Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art

The press chat snags the money quote for this acerbic overview: ""The art world is bound to the economy as tightly as Ahab to the white whale."" Reviewing the state of art since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Stallabrass (High Art Lite) details what he sees as the false ""zone of freedom"" of the '90s: politicized, Third World installation art and artists came to greater prominence only in the aftermath of the recession under George Bush, Sr., which created a demand for art that flirted with dangerous material but rarely took a stand. As the tech bubble expanded, Western art's ""core function as a propagandist for neoliberal values"" came to the fore in the form of painters and installation artists who simultaneously seemed to satirize and celebrate an empty life of products and self-regard, a phenomenon bolstered by widespread corporate sponsorship of shows. The set of interlocking and often necessarily contradictory stories that Stallabrass tells in six terse, ultimately unsatisfying chapters require more than a passing familiarity with recent modes of contemporary art and its various means of distribution and display, from giant biennials to fugitive gallery shows. But in serving Stallabrass's call for an art and art criticism that can separate themselves, even a little, from the market on which they depend, his overview is thorough enough for his intended audience.