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Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction, by Julian Stallabrass
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Contemporary art has never been so popular, but what is its role today and who is controlling its future? 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?
Here 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.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
- Sales Rank: #404389 in Books
- Published on: 2006-05-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 4.30" h x .50" w x 6.80" l, .32 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 168 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
Toil and trouble?
By The Lucid Librarian
Strictly speaking this small text did not offer a very short introduction to contemporary art. What this small text does offer is - some - introduction to contemporary art - and - Julian Stallabrass' view on the economic and political nature of contemporary art, the necessary "evils" of its relationship to fashion and money, and current trends in the art world. The blurb on the inside cover of the text is more accurate: "What is contemporary about contemporary art? What effect do politics and big business have on art? And who really runs the art world? ...an exploration of the global art scene".
This is a well written and referenced work with biting but not bitter insights that struck this reader as more of a polemic investigation rather than an investigation into the nature of contemporary art. Once that agenda is understood, the reader is drawn to gaze through Stallabrass' intense eyeglass into the art world system as it stands presently, with contemporary art examined almost as a by-product of that system. The art biennale scene discussed in chapter two "New world order" benefits from the strongest scrutiny and offered this reader an observation that only one who tracks this global art scene could offer. This chapter highlights the idealistic desire to widen cultural horizons and the uncomfortable hypocrisy that can arise from that.
"What I have sketched out here is the idea that the much-trumpeted diversity of the globalized art world may conceal other, newer uniformities." (p49)
Stallabrass discusses contemporary art and makes some key observations about how artists address consumerism, mass production, and commodification in chapter three "Consuming culture".
"Yet generally in the 1990s consumerist spectacle - suitably spun for art-world-taste - prevailed over critical thinking about the interrelationship between production and consumption." (p69).
By the final chapter "Contradictions" one is left slightly wanting; but this is not a bad thing. This simply means there is more investigation required (and that this reader's appetite was whetted for more). Stallabrass reaches into some interesting conundrums for contemporary artists and their world but doesn't attempt to resolve them or predict the future.
"This situation is marked, however, by distinct tensions and contradictions. We have seen that art's uselessness - its main use - is being sullied by the particular needs of government and business. In a linked development, art's elitism is challenged by the attempt to widen its appeal: business values art for its exclusivity, while states are generally interested in the opposite, and wish to widen its ambit. Finally art's means of production, increasingly technological, have come into conflict with its archaic relations of production." (p126).
Stallabrass seems to think that contemporary art has been captured and diminished by state and capitalist globalist agendas and makes the case for artistic freedom.
"It is easy to see that the conditions for that freedom no longer exist in the art world: artists are snug in the market's lap; works are made to court the public; sufficient autonomy is maintained to identify art as art, but otherwise most styles and subject-matter are indulged in; success generally comes swiftly, or not at all." (p134/5)
What would extend this discussion would be to look into what makes this tense relationship between those with the money to fund art and those that create it today any different to the time of the Medici. Is it simply that the idealism and rhetoric in notions of globalisation (whether economic or artistic) really does not address the power relationships between those with the advantage and those without and what happens when that power imbalance is overlooked (and a colonising or homogenising effect occurs)? Is it that the wave of mass culture and production (in material and intangible) form is really going to put notions of exclusive and rarity to test in the art world, and if so, is that necessarily going to diminish or transform art (in Western terms)? If that is the case, is there reason to revisit ideas of the power (and freedom) to challenge (as art has in the past) and the value and potency of that?
Stallabrass' text highlights the cosiness (and attendant sacrifices of expression) and the dangers (tiredness and impotency) of too close an alignment with two of society's more powerful estates. This text is not exactly controversial in its criticism, but it is definitely thought-provoking in its insights and the issues its raises.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
A rather strange book that seems to assume that you know about contemporary art already
By Michael Huggins
Reading this book reminded me of a comment by C.S. Lewis, I believe, in "The Abolition of Man"--something to the effect of "What would you think if you sent your son to the dentist, and he came back with his cavities unfilled but his head stuffed full of the dentist's obiter dicta on the Baconian theory and bimetallism?"
It reminds me, as well, of an article I read some years ago about a college professor of American literature who was supposed to be teaching a course in Hawthorne and Melville but filled it so full of the professor's own views on Marxism that the students eventually referred to the course as "Ho-thorne and Mao-ville." They would certainly recognize the same tendency in the present work.
This book is, quite simply, mistitled. It is most certainly *not* a very short introduction to contemporary art. An introduction to contemporary art would have covered the following topics:
1. What is meant by the phrase "contemporary art"? Does it mean simply all art produced in the last 10 years, or does it have a specific meaning, as "modern art" does?
2. What are some typical themes (e.g., sexuality, alienation, the cruelty of war), motifs, and forms (e.g., photography, sculpture, "found art," performance, etc.) of contemporary art?
3. Who are the major artists working in contemporary art? What are their similarities and differences?
4. Who are the major writers on contemporary art, whether journalists, academics, or others? What are their areas of agreement or disagreement?
5. How has contemporary art been received by society at large, and what influence, if any, does contemporary art seem to wield in society?
6. Since this is a "very short introduction," what should you read next, to get more depth in this topic?
Topic 6 is never covered at all. Topic 1 is not made clear. Topics 2, 3, and 5 are addressed in chapter 1 and in passing throughout the book. Topic 4 is mentioned in the next-to-last chapter.
The closest thing to what I would have expected as a sort of introductory statement to the book's overall subject is this:
"It is a basic art-world orthodoxy, echoed just about everywhere, that contemporary art is ungraspably complex and diverse. The variety of contemporary forms, techniques, and subject-matter in art is indeed bewildering. The conventional media of painting, sculpture, and print-making have been overlaid with installation and `new media', which can encompass anything from online art to computer-controlled sound environments. Artists cultivate for themselves images that range from traditional guru or shaman roles to beady-eyed, tongue-in-cheek chancer and careerist, and personas that include starstruck adolescent girls and engorged, axe-wielding psychotics. Art's concerns are also various, touching upon feminism, identity politics, mass culture, shopping, and trauma. Perhaps art's fundamental condition is to be unknowable (that concepts embodied in visual form can encompass contradiction), or perhaps those that hold to this view are helping to conceal a different uniformity."
This is the book's nearest approach to an introductory statement. Do you know where it is actually found?
The next-to-last chapter. I'm not kidding.
We are also treated to sentences like this, on the next page after the passage I just cited:
"The wide influence of Greenberg's sweeping account of the development of modern art as a Hegelian progress towards formal abstraction helped stimulate Pop Art, its explicit refutation."
Umm, that's nice, especially if you have any idea who the heck Greenberg was (the reference is to Clement Greenberg, 1909-1994, an influential American art critic). As a general reader, I know only just enough to understand this reference, though I have not read Greenberg's "sweeping account," or anything else by him. In any case, educating the reader on such boring details is apparently not the author's true interest.
The book should have been titled "The Economics and Sociology of Art, Considered with Reference to the Relation of Contemporary Art to State and Corporate Power."
Now that is a long title, but it honestly describes the book. The author, a lecturer at a British art institute, has very strong views about some things, particularly capitalism and globalism. The book's basic thesis is as follows:
"No matter how radical and even shocking it may seem, art produced within the last 15 years has actually been coopted into political, economic, and social schemes that have little to do with art, per se. Governments value it because it seems to heal the social fractures caused by capitalism. Corporations value it because embracing and promoting art and artists seems to make the corporate sponsors visionary, instead of merely exploitative and profit-hungry. A few artists reap large rewards from this, as do art critics and exhibit curators, who, whatever their pretense to support spiritual and cultural enlightenment or the progress of humanity, actually construct a sort of periodic entertainment for a well-heeled set of glitterati who travel the world to biennial art shows, some of them held in cities where most of the inhabitants can't afford to attend; the glitterati are seen as part of an elegant and fashionable milieu, while the works they view are bid up into stratospheric price levels that only the wealthiest can afford."
A few other points are made, but I believe that if Julian Stallabrass, the author of the book, read this synopsis, he would agree that this expresses the core of what he wants to say in his book. He deplores capitalism and globalism, first, last, and always. He is probably too sophisticated to be a doctrinaire advocate of Marxism, which conspicuously failed to deliver the utopia it seemed to promise, but he is quite sure what he *doesn't* like and misses no opportunity to denigrate what he calls "neo-liberalism."
This is all very well and may be more true than not, but it does not amount to an introduction to contemporary art.
What would you think of a book entitled "A Very Short Introduction to Shakespearean Drama" which engaged in detailed and intense discussions of the Elizabethan discontent, the cruelty of the conquistadors, the adventures of Sir Francis Drake, Raleigh's failed expedition to find gold, the unmarried state of Queen Elizabeth I, Essex's attempted coup, the discovery of Bermuda, the bisexuality of King James I, cod fishing off Newfoundland, the poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, and God only knows what else--but all the while, MacBeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, Hamlet, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet were mentioned only in passing, and with an air that seemed to assume that of course you had read and assimilated these works already and that the author need not be so tiresome as to actually analyze them at any length--all in the service of the author's nearly obsessive thesis that Shakespeare's plays were the unwitting handmaid of colonial oppression of indigenous peoples?
If you had a book like that about Shakespearean drama, it would be analogous to this book. I get the impression that Cambridge University Press may well have asked this author for "A Very Short Introduction to Contemporary Art," but he wrote what he darn well felt like writing about and turned it in, and they couldn't persuade him to revise it.
Now in fact, the relation of the artist to wealth and power, as well as the way art reflects (or distracts) its contemporary public, are, indeed, provocative and worthwhile topics. After I had read only a few pages, I thought, "Correct or not, does this author believe that capitalism is a new and unique villain? That artists were never oppressed in the past, or at the mercy of wealthy patrons? What about Michelangelo and Julius II? What about Vermeer and his patrons? Does the author believe that meretricious appreciation of art never existed before our own day? What about the very interesting lecture I heard a few years ago to the effect that while Vermeer was painting scenes of cool tranquility, the actual Dutch society in which he lived was rent by bitter political differences, sometimes resulting in violence, as well as foreign invasion? Wouldn't an historical perspective be worthwhile?"
Sorry, folks. The author cares for none of this. Nothing has ever been as evil, corrupting, or oppressive as capitalism and globalism. Art has been coopted by them. Capitalism and globalism are evil. Art thinks it is free, but it is the "freedom" of a lapdog. Capitalism and globalism are evil. Art enlisted in the service of political engagement may, to be sure, result in its own follies, but one thing is sure: capitalism and globalism are evil.
And in case you haven't been paying attention, capitalism and globalism are evil.
The book is sort of interesting, but more as a guide to the state of the author's thinking than as a description of contemporary art as art. This is actually one of a series of several dozen "Very Short Introduction" books offered by the same publisher on such varied topics as history, philosophy, the classics, and so forth, but if they are all as disdainfully indifferent to their title and ostensible purpose as this offering, I might think twice about ordering any of them.
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Young artists beware!
By Yoav Weiss
This is an excellent little book! Not much of an introduction as it assumes quite a lot of previous knowledge of the field; but an eye-opening Marxist analysis of the mechanics and machinations of the art world and of its myriad connections with the larger economic and political structures within which it thrives or dies.
For example the paragraph that should be carved on the lintels of all art schools doors: "...the overall nature of the arts economy is generally disavowed by its participants, particularly artists, who overlook or deny their orientation toward financial reward. Artists are singularly ill-informed about their prospects for success, are prone to taking risks, are poor but come from wealthy backgrounds... and tend to subsidize their art-making out of other earnings. These features... cause the art world to be permanently over-crowded, making the poverty of artists a structural feature."
Stallabrass discusses how the multi-cultural fashion in the arts serves (apart from a few third-world artists) the ideological campaign of the Neo-Liberal economy and the multi-national corporations. He touches on how academe creates one kind of artist while the market creates another. Both types are adapted to their niches in the economic structure and neither enjoys the freedom artists are generally assumed to gain in exchange for their frustration and poverty.
A fascinating and eye-opening read.
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