The Decline and Fall of the Avant-Garde: Essays on Contemporary Art(161 CV/Visual Arts Research)

On the occasion of the author's 80th birthdat Cv publishes a collection of essays and reviews by the eminent art historian and writer, Edward Lucie-Smith. The articles cover the broad span, of 20th/21st century art and its progression by pathways of postmodernism to contemporary art. With the experience of his landmark publications on modern art, several of which remain in print; the author introduces the reader to aspects of cultural mechanics, from the outset of creative experiment and intervention,absorbed by an intricate arena of curatorship and collection, with luminous insights to flaws in its hierarchy and prospects for the future. -This selection of recent essays turns, often it seems obsessively, on quite a small number of topics. One is the idea of an avant-garde - or, should one say, of 'avant-gardism' - now so central to any discussion of the contemporary visual arts. Another, linked to this, is the way in which avant-garde art, always instinctively perceived as something innovative and rebellious, has in fact become the official art of our time, supported by state subsidies, by quasi-official bodies of all kinds, and (particularly in the USA, where direct state support is less easily available) by a variety of prestigious cultural foundations That is, something that is seen as existing in opposition to the status quo, is in fact at the very core of the status quo. ELS o1/2013

Table of Contents:
Africa Remix; Art Criticism and the Formalist Approach; Damien Hirst Collects; DECODE: a glimpse of the future; Dialogues in Diversity; Damien Who?; Ecstasy in Los Angeles; Making Art History; Making New Museums; The Decline and Fall of the Avant-Garde; Modern British Sculpture; Radical Nature; The Modern Shaman; What it is to Curate; What Next for Contemporary Art.

About the Author :
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 (April-September 2002), and of 'Gods Becoming Men' at the Frissiras Museum, Athens [July-September 2004). He has recently become the curator of the new Bermondsey Project Space in London S.E.1