Ben Davis is the editor of Artinfo, one of the world's most popular resources for information and discussion on arts and culture. As a critic, he has become painfully aware of the role that class plays in art. 9.5 Theses on Art and Class seeks to show how a clear understanding of class makes sense of what is at stake in a broad number of contemporary art's most persistent debates, from definitions of political art, to the troubled status of outsider' and street art, to the question of how we maintain faith in art itself in a dysfunctional world.'