David Walsh is the World Socialist Web Site Arts Editor. He began to write about art and culture for the Bulletin, the newspaper of the Workers League, the predecessor of the Socialist Equality Party in the United States, in September 1991. Walsh was instrumental in the expansion of coverage of artistic and cultural developments with the launch of the WSWS seven years later. He is the author of The Sky Between the Leaves, a collection of essays on film, culture and socialism available from Mehring Books.
Art expresses things about life, about people and about oneself that are not revealed in political or scientific thought. To become whole, human beings require the truth about the world, and themselves, that art offers.
Edward Said, a Palestinian and a professor of literature at Columbia University in New York City, has set himself the task in Culture and Imperialism of offering "a history of the imperial adventure rendered in cultural terms."
This lecture was delivered by David Walsh, the arts editor of the World Socialist Web Site, at the Socialist Equality Party/WSWS summer school held August 14 to August 20, 2005 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Film is little more than a century old. It is an art form whose entire history is contained, for all intents and purposes, in the twentieth century, a century of convulsive and often tragic events, of global civil war, of gigantic and as yet unresolved social struggles.
WSWS arts editor David Walsh gave a talk in Detroit recently to SEP members and supporters to mark the publication of The Sky Between the Leaves.
What are the great questions of our time? In our view, social inequality, the threat of dictatorship, the drive to war. The unification of the working class across all ethnic and national lines, politically directed against this rotting system, is decisive.
In this report to the 2014 Workers Inquiry into the Bankruptcy of Detroit, Walsh explains why the defense of the Detroit Institute of Arts, along with other museums, libraries and cultural institutions, and the right of the working class to have access to culture are vital.
WSWS journalist Andre Damon interviews Walsh about the themes, content and political background of his book, Sky Between the Leaves, published in 2013.
A unique collection of film reviews, essays on film and interviews with directors and film critics spanning the 20 years from 1992-2012.
Why didn’t the Academy strenuously come to Ballal’s defense in its first public response to the events?
No Other Land, which reveals graphically the savagery of Zionist “ethnic cleansing” in the West Bank, has been denied widespread viewing in the US for political reasons.
Only three weeks ago, Ballal was on the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles to accept an Oscar.
Lynch attracted so much attention and interest in part because he stood out as an expressive, undoubtedly unusual figure in the generally bleak cultural landscape of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years.
The US political and entertainment establishment have made it their business to suppress No Other Land, for fear of its impact on public opinion.
Hackman brought an acute, artistically informed urgency and honesty to his roles that often transcended the conceptions and methods of the filmmaker in question.
Two of No Other Land’s co-directors, Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham, decried the decades of injustice and the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
There are striking images and certain convincing performances, but on the whole the filmmakers seem very much out of their depth. The work is starved of genuine historical and social insight.
Opposition is building to the Trump-Musk regime, but that resistance needs greater political clarity, depth and understanding. Artists must play a role in this.
The film depicts the world of sex workers convincingly, before evolving into a type of dark “screwball comedy.”
Wald's Dylan Goes Electric is the work on which the recent film about Bob Dylan’s early days in music, A Complete Unknown (James Mangold), is loosely based.
Lamar and much of the hip hop world represent the antithesis of opposition to big business and capitalism. Hip hop is big business.
In October 1854, a large crowd in Worcester, Massachusetts took action against the presence of "slave catcher" Asa O. Butman and expelled him from the city.
Trump’s attack is sinister and reactionary. He is again taking pages from Adolf Hitler’s playbook, attempting to whip up his fascist base with claims about “degenerate art.”
Armaly is an inter-disciplinary artist whose work includes the production of video, soundworks, architectural interventions, design, sculpture and large-scale installations.
The nominations were largely weak and uninspiring, more than in recent years, reflective of a film industry in economic and artistic crisis
The film has done well at the global box office, but it has largely been overshadowed by events.
To speak the truth about oppression in the West Bank is impermissible because it unavoidably points to the wider issue of Zionist crimes.
The World Socialist Web Site spoke to numerous workers and residents in the city, on the direct impact of the fire, as well as the connected social and political issues. We ask all our readers in the Los Angeles area to write to us about their experiences with the fires this week.
This is the second part of an interview with Joseph McBride, author of George Cukor’s People. The first part was posted January 8.
