Ways of Looking: How to Experience Contemporary Art

Art has changed. Those reassuringly familiar styles and movements that characterised art production prior to the twenty-first century have all vanished. Traditional artistic media no longer do what we expect of them. This book provides a straightforward, six-step programme for understanding contemporary art based on the concept of the tabula rasa a clean slate and a fresh mind. Since artists increasingly work across traditional media and genres, the author has also developed an alternative classification system Art as Entertainment, Art as Confrontation, Art as Joke designed to help make sense of otherwise obscure-seeming works. Ways of Looking transforms a potentially intimidating encounter with cuttingedge contemporary art into a dramatic, sensually rewarding and thoughtprovoking experience.