The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Paperback, New edition)

An exploration of transformations in the nature of the art object and artistic authorship in the last four decades. In this book, Martha Buskirk addresses the interesting fact that since the early 1960s, almost anything can and has been called art. Among other practices, contemporary artists have employed mass-produced elements, impermanent materials, and appropriated imagery, have incorporated performance and video, and have created works through instructions carried out by others. Furthermore, works of art that lack traditional signs of authenticity or permanence have been embraced by institutions long devoted to the original and the permanent. Buskirk begins with questions of authorship raised by minimalists' use of industrial materials and methods, including competing claims of ownership and artistic authorship evident in conflicts over the right to fabricate artists' works. Examining recent examples of appropriation, she finds precedents in pop art and the early twentieth-century readymade and explores the intersection of contemporary artistic copying and the system of copyrights, trademarks, and brand names characteristic of other forms of commodity production. She also investigates the ways that connections between work and context have transformed art and institutional conventions, the impact of new materials on definitions of medium, the role of the document as both primary and secondary object, and the significance of conceptually oriented performance work for the intersection of photography and the human body in contemporary art. Buskirk explores how artists active in the 1980s and 1990s have recombined strategies of the art of the 1960s and 1970s. She also shows how the mechanisms through which art is presented shape not only readings of the work but the work itself. She uses her discussion of the readymade and conceptual art to explore broader issues of authorship, reproduction, context, and temporality.

General

Imprint:	MIT Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	The MIT Press
Release date:	February 2005
First published:	2005
Authors:	Martha Buskirk
Dimensions:	229 x 203 x 16mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	318
Edition:	New edition
ISBN-13:	978-0-262-52442-1
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > The arts: general issues > General Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > From 1900 > General
LSN:	0-262-52442-2
Barcode:	9780262524421

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