Modernities: Art-Matters in the Present

By Joseph Masheck

Joseph Masheck wants to take art, historical and modern, as a field of lively interrelations (as if in "random-access memory" retrieval), rather than just second the motion that art history should be nonlinear; and he takes the task of art criticism to be theory in practice. Thus significant new art is represented in the thirty essays in Modernities , besides already "classic" modern architecture, sculpture, and photography, and contemporary painting by artists. Alternating between a comprehensive sense of art history and engagement with the new and unplumbed contemporary arts, he considers himself a kind of aesthetic double agent. Because Masheck is concerned with the concrete standing of artworks, he speculates on how works of art, including Marcel Duchamp's "ready-mades," relate to other things. More general themes range from the origin of the modern sense of form in prehistoric art to the historical underpinnings of expressionism and on to latter-day "graffiti" culture.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0271008083
• ISBN13: 9780271008080
• Release Date: February 1993
• Publisher: Penn State University Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.3"