Bertolt Brecht once worried that our sympathy for the victims of a social problem can make the problem's "beauty and attraction" invisible. In The Beauty of a Social Problem, Walter Benn Michaels explores the effort to overcome this difficulty through a study of several contemporary artist-photograp[...]

"A withering examination of how the celebration of cultural and ethnic difference obscures our yawning economic divide . . . This is a refreshing, angry, and important book." --"The Atlantic Monthly""" Acclaimed as "eloquent" ("Chicago Tribune"), "cogent" ("The New Yorker"), and "impossible to disag[...]