The Crisis of Ugliness ― From Cubism to Pop-art

Mikhail Lifshitz is a major forgotten figure in the tradition of Marxist philosophy and art history. The Crisis of Ugliness (1968), published here in English for the first time, is a compact broadside against modernism in the visual arts that resists the dogmatic complacencies of Stalinist aesthetics.

Mikhail Lifshitz (1905-1983) was an employee of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and from the 1930s developed, on Marxist grounds, a distinctively critical approach to literary modernism. His The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (1933) remains a major contribution to the reconstruction of Marx's own thinking on aesthetics. David Riff (1975) is a writer, artist and curator. He was a member of the work group Chto delat and co-editor of the newspaper of the same name from 2003 to 2008. Riff has curated international exhibitions and event programs and has published extensively on contemporary art. He currently lives in Berlin and works as a freelance curator.