Workshop: Art, class and the culture industry

Join US-based cultural theorist Catherine Liu, Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine and author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, for a seminar on art and class. Participants will collaboratively engage with two texts: Adorno & Horkheimer's seminal chapter 'The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception' (1944) and Ben Davis' Art in the After-Culture: Capitalist Crisis and Cultural Strategy (2022). This session will explore the enduring significance of Adorno & Horkheimer's insights into cultural production under capitalism, focusing on its homogenising effects and implementation as a tool for ideological control. Davis' analysis will further probe the role of art in addressing and navigating capitalist crises in the twenty-first century.

This workshop is presented by Monash Art Lectures (Monash University Museum of Art and Monash Art Design & Architecture). Catherine Liu's visit to Australia is supported by Griffith University Art Museum and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Catherine Liu is a professor of film and media studies at University of California, Irvine and the author of Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2021 and The American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. She has published extensively on critical theory and New Taiwan Cinema and psychoanalysis, as well as various topics in art criticism, museum history, and cultural politics.

^{Image: Catherine Liu. Photo: Alexander Raborn}