‘Field notes: contemporary art history as historiography’. Review of: Terry Smith, Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019, 456 pp., 84 b. & w. illus., £92.00 hdbk, £25.99 pbk ISBN 9781478001942

Abstract

Terry Smith characterizes Art to Come as a work of art historiography. The eleven chapters that comprise Art to Come–including several previously published essays by Smith–are primarily concerned with describing and analyzing art produced in the past few decades. This review takes up Smith’s invitation to understand Art to Come as historiography and argues that the book is a model for a mode of art writing that is simultaneously art historical and historiographical