In The Postmodern Animal, Steve Baker explores how animal imagery has been used in modern and contemporary art and performance, and in postmodern philosophy and literature, to suggest and shape ideas about identity and creativity. Baker cogently analyses the work of such European and American artists as Olly and Suzi, Mark Dion, Paula Rego and Sue Coe, at the same time looking critically at the constructions, performances and installations of Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys and other significant late twentieth-century (...) artists. Baker's book draws parallels between the animal's place in postmodern art and poststructuralist theory, drawing on works as diverse as Jacques Derrida's recent analysis of the role of animals in philosophical thought and Julian Barnes's best-selling Flaubert's Parrot. (shrink)

As a criterion for judging avant-garde art, newness has been regarded as more important than excellence. kermode's single venture into art criticism, "objects, jokes & art," suggests this search for the new has led to a trivialisation of art. ideas from his more recent literary criticism such as "the classic" could be applied to avant-garde art, providing a non-reactionary means of assessing value on the basis of a work's openness to a plurality of interpretations. this would offer an alternative reading (...) of the history of modern art, opposed to formalist and reductionist views of the modernist continuum. (shrink)

This dialogue concerns the nature of ethical responsibility in contemporary art practice, and its relation to questions of creativity; the role of writing in shaping the perception of transgenic art and related practices; and the problems that may be associated with trusting artists to act with integrity in the unchartered waters of their enthusiastic engagement with genetic technologies.