Synopses & Reviews
Contemporary Art: World Currents is the first comprehensive worldwide survey of contemporary art from the 1980s to the present day.
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.
Contemporary Art: World Currents brings the subject right up-todate, highlighting the concerns of contemporary artists while giving the reader an invaluable insight to art today.
Teaching and Learning Experience
Improve Critical Thinking- Explore how contemporary art has become a global, connected phenomenon
Engage Students- Looks at the work of contemporary artists from across the world.
Support Instructors- Image PowerPoints slides are available for Contemporary Art: World Currents.
Review
“Terry Smith is acknowledged world wide as the leading authority in the theory of contemporary art.”-- Hans Belting, Professor for Art History and Media Theory, Academy for Design, Karlsruhe, Germany, from the Global Art and the Museum website.
“Terry Smith is that rare art and social historian able to write criticism at once alert to the forces that contextualize art and sensitive to the elements and qualities that inhere to the works of art themselves.” -- College Art Association, citation for the 2010 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism
Contemporary Art: World Currents, by Terry Smith (Pearson; 348 pages). Contemporary art exists in such quantity and variety that even insiders to it will benefit by art historian Smith's clear-eyed world tour. Perhaps the best concise book of its kind available. -- Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic Holiday gift guide: books on art November 20, 2011
Synopsis
Contemporary Art: World Currents is the first comprehensive worldwide survey of contemporary art from the 1980s to the present day.
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.
Contemporary Art: World Currents brings the subject right up-todate, highlighting the concerns of contemporary artists while giving the reader an invaluable insight to art today.
Teaching and Learning Experience
Improve Critical Thinking- Explore how contemporary art has become a global, connected phenomenon
Engage Students- Looks at the work of contemporary artists from across the world.
Support Instructors- Image PowerPoints slides are available for Contemporary Art: World Currents. "
Synopsis
Contemporary Art: World Currents argues that, in recent decades, a worldwide shift from modern to contemporary art has occurred. This has not, however, been a uniform change from one phase or style in the history of art to another. Rather, artists everywhere have embraced the contemporary world’s teeming multiplicity, its proliferating differences, and its challenging complexities. Diversity—the contemporaneity of difference—not a convergence towards sameness, Smith argues, is what makes today¹s art contemporary.
About the Author
Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA, is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. His major research interests are world contemporary art, including its institutional and social contexts; the histories of multiple modernities and modernisms; the history and theory of contemporaneity; and the historiography of art history and art criticism. He has special expertise in international contemporary art (practice, theory, institutions, markets), American visual cultures since 1870, and Australia art since settlement, including Aboriginal art. Current graduate students under his supervision are working on topics such as critical global practices, alternative avant-gardes, cultural policy, and art writing. He teaches the open course Introduction to Contemporary Art, and a graduate seminar on modernity and contemporaneity. http://www.terryesmith.net/
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 7
General Introduction: Contemporary Art in Transition:
From Late Modern Art to Now 8
I BECOMING CONTEMPORARY IN EUROAMERICA
1. LATE MODERN ART BECOMES CONTEMPORARY 16
TRANSFORMATIONS IN LATE MODERN ART: ITS CONTEMPORARY ASPECTS 19
Situationism, Gutai, Happenings: Art into Life/Life into Art 19
Pop: The Social Mirror, Refracted 24
The Object Materialized: Minimalism 27
Earthworks: Extending Sculpture’s Field 29
Conceptualism: Reconceiving Art Political Interventions: Direct Democracy, Body, Self, Sexuality 36
2. THE CONTEMPORARY ART BOOM 44
THE POSTMODERN RETURN TO FIGURATION 46
The Two Germanys 46
Trauma of the Victimized 53
The Italian Transavantgarde 53
The American Scene Again 55
British Schools 56
Critical Postmodernism 58
RETRO-SENSATIONALIST ART 65
REMODERNISM IN SCULPTURE AND PHOTOGRAPHY 66
Big Photography 70
SPECTACLE ARCHITECTURE AS CONTEMPORARY ART 75
CONTEMPORARY ART BECOMES A STYLE 79
II THE TRANSNATIONAL TRANSITION
Introduction 82
3. RUSSIA AND (EAST OF) EUROPE 84
RUSSIA 85
Art under Late Socialism 86
Russian Art Becomes Contemporary 89
LATE COLD WAR MODERN ART ELSEWHERE (EAST OF) EUROPE 91
Parodies of Official Imagery 93
Performance Art Tests the Limits 97
Czechoslovakia 100
Hungary 100
The Baltic Nations 103
AFTER THE FALL: POST-COMMUNIST ART? 105
Romania 106
The Breakup of Yugoslavia 110
BEYOND “EASTERN” AND “CENTRAL” VERSUS “WESTERN” EUROPE 113
TRANSLATING THE EUROPEAN IDEAL 114
4. SOUTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA, THE CARIBBEAN 116
SOUTH AMERICA 116
Argentina 121
Brazil 125
Colombia 135
Chile 137
Mexico 139
CUBA 139
ELSEWHERE IN THE CARIBBEAN 144
SEEING THE WORLD’S CURRENTS 149
5. CHINA AND EAST ASIA 150
CHINA 150
Modern Chinese Art 151
Contemporary Chinese Art 152
TAIWAN 169
JAPAN 169
Experimental Art in the 1950s to 1970s 169
Contemporary Art 169
KOREA 171
6. INDIA, SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA 174
INDIA 174
PAKISTAN 180
THAILAND 185
INDONESIA 188
THE PHILIPPINES 191
7. OCEANIA 196
PAPUA NEW GUINEA 196
AOTEAROA/NEW ZEALAND 199
AUSTRALIA 203
8. AFRICA 214
MODERN ART IN AFRICA 215
SOUTH AFRICA UNDER APARTHEID 216
POPULAR PAINTING AND SCULPTURE IN CENTRAL AFRICA 221
COMMERCIAL TO ART PHOTOGRAPHY 227
SOUTH AFRICA AFTER APARTHEID 228
AFRICAN ART ENTERS THE INTERNATIONAL CIRCUIT 235
9. WEST ASIA 236
IRAQ 237
JORDAN 238
IRAN 241
PALESTINE 245
ISRAEL 249
FROM HURUFIYAH TO CONTEMPORARY COSMOPOLITANISM 253
III CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS
Introduction 256
10. WORLD PICTURES: MAKING ART POLITICALLY 258
ONE WORLD 259
GLOBAL NETWORKS 260
INTERVENING CRITICALLY 264
PROFILES IN SHADOWLAND 269
BARE LABOR 271
11. CLIMATE CHANGE: ART AND ECOLOGY 274
ART AND ENVIRONMENTALISM 275
CRISIS AND CATASTROPHE 279
COLLECTIVE ACTIONS, SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS 282
DESIGNS FOR LIVING 285
EXPERIMENTAL GEOGRAPHY 287
IMAGING THE FUTURE DYSTOPIA 290
ECO-CHIC, GREENWASHING, SPECTACLE 292
12. SOCIAL