The perpetual guest : art in the unfinished present

Summary: "The idea of contemporary art sometimes allows us to pretend we have made a clean break with the past. In The Perpetual Guest, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky demonstrates that any robust understanding of art's present must also account for the ongoing life and changing fortunes of its past. In surveying the art world of this past decade, Schwabsky attends not only to its most significant newer faces--among them, Kara Walker, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ai Weiwei, Chris Ofili, and Lorna Simpson--but their forebears, both recent (Jeff Wall, Nancy Spero, Dan Graham, Cindy Sherman) and more distant (Vel©Łzquez, Manet, Matisse, and the portraitists of the Renaissance). "The art critic, " Schwabsky writes, "formalizes and deliberately exemplifes the role of the spectator who realizes the artist's work, not by leaving it just as it is, but by adding something to it, making a personal contribution." Despite the hysterical pronouncements of criticism's demise, Schwabsky's rich and subtle considerations of art's complexly intertwined traditions are an indispensable contribution to understanding our present moment"--

Record details

ISBN: 9781784783266
ISBN: 9781784783257
ISBN: 1784783242
ISBN: 9781784783242
ISBN: 1784783234
ISBN: 9781784783235
Physical Description: xv, 285 pages ; 24 cm.
print
Publisher: London ; New York : Verso, 2016.
Copyright: ©2016.

Content descriptions

General Note:

"The essays collected here originally appeared in the pages of the Nation between 2006 and 2014."

Formatted Contents Note:

Machine generated contents note: I.Negative Theology -- 1.Negative Theology: Diego Velazquez -- 2.An Ambiguous Medium: Lee Ufan -- 3.The Stone Dies Away Also: Jimmie Durham -- 4.Putting the World into the World: Alighiero Boetti -- 5.The Devil, Probably: Maurizio Cattelan -- 6.A Million Little Pictures: The Pictures Generation -- 7.A Makeshift World: Thomas Demand and Bettina Pousttchi -- 8.Showing, Saying, Whistling: Lorna Simpson and Ahlam Shibli -- II.Faces out of the Crowd -- 9.Faces out of the Crowd: The Renaissance Portrait -- 10.Daring Intransigence: Gustave Courbet -- 11.Extreme Eccentrics: Modern Art and Its Collectors -- 12.Vacant, Limpid, Angelic: Willem de Kooning -- 13.Evasive Action Painter: Gerhard Richter -- 14.The Perpetual Guest: Warren Niesluchowski -- 15.Love by a Thousand Cuts: Kara Walker -- 16."You're So Pretty": Laurel Nakadate -- 17.The Complete History of Every One: Zoe Strauss -- 18.Heroism, Hidden: Ian Wallace --