Transgressions

'A welcome wake-up call, a bracing challenge to a self-styled avant-garde that is now the new orthodoxy' - J. G. Ballard The Daily Telegraph ' ... a wealth of interesting material, many valuable insights and occasional flashes of brilliance' - The Times Higher Education Supplement 'Julius's study is as broad as it is detailed ... perceptive and perspicuous ... a personal account, in which Julius articulates his own responses along with various historical and philosophical ideas he he finds appropriate; and he does so with exemplary lucidity' - Association of Art Historians Transgressions is not a comfortable - still less a comforting - read, but it has a powerful urgency that makes it an essential document for anyone remotely concerned by the state of our culture at the beginning of the 21st century. Since about the mid-19th century, artists have compulsively rejected received ideas in order to test and subvert morality, law, society, art itself. But what happens when all boundaries have been crossed, all taboos broken, all limits violated? Transgressions is the first book to address this controversial subject. Anthony Julius traces its history from the outraged response to Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe to the scandal caused by the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition a century and a half later. Throughout the book, supported by the work of such artists as Marcel Duchamp, the Chapman brothers, Andres Serrano, Damien Hirst, Gilbert & George, Paul McCarthy, Jeff Koons, Hans Haacke and Anselm Kiefer, Julius shows how the modern period has been characterized by three kinds of transgressive art: an art that perverts established art rules; an art that defiles the beliefs and sentiments of its audience; and an art that challenges and disobeys the rules of the state. Julius concludes his hard-hitting dissection of the landscapes of contemporary art by posing some important questions: what is art's future, when its boundary-exceeding, taboo-breaking endeavours become the norm? And is anything of value lost when we submit to art's violations? Also by Anthony Julius: Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm and Jewish Art T.S.Eliot, Anti-semitism and Literary Form