Product Description

This release contains the first and second season of PBS' acclaimed documentary, which takes a look into the future at how art will be changing people's lives in the 21st Century. Artists of many fields and levels of establishment are caught in the act o

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17901 in DVD
• Brand: MUSIC VIDEO DIST
• Released on: 2003-11-18
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .30 pounds
• Running time: 450 minutes

From the Back Cover
"Art:21--Art in the Twenty-First Century Season II" profiles a broad range of emerging and established artists working in the United States today--men and women of varied cultural, religious, and geographic backgrounds--who reflect the diversity of the students in our classrooms, the people in our communities, and the circles of our friends and families. Among the artists featured in this series are painters, photographers, sculptors, and performance and video artists who use a wide variety of media and materials, tools and processes, to create their work. Each one-hour program has been loosely structured around a broad category or theme: Stories, Loss & Desire, Humor and Time.

Customer Reviews

Contemporary Art for Anybody
As a new century dawns the international public is confronted by an ever more complex artistic culture. Never content to cover old ground, today's artists are experimenting with increasingly diverse media, engaging a wider variety of issues and flooding their work with more ambiguity then ever before. We exit museums, galleries and public spaces questioning the nature of the new and unfamiliar objects we encounter, daunted by the challenge of understanding how they relate to the society in which we live.

Art in the Twenty-First Century brings us closer to the understanding we're looking for. The series shows us today's top artists (e.g. Richard Serra, Matthew Barney and others) discussing their own work, giving us the opportunity to begin to comprehend their art as the outcome of their personal experiences and interaction with the world at large. We witness the artists in their studios, on site, AS WELL AS in their homes and with their families, leading lives not disimilar from our own - extracting fodder for their artistic visions from everyday observations and occurences.

Set in four epsiodes, the series groups the artists loosely according to themes (i.e. Place, Spirituality, Identity and Consumption). In such a way, we are offered a point of departure for considering a given artist's priorities and concerns, as well as a method for realizing relationships which may exist between two or more artists working in vastly different styles.

After watching Art in the Twenty-First Century you will feel equipped to embrace the ambiguity of contemporary art, to assess the integrity and thoughtfulness of work you may not even like, and to appreciate the wide array of perspectives and processes by which today's artists dissect and reassemble the modern world.

Too Pretentious And Too Myopic To Give A Clear View
The artists that are interviewed in these videos give a very myopic view of what modern artists are doing these days and what is on their minds. The focus is entirely on art stars who basically run in the same circles of galleries and therefore have a very similar sense of aesthetics regardless of medium, with very few exceptions.

There are times that a few of the artists included say some interesting things but often times enough, it's hard to see what they are saying has to do with the actual art that they are showing. Richard Sierra (1st season) and Elizabeth Murray(2nd season) are the high points of this series as I see it. They both give honest looks into their thought processes as artists, and without the pretensions of self-importance that most of the artists portray.

It's unfortunate that the producers couldn't find at least a few artists off the beaten path who are doing interesting things that aren't so main-stream for the art world. Perhaps that's too high-minded, but I think it would have made for a way more fascinating view into what is really happening in art in the 21 century!

Great Product
This is a great DVD for those interested in learning about comtemporary artists and how they make their art. Great for Art teachers also.