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Ben Davis

Ben Davis is an art critic living and working in New York City. His writings have appeared in Adbusters, Artinfo.com, Art Papers, C Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, Slate.com, The Village Voice, and many others. He is the national art critic for artnet News. Davis published his first book, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, in 2013.

Artnet News, Features• June 30, 2016

After Brexit, Art Must Break Out of Its Bubble

By Ben Davis

In the early days of 2009, to celebrate its ascendancy to the presidency of the European Union, the Czech Republic commissioned a special artwork…

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Artnet News, Reviews• June 1, 2016

Evasion and Euphemism: The Guggenheim Underintellectualizes and Depoliticizes László Moholy-Nagy

By Ben Davis

In 1921, the Hungarian expat László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), then in Berlin, signed a “Call for Elementarist Art,” alongside Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp, and…

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Artnet News, Reviews• May 6, 2016

The Pantomimed Fellowship of Nicole Eisenman’s “Al-ugh-ories”

By Ben Davis

Nicole Eisenman – beloved New York painter, now MacArthur-certified “Genius” – has just opened a show at the New Museum with the jokey title, “Al-ugh-ories.” The single-floor showing…

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Artnet News, Features• April 4, 2016

“I Wanted to Find a Way to Respond”: Artist Ben Quilty on Working with Refugees

By Ben Davis

How do you conceive of the human cost of the largest refugee crisis since World War II? Though images of the overcrowded boats crossing…

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Artnet News, Features• March 2, 2016

The State of the Artworld, Explained

By Ben Davis

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan is opening its new contemporary art initiative, taking over the old Whitney Museum of American Art’s building…

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Artnet News, Reviews• February 8, 2016

The Hermetic Lyricism of Anri Sala

By Ben Davis

“When I first showed the city footage in Poughkeepsie, [artist] Liam Gillick said to me, ‘Anri, tell me the truth. Tell me that this…

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Artnet News, Features• January 14, 2016

Do You Have to Be Rich to Make It as an Artist?

By Ben Davis

On my end-of-the-year “Best Shows” list, I nominated Rachel Rose’s hypnotic Everything and More video at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In response,…

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Artnet News, Features• December 22, 2015

The Most Important Art Essays of the Year

By Ben Davis

This time last year, my editor asked me to put together a list of the most important essays of 2014, and I drew a blank….

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Artnet News, Features• September 15, 2015

Beware the “Creative Economy”

By Ben Davis

One-thousand six-hundred fifty-four. I’m not teaching this semester, but if I were, that is the one number that I would want everyone to remember….

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Artnet News, Features• July 30, 2015

The Meaning Behind the Merger of ARTnews and Art in America

By Ben Davis

It’s a media cliché that more has changed in the last ten years in journalism than in the century before that. Yesterday’s big news…

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