Posts Tagged ‘contemporary-art’
Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985
Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 is a groundbreaking anthology that captures the essence and the edge of the contemporary art scene. Focusing on key theoretical and aesthetic issues in contemporary art in cultural, historical, and socio-political contexts –including media, architecture, postmodernism, multiculturalism, identity politics, censorship, AIDS, postcolonialism, globalization, technology, and spectatorship – this volume brings together a broad selection of important contributions that map out the role that critical theory has played in contemporary art.
This anthology mixes established and emergent art voices, including scholars, curators, critics, and artists. Interdisciplinary in approach and drawing on a wide variety of sources, Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 brings together scholarly essays, artists’ statements, and art reproductions to capture the vibrancy and dissonance that defines today’s art scene.
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of
Why would a smart New York investment banker pay $12 million for the decaying, stuffed carcass of a shark? By what alchemy does Jackson Pollock’s drip painting No. 5, 1948 sell for $140 million?
Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored.
This book is the first to look at the economics and the marketing strategies that enable the modern art market to generate such astronomical prices. Drawing on interviews with past and present executives of auction houses and art dealerships, artists, and the buyers who move the market, Thompson launches the reader on a journey of discovery through the peculiar world of modern art. Surprising, passionate, gossipy, revelatory, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark reveals a great deal that even experienced  auction purchasers do not know.
The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art
Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture: 10 Curators, 100
The latest book in the Cream series brings together 100 of the most exciting contemporary artists emerging today, chosen by 10 internationally renowned curators.
Each artistic spread includes a newly commissioned text written by the curator who selected the artists, as well as full-colour images illustrating the most recent works by the artists. Creamier is the most in-depth and original resource for anyone interested in emerging artists, that truly reflects the current moment.
Follows the award-winning Cream (1998), Fresh Cream (2000), Cream 3 (2003) and Ice Cream (2007).
Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture: 10 Curators, 100 Contemporary Artists, 10 Sources
The Photograph as Contemporary Art (World of Art)
“An essential guide.â€â€”Seattle Post-Intelligencer For this new edition, Charlotte Cotton brings the story of contemporary art photography up to date with a chapter on artists who emphasize the physical and material properties of photography, who use photography as just one component in their pan-media practice, or who choose to experiment with new modes of dissemination for their work.
Featuring significant and established art photographers such as Isa Genzken and Sherrie Levine alongside a younger generation that includes Florian Maier-Aichen, Sara VanDerBeek, and Walead Beshty, Cotton points to the diversity and energy of art photography in this century. 210 color, 32 b&w illustrations
Andy Warhol 365 Takes: The Andy Warhol Museum Collection
Andy Warhol was one of the most compelling figures of the 20th-century art world whose body of work transformed the landscape of contemporary art. He was also a notorious collector who saved practically everything that came his way. In 1994, seven years after the artist’s death, The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh became the repository not only for a substantial body of his artwork and films, but also for the Time Capsules into which he obsessively deposited a lifetime’s worth of ephemera and personal memorabilia.
For this book-created in the same format as Abrams’ best-selling Earth From Above: 365 Days-the museum has gathered highlights of its collection. Illustrated with almost 400 objects, from paintings to party invitations, the volume also features lively commentaries by the museum’s staff as well as quotes from Warhol’s own irreverent writings. Timed to coincide with the celebration of the museum’s 10-year anniversary, this book will serve as both an introduction to and a handbook for the most extensive collection anywhere of this iconic artist’s work.
Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short
Contemporary art has never been so popular, but what is its role today and who is controlling its future? Contemporary art is supposed to be a realm of freedom where artists shock, break taboos, flout generally received ideas, and switch between confronting viewers with works of great emotional profundity and jaw-dropping triviality. But away from shock tactics in the gallery, there are many unanswered questions. Who is really running the art world? What effect has America’s growing political and cultural dominance had on art?
Here Julian Stallabrass takes us inside the international art world to answer these and other controversial questions, and to argue that behind contemporary art’s variety and apparent unpredictability lies a grim uniformity. Its mysteries are all too easily explained, its depths much shallower than they seem. Contemporary art seeks to bamboozle its viewers while being the willing slave of business and government. This book is your antidote and will change the way you see contemporary art.
Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Why Is That Art?: Aesthetics and Criticism of Contemporary Art
Why Is That Art? addresses common questions that viewers raise about contemporary art: Why is that art? Why is it in an art museum? Who says it’s art? If I did this, would it be art? Why is it good? Covering a broad, diverse, and engaging sampling of works–abstract and representational painting, monumental sculpture, performance art, video installations, films, and photographs–author Terry Barrett responds to these questions using three sources: the artists who created the works, philosophers of art, and art critics. Introducing students to a variety of established theories of art, he presents the traditional sets of criteria of Realism, Expressionism, and Formalism, which are in turn updated by recent sources of Poststructuralism. Barrett applies each of these theories to challenging works of contemporary art, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each mode of interpretation. He encourages students to consider many criteria when evaluating an artwork, to critically examine judgments made by others, and to make informed judgments of their own.
Ideal for courses in aesthetics, art theory, art criticism, and the philosophy of art, Why Is That Art? is organized chronologically according to the history of aesthetics. It features sixty-seven illustrations (twenty-six in a full-color insert), discusses a wide range of American and European artists, and includes an exceptional overview of postmodern pluralism. This unique book will provide students with a newfound appreciation for contemporary art, scholarship, and reasoned argumentation, giving them the confidence to join the fascinating discourse on contemporary art.
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, Terry Smith brilliantly shows that an historical approach offers the best answer to the question: What is Contemporary Art?
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Smith 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, Smith 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, Smith 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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The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art
In this book, Martha Buskirk addresses the interesting fact that since the early 1960s, almost anything can and has been called art. Among other practices, contemporary artists have employed mass-produced elements, impermanent materials, and appropriated imagery, have incorporated performance and video, and have created works through instructions carried out by others. Furthermore, works of art that lack traditional signs of authenticity or permanence have been embraced by institutions long devoted to the original and the permanent.
Buskirk begins with questions of authorship raised by minimalists’ use of industrial materials and methods, including competing claims of ownership and artistic authorship evident in conflicts over the right to fabricate artists’ works. Examining recent examples of appropriation, she finds precedents in pop art and the early twentieth-century readymade and explores the intersection of contemporary artistic copying and the system of copyrights, trademarks, and brand names characteristic of other forms of commodity production. She also investigates the ways that connections between work and context have transformed art and institutional conventions, the impact of new materials on definitions of medium, the role of the document as both primary and secondary object, and the significance of conceptually oriented performance work for the intersection of photography and the human body in contemporary art.
Buskirk explores how artists active in the 1980s and 1990s have recombined strategies of the art of the 1960s and 1970s. She also shows how the mechanisms through which art is presented shape not only readings of the work but the work itself. She uses her discussion of the readymade and conceptual art to explore broader issues of authorship, reproduction, context, and temporality.
Seven Days in the Art World
The art market has been booming. Museum attendance is surging. More people than ever call themselves artists. Contemporary art has become a mass entertainment, a luxury good, a job description, and, for some, a kind of alternative religion.In a series of beautifully paced narratives, Sarah Thornton investigates the drama of a Christie’s auction, the workings in Takashi Murakami’s studios, the elite at the Basel Art Fair, the eccentricities of Artforum magazine, the competition behind an important art prize, life in a notorious art-school seminar, and the wonderland of the Venice Biennale. She reveals the new dynamics of creativity, taste, status, money, and the search for meaning in life. A judicious and juicy account of the institutions that have the power to shape art history, based on hundreds of interviews with high-profile players, Thornton’s entertaining ethnography will change the way you look at contemporary culture.
