Art to Come

“Global in scale, yet granular in their attention to specifics, these essays map the defining conditions of art and architecture today, laying out the forthright line of inquiry that has made Terry Smith an indispensable guide to understanding the vexing contradictions of twenty-first-century artworlds and their possible futures.” - Kobena Mercer, author of Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s

“Art to Come offers a splendid synthesis of Terry Smith’s reflection on contemporaneity. Smith is one of the main thinkers of that notion, without which there is no real understanding of contemporary art. The book shows the richness of contemporaneity as an ongoing hypothesis that keeps art alive, disclosing the main forces shaping twentieth- and twenty-first-century art as well as those probed, questioned, and sometimes reinvented in it. Those forces include not only globalization, neoliberalism, climate change, transculturality, indigeneity, and colonialism but also decolonization, inequality, and coeval connectivity.” - Christine Ross, McGill University

"Smith, who sees linearity as an ‘old-fashioned’ way of thinking about time, kicks up the silt of art history to present us with a historiography of contemporaneity. . . . To that end, he takes us through ‘contemporary’ buzzwords and ways of thinking about issues like globalisation, the Anthropocene, decolonisation, indigenisation, revived fundamentalisms and ecoactivism, to ask how we might harmonise our differences in a way that ‘ensures our mutual survival’ on this planet." - Fi Churchman, Art Review

"In bringing this collection of essays together, Smith gives readers the opportunity to chart his progress as he repeatedly surveys the contemporary terrain. These field reports from a highly engaged observer provide compelling reading for anyone concerned with art practices of the past three decades." - Martha Buskirk, Critical Inquiry

"At once retrospective and anticipatory, Smith’s description of his intent with Art to Come suggests that the book is as much for himself and ‘those to come’ as it is for art historians and other observers of contemporary art working today (24). For Smith, contemporary art history is historiography. By writing contemporary art history as personal historiography, Smith models for his readers—present and future—an ethics as much as a methodology for the study of the visual culture today." - Elizabeth Mansfield, Journal of Art Historiography