PUBLIC LECTURE: Contemporary Art: World Currents

A public lecture by Professor Terry Smith, FAHA, CIHA - Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh.

The lecture is based on Terry Smith’s new book which argues that, in recent decades, a worldwide shift from modern to contemporary art has occurred. This has not, however, been a uniform change from one phase or style in the history of art to another. Rather, artists everywhere have embraced the contemporary world’s teeming multiplicity, its proliferating differences, and its challenging complexities. Diversity--the contemporaneity of difference--not a convergence towards sameness, Smith argues, is what makes today’s art contemporary.