THE FIRST FRENCH EDITION of this book is dated 1987. This is fairly logical, in that the 1980s was a decade that wimessed a spectacular growth in public interest in forms of contemporary art rooted in the historic avant-gardes. In France, in particular, a dynamic cultural policy driven by the ministry headed by Jack Lang (which set up museums and art centers, bought works and commissioned new pieces), plus the growth in the number of galleries and collectors, began to respond to the increasing diversity of the art being produced. For more than three decades,artists had been radically rethinking both their tools and their role in society. Many of them also evinced a desire to look beyond national frontiers and work in phase with art in other countries.We should, after all, bear in mind that in 1989, the year of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Paris hosted what was no doubt the first exhibition of the era of globalization, Les Magiens de la Terre.

...

Preface

  At last, the museum appropriates an object

  that remains elusive

  The Beginnings of Social Recognition

  The Avant-gardes against Nationalism

  The Object in the Museum--What Object?

II. The work of art in the greater scheme of things

  Long Live Progress

  The Eye Aggressed and Dispossessed

  From Progress to the Disappearance of Art

  Engineer or Demiurge?

III. The artist in the world

  Collective Action

  The Collective Unconscious

  Time in Painting, Meaning History

  "The Image of the Image"

  The Model in the Image and the Image in Language

  "Spaces Rather Than Images"

  Doubts Cast on Art

IV. The definition of the work of art

  Painting Demonstration

  A Rereading of History and a New Start

  The Archeology of Painting and Archeology of the Subject

  The Strategy of Encirclement

  Back to Tradition

V. From "everything is art" to everything is deceptive

  Art as Insignificant

  Art Sticks to the Real

  Promenades and Collections

  A Withdrawal into the Self?. Far from it

  Pedagogical Leanings

  The Elusive Author

VI. Beyond the Avant-gardes and back again

  The End of the Avant-gardes?

  Back to the Reality of Things

  From Support-Surface to Figuration

  The Myth of Spontaneous Creation

  The Ambiguity of Pittura Colta

  The Eclecticism of Installations

  The Crossroads of Photography

  Nagging Doubts

VII. The society of the museum

  Institutions, Circulation, Subsidies

  Exhibition Value

  Art-world Players

  Managing the Death of Art

  Narcissism Fills in for Fetishism

VIII. Virtual works in a fragmented artistic field

  Atomized Art, Atomized Art World

  Reassemble/Recycle

  Perversions of Modernism

  Space Rather Than the Object

  Efflorescent Surfaces, Evanescent Images

IX. The triumph of contemporary art?

BY RICHARD LEYDIER

  New Spaces, Networks, and Dynamics

  The Paucity of Theory, Discourses of Authority, Disputes

  Fashion Systems

  Painting Is Back!

  An Uncertain Feeling

Chronology

Index

Acknowledgments