Description
Book SynopsisThe book was awarded The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize in 2010. Art continues to bemuse and confuse many people today. Yet, its critical analyses are saturated with daunting analyses of contemporary art’s exhaustion, its predictability or its absorption into global commercial culture. In this book, the author seeks to clarify this apprehensive perception of art. He argues it is a consequence not only of confounding art-works, but also of the paradoxical impetus of a culture of modernity. By positively reassessing the perplexing or apprehensive features of cultural modernity as well as of aesthetic inquiry, this book redefines the ambitions of art in the wake of this legacy. In the process, it challenges many familiar approaches to art inquiry in order to offer a new understanding of the aesthetic, social and cultural aspirations of art in our time.
Table of ContentsContents: The Perplexity of a Culture of Modernity – Wondrous Objectivity: art history, Freud and detection – Duchamp: creativity is a form of onanism – The medium of modernism - Love, identification and confrontation within modernity – Confrontation and Legacies: Gerhard Richter’s barbed portrait – Illegible echoes - Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the artist-spy.
