Overview

""Art history after modernism"" does not only mean that art looks different today; it also means that our discourse on art has taken a different direction, if it is safe to say it has taken a direction at all. So begins Hans Belting's brilliant, iconoclastic reconsideration of art and art history at the end of the millennium, which builds upon his earlier and highly successful volume, The End of the History of Art?. ""Known for his striking and original theories about the nature of art,"" according to the Economist, Belting here examines how art is made, viewed, and interpreted today. Arguing that contemporary art has burst out of the frame that art history had built for it, Belting calls for an entirely new approach to thinking and writing about art. He moves effortlessly between contemporary issues—the rise of global and minority art and its consequences for Western art history, installation and video art, and the troubled institution of the art museum—and questions central to art history's definition of itself, such as the distinction between high and low culture, art criticism versus art history, and the invention of modernism in art history. Forty-eight black and white images illustrate the text, perfectly reflecting the state of contemporary art. With Art History after Modernism, Belting retains his place as one of the most original thinkers working in the visual arts today.

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9780226041841

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Reviews

The value of the book lies in the way in which it shows a great art historian grappling on our behalf with the question of what it means to practice art history in an art world in which so much that was taken for granted, even in the era of Modernism, has crumpled under pressures that no one could have anticipated. It is rare to find an individual possessed of Professor Belting's profound scholarship exhibiting such cosmopolitan openness and curiosity to new media, new strategies of exhibition, new ways of thinking about and responding to art, new ways of understanding the relationship between art criticism and art history, when it would have been so easy to turn one's back on the chaos . . . Arthur Danto, Art Newspaper--Arthur Danto Art Newspaper The value of the book lies in the way in which it shows a great art historian grappling on our behalf with the question of what it means to practice art history in an art world in which so much that was taken for granted, even in the era of Modernism, has crumpled under pressures that no one could have anticipated. It is rare to find an individual possessed of Professor Belting s profound scholarship exhibiting such cosmopolitan openness and curiosity to new media, new strategies of exhibition, new ways of thinking about and responding to art, new ways of understanding the relationship between art criticism and art history, when it would have been so easy to turn one s back on the chaos . . . Arthur Danto, Art Newspaper--Arthur Danto Art Newspaper

The value of the book lies in the way in which it shows a great art historian grappling on our behalf with the question of what it means to practice art history in an art world in which so much that was taken for granted, even in the era of Modernism, has crumpled under pressures that no one could have anticipated. It is rare to find an individual possessed of Professor Belting's profound scholarship exhibiting such cosmopolitan openness and curiosity to new media, new strategies of exhibition, new ways of thinking about and responding to art, new ways of understanding the relationship between art criticism and art history, when it would have been so easy to turn one's back on the chaos . . . Arthur Danto, Art Newspaper -- Arthur Danto Art Newspaper

The value of the book lies in the way in which it shows a great art historian grappling on our behalf with the question of what it means to practice art history in an art world in which so much that was taken for granted, even in the era of Modernism, has crumpled under pressures that no one could have anticipated. It is rare to find an individual possessed of Professor Belting's profound scholarship exhibiting such cosmopolitan openness and curiosity to new media, new strategies of exhibition, new ways of thinking about and responding to art, new ways of understanding the relationship between art criticism and art history, when it would have been so easy to turn one's back on the chaos . . . Arthur Danto, Art Newspaper--Arthur Danto Art Newspaper

The value of the book lies in the way in which it shows a great art historian grappling on our behalf with the question of what it means to practice art history in an art world in which so much that was taken for granted, even in the era of Modernism, has crumpled under pressures that no one could have anticipated. It is rare to find an individual possessed of Professor Belting's profound scholarship exhibiting such cosmopolitan openness and curiosity to new media, new strategies of exhibition, new ways of thinking about and responding to art, new ways of understanding the relationship between art criticism and art history, when it would have been so easy to turn one's back on the chaos . . . Arthur Danto, Art Newspaper--Arthur Danto Art Newspaper

"""The value of the book lies in the way in which it shows a great art historian grappling on our behalf with the question of what it means to practice art history in an art world in which so much that was taken for granted, even in the era of Modernism, has crumpled under pressures that no one could have anticipated. It is rare to find an individual possessed of Professor Belting's profound scholarship exhibiting such cosmopolitan openness and curiosity to new media, new strategies of exhibition, new ways of thinking about and responding to art, new ways of understanding the relationship between art criticism and art history, when it would have been so easy to turn one's back on the chaos . . .""Arthur Danto, Art Newspaper--Arthur Danto ""Art Newspaper"""

Author Information

Hans Belting is the Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History at Northwestern University. He is the author of a number of books, including The End of the History of Art?, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, and The Invisible Masterpiece, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

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