Bertolt Brecht once worried that how we feel about the victims of a social problem can get in the way of the beauty and attraction of the problem itself. In this book, Walter Benn Michaels explores the same dilemma through a study of several contemporary artist-photographers whose work speaks to questions of political economy. Michaels focuses on the work of several artists, mostly born in the 1970s and thus raised in a world where artistic ambition has been identified with a critique of autonomous form and of meaning as a function of intention. Michaels shows that these artists engage but also push beyond this critique of autonomy and intentionality, producing works that embody a new commitment to form and meaning. The explanation for this commitment, he argues, is these artists consciousness of making art in an economy riven by structural conflict, especially an unprecedented rise in inequality. For them, he argues, the relationship of the art work to the worldto its subject and to its beholderfunctions as an emblem of the relation between classes (rather than identities or subject positions). This book will join the short shelf of essential writings about the medium of photography."

Bertolt Brecht once worried that our sympathy for the victims of a social problem can make the problem’s “beauty and attraction” invisible. In The Beauty of a Social Problem, Walter Benn Michaels explores the effort to overcome this difficulty through a study of several contemporary artist-photographers whose work speaks to questions of political economy. Although he discusses well-known figures like Walker Evans and Jeff Wall, Michaels’s focus is on a group of younger artists, including Viktoria Binschtok, Phil Chang, Liz Deschenes, and Arthur Ou. All born after 1965, they have always lived in a world where, on the one hand, artistic ambition has been synonymous with the critique of autonomous form and intentional meaning, while, on the other, the struggle between capital and labor has essentially been won by capital. Contending that the aesthetic and political conditions are connected, Michaels argues that these artists’ new commitment to form and meaning is a way for them to depict the conditions that have taken US economic inequality from its lowest level, in 1968, to its highest level today. As Michaels demonstrates, these works of art, unimaginable without the postmodern critique of autonomy and intentionality, end up departing and dissenting from that critique in continually interesting and innovative ways.

A complete set of tools for analyzing any social problem.

A complete set of tools for analyzing any social problem.

PRODUCT ONLY AVAILABLE WITHIN CENGAGE UNLIMITED. UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL PROBLEMS, progresses from micro to macro analysis, focusing first on health care, drugs and alcohol, families, and crime and then looking at the larger issues of poverty and inequality, population growth, aging, environmental problems, and global conflict.

Written from a distinctly Canadian point of view, Understanding Social Problems, Fourth Canadian Edition, examines how the structure and culture of societies contribute to social problems and their consequences. This text has strong pedagogical features and is comprehensive in its coverage, progressing from micro to macro levels of analysis. It focuses first on problems of health care, drug use, and crime, and then broadens to the widening concerns of population, health and welfare, science and technology, large-scale inequality and environmental problems. Known for its inclusive approach, Understanding Social Problems, Fourth Canadian Edition, explores powerful stories of real life people struggling with the challenges society and its problems have thrust upon them.

Social Problems in a Diverse Society provides students and instructors with a text that covers all the major social concerns we must deal with today. It focuses on the significance of racialization and ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, class, ability, and gender in understanding social problems in Canada and around the globe. Throughout the text, people--especially those from marginalized groups--are shown not merely as "victims" of social problems, but also as individual actors with agency who resist discrimination and inequality and seek to bring about change in families, schools, workplaces, and the larger society.