At the turn of the millennium, art is beginning to reflect the diversity of humanity's dreams and realities at a most dynamic time in human history. This volume is a virtual gallery, a trawl through the art world, with an A-Z of the biggest names, the rising stars and the new kids on the block.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Art at the Turn of the Millennium is a mega-exhibition--a Documenta or Venice Biennale in book form. There are 137 artists on view here in 1,200 illustrations, a nearly dizzying array of work chosen by a team of seven experts on contemporary art. Each artist gets four pages within which readers will find high-quality color illustrations, a concise commentary about the art maker, and a one- or two-sentence artist's statement. An amusing and helpful glossary, full of tricky terms from the contemporary art world like "body art," "gender surfing," and "structuralism," is thoughtfully placed at the end of the book. Arranged alphabetically, the book functions as an artifact of this particular moment in time--the very late 20th century. In its scope it identifies the transcontinental nature of the art world today. And by selecting artists who are still hard at work, Art at the Turn of the Millennium hopes to indicate some of the discipline's future directions.
Since the book functions like a dictionary of contemporary art, it is impossible to give a representative list of the artists in it. However, a ruffle of the pages turns up Tony Oursler, an L.A. artist whose video installations feature passionately articulate faces projected onto various head-shaped objects. Italian artist Pipilotti Rist makes hilarious and charming video work that is something like metamusic video. Two German photographers are included, Andreas Gursky, eminently capable of capturing the bigness of the world today, and Thomas Demand, who subjects photography to a rigorous reality check by constructing alarmingly realistic miniature sets, often architectural, which he then photographs. This is a smart and fun book that will endure on the shelves and in the hands of art enthusiasts for years to come. --Loren E. Baldwin
From Library Journal
A number of recent books have attempted to sum up the contemporary art scene, but none has been as successful as Taschen's latest. As with most such efforts, the emphasis here is on individual artists rather than themes or schools. Quibbles aside, the selection of artists is particularly good, but most of all the boundaries for inclusion were wisely set. Entry was open to those artists who have made their most significant impact in the 1980s and 1990s but limited to those who have exhibited and been written about in Europe and North America. Thus, the compilers have avoided both the perils of being taken in by who is trendy this season and of attempting a kind of superficial multiculturalism, selecting representative artists from unrelated traditions. More than 135 individuals and collectives are each given four pages. Biographical data, select exhibition and publication histories, and 250-word critical career summaries accompany six to 12 photos of single pieces and installation views on each pair of spreads. The clear and concise content, handsomely designed and packaged within sturdy "flexi-bound" covers, makes for a survey that will serve especially small and medium public libraries for years to come.AEric Bryant, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An overview(mostly images)of art & artists of the 80's/90's,
By A Customer
This review is from: Art at the Turn of the Millennium (Paperback)
This book is a great reference to the art & artists of the 80's and 90's. More picture book than words, which is often more relevant than explaining what one is looking at. This book pretty much covers those artists that we've read about in the last twenty years, and now provides you with a reference to them. There are a few commentaries and statements, and will give you an idea of where art is, or possibly headed. I can recommend this as a very good looking and nice addition to ones art book library!
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Imaginary Exhibition Catalogue,
By kitkatb (Tel-Aviv, Israel) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Art at the Turn of the Millennium (Paperback)
As the title of my review suggests, the book is composed in a form of an imaginary exhibition catalogue, where the artists are featured in an alphabetical order. The book features the most recent art of the 80's and 90's up to the year 2000, and artsits active during the last 20 years, alongside artists who became known on the international arena only a year before the book was released. The "content" of the book, or the works featured in it, are a matter of taste, of course. I found them to be unindependant mostly ("been there..." was my reaction to many of them). Nevertheless, I find the book to be a very interesting and inclusive document of the art of our days. It is important to emphasize the book does not include art critisizm, or what we call art history - in the sense that it doesn't examine every art work nor does it attempt to explain it iconographically. Instead the book gives short professional biographies of the artists featured, and references to further bibliography, that's why I still find it safe to say the book is informative. In conclusion, if there was a different rating to the content of the book as opposed to it's composition, I would rate the first 4 stars as I did, but for the second criterion I would definitely give the whole 5!
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An essential book,
By A Customer
This review is from: Art at the Turn of the Millennium (Paperback)
"Art at the Turn of the Millennium" is an essential book for browsing the work of the best artists of recent decades. The book provides an indispensable taster of many contemporary artists with large color pictures and succinct text. Certainly many great contemporary artists are missing (such as the still active significant "architectural artists" as Siah Armajani and Alice Aycock). However, no book can do justice to all major artists in the current wide contemporary field, and in light of the outstanding collection, any omissions are forgiven. (Indeed many of the work are 3d or video, as reflects the art climate of the last fifteen years. Nevertheless, most revered and noteworthy art in recent years has been 3d artwork and/or video.) An updated version of this book, "Art Now", by the same editors also is also obligatory reading for contemporary art lovers.
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