The Capital Dialogues: Sam Lewitt in Conversation with Paul North and Paul Reitter

The Capital Dialogues puts artists and thinkers into conversation with Paul North and Paul Reitter, who recently published their translation of Karl Marx’s Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1 (Princeton Press, 2024). These wide-ranging discussions trace the resurgent wave of interest in Marx within the visual arts field, mapping how these ideas are concretized across contemporary practices. This conversation is with the artist Sam Lewitt, whose deep engagement with Marx’s writing anchors his multi-format sculptures, images and installations. Lewitt’s work is held by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, among many others. His projects examine capital flows, production lines, technological obsolescence, phantom infrastructures and the artifacts of dissipating human labor. The conversation moves across Lewitt’s idiosyncratic practice, diving deeply along the way into the German literary canon, the ground-level tasks of translation, the centrality of the value-form to Marx’s writing, and the limits of art’s capacity to intervene in global circuits of industrial production.