Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This collection is part of the new Routledge ‘Advances in Art and Visual Studies’ series. As such it brings together philosophers, art educators, practising artists, practising collaborative artists, art historians, semioticians, media and communications specialists, and a novelist and short story writer who also describes himself as an art writer. The field of art history and aesthetics has broadened to include visual culture as that embraces social and political considerations of art practice. The collection, therefore, exhibits a wider perspective than might usually be represented by a collection on aesthetics. This reviewer, at least, finds it a welcome development in the study of visual art. The editors—Bacharach is a philosopher, Booth and Fjærestad are artists—introduce the collection with a bold claim to the effect that past collaboration was a matter of expediency; and that the new collaborations we are seeing in the twenty-first century are [no] longer a means to an end, and [they] are not necessarily influenced by political or philosophical convictions or status quo, the choice to collaborate is a deliberate artistic choice. Collaboration, in other words, is now part of the medium of art-making, an artistic end in itself. (1–2)