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The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art

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An exploration of transformations in the nature of the art object and artistic authorship in the last four decades.

In this book, Martha Buskirk addresses the interesting fact that since the early 1960s, almost anything can and has been called art. Among other practices, contemporary artists have employed mass-produced elements, impermanent materials, and appropriated imagery, have incorporated performance and video, and have created works through instructions carried out by others. Furthermore, works of art that lack traditional signs of authenticity or permanence have been embraced by institutions long devoted to the original and the permanent. Buskirk begins with questions of authorship raised by minimalists' use of industrial materials and methods, including competing claims of ownership and artistic authorship evident in conflicts over the right to fabricate artists' works. Examining recent examples of appropriation, she finds precedents in pop art and the early twentieth-century readymade and explores the intersection of contemporary artistic copying and the system of copyrights, trademarks, and brand names characteristic of other forms of commodity production. She also investigates the ways that connections between work and context have transformed art and institutional conventions, the impact of new materials on definitions of medium, the role of the document as both primary and secondary object, and the significance of conceptually oriented performance work for the intersection of photography and the human body in contemporary art. Buskirk explores how artists active in the 1980s and 1990s have recombined strategies of the art of the 1960s and 1970s. She also shows how the mechanisms through which art is presented shape not only readings of the work but the work itself. She uses her discussion of the readymade and conceptual art to explore broader issues of authorship, reproduction, context, and temporality.

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Detail Information

Series Title

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Call Number

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Publisher

Cambridge, Mass. : : MIT Press Direct., 2003

Collation

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Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262269582

Classification

NONE

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

Carrier Type

online resource

Edition

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Subject(s)

Arts
Aesthetics
Modern

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

Martha Buskirk

Other Information

Cataloger

Kholif Basri

Source

https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2428/The-Contingent-Object-of-Contemporary-Art

Validator

imron

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/2139.001.0001

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