The global art compass :

Title:

The global art compass : new directions in 21st-century art / Alistair Hicks.

Personal Author:

Hicks, Alistair,

Call Number:

709.05 H6311

ISBN:

9780500239193

Physical Description:

224 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 24 cm

Summary:

In the past, writers and critics such as Goethe, Ruskin, and Clement Greenberg perpetuated particular ideas about art and even dictated these ideas to the artists themselves. Today, artists no longer have to follow one prevailing theory and the art world is less centralized in particular cities: New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Beijing all offer rich environments to artists but none are designated as the exclusive center of the art world. In this book, Alistair Hicks demonstrates his belief that no single curator, critic, or dealer should monopolize our view of what is happening in the art world today, but that by listening to the artists themselves, we can gradually make out an ever-evolving web of patterns, relationships, and themes. Organized by continent and including extracts from interviews with artists from around the world, the book offers a fresh view of the contemporary art world through artists from France, Albania, Slovakia, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, The United States, China, India, and beyond. The range of artists whose work is explored includes Laure Prouvost, Anri Sala, Roman Ondák, Gabriel Orozco, Sandra Gamarra, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Nandan Ghiya, among many others.

Subject Term:

Art, Modern -- 21st century.

Publication:

New York, NY : Thames & Hudson, 2014.

Format:

Books

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Summary

In the past, writers and critics from Goethe to Clement Greenberg perpetuated particular ideas about art and even dictated them to artists. Since then, however, the artists have rebelled. They no longer have to follow one prevailing theory or head for any particular city. New York, London, Paris, Berlin and Beijing are all great places to make art, and none today has a stranglehold on creation.

The Global Art Compass demonstrates the author's belief that no single curator, critic or dealer can or should monopolize our view of what is happening in the art world today. Instead, he shows us how exciting and rewarding it is to navigate our own way through the art world by listening to the artists themselves.

Including extracts from interviews with artists as diverse as Laure Prouvost (France), Anri Sala (Albania), Gabriel Orozco (Mexico), Sandra Gamarra (Peru), Cai Guo-Qiang (China) and Nandan Ghiya (India), among many others, The Global Art Compass is a manifesto for how we might all discover our own inner art compass to help steer us towards the art that we find most meaningful and engaging.

The results show that the preoccupations of artists in the twenty-first century are largely universal: that ever-faster communications are balanced by a resistance to globalization; that while art is seen by many as a commodity, it also has the power to be a regenerative tool; and that, despite an increasing confidence in an ever-growing range of media, artists are often searching for simple stories that will reach out to bigger audiences and change their lives for the better.

Author Notes

Alistair Hicks is Senior Curator at Deutsche Bank, where he advises on how to add to the company's worldwide collection of 60,000 works of art. He is also a reviewer of art for The Times and Financial Times newspapers and for the Spectator and Vogue magazines, among others. Hicks is the author of New British Art in the Saatchi Collection (1989), The School of London: The Resurgence of Contemporary Painting (1989) and Art Works: British and German Contemporary Art, 1960-2000 (2001).

Reviews (1)

Library Journal Review

A hundred years ago Western artists were taking inspiration from the traditional arts of non-Western peoples, resulting in the transformation of modern art away from the Renaissance ideals of naturalism. More than ten years into the new millennium, such crosscurrents in the art world are flowing in every direction around the planet. Hicks, a collector, curator, and consultant for a major corporate collection, provides his views of developments in the contemporary art scene in a series of essays organized geographically by continent. Some include extracts from interviews with artists from such diverse locales as Peru, Albania, and India; also included are a number of color photographs of art objects the author finds particularly meaningful in representing trends in that region. As with any such book by an art critic or curator, the reader is getting one person's opinions, rather than a scholarly analysis. VERDICT Anyone seeking an overview of many current trends in the art world will be stimulated by this book.-Eugene C. Burt, Seattle (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.