‘Field notes: contemporary art history as historiography’. Review of: Terry Smith, Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019

Abstract

Terry Smith characterizes Art to Come as a work of art historiography. The eleven chapters that comprise Art to Come–including several previously published essays by Smith–are primarily concerned with describing and analyzing art produced in the past few decades. This review takes up Smith’s invitation to understand Art to Come as historiography and argues that the book is a model for a mode of art writing that is simultaneously art historical and historiographical.

Keywords

• contemporary art
• connectivity
• contemporaneity
• empiricism
• global art history
• art of the 21st century
• art historical methodology
• art history as historiography
• interpretive restraint
• post-cold war art
• self-reflexivity