Art critics and scholars have acknowledged the breakdown of their explanations and narratives of contemporary art in the face of what they consider the incoherent era of "pluralism" or "postmodernism" that began in the late twentieth century. This failure is in fact a result of their inability...

In 1917, when the American Society of Independent Artists refused to exhibit a porcelain urinal that Marcel Duchamp had submitted to them as a sculpture, a friend of Duchamp's wrote : "There are those who anxiously ask: 'Is he serious or is he joking?' Perhaps he is both!" Duchamp's behavior -...

The back story of twentieth-century art concerns the changing intellectual, economic, and technological setting that would cause the art of the past century to be fundamentally different from that of all earlier times. The single most important change involved the structure of the market for...

The joint production of paintings by more than one artist was not uncommon in the past: a number of Old Masters had assistants do much of the work on their paintings, executing images that had been planned by the master. Yet prior to the twentieth century very few paintings were actually signed...

A survey of textbooks reveals that Le Corbusier was the greatest architect of the twentieth century, followed by Frank Lloyd Wright and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The same evidence shows that the greatest architects alive today are Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano. Scholars have long been aware of the...

Words have appeared in visual art since classical times, but until the modern era their use was generally restricted to a few specific functions. In the early twentieth century, the Cubists Braque and Picasso began using words in their paintings and collages in entirely new ways, and their...

Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and other songwriters of the Golden Era wrote popular songs that treated common topics clearly and simply. During the mid-1960s Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney created a new kind of popular music that was personal and often obscure. This shift, which...

In an era in which there is open discussion of many previously forbidden subjects, including race, sex, religion, and drugs, why is it that the nexus between money and art remains perhaps the last taboo subject for many in the art world? The answer can be found five centuries in the past. As the...

Pablo Picasso was by far the greatest artist of the 20th century: textbooks of art history contain more than twice as many illustrations of his work as of that of his closest rival, Henri Matisse. A survey of textbooks also identifies Jackson Pollock as the greatest American artist, by a narrow...

The twentieth century was a time of rapid globalization for advanced art. Artists from a larger number of countries made important contributions than in earlier periods, and they did so in a larger number of places. Many important innovations also diffused more rapidly, and more widely, than in...