Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Modern art has radically extended the conventional medium of sculpture and painting. Following on innovative ideas about representation and the free use of materials in Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism - particularly in the work of Duchamp - artists abandoned strict adherence to traditional hierarchies of mediums and embraced any means, including technological, which best served their purposes. Furthermore, especially in the last 50 years, time and duration have reinstated narrative back in art: in filmmaking and video, the narrative theatricality of happening, performance and installation art, digitally manipulated photography and virtual reality

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction (p. 7)
• Time Art (p. 12)
• Film and Avant-Garde Cinema I (p. 15)
• Duchamp to Cage to Fluxus (p. 21)
• Film and Avant-Garde Cinema II (p. 27)
• Chapter 1 Media and Performance (p. 36)
• 1960s Multimedia Performances (p. 36)
• Studio Performances (p. 47)
• Japanese Gutai and Viennese Actionism (p. 54)
• Gender and Media Performance (p. 59)
• Minimalist and Conceptual Trends (p. 61)
• Politics, Postmodernism, and the New Spectacle (p. 64)
• Chapter 2 Video Art (p. 78)
• A New Media (p. 78)
• Conceptual Video (p. 93)
• Personal Narratives (p. 107)
• Chapter 3 Video Installation Art (p. 116)
• Sculptural Space and Surveillance (p. 117)
• Exploring the Political (p. 125)
• Exploring the Lyrical (p. 138)
• Exploring Identities (p. 148)
• Chapter 4 Digital Art (p. 168)
• Computer Art (p. 171)
• Digitally Altered Photography (p. 184)
• Art of the Worldwide Web (p. 192)
• Interactive Digital Art (p. 201)
• Virtual Reality (p. 208)
• Select Bibliography (p. 218)
• List of Illustrations (p. 219)
• Index (p. 222)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

School Library Journal Review

YA-Three excellent series titles. Contemporary African Art emphasizes the changes in the art of this continent in the last half of the 20th century. Maya Art examines the reasons behind the artwork and ways the buildings were constructed, incorporating new archaeological findings. They include recent deciphers of Mayan writing that provide understanding to the ceramics, sculpture, architecture, murals, and books. Amazingly, op art and pop art have become almost traditional. With chapters on performance art (Rauschenberg), video, digital, and virtual reality, New Media truly introduces the new wave. The paper in these compact books is of high quality, resulting in outstanding, almost platelike reproduction of the numerous color and black-and-white photos. The illustrations are fully captioned and they alone could justify purchase of these titles.-Claudia Moore, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.