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"Arts, Modern -- 20th century"
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In the Blink of an Ear
An ear-opening reassessment of sonic art from World War II to the present Marcel Duchamp famously championed a \"non-retinal\" visual art, rejecting judgments of taste and beauty.
eBook
Talking prices
How do dealers price contemporary art in a world where objective criteria seem absent?Talking Pricesis the first book to examine this question from a sociological perspective. On the basis of a wide range of qualitative and quantitative data, including interviews with art dealers in New York and Amsterdam, Olav Velthuis shows how contemporary art galleries juggle the contradictory logics of art and economics. In doing so, they rely on a highly ritualized business repertoire. For instance, a sharp distinction between a gallery's museumlike front space and its businesslike back space safeguards the separation of art from commerce.
Velthuis shows that prices, far from being abstract numbers, convey rich meanings to trading partners that extend well beyond the works of art. A high price may indicate not only the quality of a work but also the identity of collectors who bought it before the artist's reputation was established. Such meanings are far from unequivocal. For some, a high price may be a symbol of status; for others, it is a symbol of fraud.
Whereas sociological thought has long viewed prices as reducing qualities to quantities, this pathbreaking and engagingly written book reveals the rich world behind these numerical values. Art dealers distinguish different types of prices and attach moral significance to them. Thus the price mechanism constitutes a symbolic system akin to language.
eBook
Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art
From Picasso's Cubism and Duchamp's readymades to Warhol's silkscreens and Smithson's earthworks, the art of the twentieth century broke completely with earlier artistic traditions. A basic change in the market for advanced art produced a heightened demand for innovation, and young conceptual innovators – from Picasso and Duchamp to Rauschenberg and Warhol to Cindy Sherman and Damien Hirst – responded not only by creating dozens of new forms of art, but also by behaving in ways that would have been incomprehensible to their predecessors. Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art presents the first systematic analysis of the reasons for this discontinuity. David W. Galenson, whose earlier research has changed our understanding of creativity, combines social scientific methods with qualitative analysis to produce a fundamentally new interpretation of modern art that will give readers a far deeper appreciation of the art of the past century, and of today, than is available elsewhere.
eBook
Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination
Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination explores the role of art in conceiving and reconfiguring the political, ethical and social landscape of our time. Understanding art as a vital form of articulation, Meskimmon argues that artworks do more than simply reflect and represent the processes of transnational and transcultural exchange typical of the global economy. Rather, art can change the way we imagine, understand and engage with the world and with others very different than ourselves. In this sense, art participates in a critical dialogue between cosmopolitan imagination, embodied ethics and locational identity.
The development of a cosmopolitan imagination is crucial to engendering a global sense of ethical and political responsibility. By materialising concepts and meanings beyond the limits of a narrow individualism, art plays an important role in this development, enabling us to encounter difference, imagine change and make possible the new. This book asks what it means to inhabit a globalized world – how we might literally and figuratively make ourselves cosmopolitans, ‘at home’ everywhere. Contemporary art provides a space for this enquiry.
Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination is structured and written through four ‘architectonic figurations’ – foundation, threshold, passage and landing – which simultaneously reference the built environment and the transformative structure of knowledge-systems. It offers a challenging new direction in the current literature on cosmopolitanism, globalisation and art.
List of Illustrations List of Plates Introduction. Contemporary art: at home in a global world Chapter 1. Foundation – dynamic ground Chapter 2. Threshold – infinite generosity Chapter 3. Passage – transitive affects Chapter 4. Landing – imaginative engagement Afterword On Affirmative Criticality Selected Bibliography Index
Dr. Marsha Meskimmon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Loughborough, UK. Her research centres on the work of women artists and expanded theoretical and critical perspectives on aesthetics, history and gendered subjectivity. She has authored a number of books and journal articles, including Women Making Art: History, Subjectivity, Aesthetics (2003) and We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (1999).
eBook
How Photography Became Contemporary Art
When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a
budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary
art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New
York Times , photography was at the vital center of artistic
debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about
photography's \"boom years,\" chronicling the medium's increasing
role within the most important art movements of the time, from
Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also
traces photography's embrace by museums and galleries, as well as
its politicization in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s.
Grundberg reflects on the landmark exhibitions that defined the
moment and his encounters with the work of leading
photographers-many of whom he knew personally-including Gordon
Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe. He navigates
crucial themes such as photography's relationship to theory as well
as feminism and artists of color. Part memoir and part history,
this perspective by one of the period's leading critics ultimately
tells a larger story about the crucial decades of the 70s and 80s
through the medium of photography.
eBook