Edward Lucie-Smith

Gebundenes Buch

Magical Thinking

Why the avant-garde is now history

Beschreibung

The word 'avant-garde', so much used in connection with the various manifestations of contemporary art, is starting to have a strange, ironic ring to it. One might even claim that it is starting to signify what is behind the times, rather than in front of them. Like all such terms, it is in fact a metaphor, rather than a direct description. Borrowed from old-fashioned military terminology, it seeks to describe a situation where social norms are being perpetually challenged by artists. In the military sphere, where it originated, it is long out of use. Armies no longer marshal themselves in regular formations of the battlefield. There is now no recognized grammar of warfare - any more than (come to think of it) there is a recognized grammar of art. The mantra now is: 'It's art because I say it's art!' In these circumstances, it is increasingly difficult to define what is positioned ahead of what - who is at the head of the column and who is near he tail end of it. ELS

Autor

Edward Lucie-Smith was born in 1933 at Kingston, Jamaica. He moved to Britain in 1946, and was educated at King's School, Canterbury and Merton College, Oxford, where he read History. Subsequently he was an Education Officer in the R.A.F., then worked in advertising for ten years before becoming a freelance author. He is now an internationally known art critic and historian, who is also a published poet (winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), an anthologist and a practicing photographer. He has published more than a hundred books in all, including a biography of Joan of Arc (recently republished by Penguin in paperback as a 'classic biography'), a historical novel, and more than sixty books about art, chiefly but not exclusively about contemporary work. A number of his art books, among them Movements in Art since 1945 , Visual Arts of the 20th Century, A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today are used as standard texts throughout the world. Movements in Art since 1945, first published in 1969, has been continuously in print since that date. He has been curator of a number of exhibitions, including three Peter Moores Projects at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, (surveys of contemporary British art), The New British Painting (which toured US venues in 1988-90) and two artist retrospectives, Lin Emery and George Dunbar, both for the New Orleans Museum of Art. He has been a jury member for the John Moores prize exhibition in Liverpool, and for biennials in Cairo, Sharjah, Alexandria and Belgrade. He was curator of 'New British Art'. at the Orion Gallery in Ostend (April-June 2001), of 'New Classicism: Artists of the Ideal', at Palazzo Forti, Verona (AprilSeptember 2002), and of 'Gods Becoming Men' at the Frissiras Museum, Athens [July-September 2004).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cv Publications
• Seitenzahl: 90
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. Dezember 2023
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 222mm x 145mm x 10mm
• Gewicht: 310g
• ISBN-13: 9781908419460
• ISBN-10: 1908419466
• Artikelnr.: 69622290