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100 Works of Art That Will Define Our Age
Bold and engaging predictions of which artists and artworks from the past two decades will endure through their power to question, provoke, and inspire Just as Picasso’s Guernica or Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa survive as powerful cultural documents of their time, there will be works from our own era that will endure for generations to come.
Kelly Grovier curates a compelling list of one hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, performances, and video pieces that have made the greatest impact from 1989 to the present. The global cast includes Marina Abramovic , Matthew Barney, Christian Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Cristina Iglesias, On Kawara, Jeff Koons, Ernesto Neto, Gerhard Richter, Pipilotti Rist, Kara Walker, and Ai Weiwei. Many of the pieces reflect the cultural upheavals of recent times, from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the blossoming of the Arab Spring.
A daring yet convincing analysis of which artworks best capture the zeitgeist of our time, Grovier’s list also provides a much-needed map through the landscape of contemporary art. Illustrations of key works are supplemented by comparative images, and short texts offer a biography of each artwork, tracing its inception and impact, and offering a view not only into the imagination of the artist but into the age in which we live. 391 illustrations, 366 in color
Kelly Grovier curates a compelling list of one hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, installations, performances, and video pieces that have made the greatest impact from 1989 to the present. The global cast includes Marina Abramovic , Matthew Barney, Christian Boltanski, Louise Bourgeois, Maurizio Cattelan, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Cristina Iglesias, On Kawara, Jeff Koons, Ernesto Neto, Gerhard Richter, Pipilotti Rist, Kara Walker, and Ai Weiwei. Many of the pieces reflect the cultural upheavals of recent times, from the collapse of the Berlin Wall to the blossoming of the Arab Spring.
A daring yet convincing analysis of which artworks best capture the zeitgeist of our time, Grovier’s list also provides a much-needed map through the landscape of contemporary art. Illustrations of key works are supplemented by comparative images, and short texts offer a biography of each artwork, tracing its inception and impact, and offering a view not only into the imagination of the artist but into the age in which we live. 391 illustrations, 366 in color
320 pages, Hardcover
First published November 4, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 21, 2020
Cute, mildly dimwitted ideas seem to be the best that art can offer us now. A life-sized shoe store in the middle of the desert? Cute. A giant, functional fun slide in an art museum? Cute. 100 million handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds? Cute. A platinum human skull covered in real diamonds? Cute, I guess. What distinguishes these ideas from the kind of thing you’d jokingly jot on the back of notebook in junior high is that they are very expensive. Can you afford a projector strong enough to beam texts onto public monuments? Can you afford the permits? Jenny Holzer can, apparently. An artist is someone who comes up with the same dopey, silly ideas as you or me but who has enough contacts to be able to get the grants to afford to build a 136,000-cubic-foot box that’s really dark inside. Banksy starts to look like a hero because his cute ideas are spray-painted on walls, which is more or less that venue that suits this kind of art. Borges once said that the problem with self-referential “trick” novels is that it’s inefficient to have to wade through an entire novel to get to the trick; Borges famously just wrote reviews of the nonexistent novels instead. I like the idea of collecting hundreds of nineteenth-century copies of a particular saint’s head, but once you tell me what you’re up to, does anyone have to see it? Some collections exist mostly to prove to the world that the collector could afford them.
(Sarah Lucas gets some kind of points for making a cute, dimwitted sculpture that must have cost under three dollars; the sculpture is not therefore less dimwitted, though.)
Not every work of art in this book is so limited. Nobody’s going to claim John Currin isn’t technically proficient. For works of art that register as, you know, normal works of art, the kind of thing that might fly in Peoria, Wangechi Mutu’s “Backlash Blues” looks really good. Making a portrait of a child-murderer out of children’s handprints is a cute idea (not “cute,” but you know what I mean) that may be less dimwitted than the rest of them—I think there’s something there. And, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with cute, dimwitted ideas. A working toilet surrounded by one-way mirrors on a street corner is genuinely cute; I bet it’s fun to use it and then high-five your friends afterwards. I rode Carsten Höller’s fun slide once, myself; it was fun.
Gregor Schneider’s cute, dimwitted idea was never actually attempted, which I assume means he wins the book.
As for Kelly Grovier’s text, the 100 writeups he offers about these 100 works of art…I think he gives it a solid effort. I’d be hard pressed to think of intetesting things to say about 100 of the best works of art from any time period, let alone most of this silly nonsense. A lot of what we get is trivia and artists’ statements—a sculpture of a big spider is not really enhanced by the artist waxing: “like a spider, my mother was a weaver…” (it goes on like that; of course it goes on) and pretending that this stuff matters is one of the more humiliating aspects of contemporary art—but what else do you expect? My only real complaint is the really so very many times that Grovier starts a writeup with the same verbal structure:
*‘Destiny,’ the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, ‘is like a…’
*‘Inside you,’ Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer once wrote, ‘vaults behind…’
*‘What art offers,’ the American writer John Updike once wrote, ‘is…’
*‘The eye,’ W.H. Auden once explained, ‘tends to be…’
I assure you there are a lot more; I just picked these at random. For pete’s sake, find a new way to quote someone!
Anyway, if these cute, dimwitted ideas will define our age that is sad, but I guess we deserve it.
(Sarah Lucas gets some kind of points for making a cute, dimwitted sculpture that must have cost under three dollars; the sculpture is not therefore less dimwitted, though.)
Not every work of art in this book is so limited. Nobody’s going to claim John Currin isn’t technically proficient. For works of art that register as, you know, normal works of art, the kind of thing that might fly in Peoria, Wangechi Mutu’s “Backlash Blues” looks really good. Making a portrait of a child-murderer out of children’s handprints is a cute idea (not “cute,” but you know what I mean) that may be less dimwitted than the rest of them—I think there’s something there. And, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with cute, dimwitted ideas. A working toilet surrounded by one-way mirrors on a street corner is genuinely cute; I bet it’s fun to use it and then high-five your friends afterwards. I rode Carsten Höller’s fun slide once, myself; it was fun.
Gregor Schneider’s cute, dimwitted idea was never actually attempted, which I assume means he wins the book.
As for Kelly Grovier’s text, the 100 writeups he offers about these 100 works of art…I think he gives it a solid effort. I’d be hard pressed to think of intetesting things to say about 100 of the best works of art from any time period, let alone most of this silly nonsense. A lot of what we get is trivia and artists’ statements—a sculpture of a big spider is not really enhanced by the artist waxing: “like a spider, my mother was a weaver…” (it goes on like that; of course it goes on) and pretending that this stuff matters is one of the more humiliating aspects of contemporary art—but what else do you expect? My only real complaint is the really so very many times that Grovier starts a writeup with the same verbal structure:
*‘Destiny,’ the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, ‘is like a…’
*‘Inside you,’ Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer once wrote, ‘vaults behind…’
*‘What art offers,’ the American writer John Updike once wrote, ‘is…’
*‘The eye,’ W.H. Auden once explained, ‘tends to be…’
I assure you there are a lot more; I just picked these at random. For pete’s sake, find a new way to quote someone!
Anyway, if these cute, dimwitted ideas will define our age that is sad, but I guess we deserve it.
February 10, 2018
This book deserves more stars than I can possibly give it in Goodreads. These are artistic endeavors that stretch the definition of art. I couldn't have been more impressed and I can't wait to look at it again, and probably add more to this review. One artist makes a mold of his head every 5 years then fills it with 4 liters of his own blood taken over a period of many months, then stores it in a freezer, with his previous heads. Another builds underground subway stations in parts of the world where there are no subways. The 24-hour long film, "The Clock" is included as one would expect. So is Cindy Sherman with her 40-year history of taking pictures of herself. Kara Walker's silhouettes about the days of slavery are here, as is a skull coated with over a 1,000 carats of diamonds. Some are extremely beautiful in their simplicity like an empty room with the lights blinking on and off every 5 seconds, or a single light on a moving cord slowly rising and falling in the midst of stacks of wire lockers. A hundred million hand made ceramic sunflowers seeds are here, as is an artist who simply stares at you across an empty table, which has resulted in on-line support groups for those who survive the experience. As excellent as the art is, the commentary by Grovier who skillfully puts every work in perspective, adds much to this excellent book. This is for people who love art and also for people who don't care about art. If you love art this book will make you love it even more and if you don't care you may care even less after looking at this, but you will not be unchanged. Don't miss it. This would be my candidate for the best book of the year.
February 12, 2017
Good place to look for famous contemporary artists you might not know:
Favorite or Interesting Pieces:
Marina Abramovic "The Artist is Present" (2010) Already watched the documentary with the same title, and admire more of her earlier works than this one
Ai WeiWei "Sunflower Seeds" (2010) One hundred hand sculpted and painted porcelain sunflower seeds made by 1,600 Chinese artisans. Certainly a powerful statement.
Mark Alexander "The Blacker Gachet" (2005-6) A Japanese businessman bought Van Gough's Dr. Gachet in 1990 for 82.4 million, highest ever paid at that point. Then when he died in 1996, it seems he cremated himself with the painting. Supposedly this event has become a metaphor in the art world for the eventual disintegration of all art. The more interesting story is this, Alexander happened to cash in on the idea and paint these dark smoky all black portraits of Dr. Gachet again, 13 of them. I suppose these will then be bought for millions of dollars.
I'd just been thinking of an idea for a piece of art, like an anti-Duchamp ready-made, you could call it an un-made, and it would be hyping the price up on a piece, getting it higher and higher, and then never selling it, in fact donating it to a museum or city or venue for nothing on the legal binding contract that it can never be bought or sold. I told this to a friend and he argued that eventually it would be sold. He said the only way to really get rid of its monetary value would be to burn it. In another inverse way, that's what that's businessman did. Although then someone still kept the idea around in monetary form. Money's certainly a hard racket to beat, especially in the contemporary art world.
Maurizio Cattelan "L.O.V.E" (2010) Finally this guy does something political, maybe he had before, but I'd watched an art safari documentary on him and he just seemed like a vacuous jokester. Here he takes the joke in a hilarious and meaningful way. After all who better to criticize the kings than the jester. Here he builds an eleven meter tall middle finger sculpted in marble in the plaza of Milan's stock exchange. Business schools canceled conferences scheduled to be held in adjoining buildings. Executives with plush offices facing the Piazza demanded new digs away from the crass eyesore. Cattelan in true joker fashion says the piece was to disfigure the fascist salute of Mussolini, because the fingers of the hand outside the middle finger are actually broken off. The writer of this book says that the insult is in the eye of the beholder, it could be the bankers flipping off the world, or the people flipping off the bankers. However I say it's the people, because the fingers are broken off, that shows a lack of power, it shows a desperate sort of fuck you and we can't do anything about it stance. I wonder what L.O.V.E. stands for? Probably in Italian? Loving Our Virtuous Economy?
Martin Creed "Work No. 227, the lights going on and off" (2000) That's right, it's a room where the lights go on for five seconds then go off, between doorways through the rest of the gallery. It had its lovers, its haters. It even had a woman from North London who dreamed she was throwing eggs at the exhibit, told her husband who said oh don't do that, and two hours later she was defacing the exhibit (with eggs? Not sure), when she was arrested she said: I have nothing against Creed, although I do not think his work can be considered art. At worst, it's an electrical work. At best, it's a philosophy.
Olafur Eliasson "The Weather Project" (2003) Imagine a huge burning sun in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, hazy, eerie, an all-consuming sunset. Looks pretty magnificent in this photo, wonder if they turned the heat up in the room? With its title, it's an obviously nod to climate change. It did attract over two million visitors, but I'm not sure they came because the critique of climate change, in fact I think they came because ironically it was very beautiful to behold.
Elmgreen & Dragset "Prada Marfa" (2005) They set up a prada shopfront just outside of Marfa, Texas (pop. 2,100). No one worked there, no one opened it. It was on an abandoned highway. Within three days, people broke in and looted all the handbags and shoes. Were they real Prada? Probably. They tagged the place with an art critique of their own: "Dumb Dum Dum". Funny enough they were actually making it into a better artwork, a vandalized Prada store in the middle of nowhere, now that's real art.
Tracey Emin "My Bed" 1998 Her disheveled bed, next to it on a natty blue rug: KY, pregnancy test, panties, cigarette cartons, a little puppy, tampons, wads of tissue, condoms somewhere?, and pantyhose on the bed, some sort of locked up backpack on the other side of the bed. I'd say there's a narrative here though some critics hated it.
Carsten Holler "Test Site" (2006) It's a metal slide you can play in, warped around the floors of the Tate Modern.
Jeff Koons "Puppy" (1992) Koons gets dropped from a exhibiting at documenta 9 in Germany probably because of his Made in Heaven series, photos and paintings of him having sex with his porn star wife. So what does he do? He creates the largest topiary animal ever known to man: a twelve meter tall West Highland Terrier covered with over 70,000 blossoming flowers outside the event. Later, when it goes on permanent display at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, basque Separatists attempt to fill the puppy up with remote control grenades as a terrorist attack, in the confrontation a police man is killed, but the plot foiled.
Sarah Lucas "Au Naturel" (1994) It's a dirty mattress with two melons stuck in it (breasts), a bucket laying on its side underneath the melons (a vagina I heard another art critic say), and a cucumber with two oranges off to the side (a penis).
Ernesto Neto "Leviathan Thot" (2006) Take the Patheon in Paris, home of all their revered rational thinkers etc and fill it up with a gooey white Ghostbusters-esque supernatural ecto-plasm and hang it from the rafters in total asymmetrical geometry. What's all this goop mean? Well the Leviathan is the monstrous state in Thomas Hobbes so says the author of this book. It could be said to be achieving a sculpture of such abstract design it relates to thoughts and thus to the idealization of France's heroes. Or maybe it's cum? No, too crude. Obviously I won't be buried in a Pantheon. Nor will Ernesto Neto.
Marc Quinn "Self" (1991-) Creepy creepy creepy, did I say creepy. Just look it up, it's a sculpture of his head, his texture of it almost looks like we've zoomed into the microscopic level of an electron microscope. It's made out his blood every 5 years, it's an ongoing sculpture. It's kept in tact through refrigeration and the steel mold. His eyes are closed, it looks like he's been buried and frozen in a volcano, say Pompeii. Judging by the surface of his skin, he really needs to go to a dermatologist right away.
Gregor Schneider "The Beauty of Death" (unmade) I've seen this guy before in another Art Safari episode, this guy is a creep. Watching the video you'd almost imagine he either was 1) molested or beat as a child, 2) has fantasies of murder or has murdered someone, and/or 3) may have brain damage from the lead factory he and his family have worked in. So when I heard this piece, the "pure idea" of having a place where someone could die in peace, a beautiful spot (based on his aesthetics, for he makes rooms, that's his art mostly, Wes Craven esque rooms, sparse, dark, with odd objects, just the place you'd like to wander into and meet a homicidal German). "I want to display a person dying naturally in the piece or somebody who has just died. My aim is to show the beauty of death". This coming from a man who made up a female alter ego who said was an artist who worked with him, and had her piece be a mannequin of a dead woman and a pipe in the corner of a room. His death idea was met with outrage in 2008 when he revealed the idea in an interview. He got death threats. He said he didn't want to sensationalize it. He wanted to reclaim that final human action. "My aim would be to find a way of death that is beautiful and fulfilled." In 2005-2007 he built Toter Raum: Death space, it's a very simple room and I hope no one will die in it or have a funeral there. The author of this book tries to reason with Scheinder's ambition, but I really don't think he saw that Art Safari episode, where the artist comes off as insane and can't answer questions, retreats into himself, and seems utterly detached. Perfect serial killer vibe meets sparse interior design.
Favorite or Interesting Pieces:
Marina Abramovic "The Artist is Present" (2010) Already watched the documentary with the same title, and admire more of her earlier works than this one
Ai WeiWei "Sunflower Seeds" (2010) One hundred hand sculpted and painted porcelain sunflower seeds made by 1,600 Chinese artisans. Certainly a powerful statement.
Mark Alexander "The Blacker Gachet" (2005-6) A Japanese businessman bought Van Gough's Dr. Gachet in 1990 for 82.4 million, highest ever paid at that point. Then when he died in 1996, it seems he cremated himself with the painting. Supposedly this event has become a metaphor in the art world for the eventual disintegration of all art. The more interesting story is this, Alexander happened to cash in on the idea and paint these dark smoky all black portraits of Dr. Gachet again, 13 of them. I suppose these will then be bought for millions of dollars.
I'd just been thinking of an idea for a piece of art, like an anti-Duchamp ready-made, you could call it an un-made, and it would be hyping the price up on a piece, getting it higher and higher, and then never selling it, in fact donating it to a museum or city or venue for nothing on the legal binding contract that it can never be bought or sold. I told this to a friend and he argued that eventually it would be sold. He said the only way to really get rid of its monetary value would be to burn it. In another inverse way, that's what that's businessman did. Although then someone still kept the idea around in monetary form. Money's certainly a hard racket to beat, especially in the contemporary art world.
Maurizio Cattelan "L.O.V.E" (2010) Finally this guy does something political, maybe he had before, but I'd watched an art safari documentary on him and he just seemed like a vacuous jokester. Here he takes the joke in a hilarious and meaningful way. After all who better to criticize the kings than the jester. Here he builds an eleven meter tall middle finger sculpted in marble in the plaza of Milan's stock exchange. Business schools canceled conferences scheduled to be held in adjoining buildings. Executives with plush offices facing the Piazza demanded new digs away from the crass eyesore. Cattelan in true joker fashion says the piece was to disfigure the fascist salute of Mussolini, because the fingers of the hand outside the middle finger are actually broken off. The writer of this book says that the insult is in the eye of the beholder, it could be the bankers flipping off the world, or the people flipping off the bankers. However I say it's the people, because the fingers are broken off, that shows a lack of power, it shows a desperate sort of fuck you and we can't do anything about it stance. I wonder what L.O.V.E. stands for? Probably in Italian? Loving Our Virtuous Economy?
Martin Creed "Work No. 227, the lights going on and off" (2000) That's right, it's a room where the lights go on for five seconds then go off, between doorways through the rest of the gallery. It had its lovers, its haters. It even had a woman from North London who dreamed she was throwing eggs at the exhibit, told her husband who said oh don't do that, and two hours later she was defacing the exhibit (with eggs? Not sure), when she was arrested she said: I have nothing against Creed, although I do not think his work can be considered art. At worst, it's an electrical work. At best, it's a philosophy.
Olafur Eliasson "The Weather Project" (2003) Imagine a huge burning sun in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, hazy, eerie, an all-consuming sunset. Looks pretty magnificent in this photo, wonder if they turned the heat up in the room? With its title, it's an obviously nod to climate change. It did attract over two million visitors, but I'm not sure they came because the critique of climate change, in fact I think they came because ironically it was very beautiful to behold.
Elmgreen & Dragset "Prada Marfa" (2005) They set up a prada shopfront just outside of Marfa, Texas (pop. 2,100). No one worked there, no one opened it. It was on an abandoned highway. Within three days, people broke in and looted all the handbags and shoes. Were they real Prada? Probably. They tagged the place with an art critique of their own: "Dumb Dum Dum". Funny enough they were actually making it into a better artwork, a vandalized Prada store in the middle of nowhere, now that's real art.
Tracey Emin "My Bed" 1998 Her disheveled bed, next to it on a natty blue rug: KY, pregnancy test, panties, cigarette cartons, a little puppy, tampons, wads of tissue, condoms somewhere?, and pantyhose on the bed, some sort of locked up backpack on the other side of the bed. I'd say there's a narrative here though some critics hated it.
Carsten Holler "Test Site" (2006) It's a metal slide you can play in, warped around the floors of the Tate Modern.
Jeff Koons "Puppy" (1992) Koons gets dropped from a exhibiting at documenta 9 in Germany probably because of his Made in Heaven series, photos and paintings of him having sex with his porn star wife. So what does he do? He creates the largest topiary animal ever known to man: a twelve meter tall West Highland Terrier covered with over 70,000 blossoming flowers outside the event. Later, when it goes on permanent display at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, basque Separatists attempt to fill the puppy up with remote control grenades as a terrorist attack, in the confrontation a police man is killed, but the plot foiled.
Sarah Lucas "Au Naturel" (1994) It's a dirty mattress with two melons stuck in it (breasts), a bucket laying on its side underneath the melons (a vagina I heard another art critic say), and a cucumber with two oranges off to the side (a penis).
Ernesto Neto "Leviathan Thot" (2006) Take the Patheon in Paris, home of all their revered rational thinkers etc and fill it up with a gooey white Ghostbusters-esque supernatural ecto-plasm and hang it from the rafters in total asymmetrical geometry. What's all this goop mean? Well the Leviathan is the monstrous state in Thomas Hobbes so says the author of this book. It could be said to be achieving a sculpture of such abstract design it relates to thoughts and thus to the idealization of France's heroes. Or maybe it's cum? No, too crude. Obviously I won't be buried in a Pantheon. Nor will Ernesto Neto.
Marc Quinn "Self" (1991-) Creepy creepy creepy, did I say creepy. Just look it up, it's a sculpture of his head, his texture of it almost looks like we've zoomed into the microscopic level of an electron microscope. It's made out his blood every 5 years, it's an ongoing sculpture. It's kept in tact through refrigeration and the steel mold. His eyes are closed, it looks like he's been buried and frozen in a volcano, say Pompeii. Judging by the surface of his skin, he really needs to go to a dermatologist right away.
Gregor Schneider "The Beauty of Death" (unmade) I've seen this guy before in another Art Safari episode, this guy is a creep. Watching the video you'd almost imagine he either was 1) molested or beat as a child, 2) has fantasies of murder or has murdered someone, and/or 3) may have brain damage from the lead factory he and his family have worked in. So when I heard this piece, the "pure idea" of having a place where someone could die in peace, a beautiful spot (based on his aesthetics, for he makes rooms, that's his art mostly, Wes Craven esque rooms, sparse, dark, with odd objects, just the place you'd like to wander into and meet a homicidal German). "I want to display a person dying naturally in the piece or somebody who has just died. My aim is to show the beauty of death". This coming from a man who made up a female alter ego who said was an artist who worked with him, and had her piece be a mannequin of a dead woman and a pipe in the corner of a room. His death idea was met with outrage in 2008 when he revealed the idea in an interview. He got death threats. He said he didn't want to sensationalize it. He wanted to reclaim that final human action. "My aim would be to find a way of death that is beautiful and fulfilled." In 2005-2007 he built Toter Raum: Death space, it's a very simple room and I hope no one will die in it or have a funeral there. The author of this book tries to reason with Scheinder's ambition, but I really don't think he saw that Art Safari episode, where the artist comes off as insane and can't answer questions, retreats into himself, and seems utterly detached. Perfect serial killer vibe meets sparse interior design.
April 14, 2022
Of all the art featured in this book, they chose this for the cover? Most of the time I put it facedown on the couch because my kids thought it was creepy.
Overall I learned quite a few interesting facts about the art featured, even if I may disagree with some pieces that they “define our age”.
Overall I learned quite a few interesting facts about the art featured, even if I may disagree with some pieces that they “define our age”.
November 12, 2025
Reading that great coffee table book on “The Gothic” had me wondering why I don’t read more books with big, pretty pictures, and I picked up this book from the library because the pictures were quite big. But pretty? Come on, man, get real! “Pretty” isn’t what contemporary art is about!
I’m sure a more informed reader could quibble with Kelly Grovier's selection of works, but a beginner like me was impressed by the seeming comprehensiveness and variety of this “100.” I was actually weirdly familiar with more of these pieces than I expected (maybe from reading Billy Childish’s Wikipedia page a lot, over the years?), most as examples of how wacky and esoteric conceptual art has become. But I dunno, y'all, I kinda like a lot of this stuff. Yeah okay, maybe photos of the artist making eye contact with people at the museum (that's the piece) isn't as purely aesthetically stimulating as fucking Picasso or whatever, and maybe the scale of most of these works-- they are all like 10 meter wide canvasses, of massive, walk-in installations-- doesn't quite lend itself to the whole "book" format. I still gotta admit that I was always eager to see what surprise awaited me when I turned the page. And more than that, I also gotta say that I was genuinely moved and maybe even disturbed by the totality of Grovier's selections. The world being reflected back at us by these odd, occasionally confounding, almost never conventionally beautiful, frequently political if not straight-up confrontational pieces is a puzzling, ugly, harsh, fractured, incomprehensible one. In that way, the "Age" defined by this book (the 90s and 2000s, mainly) kind of uncannily prefigures our own. You will not find the optimism of Clinton/Obama/The End of History era here, but the cruelty, absurdity, and strangeness of the Trump era.
Because that's how I write every review now-- full o' Trump SHIT. Deal with it! Free Palestine!
I’m sure a more informed reader could quibble with Kelly Grovier's selection of works, but a beginner like me was impressed by the seeming comprehensiveness and variety of this “100.” I was actually weirdly familiar with more of these pieces than I expected (maybe from reading Billy Childish’s Wikipedia page a lot, over the years?), most as examples of how wacky and esoteric conceptual art has become. But I dunno, y'all, I kinda like a lot of this stuff. Yeah okay, maybe photos of the artist making eye contact with people at the museum (that's the piece) isn't as purely aesthetically stimulating as fucking Picasso or whatever, and maybe the scale of most of these works-- they are all like 10 meter wide canvasses, of massive, walk-in installations-- doesn't quite lend itself to the whole "book" format. I still gotta admit that I was always eager to see what surprise awaited me when I turned the page. And more than that, I also gotta say that I was genuinely moved and maybe even disturbed by the totality of Grovier's selections. The world being reflected back at us by these odd, occasionally confounding, almost never conventionally beautiful, frequently political if not straight-up confrontational pieces is a puzzling, ugly, harsh, fractured, incomprehensible one. In that way, the "Age" defined by this book (the 90s and 2000s, mainly) kind of uncannily prefigures our own. You will not find the optimism of Clinton/Obama/The End of History era here, but the cruelty, absurdity, and strangeness of the Trump era.
Because that's how I write every review now-- full o' Trump SHIT. Deal with it! Free Palestine!
September 21, 2021
Als je door het boek bladert, krijg je wel de indruk dat een hedendaags kunstwerk, als het nog enig belang wil hebben, een enorme productiekost gehad moet hebben. Tientallen tonnen metaal, honderden kubieke meters ruimte, honderdduizenden deeltjes, het kan niet op. Gelukkig zitten er ook enkele kunstenaars tussen die hun opvattingen met behulp van een budget op menselijke schaal, vorm kunnen geven.
Want to read
July 29, 2023Dewey 709.051 G919o
September 15, 2014
I liked this book for what it was, which is a useful cross-section of the recent art scene. The commentary was generally interesting and insightful. And if I’m of the opinion that 60% of these works are complete b.s. ... well, I suppose that’s a problem that I have with contemporary art, not with this book.
June 10, 2014
I'm not sure that I agree with all of Grovier's picks and certainly feel that many major artists were missed. James Turrell is one who comes to mind right off the bat. I did enjoy some of the comparisons to classic works of art and the opportunity to be introduced to new (to me) artists.
December 6, 2014
I've only looked at the first 10 works, but
already have learned so many fascinating and quirky things I've decided to buy it. I want to savor it then pass it along to Alana. This is a book that MUST be read. The pictures alone only give about 10% of the story.
already have learned so many fascinating and quirky things I've decided to buy it. I want to savor it then pass it along to Alana. This is a book that MUST be read. The pictures alone only give about 10% of the story.
Currently reading
March 2, 2017-
May 13, 2014
i wish someone else would have written this
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews