Customer Reviews

Participation (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)

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This edited collection of short readings is part of a series jointly published by Whitechapel gallery and MIT press. They are all based around topical themes in modern and contemporary art: participation, the archive, utopia, appropriation and so forth. This one on participation is not very well structured, the selected texts are often very abbreviated, and the logic of the selection is hard to follow.

For anyone seriously interested in the topic of participation in art this book will disappoint. A better book would be Grant Kester's Conversation Pieces or the recent exhibition catalogue (The Art of Participation 1950 to Now), or Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. If you don't know anything at all about participation in art and want a few pointers on the topic, it's OK but not great.

Having bought this one and flicked through others in the series in bookshops I wouldn't buy another one.
I can't work out who the publishers are aiming at in terms of audience, maybe undergraduates?

Until I read this book I could not give myself permission to have my own ideas about some of the world's greatest art pieces and give my educated opinion about them. Umberto Eco's 1st essay is a wonder!

This book arrived on time. The book was new as described by seller and had a good price.