Igor Zabel (1958–2005) was a Slovenian curator, writer, and cultural theorist. This important translation of his writings will enrich the international critical field through Zabel's extraordinary analytical and emphatic thinking and writing.As well as texts dealing with international issues, his writings can serve as a methodology model for research into Eastern European art practices, which often share common stand points and problems.The selected texts are divided into four chapters: East-West and Between (dialogue and perception of the Other in the context of the complex relations established after the fall of the Wall in 1989), Strategies and Spaces of Art (strategies of representation and theories of display, the role of the curator, and the new understanding of the white cube), Ad Personam (individual artists and art from Socialist Realism and conceptualism to postmodernism and contextual art, particularly in Slovenia and South-Eastern Europe), and Extras (selected columns on arts and culture).

Updated and reorganized to offer the best collection of state-of-the-art readings on the role of critical theory in contemporary art, this second edition of Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985 brings together scholarly essays, artists’ statements, and art reproductions to capture the vibrancy and dissonance that define today’s art scene. Incorporates new and updated topics that have become central to art theory and practice over the past decade New and updated chapters cover such topics as: international biennials, historicizing of the term “contemporary art”, aesthetics, art and politics, feminism and pornography, ecology and art, the Middle East and conflict studies, Eastern European art and politics, gender and war, and technology Features a thematic reconfiguration of sections and new introductions to make readings user–friendly Extensively illustrated throughout with an expanded color-plate section New contributions to this edition include those by Alexander Alberro, Claire Bishop, T.J. Demos, Anthony Downey, Liam Gillick, Marina Gr?iniæ, Mary Kelly, Chantal Mouffe, Beatriz Preciado, Jacques Ranciere, Blake Stimson, and Chin-Tao Wu.

Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy makers and creative entrepreneurs. Building on the legacy of events that conjoin art, critical theory and counterculture, from Nova Convention to documenta X, the new biennial blends the modalities of protest with a neoliberal politics of creativity. This book examines a strained period for these high art institutions, a period when their politics are brought into question and often boycotted in the context of austerity, crisis and the rise of Occupy cultures. Using the 3rd Athens Biennale and the 7th Berlin Biennale as its main case studies, it looks at how the in-built tensions between the domains of art and politics take shape when spectacular displays attempt to operate as immediate activist sites. Drawing on ethnographic research and contemporary cultural theory, this book argues that biennials both denunciate the aesthetic as bourgeois category and simultaneously replicate and diffuse an exclusive sociability across social landscapes.

In recent years, many prominent and successful artists have claimed that their primary concern is not the artwork they produce but the artistic process itself. In this volume, Kim Grant analyzes this idea and traces its historical roots, showing how changing concepts of artistic process have played a dominant role in the development of modern and contemporary art. This astute account of the ways in which process has been understood and addressed examines canonical artists such as Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, and De Kooning, as well as philosophers and art theorists such as Henri Focillon, R. G. Collingwood, and John Dewey. Placing “process art” within a larger historical context, Grant looks at the changing relations of the artist’s labor to traditional craftsmanship and industrial production, the status of art as a commodity, the increasing importance of the body and materiality in art making, and the nature and significance of the artist’s role in modern society. In doing so, she shows how process is an intrinsic part of aesthetic theory that connects to important contemporary debates about work, craft, and labor. Comprehensive and insightful, this synthetic study of process in modern and contemporary art reveals how artists’ explicit engagement with the concept fits into a broader narrative of the significance of art in the industrial and postindustrial world.

A new reading of the philosophy of contemporary art by the author of The Politics of Time Contemporary art is the object of inflated and widely divergent claims. But what kind of discourse can open it up effectively to critical analysis? Anywhere or Not at All is a major philosophical intervention in art theory that challenges the terms of established positions through a new approach at once philosophical, historical, social and art-critical. Developing the position that “contemporary art is postconceptual art,” the book progresses through a dual series of conceptual constructions and interpretations of particular works to assess the art from a number of perspectives: contemporaneity and its global context; art against aesthetic; the Romantic pre-history of conceptual art; the multiplicity of modernisms; transcategoriality; conceptual abstraction; photographic ontology; digitalization; and the institutional and existential complexities of art-space and art-time. Anywhere or Not at All maps out the conceptual space for an art that is both critical and contemporary in the era of global capitalism. Winner of the 2014 Annual Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (USA)

Enth. u. a.: S. 74: Concrete art (1936-49) / Max Bill. - S. 74-77: The mathematical approach in contemporary art (1949) / Max Bill. - S. 301-304: Dieter Roth.

This glossary is a guide to the language of current theory and criticism of visual arts and culture. It includes over 400 terms or phrases that have recently entered discourse on the visual arts. Since the early 1970s, the vocabulary used to discuss the visual arts has expanded radically, leaving many teachers, students, artists, and critics without a clear understanding of the terms employed in cultural discussions and debate. Terms can be accessed alphabetically or thematically, and the significant cross referencing makes this an easy dictionary to use.

"In this compilation of essays Camiel van Winkel uncovers the conceptual roots of contemporary art. He shows that the art of today as a whole is essentially 'post-conceptual'. The production and reception of art are determined by circumstances and factors that conceptual artists in the years 1965-75 were the first to announce: the cultural dominance of information, the professionalization of artistic practices, and the applicability of the criteria of 'good design'. This post-conceptual perspective offers a new and revealing insight into the systematics of contemporary art and artisthood, in particular with regard to the relationship between conceptual and visual aspects, the meaning of theoretical discourse, and the role of institutions and mediators"--P. [4] of cover.

The Companion provides an accessible critical survey of Western visual art theory from sources in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance thought through to contemporary writings.