February 2012 by the International Sculpture Center, indicates that it will

provide a useful resource on artists’ burgeoning forms of environmentalist

engagement.

doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcr047

Advance Access Publication 14 February 2012

Is Contemporary Art History?

Robert Slifkin

Terry Smith,   What Is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press:

Chicago, 2009), 75 illns., 344 pp., hardback ISBN 9780226764306,

$75.00.

Katy Siegel,   Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art

(London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 61 illns., 256 pp., hardback

ISBN 9781861897732, £19.95.

In the past thirty years, the discipline of art history has

experienced a series of professed crises that have greatly 

expanded not only the sorts of questions scholars bring to

their inquiries, but also equally important the types of 

objects deemed worthy of analysis. Beginning with the ‘new

art history’ in the 1980s, a variety of interdisciplinary 

approaches ranging from semiotics to social history have

been marshalled in the name of wresting the work of art out

of formalist hermeticism and into larger cultural fields, to

consider, as Svetlana Alpers wrote in one of the earliest

declarations of this new trend, ‘the work of art as a “piece

of history”’.1 While the academic study of art has regularly 

regarded the aesthetic object as an index of history (through

such signifiers as style, iconology, and authorial

performance), the new art history and the subsequent

waves of postmodernisms (globalism being one of the most

recent) have made the work’s broader cultural engagement

a central, albeit highly problematic, issue. As the conception

of visual representation expanded to include of host of new

objects (as well as events and actions), various thinkers

began to consider the pivotal role of image-making within a

wide spectrum of social practices and accordingly developed

sophisticated critiques of an image’s corroboration to

external reality. By questioning representational veracity and

the politics of vision the new art history (as well as a great

deal of art produced in the past thirty years) demanded, in

Leo Steinberg’s famous terms, ‘other criteria’. The

long-established approaches of iconography and stylistic

attribution as well as the more vanguard conventions of 

modernist self-reflexivity appeared to be inappropriate to

much of the new art being produced, and in turn,

encouraged certain scholars to reconsider established

canons and previously marginalised artists and objects. As

the discipline’s focus shifted from a diachronic to a more

synchronic axis, a conceptual space opened up for works of 

art whose analysis was not dependent on questions of 

periodisation or progress, whether aesthetic or political.

Arguably, the new art history’s attention to context and

contingency enabled contemporary art (along with global

art) – art, one might say, with an ‘underdeveloped’

relationship to the past – to be considered as an

acceptable subject for art historical inquiry.

Admittedly, this is a somewhat idealistic account of the

remarkable growth of modern and contemporary art within

the field of art history. Terry Smith in his recent book,   What 

is Contemporary Art? , offers a more materialist explanation

for this state of affairs, arguing that the rise of  

contemporary art can best be understood in terms of a

series of institutional transformations. Smith has been at

the forefront of recent debates concerning the place of 

contemporary art within the discipline.2 According to Smith,

our attention to the contemporary is, like the new art history 

before it, an effect of the broader postmodern reassessment

of established conceptions of truth and normativity. As he

notes in the introduction to his book, the various critiques of 

‘exclusivist theories, imposed historicisms, and grand

narratives’ have produced an ‘open field’, in which liberatory 

possibility and a dangerous evasion of criticality precariously 

coexist. Contemporaneity then, for Smith, is not an

ontological condition of living in the ‘now time’ of the present

(a situation that, as Baudelaire asserted many years ago,

existed as much for Michelangelo as Manet), but is rather a

novel and unprecedented situation brought about by the

collapse of modern notions of progress and humanist

universality as well as the rise of new forms of archivation

and communication. As he succinctly defines the concept,

albeit in terms that many might consider equally applicable

to modernism or postmodernism, contemporaneity ‘points to

a  multiplicity of relationships between being and time’ (p. 4).

Smith distinguishes three main currents in contemporary 

artistic practice. The first is defined by what he sees as the

nostalgic and conservative practices of ‘retro-sensationalist’

artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, the ‘remodernism’

of Gerhard Richter and Jeff Wall, and the ‘spectacle art’ of 

Matthew Barney, as well as the extensive biennale system

which promotes such art and operates, whether critically or

complicitly, within the hegemonic structures of ‘neolibereal

economics, globalising capital, and neoconservative politics’.

The second strand is informed by the various postcolonial

movements that have given voice to a multitude of  

previously marginalised communities, effectively  

destabilising the staid notions of modernity, whether

political or aesthetic, by promoting practices ‘usually 

entailing research over time, widespread public involvement,

and lengthy, didactic presentations’. Finally, Smith

associates the third and still-emerging drift with a

‘generational change’ produced in part by the two other

currents, in which ‘gratuitous provocation and grand

symbolic statement’ are rejected in favour of ‘specific,

small-scale, and modest offerings’ by artists who investigate

‘interactive potentialities of various material media, virtual

communication networks, and open-ended modes of 

tangible connectivity’ (p. 8). Despite the author’s interest in

the remarkable heterogeneity of contemporary art practice,

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 35.1 2012   111

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it becomes increasing evident throughout the book that

Smith holds these various approaches in inverse order of 

esteem, in many ways basing his evaluations upon the

long-standing avant-garde criteria of resistance to

convention through new and emerging modes of production.

Smith’s taxonomic inclination is most powerfully put to use

in the first part of the book dedicated to what might be

considered the institutional preconditions for

contemporaneity, in which he offers a series of chapters

addressing recent museum renovations, reinstallations, and

openings at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York,

Dia Beacon, and the Saatchi Gallery and Tate Modern in

London. While much of Smith’s criticism and commentary 

about the ‘new’ MoMA and the innovative recontextualisation

of Tate Modern’s collection will be familiar to many readers,

the way in which he demonstrates how each of these case

studies align with the larger currents of contemporaneity 

provocatively suggests the possible role these institutions

may play in the construction of ‘the contemporary’. For Smith,

MoMA’s anxiety about incorporating works of recent art that

do not partake in its definitive narrative of modernist

self-reflexivity and Tate Modern’s practice of ‘contemporising 

of displays’ (p. 59) so that every gallery appears ‘as if they 

were temporary exhibits, implicitly open to change’, serve as

potent examples of how the pressure to be contemporaneous

shapes some of the most powerful art institutions, making 

certain strands of contemporary installation art and curatorial

practice almost indistinguishable.

Building upon the largely institutional focus of the book,

Smith asserts that, within the age of spectacle, it is the

‘exhibition purpose’ of the museum that defines its

existence (as opposed to its archival or educational roles).

As one attraction among many, the museum attempts to

offer viewers ‘experience’ rather than insight. In this

situation, artists producing what Smith calls ‘attractor art’

often get large commissions for site-specific works. Smith

singles out the Guggenheim franchise as the epitome of this

phenomenon. The affective sculptural spaces crafted by 

Frank Gehry for the Guggenheim Bilbao and Matthew

Barney’s Cremaster Series (which was exhibited in its

entirety along with related sculptures at the New York

branch of the museum in 2003) suggest for Smith a

troubling side of the postmodern blurring of art and life,

high and low culture, and distinctive artistic media.

Moreover, many of the same artists creating art for

experience-oriented museums are also making work

specifically for the art market. According to Smith, one

defining feature of contemporary art is its unprecedented

sensitivity to the ways in which it circulates and interacts

with the various flows of capital that connect the global art

world. One might argue then that definitively contemporary 

art, art that speaks to our moment of contemporaneity,

takes the market as a principle site of investigation (and,

one might add, is typically very expensive). Near the end of 

his book, Smith provides this possible designation that

emphasises the institutional and discursive foundations for

his topic, going so far as to describe contemporary art as a

system rather than a series of objects: ‘Contemporary Art is

the institutionalized network through which the art of today 

presents itself and to its interested audiences all over the

world’ (p. 241).

Such a definition enables Smith to consider recent

Australian aboriginal art as a manifestation of the

contemporary. The author slyly notes that like the art of 

 Young British Artists such as Damien Hirst, these works

have similarly ‘benefited from the recent collapse of the

distinction between primary and secondary markets’

(p. 139) and the emergence of the art fair and biennial as

their standard commercial channels. Smith is particularly 

good at describing contemporary art’s current dominance of 

the secondary market of auction houses and the mediating 

role of art fairs within this new paradigm. In his account of 

the enormous expansion of the contemporary art market in

the past twenty years, he offers a brief historical overview of 

its increasing ‘monetarisation’, beginning in the 1960s and

coming into fruition in the 1980s, and identifies the key 

moments when auction houses began using the term

‘Contemporary’ to describe certain lots. As Smith notes, the

market ‘now treats contemporary art as is it was modern art

already’ (p. 123) serving as the primary organ for cultural

validation, a post previously held by critics, museums, and,

to a lesser extent, the academy. Returning to his key theme

of the simultaneity of the contemporary – the way in which

time seems paradoxically compressed and dispersed within

an age of spectacle and digital achivisation – Smith

identifies how the contemporary market’s seemingly 

insatiable appetite for new and often untested art often

mirrors other aspects of the larger culture, so that the

‘superrich’ who frequent such fairs may find their values

reflected in the works on display.

Smith concludes his account with a series of chapters

dedicated to art that largely falls outside of the

contemporary realm of markets and spectacle, surveying a

broad spectrum of recent artistic production from around

the globe. As the world seems to collapse into a

technologically mediated all-pervasive present, certain

artists have found ways to defamilairise this connectivity,

often exploring strategies of temporal acceleration and

deceleration as well as historical citation as a way to

obliquely approach the present and, as Smith asserts, ‘to

find freedom within mediation, to piece together a sense of 

self from the fragmented strangeness that is all around us’

(p. 235). The author’s esteem for artists such as Wilfredo

Prieto, Jean-Michel Bruyere, and Emily Jaciris is evident in

the way he presents their work as more authentic models of 

contemporaneous art: art made in response to specific and

immediate situations, a timely art, a ‘supplier of  

singularities’ (p. 181), as he puts it, as opposed to art that

sustains the largely modern ideal of aesthetic timelessness.

This, one might say, is art   not   for the ages but for   now .

Aligning the local with the political, Smith compellingly 

suggests how the true challenge of a newly globalised art

world entails recognising how the new art forces a major

reconsideration of some of the most fundamental tenets of 

value as well as the very ontology of the artwork.

112   OXFORD ART JOURNAL 35.1 2012

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Smith’s vibrant and sometimes journalistic prose coupled

with the episodic structure of his book – he describes his

method of ‘show and tell’ (p. 241) – at times reads like an

erudite version of Sarah Thornton’s popular book   Seven

Days in the Art World  (2009). The author no doubt sees this

pluralistic approach as the most advanced strategy for

accounting for an increasingly complex and diverse art

world, following the conventional postmodernist approach to

narrative in which disjunction and microhistories are

favoured over continuity and grand narratives. At a moment

when such tendencies have challenged our capacity to think

historically, the concept of the ‘contemporary’, as Smith

notes, ‘could well come to mean periodlessness, being 

perpetually out of time, or at least not subject to historical

unfolding’ (p. 245). Contemporary art by this definition is an

art that, through a variety of strategies, resists

historicisation, a description that certainly resonates with

the sense shared by many critics in the past thirty years

that there is no longer any reigning period styles (such as

Abstract Expressionism and minimal art were for the 1950s

and 1960s for instance). Yet, as Smith suggests, drawing 

upon the critical insights of Frederic Jameson in response to

the supposed end of history championed by certain thinkers

beginning in the late 1980s, this sort of historical relativism

might in fact be symptomatic of a social failure of  

imagination. It thus became essential for us to determine

what defines our time, otherwise, as Smith grimly warns, ‘it

will elude us – even, perhaps, destroy us’ (p. 255).

In   Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary 

 Art,   Katy Siegel similarly acknowledges the challenges of 

writing a history of art produced at a moment when

totalising historical accounts are deemed highly suspect.

Nonetheless, her book presents its subject in what is in

many ways a traditional structure for art historical analysis.

Not only does she identify a definitive starting point for her

narrative – a gesture that flies in the face of postmodern

critiques of origins and narratives, both grand and small –

but also she selects a rather conventional starting point for

her account of contemporary art: the end of the Second

World War, a moment that has long stood for the ‘triumph’

of American art, corresponding with the United States’ rise

to international dominance, as well as the country’s

subsequent ‘theft’ of modern art from Europe.

 Yet, it is precisely this ostensible conventionalism that sets

Siegel’s book against the grain of most postmodern accounts

of postmodern art (or most contemporary accounts of 

contemporary art for that matter). Surprisingly, out of such

seemingly conservative and outmoded methods Siegel

produces a refreshingly counterintuitive and constructive

approach to the material she addresses. Noting in the

introduction the way in which post-war art is typically 

accommodated within the European avant-garde tradition, so

that the ‘triumph’ of American painting was achieved by 

surpassing the School of Paris (this, of course, was the

argument of critics like Clement Greenberg, but as Siegel

notes, similar narratives have also been marshalled to

celebrate the achievements of latter day American artists

such as Andy Warhol and Mike Kelley). By connecting 

post-war American art within a prewar European paradigm,

these approaches revealed some important (and often times

concrete) relationships between the two bodies of works: one

can think of Pollock’s debt to surrealist automaticism or

Warhol’s investigation of the readymade. Yet, lost in these

transnational histories of modernism is, according to Siegel,

the particular ‘American social conditions’ (p. 8) in which the

works were created and alongside this, a great deal of the

larger meaning of the works themselves. In fact, Siegel

argues that it is precisely in this amalgamation of prewar

tradition with unprecedented American experience that

contemporary art was ‘created’ (p. 11).

Such statements run the risk of reasserting a new version

of American exceptionalism, which was already present in

many of the earliest accounts of post-war art. Yet, as Siegel

perceptively notes, once American art became more

important within the discourse of an international (if still

decidedly western) modern art history, its ‘Americanness’

diminished in the critical discourse and the specific historical

circumstances in which it was produced became less

significant, at least in terms of its prevailing reception.

Similarly, the recent rise in globalism, which typically 

identifies artistic practices that already operate within the

existing epistemological boundaries of contemporary art, has

often ‘allowed the continuation of an art discourse less

historical than theoretical’ (p. 12). Rather than a resurrection

of American exceptionalism, Siegel’s book represents a

welcome attempt to approach a significant body of recent art

with a degree of historical and regional specificity rarely 

applied to such works without diminishing its broader

aesthetic and geographic resonances. (One may argue, along 

the line of Jean Baudrilliard, that America, while not unique

or wholly characteristic of all the possible manifestation of 

postmodern culture, nonetheless represents an exemplary 

instance of it, an extreme in the age of extremes.)

Siegel presents her narrative through five chapters

structured by the following dichotomies: Beginning and End;

Black and White; Success and Failure; The One and the

Many; and First and Last. The first chapter draws upon the

tradition of reinvention, both national and individual, to

assess how a heightened sensitivity to the end of history in

the post-war years made these concerns newly relevant, so

that artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman could

imagine themselves as the first artist (and artists themselves

as the first men, to cite Newman’s famous essay) while

simultaneously pondering the question of when a painting 

that had no concrete referent could be finished.

Characteristic of what could be considered her materialist

approach to the subject (a point that aligns her method with

Smith’s to a certain extent), Siegel identifies actual historical

foundations for the post-historical tendency in post-war art

historical discourse, noting how the threat of nuclear

weapons and the broader critique of the western humanist

tradition in the wake of the Second World War seemed to

encourage ‘an irrevocable wiping of the historical slate’

(p. 10). In other words, the poststructuralist critique of history 

and prediction of the ‘end of man’ famously described in the

final pages of Michel Foucault’s   Les Mots et les Choses

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 35.1 2012   113

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(1966) finds its materialist correlate in the technologies, both

utopian and apocalyptic, that threatened to make humans

obsolete if not extinct. Emphasising continuity rather than the

conventional avant-garde concept of paradigm shift or the

postmodern doctrine of difference, Siegel’s approach reveals

surprising correspondence between ostensibly antagonistic

styles and practices, powerfully defamilairising inherited

modernist and postmodernist myths.

This method leads to another aspect of her book that is

both rewarding and unusual. Drawing upon Eric Hobsbawn’s

conception of postmodernism as a period of decline and

doubt for the industrialised West, when economic growth

faltered after a ‘Golden Age’ of the immediate post-war

years and new players entered the arenas of international

politics and commerce, Siegel presents a decidedly  

non-triumphant and non-teleological trajectory to her

narrative.3 Accordingly, the apparent shifts from modernism

and postmodernism appear less as fundamental alterations

in artistic practice or merely stylistic monikers but instead

reflect changing cultural attitudes based on material events.

Thus, to cite one of the many compelling insights offered in

the book, a strategy of incompletion when enacted by 

Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s could represent

existential possibility while the entropic industrial wastelands

of Robert Smithson’s   Monuments of the Passaic   (1967)

seems to figure the impossibility of progress, differences

that speak to the altered economic conditions and cultural

attitudes in which they were created. Siegel then tracks this

theme through a series of later examples of more recent

art, from Cady Noland’s aggressive amalgamations of the

darker side of American power to the grainy photographs

Robert Gober exhibited at the 2001 Venice Biennale,

describing how issues of finitude and beginning continue to

resonate in recent artistic production, albeit presenting 

different meanings within different circumstances.

Each chapter follows a similar pattern, in which a certain

theme is first identified through focused examination of 

categorically post-war art and then tracked through its

manifestation in more recent examples. Repeatedly 

throughout her account Siegel returns to 1945, describing 

the year as a ‘real historical break’ (p. 10), a date grounded

in significant events rather than an arbitrary or discursive

formation, finding seminal themes that reappear throughout

the post-war period. At its best, Siegel’s approach, in which

historically specific readings of individual works are

organised within a series of structuring oppositions whose

elementary dualities acknowledge their constructedness,

provides new and stimulating conceptual ‘handles’ to

consider broad tendencies in post-war art. The fact that

Siegel’s categories produce a canon by and large quite

similar to the conventional one of the present moment may 

raise certain doubts about the novelty of her approach. Yet,

her juxtapositions frequently produce stimulating insights, so

that for instance the monochromic greyness of minimal art

is seen as part of a broader tendency in post-war art to

invoke a ‘flatness of affect’ (p. 65) through such motifs as

newspapers (in the work of such artists as Johns,

Rauschenberg, and Warhol).

If, as Hal Foster has recently noted in a roundtable

discussion related to another recent attempt to periodise

and narrativise contemporary art, the ‘post-historical default’

of much modern and contemporary art history has become

a ‘dysfunctional’ predicament, Siegel has offered one

possible solution to this ‘crisis’, by reconsidering the

tradition of hermeneutics and interpreting the avowedly 

anti-interpretive art in explicitly historically sensitive ways.4

Since 45  offers a pioneering example of a critical history of 

modern and contemporary art that does not take art’s

criticality as its essential criterion of value. By  

demonstrating the continued vitality of certain themes,

Siegel is able to show that art of the relatively recent past

(such as Abstract Expressionism and Pop) still has lessons

to impart, while art of the recent present is engaged in its

own historical conditions more than we may often recognise.

Following Siegel’s compelling argument that the rise of 

contemporary art was in part predicated on a mythic belief 

in the irrelevance of historical precedent which arose out of 

the apocalyptic doom of nuclear war and the utopian

potential of industrial and post-industrial production, it is

possible to recognise how these threats and promises have

remained a distinct presence in our culture (albeit under the

changed guise of ecological and global terminology). By 

demarcating the continuities and the transformations in her

chosen themes, Siegel demonstrates the enduring relevance

of the concept of history. As both Smith and Siegel

provocatively suggest, the fundamental challenge for a

history of contemporary art entails recognising art’s specific

engagement with the present, which in turn, requires a

renewed attention to art’s place within a temporal matrix of 

past and future. In this regard, our current anxiety about

contemporary art may be a hopeful sign that we have begun

to think historically with a renewed intensity and in time

may be able to imagine not only the present relevance of the

past but also possible futures different from the present.5

Notes

1. Svetlana Alpers, ‘Is Art History?’, Deadalus, vol. 106,  Summer 1977, p. 1.2. Smith’s recent article in the   Art Bulletin   addressed the academic issues

related to the rise in interest in contemporary art Terry Smith, ‘The State of Art History: Contemporary Art’,   Art Bulletin, vol. 92, December 2010,

pp. 366–83.3. Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991

(Pantheon: London, 1994).

4. Foster et al .,  Art Since 1900  (Thames and Hudson: London, 2005), p. 679.5. Tim Griffin has recently noted how the current interest in ‘the

contemporary’ is often invoked as a term that ‘has operated largely in reverse – 

that has been put forward, in other words, as a meaningful denomination and

subject of inquiry in advance of any actual, deductive relationship to the

surrounding world’. Tim Griffin, ‘Out of Time’,  Artforum, vol. 50, September

2011, p. 288.

doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcr048

Advance Access Publication 29 January 2012

114   OXFORD ART JOURNAL 35.1 2012

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