Title: Contemporary art : world currents /
Authors: Smith, Terry
Publisher: Prentice Hall,
Year: 2011
Subjects: Art, Modern Themes, motives; Art, Modern Themes, motives.
Abstract: "Author Terry Smith argues that, in recent decades, a global shift from modern to contemporary art has occurred: artists everywhere have embraced the contemporary world's teeming multiplicity, its proliferating differences and its challenging complexities and new technologies. Alongside more than 350 carefully selected color images of key works, Terry Smith offers the first account of these changes, from their historical beginnings to the present day. Exploring key works by both well known and little-known artists, the author shows how contemporary art achieved definitive force in the markets and museums of the major art centres during the 1980s and then became a global phenomenon as artworlds everywhere began to connect more closely: new communicative technologies and expanding social media are now shaping the future of art. Contemporary Art: World Currents breaks new ground in tracing how modern, traditional and indigenous art became contemporary in each cultural region of the world, ranging across Western, East and Central Europe, North and South America and the Caribbean, Oceania, Africa, and the Middle East. Terry Smith lays the groundwork for a new comparative approach to contemporary art, emphasizing its relationships to all aspects of contemporary life. He argues that it is cultural diversity and individual artistic inventiveness, not a convergence towards sameness, which makes today's art contemporary." -- Publisher's description.
Contents: General introduction: Contemporary Art in transition: from Late Modern Art to now. -- I. Becoming contemporary in Euroamerica. -- 1. Late Modern Art becomes contemporary. -- Transformations in Late Modern Art: its contemporary aspects -- Situationism, Gutai, happenings: art into life-life into art -- Pop: the social mirror, refracted -- The object materialized: Minimalism -- Earthworks: extending sculpture's field -- Conceptualism: reconceiving art -- Political interventions: direct democracy, body, self, sexuality -- 2. The Contemporary Art boom. -- The postmodern return to figuration -- The two Germanys -- Trauma of the victimized -- The Italian transavantgarde -- The American scene again -- British schools -- Critical Postmodernism -- Retro-sensational Art -- Remodernism in sculpture and photography -- Big photography -- Spectacle architecture as Contemporary Art -- Contemporary Art becomes a style -- II. The transnational transition. -- Introduction -- 3. Russia and (East of) Europe. -- Russia -- Art under Late Socialism -- Russian Art becomes Contemporary -- Late Cold War Modern Art elsewhere (East of) Europe -- Parodies of official imagery -- Performance Art tests the limits -- Czechoslovakia -- Hungary -- The Baltic nations -- After the Fall: Post-Communist Art? -- Romania -- The breakup of Yugoslavia -- Beyond "Eastern" and "Central" versus "Western" Europe -- Translating the European ideal -- 4. South and Central America, the Caribbean. -- South America -- Argentina -- Brazil -- Colombia -- Chile -- Mexico -- Cuba -- Elsewhere in the Caribbean -- Seeing the world's currents --