Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. Born in 1970 and raised in Valley Stream on Long Island near New York City, Cutrone is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Departments of Art History, Theory and Criticism and Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and instructor at the Institute for Clinical Social Work. He was a longtime lecturer in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division at the University of Chicago, where he completed the PhD in the Committee on the History of Culture and MA in Art History. He received the MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the BA from Hampshire College. His doctoral dissertation is on Adorno’s Marxism.
Cutrone is the original lead organizer of the Platypus Affiliated Society (its reading group in Chicago was established in 2006). From 1989ā92, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, to the Los Angeles Riots and the election of Bill Clinton, Cutrone was a youth member of the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), upholding the revolutionary socialist tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and the October Revolution of 1917.
Intellectuals are at once beneficiaries of a bad society, and yet those on whose socially useless work it largely depends whether a society emancipated from utility is achieved ā this is not a contradiction acceptable once and for all and therefore irrelevant. It gnaws incessantly at the objective quality of their work. Whatever the intellectual does, is wrong. He experiences drastically and vitally the ignominious choice that late capitalism secretly presents to all its dependants: to become one more grown-up, or to remain a child. .Ā .Ā . Intelligence is a moral category.
ā Theodor W. Adorno (1903ā69), Minima Moralia (1944ā47)