Product Description

Contemporary art has never been so popular - but what is 'contemporary' about contemporary art? What is its role today, and who is controlling its future?

Bloody toy soldiers, gilded shopping carts, and embroidered tents. Contemporary art is supposed to be a realm of freedom where artists shock, break taboos, flout generally received ideas, and switch between confronting viewers with works of great emotional profundity and jaw-dropping triviality. But away from shock tactics in the gallery, there are many unanswered questions. Who is really running the art world? What effect has America's growing political and cultural dominance had on art?

Julian Stallabrass takes us inside the international art world to answer these and other controversial questions, and to argue that behind contemporary art's variety and apparent unpredictability lies a grim uniformity. Its mysteries are all too easily explained, its depths much shallower than they seem. Contemporary art seeks to bamboozle its viewers while being the willing slave of business and government. This book is your antidote and will change the way you see contemporary art.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19595 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-23
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 168 pages

Tribune, 14 April 2006
'a readable, concise and often witty account'

Independent on Sunday, 23 April 2006
'by far the most strident and polemic entry I've yet come across in Oxford's excellent series of Very Short Introductions.'

Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunda
"by far the most strident and polemic entry I've yet come across in Oxford's excellent series of "very short introductions""

Customer Reviews

Fascinating But Not For Beginners
I think this book is brilliant, yet I am not 100% sure why it is in the Very Short Introduction series. It isn't really an introduction to contemporary art. If you don't know much about art, and you don't know much about contemporary artists, you aren't going to be very much the wiser after reading this book, at least at a basic level. It deals only sketchily with the work of artists, using them to illustrate points rather than to tell you much about them or the artists themselves. It doesn't really set out to tell you what art is either, in any easily identifiable way.
Having said that, it gets five stars in my book because it illustrates a fascinating view of art that I have never really been aware of before. Stallabras talks about contemporary art in relation to world politics, commerce, consumerism and the worlds of big business and finance. He talks about how art has changed and been shaped by the demands that these external pressure points have put upon it, and what that means for the way we 'read' art and art works. He talks about how it affects our understanding of where art fits in the current world order and what that means for artists.
It is an incredibly interesting book, from which I have learned a great deal. It really made me think and made me look at things like how exhibitions are staged and what museums are for in a radically different light. It is well worth the money and the time to read it, but you do have to have some prior knowledge of art beforehand to get the best out of it.