Discourse and Dialogue

Discourse and Dialogue:
“9.5 Theses on Art and Class”
Wednesday July 12th
7 – 8:30 pm

On the evening of July 12th, LUMP will host Discourse and Dialogue, a roving monthly in-depth discussion about artwork, philosophies and the art world at large, organized by artist Jean Gray Moh. Anyone is welcome to join in on the conversation at any time.

The focus of this discussion will be “9.5 Theses on Art and Class” a 2013 essay written by art critic Ben Davis, and we will be joined by Kathryn Desplanque along with Jean Gray Moh. This essay reframes the dynamics of the art world, especially the relationship between artists and the art market, in Marxist terms through class analysis. Unafraid to challenge art world assumptions and posturing, 9.5 Theses invites artists, art organizers, and art administrators to reconsider whether our actions are really in alignment with our values.” Link to essay serving as pre-read material can be found at this drive link.

Kathryn Desplanque, Ph.D. is a mixed Black queer multi-generational immigrant, a rollerskater, and a visual artist, an arts organizer, and an art history professor. She earned her Ph.D. from Duke University and is an assistant professor of 18th and 19th-century European art history at UNC Chapel Hill. She is finishing a first book on the origins of the starving artist trope, invented and popularized at the dawn of global capitalism in the late eighteenth century to criticize the emergence of a free market for art. Her visual art practice builds exotopias or alien landscapes so that she, a hyper-liminal child of diaspora, can imagine a place where she could be free.

Event location:
Lump Raleigh
505 S Blount St, Raleigh, NC 27601