Golden Nugget

Alex Pullman claimed to have been abducted by aliens. While aboard their spacecraft he had the following visions of the future. The bombs and missiles of World War Three were frozen above the world's cities just as the UFOs arrived. Later that day long-dead communards reappeared as zombies and ghosts – walking anachronisms in the streets of each city and town. The "Evicted Art Blog" will, over the coming months, share Pullman's account of his visions.

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Evicted Art (8 Points)

As Ernst Fischer observed in The Necessity of Art, the origin of art in hunter-gatherer societies resulted in the projection of the human imagination on all that which could not yet be understood. Fischer argued that this was both a social and spiritual aspect of early art. Humans, he argued, rebelled against consuming themselves in the confines of their own life. At the same time art served to unite small bands of human beings around common concerns and a common narrative.

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