by Jon Lackman | 3 December 2007 | Books, Theory
Published recently, Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, edited by Diarmuid Costello and Jonathan Vickery, “assesses the work of those thinkers (including artists) who have had a major impact on making, criticizing and interpreting art since the 1960s.” David Carrier writes on Arthur Danto, Stephen Melville on Michael Fried, Mignon Nixon on Melanie Klein, Alex Potts on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Margaret Iversen on Mary Kelly. As the editors note,
Most of the thinkers profiled in this book will already be more or less familiar to readers in the field; though we have also included several we believe are typically overlooked (such as [Albrecht] Wellmer and [Niklas] Luhmann), as well as more recent thinkers (such as [J.M.] Bernstein and [James] Elkins), whose work is only now beginning to gain recognition and influence. In one case we have even included a curator ([Nicolas] Bourriaud) given how widely his writings and exhibitions have been discussed over the last decade.
Particularly notable is the section on
artists as thinkers, that is, artists who have made a major contribution to thought about art since the 1960s through their writings as well as their art. Though one can find many anthologies of artists’ writings, one rarely finds artists treated on an equal footing with theorists, historians and philosophers when it comes to producing knowledge about art.
