Art and the Poor

Can the poor make art? Can they appreciate it? What is the point of asking if economic inequality has any aesthetic consequences? The present article argues that in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Walker Evans and James Agee ask and answer these questions and in the process develop three contradictory accounts (economism, populism, and existential fatalism). While my analysis shows that all findings about the poor's relation to art are by necessity contingent because aesthetic categories themselves are contingent, it also raises the possibility that the main effect of morally serious inquiries into the aesthetic lives of the poor is not so much to make factual determinations on aesthetic consequences of poverty as to give creative vent to the inquirer's unease about the difficulty of class reconciliation in a divided society. The economically privileged can certainly articulate their relation to the poor in purely economic terms, but Famous Men strongly suggests that the aesthetic approach that deforms the economic problem of poverty into the problem of art is far superior in the range, variety, and subtlety of feelings it allows them to express.