An Apprehensive Aesthetic: The Legacy of Modernist Culture: The Legacy of Modernist Culture

ISBN-13: 9783039117208 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 294 str.

Andrew McNamara

Opis

The book was awarded The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize in 2010.
Art continues to bemuse and confuse many people today. Yet, its critical analyses are saturated with daunting analyses of contemporary art s exhaustion, its predictability or its absorption into global commercial culture. In this book, the author seeks to clarify this apprehensive perception of art. He argues it is a consequence not only of confounding art-works, but also of the paradoxical impetus of a culture of modernity. By positively reassessing the perplexing or apprehensive features of cultural modernity as well as of aesthetic inquiry, this book rede?nes the ambitions of art in the wake of this legacy. In the process, it challenges many familiar approaches to art inquiry in order to offer a new understanding of the aesthetic, social and cultural aspirations of art in our time."

Spis treści

Contents: The Perplexity of a Culture of Modernity - Wondrous Objectivity: art history, Freud and detection - Duchamp: creativity is a form of onanism - The medium of modernism - Love, identification and confrontation within modernity - Confrontation and Legacies: Gerhard Richter's barbed portrait - Illegible echoes - Felix Gonzalez-Torres, the artist-spy.

O autorze

The Author: Andrew McNamara is an Associate Professor at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. He has published on art history, aesthetics, modernism and contemporary art in both Europe and the United States. With Ann Stephen and Philip Goad, he produced a major appraisal of the reception of modernism in Australia, Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917-1967 (2006) and Modern Times: The Unwritten History of Modernism in Australia (2008).