Art & Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts

This text offers an alternative history of modern art - in a chronology of the ways in which, for different reasons at different times, artists and their works have managed to offend and outrage the public at large, the politicians, the art establishment and/or the media. In a series of case studies, the book explores the uneasy relationship between art and the wider world since World War II, teasing out the often mutually incomprehending relationships between artists and the mass media, and the problematic interface between art and society. What happens when an artist’s work is labelled obscene - and who decides? Who or what is the arbiter of good taste ? Literally, what constitutes a work of art - and why are we sometimes so troubled by the avant-garde?