Contemporary Art: World Currents argues that, in recent decades, a worldwide shift from modern to contemporary art has occurred. Artists everywhere have embraced the contemporary world's teeming multiplicity, its proliferating differences and its challenging complexities. This book shows how contemporary art achieved definitive force in the markets and museums of the major art centres during the 1980s. It then became a global phenomenon as artworlds everywhere began to connect more closely, to become contemporaneous with each other. New communicative technologies and expanding social media are now shaping the future of art. Terry Smith offers the first account of these changes, from their historical beginnings to the present day. This book breaks new ground in tracing how modern, traditional and indigenous art became contemporary in each of cultural region of the world. The author argues that it is diversity, or the contemporaneity of difference, not a convergence towards sameness, which makes today's art contemporary.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments General Introduction: Contemporary Art in Transition: From Late Modern Art to Now I BECOMING CONTEMPORARY IN EUROAMERICA 1. Late Modern Art becomes Contemporary 2. The Contemporary Art Boom II THE TRANSNATIONAL TRANSITION 3. Russia and (East of) Europe 4. South and Central America, the Caribbean 5. China and East Asia 6. India, South and Southeast Asia 7. Oceania 8. Africa 9. West Asia III CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS 10. World Pictures: Making Art Politically 11. Climate Change: Art and Ecology 12. Social Media: Affects of Time 13. Coda: Permanent Transition Notes Select Bibliography A Directory of Selected Contemporary Art Websites Index Picture Credits

About the Author

Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and Distinguished Visiting Professor, National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. He was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney. A leading authority in the theory of contemporary world art, he is the author of a number of books most recently: What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Reviews

"Terry Smith is acknowledged world wide as the leading authority in the theory of contemporary art."-- Hans Belting, Professor for Art History and Media Theory, Academy for Design, Karlsruhe, Germany, from the Global Art and the Museum website. "Terry Smith is that rare art and social historian able to write criticism at once alert to the forces that contextualize art and sensitive to the elements and qualities that inhere to the works of art themselves."-College Art Association, citation for the 2010 Frank Jewett Mather Award for Art Criticism