Description
Book SynopsisIn Art to Come Terry Smith-who is widely recognized as one of the world's leading historians and theorists of contemporary art-traces the emergence of contemporary art and further develops his concept of contemporaneity. Smith shows that embracing contemporaneity as both a historical concept and a condition of the globalized world allows us to grasp how contemporary art exists in a fluid space of increasing interdependencies, multiple contemporaneous modernities, and persistent inequalities. Throughout these essays, Smith offers systematic proposals for writing contemporary art's histories while assessing how curators, critics, philosophers, artists, and art historians are currently doing so. Among other topics, Smith examines the intersection of architecture with other visual arts, Chinese art since the Cultural Revolution, how philosophers are theorizing concepts associated with the contemporary, Australian Indigenous art, and the current state of art history. Art to Come will be essential reading for artists, art students, curators, gallery workers, historians, critics, and theorists.
Trade Review"Smith, who sees linearity as an ‘old-fashioned’ way of thinking about time, kicks up the silt of art history to present us with a historiography of contemporaneity. . . . To that end, he takes us through ‘contemporary’ buzzwords and ways of thinking about issues like globalisation, the Anthropocene, decolonisation, indigenisation, revived fundamentalisms and ecoactivism, to ask how we might harmonise our differences in a way that ‘ensures our mutual survival’ on this planet." -- Fi Churchman * Art Review *
"In bringing this collection of essays together, Smith gives readers the opportunity to chart his progress as he repeatedly surveys the contemporary terrain. These field reports from a highly engaged observer provide compelling reading for anyone concerned with art practices of the past three decades." -- Martha Buskirk * Critical Inquiry *
"At once retrospective and anticipatory, Smith’s description of his intent with
Art to Come suggests that the book is as much for himself and ‘those to come’ as it is for art historians and other observers of contemporary art working today (24). For Smith, contemporary art history is historiography. By writing contemporary art history as personal historiography, Smith models for his readers—present and future—an ethics as much as a methodology for the study of the visual culture today." -- Elizabeth Mansfield * Journal of Art Historiography *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Anticipation and Historicity 1
Part I. Thinking Contemporary Art
1. Contemporary Art, Contemporaneity, and Art to Come 27
2. In a Nutshell: Art within Contemporary Conditions 54
3. Contemporary Architecture: Spectacle, Crisis, Aftermath 64
4. Concurrence: Art, Design, Architecture 101
5. Background Story, Global Foreground: Chinese Contemporary Art 126
6. Country, Indigeneity, Sovereignty: Aboriginal Australian Art 156
7. Placemaking, Displacement, Worlds-within-Worlds 198
8. Picturing Planetarity: Arts of Multiverse 228
Part II. Art Historiography: Conjectures and Refutations
9. The State of Art History: Contemporary Art 245
10. Theorizing the Contemporary and the Postcontemporary 279
11. Writing Histories of Contemporary Art: The Situation Now 311
Conclusion: Concurrence in Contemporary World Picturing 353
Notes 365
Index 417
