Art & Today
Art & Today is the most comprehensive survey of contemporary art of the past three decades. The book's original thematic organization gives a welcome order to the flux of contemporary art. Over four hundred of the most significant contemporary artists from around the world are represented, including emerging as well as established figures. The book's lively, straightforward, and authoritative writing makes the volume a perfect introduction to contemporary art for students in the field as...
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Art & Today is the most comprehensive survey of contemporary art of the past three decades. The book's original thematic organization gives a welcome order to the flux of contemporary art. Over four hundred of the most significant contemporary artists from around the world are represented, including emerging as well as established figures. The book's lively, straightforward, and authoritative writing makes the volume a perfect introduction to contemporary art for students in the field as well as anyone interested in the subject. This book is the follow-up to Phaidon's extremely successful Art Today.The Barnes & Noble ReviewArt and Today is the most comprehensive survey of contemporary art. Full stop. There simply isn t anything else out there that compares to this book s breadth: nearly 500 oversized full-color pages, representing more than 400 international artists of the past three decades. Rather than presenting these artists as a chronological progression of like-minded members of movements, this survey ditches the isms and substitutes 16 loose categories, in which many artists appear multiple times. An introductory text briefly covers the earlier part of the 21st century (Clement Greenberg, modernism, Warhol), then deposits us in 1980. The YBAs (Young British Artists) Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, graffiti artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami show up in the "After Warhol" section; ready-made art includes work by Barbara Kruger and Jeff Koons. Abstraction is represented by Brice Marsden, Ellsworth Kelly, and Sol Le Witt, while Chuck Close, Vik Muniz, Elizabeth Peyton, and Gerhard Richter hang out in the realist corner. Artists who work with narrative -- like Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney -- are in something called "postmodern storytelling," while a section devoted to technology-based art gives us Nancy Burson s age-progression software and Eduardo Kac s experiments with DNA. Let s not forget Kiki Smith, Bill Viola, Kara Walker, John Cage, Bruce Nauman, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Lorna Simpson. If they make art, and they made it in the last 30 years, they re in here. As with any survey, each artist is represented by only a handful of images. But Heartley does an admirable job of weaving it all together. --Amy Benfer
\ Publishers WeeklyThe history of contemporary art, writes Heartney (Postmodernism), a contributing editor to Art in America, offers a "tapestry of stories" in an innovative, intellectually vigorous and superbly illustrated survey. In this era of "anarchic pluralism," master narratives are inappropriate, and Heartney thus organizes her vividly written study thematically ("Art and Time," "Art and Narrative") rather than chronologically, and artists range from Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and other "high kitsch" creators to the "participatory" works of artists such as Nam June Paik and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Heartney's focus is sharp and selective, and her approach complexly postmodern: the "ever-proliferating universe" of Matthew Ritchie's installations are discussed in the context of Roland Barthes, Cindy Sherman's photographs as Bakhtinian carnival. Participatory art, Heartney argues in her last chapter, is "a direct challenge to cherished assumptions about the meaning of art," whose "democratization" may be the most significant force in art today. This exceptional survey will have wide appeal-from the generalist to the scholar interested in a work that's both perceptive and energetic. (May)\ Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.\ \ \ The Barnes & Noble ReviewArt and Today is the most comprehensive survey of contemporary art. Full stop. There simply isn't anything else out there that compares to this book's breadth: nearly 500 oversized full-color pages, representing more than 400 international artists of the past three decades. Rather than presenting these artists as a chronological progression of like-minded members of movements, this survey ditches the isms and substitutes 16 loose categories, in which many artists appear multiple times. An introductory text briefly covers the earlier part of the 21st century (Clement Greenberg, modernism, Warhol), then deposits us in 1980. The YBAs (Young British Artists) Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, graffiti artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami show up in the "After Warhol" section; ready-made art includes work by Barbara Kruger and Jeff Koons. Abstraction is represented by Brice Marsden, Ellsworth Kelly, and Sol Le Witt, while Chuck Close, Vik Muniz, Elizabeth Peyton, and Gerhard Richter hang out in the realist corner. Artists who work with narrative -- like Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney -- are in something called "postmodern storytelling," while a section devoted to technology-based art gives us Nancy Burson's age-progression software and Eduardo Kac's experiments with DNA. Let's not forget Kiki Smith, Bill Viola, Kara Walker, John Cage, Bruce Nauman, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Lorna Simpson. If they make art, and they made it in the last 30 years, they're in here. As with any survey, each artist is represented by only a handful of images. But Heartley does an admirable job of weaving it all together. --Amy Benfer\ \
