What is Contemporary Art?

Locations
Call Number: 709.05 Sm
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	709.05 Sm	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Contemporary art inside out -- Museums: modern/contemporary -- Remodernizing Manhattan -- Sublime-on-Hudson: Dia : Beacon now -- Sensation=Saatchi -- Contemporizing the Tate Modern -- Spectacles: architecture/sculpture -- The experience museum: Bilbao and beyond -- The intensity exhibit: Barneyworld at McGuggenheim -- Markets: global/local -- Going global: selling contemporary art -- From the desert to the fair -- Countercurrents: south/north -- The postcolonial turn -- Our otherness: the beauty of the animal -- Contemporaneity: times/places -- Taking time -- Art, truth, and politics -- An art historical hypothesis -- What is contemporary art?
Who gets to say what counts as contemporary art? Artists, critics, curators, gallerists, auctioneers, collectors, or the public? Revealing how all of these groups have shaped today's multifaceted definition, the author brilliantly shows that an historical approach offers the best answer to the question: What is Contemporary Art? She argues that the most recognizable kind is characterized by a return to mainstream modernism in the work of such artists as Richard Serra and Gerhard Richter, as well as the retro-sensationalism of figures like Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami. At the same time, she reveals, postcolonial artists are engaged in a different kind of practice: one that builds on local concerns and tackles questions of identity, history, and globalization. A younger generation embodies yet a third approach to contemporaneity by investigating time, place, mediation, and ethics through small-scale, closely connective art making. Inviting readers into these diverse yet overlapping art worlds, the author offers a behind-the-scenes introduction to the institutions, the personalities, the biennials, and of course the works that together are defining the contemporary. The resulting map of where art is now illuminates not only where it has been but also where it is going.

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