The Art of Social Critique Painting Mirrors of Social Life [Hardcover]

The Art of Social Critique: Painting Mirrors of Social Life?is a welcome addition to the literature on the arts and social change. Unusually wide-ranging in the art forms and topics it covers, and filled with useful insights, this anthology should prove of great interest to scholars and students in American studies, ethnic and gender studies, sociology, the fine arts and literary/cultural studies.What a marvelous journey this book is. These encounters with the likes of Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Pryor, Tori Amos, and The Wire , are all potent reminders that our art is the enduring and essential mirror we need to make sense and meaning in the world.?The Art of Social Critique, is both inspiring and entertaining. Read and weep, read and laugh, read and be provoked.Shawn Binghams The Art of Social Critique: Painting Mirrors of Social Life is a tour de force of how artists of all kinds use their talents, skills, and visions to embrace, interpret, and change the world. This collection of essays proves without a doubt that artists play crucial roles in the politics of cultural values and norms, not just policy and protest. Thus, these articles go beyond the clich?d debate over whether artists should be politicaltheir work is inevitably and inescapably political. Instead this book investigates the myriad ways in which artists are sociological in their representations of and conversations with the social world. From architecture to poetry, from stand-up comedy to rock music, Binghams anthology will give readers an array of tools for investigating how art and artists provide us with the most powerful interdisciplinary depictions of our life and timessomething all students of the social world will want to know.By treading the common ground between the arts, humanities and social sciences, The Art of Social Critique raises important questions about the role of art in society, and posits art as a qualitative form of social inquiry. The authorslU