The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970

Sayre defines art in terms of its shared, distinctly postmodern concerns, showing for the first time how the entire range of contemporary art--including dance, photography, oral poetry, performance art, and earth sculpture--is associated in a collective avant-garde project. Examining such artists as Cindy Sherman, Andy Warhol and Laurie Anderson and focusing specifically upon the relationship of postmodernism to the concerns of feminist art in their work, this book provides a consistently illuminating explanation of contemporary art forms. "No one can read The Object of Performance without gaining a far better understanding than before of what has happened to art, and, in some measure, why."-- Arthur C. Danto.