In 2006, an avant-garde team of German “author-directors,” working under the moniker Rimini Protokoll, made an ambitious move to extend the first volume of Marx’s seminal work from the page to the stage. Courtesy Helgard Kim Haug / Rimini Protokoll. 1. The Labor of Dance: Duncan Campbell, It For Others, (2013)ĭas Kapital Band 1. So in honor of the German economist and his influential work, h ere are five interesting ways Das Kapital has been considered by artists throughout the years. More importantly, art can make the contents of Marx’s complex writings more accessible to people by visually conveying the messages contained within them, and there are many ways in which art might be able to offer a fresh perspective on the 150-year-old text. As a result, Marx’s writings continue to be dominant in artistic discourses, as well as the subject of many artworks. Since then, Marx’s analysis of the creation of value in capitalist society has been particularly relevant to how we think about art and artistic production today.

Marxist theory has had a tremendous influence on the interpretations of art and art history, particularly in the 1960s, when a generation of art historians developed critical theories based on Marxist aesthetics and left-communist ideology. A century and a half later, the dense tome has become familiar to many-although few have read it. The first volume of the opus-where Marx expounds on three decades of research into the capitalist production of industrial England-was published on September 14, 1867. There are tens of thousands of pages in the four hefty volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy , more commonly referred to as Das Kapital.

Das kapital volume 1