ART 236 : Modern Art History

Sandler discusses the major and minor artists and their works; movements, ideas, attitudes, and styles; and the social and cultural context of the period. He covers post-modernist art theory, the art market, and consumer society. American and European art and artists are included.

In The End of Art, Donald Kuspit argues that art is over because it has lost its aesthetic import. Art has been replaced by 'postart', a term invented by Alan Kaprow, as a new visual category that elevates the banal over the enigmatic, the scatological over the sacred, cleverness over creativity. Tracing the demise of aesthetic experience to the works and theory of Marcel Duchamp and Barnett Newman, Kuspit argues that devaluation is inseparable from the entropic character of modern art, and that anti-aesthetic postmodern art is its final state.

For better or worse, modernism and postmodernism are now the two most comprehensive and influential terms applied to twentieth-century culture. The Postmodern Arts begins by establishing definitions of both words, while also demonstrating the inconsistencies and contradictions which are inherent within them. As with all books in the Critical Readers in Theory and Practice series, the volume is divided into two halves: the first, a comprehensive and thorough introduction by the editor, offering a schematic survey of the major themes and positions taken in the debates around modernism and postmodernism.

Written by a well-known multimedia artist, this cross-disciplinary survey examines the impact of today's high-level computer and video technologies upon contemporary art. It draws connections between the production, dissemination, value and creation of art-past and present-serving as a frame-of-reference for the future.