In his new collection of essays, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class and Other Writings, the critic Ben Davis has set for himself a daunting goal: to take the art world to task for its self-imposed isolation from social realities, its elitism, and its pretenses to political commitment, while simultaneously defending art from the charge of being purely decadent or irrelevant, a plaything of the rich of little import to people committed to social change.

The book’s sixteen essays, divided into broad thematic groupings (“Art and Class,” “Art and Politics,” “Art and Its Audiences,” “Art and Theory”) cover an ambitious range of topics, from the museum-building boom and the expansion of the art market to street art, hipster culture, and the present-day currency of postmodernism. Informed by his experience as a writer and editor for mainstream art publications and his identification as a Marxist activist, the book is an attempt to bridge the gap between the two spheres, with the hopes that it will enable struggling artists and skeptical activists to see each other as allies.

Davis’s targets are diverse, but his arguments tend to revolve around a thesis first advanced in the book’s titular essay, originally published as a pamphlet accompanying the exhibition “#class” at New York’s Winkleman Gallery in 2010: that artistic labor is inherently middle-class, regardless of the actual income of artists, and that as a result, artists’ political potential is necessarily limited. Davis has described the intent of his original “9.5 Theses” essay as “an attempt to show that the values held within the sphere of the visual arts are unlikely to be the basis for effective struggle even for its own objectives,” an emphasis taken up throughout the book as well. Pessimistic though this may seem, his basic point is that a realistic understanding of what art can and cannot do will ultimately enable artists to work towards real social change, even if it means acknowledging that it won’t be through art alone.