Art Theory Text with Sketch 1948

Editor: Here we have Stuart Davis’s "Art Theory Text with Sketch," undated, from the Harvard Art Museums. It looks like a page torn from a notebook, filled with handwritten thoughts and a small geometric sketch. What strikes you about this piece? Curator: Davis, deeply engaged with abstraction and modernism, uses text here as a medium itself. He's challenging the traditional boundaries of art, isn't he? This piece isn't just about what art looks like, but about its purpose, or as he suggests, its "non-practical motivation". Editor: So, he's pushing back against the idea that art needs to have a functional, economic purpose? Curator: Precisely. And look at the context: Davis was working during the rise of mass media and consumer culture. Was he perhaps critiquing the commodification of art? Editor: That’s a perspective I hadn’t considered. It makes you wonder what Davis would think of today's art world.