The Global Art Compass: New Directions in 21st-Century Art

A hundred years ago Western artists were taking inspiration from the traditional arts of non-Western peoples, resulting in the transformation of modern art away from the Renaissance ideals of naturalism. More than ten years into the new millennium, such crosscurrents in the art world are flowing in every direction around the planet. Hicks, a collector, curator, and consultant for a major corporate collection, provides his views of developments in the contemporary art scene in a series of essays organized geographically by continent. Some include extracts from interviews with artists from such diverse locales as Peru, Albania, and India; also included are a number of color photographs of art objects the author finds particularly meaningful in representing trends in that region. As with any such book by an art critic or curator, the reader is getting one person's opinions, rather than a scholarly analysis.