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As public interest in modern art continues to grow, as witnessed by the spectacular success of Tate Modern and the Bilbao Guggenheim, there is a real need for a book that will engage general readers, offering them not only information and ideas about modern art, but also explaining its contemporary relevance and history. This book achieves all this and focuses on interrogating the idea of 'modern' art by asking such questions as: What has made a work of art qualify as modern (or fail to)? How has this selection been made? What is the relationship between modern and contemporary art? Is 'postmodernist' art no longer modern, or just no longer modernist - in either case, why, and what does this claim mean, both for art and the idea of 'the modern'? Cottington examines many key aspects of this subject, including the issue of controversy in modern art, from Manet's Dejeuner sur L'Herbe (1863) to Picasso's Les Demoiselles, and Tracey Emin's Bed, (1999); and the role of the dealer from the main Cubist art dealer Kahnweiler to Charles Saatchi.
[...]... had to, after all, as I shall argue later Modern Art self-conscious transgressions of prevailing assumptions of what was aesthetically, morally, or politically acceptable were at the same time a guarantor of the individualism that was fundamental to modern Western ideology In their different ways, artists such as Van Gogh, Picasso, and, later, Jackson Pollock enacted the individualism that all aspired... members at that time – who borrowed its implications of advanced status, of being ‘ahead of the game’, from an original military usage that had already been broadened into political discourse – as a means of compensating themselves for the social and cultural marginalization that they were experiencing Shut out of the mainstream and its material rewards, many selfstyled avant-garde artists also channelled... often appealed, and the ‘difficulty’ of the images and objects they made – the resistance of an abstract painting by Mondrian, say, or a minimalist object by Morris to any easy interpretation; their refusal to offer any obvious ‘meaning’ – carried inescapable associations of a cultural elitism that fatally undercut any claims to populism the artists themselves might have mounted It is true that much avant-gardist... the 30 years from 1900 that saw revolutions in the technologies of the design and 10 Perhaps, though, I should say ‘reassimilated’ Because, as I noted, modern art’ began partly as a reaction against that very collapse of art’s values into spectacle and commerce that characterized 19thcentury academicism Perhaps the founding moment of modern art was the 1863 Salon des Refusés in Paris, when a selection... impersonal techniques of advertisement billboards and packaging; to the blatantly challenging, such as Duchamp’s nomination of a urinal (and, more recently and exotically, Hirst’s nomination of a dead shark) as a work of art (Figure 1) And this questioning has posed an affront to established values, unerringly alienating that ‘everyone’ in whose name it was, purportedly, undertaken Indeed, in the case... painstakingly systematic brushwork – and its more than a hint of caricature – marked it off from the work of the older impressionists The painting thus declared itself, and was taken as, the ‘manifesto’ of a new approach to art, one that sat astride two of the paradoxes I outlined earlier For it was both a clear return to traditional values in painting that both Salon artists’ anecdotalism and the informalities... well as aesthetically radical, and socially rebellious And they shaped his or her art into a weapon for critiquing the dominant visual codes of modern capitalist society So that by the mid-1980s, critic and art historian Benjamin Buchloh could define, and celebrate, avant-garde artmaking as: a continually renewed struggle over the definition of cultural meaning, the discovery and representation of new audiences,... 11 Introduction production of consumer goods, and in the means of creation of demand for them, avant-garde art remained on the cultural margins; its unorthodoxies remained beyond the pale of mainstream taste This too was soon to change, however The social base of modern art began to broaden at about the same time as its cultural headquarters moved across the Atlantic, from Paris to New York, in a development... that has characterized the avant-gardism of modern artists (and has fuelled the explicitly oppositional politics of many) But it has also placed them, and the art they have produced, in a triple paradox First, because the starting point for many of these explorations has been a questioning of the materials, conventions, and skills of art practice itself This questioning has been conducted via a range... character has excluded one half of that society from its own ranks As art historian Carol Duncan observed 30 years ago, the behaviour, art practices, and creations of early 20th-century vanguard artists were grounded in a widespread culture of masculinism: from the prevalence of the female nude as subject in painting and sculpture, via the socially regressive sexual relations that typified a ‘bohemian’ . RIGHTS David DeGrazia ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn ARCHITECTURE Andrew Ballantyne ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes ART HISTORY Dana Arnold ART THEORY Cynthia Freeland THE. now: ANARCHISM Colin Ward ANCIENT EGYPT Ian Shaw ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas ANCIENT WARFARE Harry Sidebottom THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair ANIMAL RIGHTS David