Contemporary Art: Art Since 1970 - Softcover

For undergraduate/graduate courses in Contemporary Art, Art Criticism, and Art History; also appropriate for studio courses. This text gathers together the seminal moments in the international art scene of the last few years, placing them in the context of the critical and public understanding of the works, and brings into play the remarkable growth of contemporary art museums across the United States, Europe, and globally. Contemporary Art describes the latest trends and tendencies in art, calling upon international exhibitions, curatorial projects, and the growth of new technology, and showing the rapidly evolving experiment that is the visual arts of our time.

What are the central values of contemporary art? In Contemporary Art Brandon Taylor charts the ideas and practices of new art across a wide international spectrum. From Minimalism and Conceptualism to video and film, from painting and sculpture to performance and installation, he shows how advanced art has continued to provoke and perplex a fascinated public.

Contemporary Art shows how contemporary art of the last three decades has been energized not merely by changing technologies of art-making, but by the spread of new museum architecture, by the voice of the critic, and in recent times by the activity of the powerful international curator. Contemporary Art also shows how the dominant narrative of advanced art in the USA and Western Europe has been invigorated by an expanding international network, from the West Coast of America, from Eastern and Central Europe, and more recently from Asia and Africa.

Reviewing the major controversies of the later twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first, it also includes a discussion of the impact of the internet and digital art. Generously illustrated in color and with a timeline, Contemporary Art will appeal to students and gallery-goers wishing for a guiding narrative to the most adventurous art of our time.

Brandon Taylor is Professor of History of Art at the University of Southampton, England. He has written art criticism for The Times, The New Statesman, and a range of art magazines. His other books include Art and Literature under the Bolsheviks (two volumes, 1991 and 1992), Art of the Soviets (1993), The Art of Today (1995), Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public (1999), and Collage: The Making of Modern Art (2004).