The Rise of the Sixties

Résumé du livre

Moving from New York to Paris, from Hollywood to Dusseldorf to London, Crow traces the emergence of a new aesthetic climate that challenged established notions of content, style, medium, and audience. In Happenings, in the Situationist International, in the Fluxus group, artists worked together in novel ways, inventing new forms of collaboration and erasing distinctions between performance and visual art. As the 1960s progressed, artists responded in many ways to the decade's pressures; internalizing the divisive issues raised by the politics of protest, they rethought the role of the artist in society, reexamined the notion of an art of personal "identity", discover celebrity, devised visual languages of provocation and dissent, and attacked the institutions of cultural power - figuratively and sometimes literally. Crow sees the art of the 1960s as a reconfiguration of the concept of art itself, still cited today by conservative critics as the wellspring of all contemporary scandals, and by those of the left as rare instance of successful aesthetic radicalism. He expertly follows the myriad expressions of this new aesthetic, weaving together the European and American experiences, and pausing to consider in detail many individual works of art with his always perceptive critical eye. Both synthesis and critical study, this book reopens the 1960s to a fresh analysis.