Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary
- ISBN-10
- 0262035952
- ISBN-13
- 9780262035958
- Category
- Art
- Pages
- 291
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017-04-07
- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Author
- David Teh
Description
The interplay of the local and the global in contemporary Thai art, as artists strive for international recognition and a new meaning of the national. Since the 1990s, Thai contemporary art has achieved international recognition, circulating globally by way of biennials, museums, and commercial galleries. Many Thai artists have shed identification with their nation; but “Thainess” remains an interpretive crutch for understanding their work. In this book, the curator and critic David Teh examines the tension between the global and the local in Thai contemporary art. Writing the first serious study of Thai art since 1992 (and noting that art history and criticism have lagged behind the market in recognizing it), he describes the competing claims to contemporaneity, as staked in Thailand and on behalf of Thai art elsewhere. He shows how the values of the global art world are exchanged with local ones, how they do and don't correspond, and how these discrepancies have been exploited. How can we make sense of globally circulating art without forgoing the interpretive resources of the local, national, or regional context? Teh examines the work of artists who straddle the local and the global, becoming willing agents of assimilation yet resisting homogenization. He describes the transition from an artistic subjectivity couched in terms of national community to a more qualified, postnational one, against the backdrop of the singular but waning sovereignty of the Thai monarchy and sustained political and economic turmoil. Among the national currencies of Thai art that Teh identifies are an agricultural symbology, a Siamese poetics of distance and itinerancy, and Hindu-Buddhist conceptions of charismatic power. Each of these currencies has been converted to a legal tender in global art—signifying sustainability, utopia, the conceptual, and the relational—but what is lost, and what may be gained, in such exchanges?
Get the book
Similar books
-
Blue Book of Art Values: Artists & Their Works from Around the World
By William Edwin DayBlue Book of Art Values: Artists & Their Works from Around the World
-
New Deal Art in Alabama: The Murals, Sculptures and Other Works, and Their Creators
By Anita Price Davis, Jimmy S. EmersonPeter Jennings and Todd Brewster, The Century (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 154. 8. Time-Life Editors, This Fabulous Century, Vol. IV, 23. 9.
-
The World of Bob Timberlake
By Bob TimberlakeOffers a selection of eighty-seven full-color reproductions of Timberlake's paintings, with an introduction by the painter
-
The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop
By Karen L. Maness, Richard M. IsackesTHE FERRELL BROTHERS, WILBUR AND WARREN , in their own words "were not known as singular artists but a duo." Wilbur began his career as a motion picture ...
-
John Singer Sargent and His Muse: Painting Love and Loss
By Karen Corsano, Daniel WillimanAdelson, Warren, “John Singer Sargent and the 'New Painting,'” in Stanley Olson, Warren Adelson, and Richard Ormond, Sargent at Broadway: The Impressionist ...
-
The Art of the Hollywood Backdrop
By Karen L. Maness, Richard M. IsackesThis is a rich undiscovered history—a history replete with competing art departments, dynastic scenic families, and origins stretching back to the films of Méliès, Edison, Sennett, Chaplin, and Fairbanks.
-
Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History
By Karen LangThrough careful research, Carol Gibson-Wood exposes the mythology surrounding the Morellian method, especially the mythology of the coherence and primacy of his method of attribution. She argues that it “could also be said that Berenson ...
-
Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity
By Karen B. SternGibson translates from the Phoenician: “Beware! Behold, there is disaster for you ... !” (SSI 3, no. 5=KAI nr. 2). Examples from Cyprus include SSI 3, no. 12=KAI nr. 30. Gibson's translation of the Phoenician reads (SSI 3, ...
-
Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960
By Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Kevin Stayton, Brooklyn Museum of ArtExamines the emergence of abstract organic forms and their assimilation into the popular arts and culture of American life from 1940-1960, covering advertising, decorative arts, commercial design, and the fine arts.
-
Typography: A Very Short Introduction
By Paul Luna... S. Newman ACCOUNTING Christopher Nobes ADAM SMITH Christopher J. Berry ADOLESCENCE Peter K. Smith ADVERTISING ... ALGEBRA Peter M. Higgins AMERICAN CULTURAL HISTORY Eric Avila AMERICAN HISTORY Paul S. Boyer AMERICAN IMMIGRATION ...