Chapter 1 A Sea-Change Rich and Strange
In: The Explicit MaterialSearch for other papers by David Lowenthal in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Abstract
The last half century has witnessed revolutionary changes in how works of art are created and viewed by artists, collectors, curators, conservators, and audiences. Traditional mantras extolling material permanence, wholeness, single authorship, authorial intentions, and original authenticity have been increasingly supplanted by appreciative acceptance of temporal transience, processual transformation, varying contextual circumstances, life-cycle mutability, erosive and corrosive agency, and surrogates and replicas. Here I relate these changes to Renaissance, Chinese, Japanese, and modernist aesthetics and influences. I conclude by discussing their consequences and curatorial and conservation dilemmas for the associated development of auto-destructive, installation, performative, kinetic, and participatory art.