Duke University Press Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art

In Art to Come Terry Smith—who is widely recognized as one of the world's leading historians and theorists of contemporary art—traces the emergence of contemporary art and further develops his concept of contemporaneity. Smith shows that embracing contemporaneity as both a historical concept and a condition of the globalized world allows us to grasp how contemporary art exists in a fluid space of increasing interdependencies, multiple contemporaneous modernities, and persistent inequalities. Throughout these essays, Smith offers systematic proposals for writing contemporary art's histories while assessing how curators, critics, philosophers, artists, and art historians are currently doing so. Among other topics, Smith examines the intersection of architecture with other visual arts, Chinese art since the Cultural Revolution, how philosophers are theorizing concepts associated with the contemporary, Australian Indigenous art, and the current state of art history. Art to Come will be essential reading for artists, art students, curators, gallery workers, historians, critics, and theorists. Review "In bringing this collection of essays together, Smith gives readers the opportunity to chart his progress as he repeatedly surveys the contemporary terrain. These field reports from a highly engaged observer provide compelling reading for anyone concerned with art practices of the past three decades."--Martha Buskirk "Critical Inquiry" (2/10/2021 12:00:00 AM) "Smith, who sees linearity as an 'old-fashioned' way of thinking about time, kicks up the silt of art history to present us with a historiography of contemporaneity. . . . To that end, he takes us through 'contemporary' buzzwords and ways of thinking about issues like globalisation, the Anthropocene, decolonisation, indigenisation, revived fundamentalisms and ecoactivism, to ask how we might harmonise our differences in a way that 'ensures our mutual survival' on this planet."--Fi Churchman "Art Review" (1/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) Review “ Art to Come offers a splendid synthesis of Terry Smith's reflection on contemporaneity. Smith is one of the main thinkers of that notion, without which there is no real understanding of contemporary art. The book shows the richness of contemporaneity as an ongoing hypothesis that keeps art alive, disclosing the main forces shaping, probed, questioned, and sometimes reinvented in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, including globalization, neoliberalism, climate change, transculturality, indigeneity, colonialism but also decolonization, and inequality but also coeval connectivity.” Author: Christine Ross, McGill University From the Author Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. He is the author of several books, including One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism, also published by Duke University Press, and What Is Contemporary Art? About the Author Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. He is the author of several books, including One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism, also published by Duke University Press, and What Is Contemporary Art?