Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Introduction: And Now for Something Completely Different
- 1 The Back Story of Twentieth-Century Art
- 2 The Greatest Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 3 The Most Important Works of Art of the Twentieth Century
- 4 The Greatest Artistic Breakthroughs of the Twentieth Century
- 5 The Greatest Women Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 6 Creating New Genres: Conceptual Artists at Work and Play in the Twentieth Century
- 7 And Now for Something Completely Different: The Versatility of Conceptual Innovators
- 8 You Cannot Be Serious: The Conceptual Innovator as Trickster
- 9 Painting by Proxy: The Conceptual Artist as Manufacturer
- 10 Co-Authoring Advanced Art
- 11 Language in Visual Art
- 12 Portraits of the Artist: Personal Visual Art in the Twentieth Century
- 13 The Rise and (Partial) Fall of Abstract Painting in the Twentieth Century
- 14 The Globalization of Advanced Art in the Twentieth Century
- 15 Artists and the Market: From Leonardo and Titian to Warhol and Hirst
- 16 The State of Advanced Art: The Late Twentieth Century and Beyond
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
16 - The State of Advanced Art: The Late Twentieth Century and Beyond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Introduction: And Now for Something Completely Different
- 1 The Back Story of Twentieth-Century Art
- 2 The Greatest Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 3 The Most Important Works of Art of the Twentieth Century
- 4 The Greatest Artistic Breakthroughs of the Twentieth Century
- 5 The Greatest Women Artists of the Twentieth Century
- 6 Creating New Genres: Conceptual Artists at Work and Play in the Twentieth Century
- 7 And Now for Something Completely Different: The Versatility of Conceptual Innovators
- 8 You Cannot Be Serious: The Conceptual Innovator as Trickster
- 9 Painting by Proxy: The Conceptual Artist as Manufacturer
- 10 Co-Authoring Advanced Art
- 11 Language in Visual Art
- 12 Portraits of the Artist: Personal Visual Art in the Twentieth Century
- 13 The Rise and (Partial) Fall of Abstract Painting in the Twentieth Century
- 14 The Globalization of Advanced Art in the Twentieth Century
- 15 Artists and the Market: From Leonardo and Titian to Warhol and Hirst
- 16 The State of Advanced Art: The Late Twentieth Century and Beyond
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Pluralism, Postmodernism, and Perplexed Art Pundits
Painters no longer live within a tradition and so each of us must recreate an entire language.
Pablo PicassoWell, thank God, art tends to be less what critics write than what artists make.
Jasper JohnsIn 2005, Peter Schjeldahl wrote in the New Yorker that “The contemporary art world of the 1980s blew apart into four main fragments…Eventually, even the fragments disintegrated, becoming the sluggish mishmash that has prevailed in art ever since.” The idea that advanced art had become fragmented in the late twentieth century was not a new one. In 1984, for example, the art historian Corinne Robins titled her survey of American art during 1968–1981 The Pluralist Era, and on the first page observed that “the Pluralism of the seventies…effectively did away with the idea of dominant styles for at least a decade.” Over time, another term gained currency to describe the situation, as in 2000, Jonathan Fineberg explained in his textbook, Art Since 1940, that what had emerged in the seventies was postmodernism, “an inclusive aesthetic that cultivates the variety of incoherence.”
Whatever name they give to the situation, there is widespread agreement among art critics and scholars that they have lost the ability to provide any convincing overall narrative or explanation for the art of the late twentieth century and beyond. The critic Arthur Danto, for example, remarked in 1997 that “contemporary art no longer allows itself to be represented by master narratives at all.”
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- Information
- Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art , pp. 343 - 364Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009