List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Anticipation and Historicity 1
Part I. Thinking Contemporary Art
1. Contemporary Art, Contemporaneity, and Art to Come 27
2. In a Nutshell: Art within Contemporary Conditions 54
3. Contemporary Architecture: Spectacle, Crisis, Aftermath
64
4. Concurrence: Art, Design, Architecture 101
5. Background Story, Global Foreground: Chinese Contemporary
Art 126
6. Country, Indigeneity, Sovereignty: Aboriginal Australian
Art 156
7. Placemaking, Displacement, Worlds-within-Worlds 198
8. Picturing Planetarity: Arts of Multiverse 228
Part II. Art Historiography: Conjectures and Refutations
9. The State of Art History: Contemporary Art 245
10. Theorizing the Contemporary and the Postcontemporary
279
11. Writing Histories of Contemporary Art: The Situation Now
311
Conclusion: Concurrence in Contemporary World Picturing
353
Notes 365
Index 417
Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. He is the author of several books, including One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism, also published by Duke University Press, and What Is Contemporary Art?
"Smith, who sees linearity as an ‘old-fashioned’ way of thinking
about time, kicks up the silt of art history to present us with a
historiography of contemporaneity. . . . To that end, he takes us
through ‘contemporary’ buzzwords and ways of thinking about issues
like globalisation, the Anthropocene, decolonisation,
indigenisation, revived fundamentalisms and ecoactivism, to ask how
we might harmonise our differences in a way that ‘ensures our
mutual survival’ on this planet."
*Art Review*
"In bringing this collection of essays together, Smith gives
readers the opportunity to chart his progress as he repeatedly
surveys the contemporary terrain. These field reports from a highly
engaged observer provide compelling reading for anyone concerned
with art practices of the past three decades."
*Critical Inquiry*
"At once retrospective and anticipatory, Smith’s description of his
intent with Art to Come suggests that the book is as much for
himself and ‘those to come’ as it is for art historians and other
observers of contemporary art working today (24). For Smith,
contemporary art history is historiography. By writing contemporary
art history as personal historiography, Smith models for his
readers—present and future—an ethics as much as a methodology for
the study of the visual culture today."
*Journal of Art Historiography*
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