To rescue Kahlo from the clutches of the corporate art market, we need to acknowledge the overt and covert political dimensions of the work, demands GAVIN O’TOOLE
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Age cannot wither him
New books on Shakespeare illustrate how his work continues to affect our understanding of economics, psychology and language four centuries after his death, says GORDON PARSONS
If you can see past the relentless commodification you will be rewarded by enormously powerful work, suggests JENNY MITCHELL
CHRIS SEARLE revels in the one-off collaboration between an American polymath and a British Muslim, and detects the presence of their revolutionary forebear
GORDON PARSONS revels in an ebullient production of Shakespeare’s magical comedy
BRENT CUTLER welcomes a thoughtful analysis of the Erdogan regime, viewed through the evolving history of a neighbourhood in Istanbul
GORDON PARSONS regrets the price, but is dazzled by an outstandingly ambitious study of the way art restoration in particular, and culture in general was weaponised by the Nazis
Marx and Freud
by Crystal Bartolovich, David
Hillman and Jean Howard
(The Arden Shakespeare, £23.99)
Shakespeare and Economic Theory
by David Hawkes
(The Arden Shakespeare, £17.99)
Shakespeare’s Political and Economic Language
by Vivian Thomas
(The Arden Shakespeare, £25.99)
SHAKESPEARE’S contemporary Ben Jonson eulogised him as “not of an age but for all time” and it is true that successive periods have indeed treated the Bard’s works as mirrors reflecting and commentating on particular contemporary experiences.
As the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin affirms, the “afterlife” of great works of art changes because they are inextricable from the networks of social relations in which they come to have meaning.
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ALEX HALL is fascinated by a lucid and historically convincing account of how rent has dominated capitalist economies from feudalism to modernity
MARTIN GRAHAM welcomes, with reservations, a scholarly addition to the unfinished business of understanding how capital works on a world scale
ALAN McGUIRE welcomes a biography of the French semiologist and philosopher
The creative imagination is a weapon against barbarism, writes KENNY COYLE, who is a keynote speaker at the Manifesto Press conference, Art in the Age of Degenerative Capitalism, tomorrow at the Marx Memorial Library & Workers School in London