Show Time: The 50 Most Influential Exhibitions of Contemporary Art

The book gives an unusual overview of the history of exhibitions and a new understanding of the idea of the curator. Not a curator of monographic exhibitions but an exhibition maker of staged group exhibitions as collective experiences. Show Time is compact and the entries to the point. What they make clear is that the form of exhibition making done during the 1990 and the last two decades ended somewhere around 2010 with the full on corporatization of museums and the explosion of the art market. This book is a perfect guide for anyone that is serious about studying the history of recent exhibitions.

A total waste of money. I was expecting a range of good documentary illustrations of these exhibitions, alongside some (brief) introductory essays discussing the importance of each exhibition. This seems a totally reasonable expectation. What I received was a book that literally seemed to have been created by an algorithm: aside from the briefest of blurbs on the exhibition (more detailed information could be sourced off wikipedia!), the rest of the text was just a laundry list of names and numerial data on each show that seems completely useless for 99% of readers, whether those in the art world, in academics, or just a curious public. All this might have been acceptable if it had been a picture book of excellent illustrations, but here too it was awful: each exhibition gets a single, usually unrepresentative illustration. Between the short and awful text, and the few and awful illustrations, I felt like I had just wasted $35. Seriously, you will get better information through a random web search than you will find in this book.At the same time, I had ordered "Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions that Made Art History: 1962-2002" by Bruce Altshuler, and that - while more expensive - is absolutely everything that this book was not. The illustrations within Altshuler's book are many and well-represent the exhibitions, and his ample texts are clear and authoritative. His is the book you want. It's beautiful and scholarly both. Hoffmann's is neither.I have immense respect for Hoffmann's work as a curator, so I have to believe this book was something that was basically thrown together by unpaid interns which he then put his name on. Unfortunate.

I recently discovered Show Time on Amazon but ended up buying it from my local bookstore. Overall this publication packs a huge amount of information in a concise, affordable package. It serves (for me) as an excellent introduction to the most important contemporary art exhibitions of the past twenty years. Depending on where you are coming from you may not agree with all the choices or feel that it doesn't dive deep enough into the critical reaction to the shows themselves, but if you simply want to get a crash course on the state of the contemporary art exhibition this should be your first stop. The book's design is a bit dry and I do wish it had more reproductions to flesh out the experience, but overall I think it is is one of few publications that covers such ground in a wide reaching way. I also found the roundtable interview to be quite interesting as well. Given its directness, I imagine it should be extremely useful to both undergraduate and grad students.Along with Salon to Biennial, Biennials and Beyond, On Curating, and A Brief History of Curating, Show Time is definitely recommended for anyone interested in contemporary art, curating, and global exhibitions.

good source material

It came in good condition. Thank you.

Resumo das 50 exposições, de arte contemporânea, que mais influenciaram a curadoria contemporânea nos últimos 40 anos. Organizado de forma simples e com óptima fotografia