A lively introduction to and history of international contemporary art from 1960 to the
present. What does it mean? Is it really art? Why does it cost so much? While these
questions are perpetually asked about contemporary art they are not the questions that E. H.
Gombrich set out to answer in his seminal book The Story of Art. Contemporary art is very
different from what came before. From the 1960s where Gombrich's account concludes artists
began to abandon traditional forms of art and started to make work that questioned art's very
definition. This is where Godfrey picks up the story. Developments in contemporary art have
followed no straightforward line of progress or sequence of movements. Recognizing this Tony
Godfrey creates a narrative from a series of often dramatic creative conflicts and arguments
around what art is or should be. From object versus sculpture and painting versus conceptual to
local versus global gallery versus wider world The Story of Contemporary Art traces a history
in terms of drastic changes in social and political life over the last sixty years. How do
we experience being human in a world that seems to change so quickly? In exploring art's
relationship to this question Godfrey asserts that multiple voices must be heard: critics
theorists curators and collectors but also audiences and artists themselves. Key to the book
is the story of how a perception that art was made almost exclusively by white men from North
America and Western Europe has been radically overturned. Compelling and intelligent but never
academic this book tells us how.
