Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now

by Brandon Taylor

For a course on Contemporary Art. Offering a critical perspective-rather than a traditional survey, this provocative text explores the art of the last twenty years-the latter 1970s, the 1980s, and the first half of the 1990s-in both a thematic and chronological fashion. Using an engaging and approachable style-and an abundance of color illustrations, it takes a long look at dominant tendencies in contemporary art in the United States, Western and Eastern Europe, and Russia-and provides a series of challenging view points on the most advanced art forms, themes, and issues.

Genres: Art

176 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1995

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

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is much more impactful in its reading than represented by its cover. Filled with high definition images of works that grope at the avant-garde, this book is a thorough timekeeper and interpreter of art movements following 1960. Accompanying images of abstract art, conceptual art, feminist art, photography... support text that focus as deep as the neighborhood movements within New York during the post modern period, as well as the contrast between American and European interpretations post modernism. This is a western capsule on modern/post modern art yet again. If you want a quick overview of the modern / postmodern art world, that simultaneously covers all of the basis, then chug a Red Bull and prepare to forget dense paragraphs and thread in order to understand them fully. Ideas are deep and coax blood from the readers' eyes, but once finished, form a callous which firms art understanding throughout history. This book feels to me to be necessary in understanding the state of art today - a necessary building block for anyone seeking to define what is art.

[Rob · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked up in the '00-'01 SMP frenzy; I was looking to wrap my head around post-modernism in a way that had a definition with which I could smother a couple of characters. This sat at my bedside for about a year along with The Anti-Aesthetic... and New Media in the Late 20th Century . I got out of it what I needed though (art not being my particular field) I don't know if it really exemplifies this spot of knowledge. It has some neat pictures though.