Synopses & Reviews
Art History After the Sixties examines the 1960s and 1970s as a watershed era in our current understanding of art and its historiography. Pamela Lee asks how, why, and at what cost art critics of that generation shifted their attention away from aesthetics to focus pimarily on the social and political nature of art most notably in the writings appearing in the influential journal October. She also looks closesly at the major artists of that era from Robert Smithson, most well known for his provocative earthwork Spiral Jetty, to Andy Warhol.
Art History After the Sixties is the fifth volume in Theories of Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts James Elkins 's series of short books on the theories of modernism written by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism. The book will feature a critical introduction by a fellow art historian placing the book in conversation with the previous books in the series.
Synopsis
Pamela M. Lee's New Games revisits postmodernism in light of art history's more recent embrace of "the contemporary." What can the theories and practices associated with postmodernism tell us about the obsession with the contemporary in both the academy and the art world? In looking at work by Dara Birnbaum, yvind Fahlstr m and Richard Serra, among others, Lee returns to Jean-Francois Lyotard's canonical text The Postmodern Condition as a means to understand more recent art-critical interests in interactivity, collectivism and neo-liberalism. She reads Lyotard's well-known treatment of language games relative to the game theory associated with the Cold War and the rise of the information society. New Games asks readers to think critically about our recent past and the embattled state of our contemporary preoccupations.
With a critical introduction by Johanna Burton, New Games is the fourth and penultimate volume in Routledge's series of short books on the theories of modernism by leading art historians on twentieth-century art and art criticism.