Description
Book SynopsisThe landscape of contemporary art has changed dramatically during the last hundred years. We have seen a painting of a single black square on a white ground, Kazimir Malevich''s Black Square (1915), and a hand-signed porcelain urinal, Marcel Duchamp''s Fountain (1917). Mid-century brought us the Abstract Expressionist drip paintings of
Jackson Pollock. In Piero Manzoni''s Artist''s Shit (1961), we got a series of 90 sealed tin cans purportedly containing Manzoni''s own excrement. A decade later, with Chris Burden''s Shoot (1971), we saw a performance in which the artist was voluntarily shot in the arm with a rifle. More recently, Damien Hirst exhibited a shark floating in a glass tank of formaldehyde and fellow British artist Tracey Emin-in her autobiographical installation The History of Painting (1999)-displayed, among other items, her own used tampons.
It is no wonder, then, that the art-viewing public is perplexed. What''s going on here? Do today''s renowned artists-l
