The Art of Return: The Sixties & Contemporary Culture (Signed)

$60.00 Member Price: $54.00

By James Meyer

In this innovative work, James Meyer turns to art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to examine the fascination with the sixties and contemporary expressions of these cultural memories across the globe. Meyer draws on a diverse range of cultural objects that reimagine this revolutionary era stretching from the 1950s to the 1970s, including reenactments of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist marches, paintings, sculptures, photographs, novels, and films. Many of these works were created by artists and writers born during the Sixties who were driven to understand a monumental era that they missed. These cases show us that the past becomes significant only in relation to our present, and our remembered history never perfectly replicates time past. This, Meyer argues, is precisely what makes our contemporary attachment to the past so important: it provides us a critical opportunity to examine our own relationship to history, memory, and nostalgia.

University of Chicago Press, 2019
Hardcover, 302 pages
94 color plates, 38 halftones
7 x 10 inches
Signed by the author

Shop