Red Aesthetics

Red Aesthetics offers a new way to think about art and politics, focusing on the revolutionary work of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Bertolt Brecht, and Sergei Eisenstein between the wars. Todd Cronan shows how these three artists' photographs, dramas, films, and writingscentered on class conflictdiffer from current left orthodoxies rooted in empathy. Writing against liberal pieties, Cronan contends, following Brecht, that empathy is not the solution to our problems, but more like the source of them.