The Story of Contemporary Art

Hardback

Main Details

Title The Story of Contemporary Art
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Tony Godfrey
Physical Properties
Format:Hardback
Pages:280
Dimensions(mm): Height 260,Width 200
Category/GenreArt History
Art and design styles - from c 1960 to now
ISBN/Barcode 9780500239872
ClassificationsDewey:709.04
Audience
General
Illustrations 202 Illustrations, unspecified

Publishing Details

Publisher Thames & Hudson Ltd
Imprint Thames & Hudson Ltd
Publication Date 27 August 2020
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

What does it mean? Is it really art? Why does it cost so much? While these questions are perpetually asked about contemporary art, they are not the questions that E. H. Gombrich set out to answer in his seminal book The Story of Art. Contemporary art is very different from what came before. From the 1960s, where Gombrich's account concludes, artists began to abandon traditional forms of art and started to make work that questioned art's very definition. This is where Godfrey picks up the story. Developments in contemporary art have followed no straightforward line of progress or sequence of movements. Recognizing this, Tony Godfrey creates a narrative from a series of often dramatic creative conflicts and arguments around what art is or should be. From object versus sculpture and painting versus conceptual to local versus global, gallery versus wider world, The Story of Contemporary Art traces a history in terms of drastic changes in social and political life over the last sixty years. How do we experience being human in a world that seems to change so quickly? In exploring art's relationship to this question, Godfrey asserts that multiple voices must be heard: critics, theorists, curators and collectors, but also audiences and artists themselves. Key to the book is the story of how a perception that art was made almost exclusively by white men from North America and Western Europe has been radically overturned. Compelling and intelligent, but never academic, this book tells us how.

Author Biography

Tony Godfrey lives in Manila, where he works as a curator with artists from SouthEast Asia. He was formerly Programme Director of the MA in Contemporary Art at Sotheby's Institute, London. He has written for the Burlington Magazine and Art in America, and is the author of Conceptual Art and Painting Today, as well as numerous exhibition catalogues.