Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present

First published in 1979, the latest edition of this pioneering study in the World of Art series surveys a full century of performance, from the Futurist manifesto of 1909 to the second decade of the new millennium. Art historian and gallery curator Rose Lee Goldberg explains how a medium once used only in sporadic outbreaks of artistic dissent has become, over the course of a century, a vital and integral part of the contemporary mainstream and a global phenomenon.

Amazon: First widely, and fittingly, recognized in the 1970s the heyday of conceptual art, which insisted on "an art of ideas over product, and on an art that could not be bought and sold" performance art has thrived in recent decades, according to RoseLee Goldberg's Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. First published more than 20 years ago, the book has been extensively updated. Goldberg (Laurie Anderson), a former curator of the Kitchen Center for Music, Video and Performance in New York City, analyzes artists as varied as the dadaists, Laurie Anderson, John Cage, Cindy Sherman, Mariko Mori, Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney, Karen Finley, Forced Entertainment and Desperate Optimists.