Eleanor Heartney- Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order

Eleanor Heartney
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Eleanor Heartney
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Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order
By Eleanor Heartney

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One of the most damning charges that can be leveled against artists, curators and critics these days is that they are "reducing art to politics." The idea has taken hold that politics is like a virus, sucking all the aesthetic sophistication, beauty and formal intelligence out of an art work, and leaving behind only an empty husk of tired propaganda. But while it is true that there is nothing more tedious than an art work which exists only to triumphantly inform us that "racism is bad" or "war creates innocent victims," it would be a big mistake to dismiss art which takes on issues of society as a sign of imaginative failure.

This book looks at art and politics from a variety of standpoints, among them, the failures and successes of art committed to social change, the intersections between art and religion, globalism and economics, the dangers posed by paranoia and censorship to our vision of free expression and the new urgency of these issues in a post 9/11 world.

Taken together, these essays present a plea for complexity in Contemporary Art and in our understanding of that art. At a moment when so much of our cultural and political rhetoric revolves around stark oppositions - left & right, good & evil, progressive & reactionary, red & blue - art which operates on multiple levels can play an important role in reinvigorating public debate. To defend complexity is also to defend our ability to function in a meaningful way in this world.

A frequent contributor to Art in America, Eleanor Heartney was the 1992 recipient of the College Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and has also received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Asian Cultural Council. She is currently co-president of the AICAUSA, the American section of the International Art Critics' Association.

Read More about Eleanor Heartney's "Lessons in Controversy Lecture"

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