Art after conceptual art - Alexander Alberro

Art After Conceptual Art tracks the various legacies
of conceptualist practice over the past three decades. This collection of essays by
art historians from Europe and the Americas introduces and develops the idea that
conceptual art generated several different, and even contradictory, forms of art
practice. Some of these contested commonplace assumptions of what art is; others
served to buttress those assumptions. The bulk of the volume features newly written
and highly innovative essays challenging standard interpretations of the legacy of
conceptualism and discussing the influence of conceptualism's varied practices on
art since the 1970s. The essays explore topics as diverse as the interrelationships
between conceptualism and institutional critique, neoexpressionist painting and
conceptualist paradigms, conceptual art's often-ignored complicity with design and
commodity culture, the specific forms of identity politics taken up by the reception
of conceptual art, and conceptualism's North/South and East/West dynamics. A few
texts that continue to be crucial for critical debates within the fields of
conceptual and postconceptual art practice, history, and theory have been reprinted
in order to convey the vibrant and ongoing discussion on the status of art after
conceptual art. Taken together, the essays will inspire an exploration of the
relationship between postconceptualist practices and the beginnings of contemporary
art.

Distributed for the Generali Foundation, Vienna.