Art Today /anglais

by Brandon Taylor

In Art Today Brandon Taylor charts the ideas and practices of contemporary 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. Art Today shows how the new 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. It 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 colour, Art Today is a guiding narrative to the most adventurous art of our time.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published September 27, 2004

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Brandon Taylor is Professor in the History of Art, University of Southampton. His other publications include Art and Literature Under the Bolsheviks, Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public, and Art Today.

Reviews

[CM · Rating 2 out of 5]

A passable chronological survey text on the art ,starting from the 1970s till 2004, that ,as you may see in my notes above(probably only available in certain OS version of goodreads), can be erudite but inadvertently amusing or self-aggrandizing. Given its bulky format (definitely a chore to read the print edition here), I am a bit disappointed that Non-western art only receives a treatment of a single chapter with 20 pages. The photo situation (ratio of artworks mentioned : artworks with photographs) is always not satisfactory in art books but it is a bit worse here, being some small rectangles in such a large format. The lack of historical context , but a table listing seemingly unrelated historical and art world events at the back of the book ,like putting the death of Picasso next to the invention of calculators, is ,to say the least, misguided.

Having said all of that, those chapters before the last one , at their best, did contain a certain narrative with analytical rigor. The last chapter , being the most recent one, can be revealing more of the author's own preference. Reader is given some artists' quotes at the end of each chapter and some can be quite revealing for the period or their respective art movement.