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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wise, thoughtful, stimulating treatise on 'Whither Art',
By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: Art Tomorrow (Paperback)
Edward Lucie-Smith continues to plumb the fields of the visual arts with excellent research, a seemingly endless library of images, candor, welcome opinion, and in short, provides insights into a field that at times defies verbal description. He is an adept art historian (probably the most informed of all the writers creating art books today), a fine writer and is able to suffuse all of his commentary with wit and spice. Lucie-Smith makes it clear from the first page that this book is meant to address only art of the 21st Century by limiting his examples and references to the visual arts since 1990 to the present. Naturally he is not writing in a vacuum: he generously addresses Modernism, the movement that began the 20th century as a revolt against academian representational, figurative story art. He develops his line of thinking with superb observations and examples of how ( with the eventual obliteration of observed subject matter in the form of expressionsim, abstract expressionism, and finally minimalism ) artists traveled across this bridge of destruction to once again depict the, yes, 'human condition'. He divides this marvelously illustrated book into sections on the influence and roles of museums and public places art, on the vastly important (surprise) heritage of Pop Art on the development of intensely personal agendas of the artists, a re-evaluation of re-examining the past (art history) and appropriating art's foundations to suit the new tools of video, site specific art, art created to shock, photography, three dimensional installation art, environmental art, feminisim and gay art, and a return to painting the figure no matter how distorted or altered. He also takes the time to view the influence of globalization on how all art is made: excellent pages about African, Australian Aboriginal, African Americam, Asian, Indian, and art from the new Russia and eastern European countries abound with superb, highly informative illustrations and commentary. Reading this book - and I do mean READING which in the case of massively sized, color-pregnant art tomes is unusual given the fact that these coffee table books are used more for browsing than learning - is like attending a full museum-curated exhibition on the present state of art. The advantage is that no musuem could be as inclusive of all the types of art herein represented. No matter how seasoned the reader, this superb book will enlighten, inform, and impress. There is so much to be absorbed here that this is a book that should become a staple in the libraires of all those who are committed to keeping abreast of the visual arts in the 21st Century. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED! Kudos, once again, to Edward Lucie-Smith and to TERRAIL Books.
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