Investigating Modern Art

Modern art sometimes seems difficult - or even impossible - to understand. In this appealing book, modern art becomes accessible through clear and informative discussions about modern artists, art movements, and art works. Charting the development of modern art from the nineteenth century through the present day, each chapter focuses on particular artists and works of art, placing them in their artistic contexts and discussing them from a variety of viewpoints. Issues of gender and ethnicity, criticisms of the accepted canon of modern art, and important social and political influences on the institutions of art are woven into the discussion of key artists such as Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, and Warhol and movements such as Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Impressionism, and Minimal Art.

Today the Museum of Modern Art is widely recognized for establishing the canon of modern art; yet in its early years, the museum considered modern art part of a still unfolding experiment in contemporary visual production. By bracketing MoMA's early history from its later reputation, this book explores the ways the Museum acted as a laboratory to set an ambitious agenda for the exhibition of a multidisciplinary idea of modern art. Between its founding in 1929 and its 20th anniversary in 1949, MoMA created the first museum departments of architecture and design, film, and photography in the country, marshaled modern art as a political tool, and brought consumer culture into a versatile yet institutional context. Encompassing 14 essays that investigate the diversity of modern art, this volume demonstrates how MoMA's programming shaped a version of modern art that was not elitist but fundamentally intertwined with all levels of cultural production.

Through an investigation of the history of modern art, the contemporary relevance of this pivotal artistic movement is explained. Concise and accessible, Modern Art: A Very Short Introduction interrogates the ideas of modern art. It questions the notions of what qualifies as 'modern', and explores the ways in which modern art relates to contemporary and postmodern movements. Provocative and engaging, Modern Art: A Very Short Introduction is an ideal guide for gallery goers, students, and all those either interested in, or confused by, the idea of modern art.

Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.

Revised and restructured, this second edition of Modern Art traces the historical and contemporary contexts for understanding modern art movements, and the theories that influenced and attempted to explain them. Its radical approach foregoes the chronological approach to art movements in favour of looking at the ways in which art has been understood. The editors investigate the main developments in art interpretation and draw examples from a wide range of genres including painting, sculpture, photography, installation and performance art. This second edition has been fully updated to include many more examples of recent art practice, as well as an expanded glossary and comprehensive marginal notes providing definitions of key terms. Extensively illustrated with a wide range of visual examples, Modern Art is the essential textbook for students of art history.

In the world of law enforcement art and antiquity crime has in the past usually assumed a place of low interest and priority. That situation has now slowly begun to change on both the local and international level as criminals, encouraged in part by the record sums now being paid for art treasures, are now seeking to exploit the art market more systematically by means of theft, fraud and looting. In this collection academics and practitioners from Australasia, Europe and North America combine to examine the challenges presented to the criminal justice system by these developments. Best practice methods of detecting, investigating, prosecuting and preventing such crimes are explored. This book will be of interest and use to academics and practitioners alike in the areas of law, crime and justice.