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Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings
Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz
For anyone wanting to know what modern and contemporary artists actually thought—in their own words—this is among the most useful books to own. Edited by the art historians Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz for the University of California Press, this hefty sourcebook gathers primary documents: manifestos, statements, interviews, and essays by the artists themselves, organized by movement and theme across the postwar era. Rather than filtering everything through critics, it lets Rauschenberg, the Fluxus group, performance and conceptual artists, and dozens more speak directly, with Stiles's substantial introductions setting each section in context. It's a textbook and a reference, dense but navigable, and it has been standard on art-school reading lists for good reason. For anyone serious about understanding contemporary art from the inside, it's close to indispensable.
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The editors
Kristine Stiles is an art historian at Duke specializing in performance, trauma, and the global avant-garde; Peter Selz (1919–2019) was a pioneering curator of modern art, including at MoMA and Berkeley. Their combined range shapes the book's unusually broad reach.
The book
Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, first published by the University of California Press in 1996 and later revised, is a large anthology of artists' own writings from the postwar period onward. It is arranged thematically, with each section framed by scholarly introductions—chiefly Stiles's—that situate the primary texts.
How it reads
It is a reference work rather than a cover-to-cover read, and its value is exactly that: a reliable, wide-ranging trove of source material. The framing essays remain respected, and the book is still assigned widely, though the newest decades of art naturally fall outside its scope.
For more context
It descends from Herschel Chipp's classic Theories of Modern Art, extending that documentary approach into performance, Fluxus, conceptualism, and beyond.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Kristine Stiles & Peter Selz
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Place of publication
- Berkeley and Los Angeles
- Year
- 1996
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Paperback
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine