It’s Time to Talk About Classism in the Art World
In his memoiristic new book, photographer Mark Alice Durant weaves his personal experiences into a larger rebuke of the economic inequality that governs the art world.
For something that determines so much — about the art we make, the art we get to see or not, the art that may never be made at all — the issue of class is rarely discussed in the art world. Breaking the silence, artist and writer Mark Alice Durant speaks up in his memoir-cum-rebuke, Confessions of a Working Class Artist (2026). It reads both like a Künstlerroman and an updated version of the seminal guide for the aspiring artist, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929), for our dystopian neo-Gilded Age.
For Durant, also the author of the moving photographic memoir Summer of the White Fox, and After (2024) and publisher at Saint Lucy Books, which released both titles, choosing to become an artist was an act of self-exile. He writes that he psychically uprooted himself from the working-class precincts of Boston where he grew up as well as from his extended family, with the exception of his mother, unusually open-minded and supportive of her son. Perhaps she saw herself in his youthful gift of a framed reproduction of Jules Breton’s 1884 painting of a field worker, “The Song of the Lark.” After deciding on this path, Durant writes, “I could never return home on some level.”
