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Contemporary Art
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 5, 2023
I am an art lover, a very amateur one at that and my interest in art mostly lies in the period between post Impressionism and the end of abstract expressionism.
For the longest time, I have had no idea what to make of contemporary art, especially conceptual art and some of the installation art. It seems to me , as someone who does not know a whole lot but loves art, that, as art gets more and more intellectualized, it is becoming very alienating.
Sometimes when I view a piece of art in a gallery that puzzles me, it feels like I am not getting an inside joke that everyone else who is in the know gets.
I often wonder what’s next …where do we go after we have deconstructed everything and then deconstructed the deconstruction itself?
Then I read Hal’s essay in Infinite Jest re “modern” and “post-modern” heroes where he also questions what is next …somehow, it made me want to learn more about contemporary art as a way to understand the postmodern society and to learn about contemporary art properly.
But all this is just my silly ramblings about my sudden interest in contemporary art and it barely has anything to do with this book itself.
Unfortunately, this book wasn’t very helpful to me, and I gave up reading the text at about page 90.
I don’t think the editing is great and the reading experience was very disorienting. For instance, the text would refer to a painting/ artwork by a certain artist but the illustration next to the text would be a completely different piece of artwork.
Also this book was published in the late eighties so a lot of important developments in art from the 90s and onwards were not included.
It did help me to compile of list of arts to check out :
Andreas Schulze
Gerhard Richter
Mimmo Paladino
Sandro Chia
Jiri Georg Dokoupil
Martin Kippenberger
Cindy Sherman
Katharina Sieverding
Rosemarie Trockel
Susan Rothenberg
Ross Bleckner
Thomas Ruff
Joseph Beuys
For the longest time, I have had no idea what to make of contemporary art, especially conceptual art and some of the installation art. It seems to me , as someone who does not know a whole lot but loves art, that, as art gets more and more intellectualized, it is becoming very alienating.
Sometimes when I view a piece of art in a gallery that puzzles me, it feels like I am not getting an inside joke that everyone else who is in the know gets.
I often wonder what’s next …where do we go after we have deconstructed everything and then deconstructed the deconstruction itself?
Then I read Hal’s essay in Infinite Jest re “modern” and “post-modern” heroes where he also questions what is next …somehow, it made me want to learn more about contemporary art as a way to understand the postmodern society and to learn about contemporary art properly.
But all this is just my silly ramblings about my sudden interest in contemporary art and it barely has anything to do with this book itself.
Unfortunately, this book wasn’t very helpful to me, and I gave up reading the text at about page 90.
I don’t think the editing is great and the reading experience was very disorienting. For instance, the text would refer to a painting/ artwork by a certain artist but the illustration next to the text would be a completely different piece of artwork.
Also this book was published in the late eighties so a lot of important developments in art from the 90s and onwards were not included.
It did help me to compile of list of arts to check out :
Andreas Schulze
Gerhard Richter
Mimmo Paladino
Sandro Chia
Jiri Georg Dokoupil
Martin Kippenberger
Cindy Sherman
Katharina Sieverding
Rosemarie Trockel
Susan Rothenberg
Ross Bleckner
Thomas Ruff
Joseph Beuys
September 24, 2015
Very disappointing. I must admit to having reservations when I saw the book's title - presumably, the author either meant one of two things. He might have been imagining an art movement called Contemporary Art - which he seems to take to mean a mix of several different genres, each of which he struggles through various names for in the text. Alternatively, he might have meant that the work was contemporary to himself, in which case "Art of the 1980s", or "Current art" would have made more sense than trying an overarching title which would so quickly seem dated. Certainly there is nothing now that is "contemporary" about the work if, by that term you mean up-to-date. Yet this is a minor quibble, and nothing compared with the book's other problems.
The biggest problem, by far, is the text. The book was published by Taschen, which gave me great hope; Taschen art books are almost without exception well-written, with text that is informative, or, at the very least, interesting. Unfortunately, this book was one of those rare exceptions. The text, written in a style which we art critics sometimes call "art wank", is dense and obfuscatory to the point of impenetrability. Where there are moments of clarity, the points being made are either banal or simply incorrect, or ar simply pointing out how - in the authors view - German art of the 1980s was exciting and new, American art was jaded and in a rut, Italian art was either poor or derivative, and the art of other countries was not worth mentioning. When individual artists or works are referred to in the text, the complementary images of the works are not present - or if they are, they are many pages away from their text reference. Many other plates are presented which are not referred to in the text (and for that, the readers can perhaps be thankful, as they are more able to draw their own thoughts and inferences from the works). I don't know whether it is the author or the translator who is to blame for the text, though I fear it is probably the author; the problems relating to the placement of text and relevant images is possibly due to changes during translation or sloppy editing. In any case, the book overall did not leave a good impression.
Don't get me wrong, the art, by and large, was pretty reasonable, though hardly what I'd consider strong choices to illustrate the styles of art discussed, and for that art alone it might be worth having a thumb through the book. But if you want to read about Neo-dada, Transavantgarde, Nouveau realisme, and the other modernist and postmodernist art movements lumped together in this book, find a text which actually tells you something. The one-star rating is an average of three for the images, zero for the text, and zero for the editing.
The biggest problem, by far, is the text. The book was published by Taschen, which gave me great hope; Taschen art books are almost without exception well-written, with text that is informative, or, at the very least, interesting. Unfortunately, this book was one of those rare exceptions. The text, written in a style which we art critics sometimes call "art wank", is dense and obfuscatory to the point of impenetrability. Where there are moments of clarity, the points being made are either banal or simply incorrect, or ar simply pointing out how - in the authors view - German art of the 1980s was exciting and new, American art was jaded and in a rut, Italian art was either poor or derivative, and the art of other countries was not worth mentioning. When individual artists or works are referred to in the text, the complementary images of the works are not present - or if they are, they are many pages away from their text reference. Many other plates are presented which are not referred to in the text (and for that, the readers can perhaps be thankful, as they are more able to draw their own thoughts and inferences from the works). I don't know whether it is the author or the translator who is to blame for the text, though I fear it is probably the author; the problems relating to the placement of text and relevant images is possibly due to changes during translation or sloppy editing. In any case, the book overall did not leave a good impression.
Don't get me wrong, the art, by and large, was pretty reasonable, though hardly what I'd consider strong choices to illustrate the styles of art discussed, and for that art alone it might be worth having a thumb through the book. But if you want to read about Neo-dada, Transavantgarde, Nouveau realisme, and the other modernist and postmodernist art movements lumped together in this book, find a text which actually tells you something. The one-star rating is an average of three for the images, zero for the text, and zero for the editing.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews