The Berlin Wall was coming down, the Soviet Union was dissolving, Communist China was well on its way down the capitalist path; the world was witnessing political and social transformations without precedent. Artists, seeing it all firsthand, responded with a revolution of their own. What form this revolution took--how artists in the 1980s marked their societies' traumatic transition from decaying socialism to an insecure future--emerges in this remarkable volume. With in-depth perspectives on art and artists in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and Mitteleuropa, China, and Cuba--all from scholars and art critics who were players in the tumultuous cultural landscapes they describe--this stunningly illustrated collection captures a singular period in the history of world art, and a critical moment in the cultural and political transition from the last century to our own. Authors Ales Erjavec, Gao Minglu, Boris Groys, Peter Gyorgy, Gerardo Mosquera, and Misko Suvakovic observe distinct national differences in artistic responses to the social and political challenges of the time. But their essays also reveal a clear pattern in the ways in which artists registered the exhaustion of the socialist vision and absorbed the influence of art movements such as constructivism, pop art, and conceptual art, as well as the provocations of western pop culture. Indebted to but not derived from capitalist postmodernism, the result was a unique version of postsocialist postmodernism, an artistic/political innovation clearly identified and illustrated for the first time in these pages.

阿萊斯．阿雷斯．艾爾札維克 (Ales Erjavec)

為斯洛維尼亞科學暨藝術研究院科學研究中心的哲學所研究顧問與盧比亞納大學的美學教授。

波利斯．葛洛伊斯 (Boris Groys)

出生於東柏林，在聖彼得堡學習哲學與數學，並在莫斯科的許多研究機構作研究人員。1981年，移居西德。目前於卡爾斯魯爾的藝術與媒體科技中心任美學與媒體理論的教授。

密斯科．蘇瓦科維奇 (Misko Suvakovic)

為貝爾格勒的藝術大學音樂學系美學與藝術史教授。

彼得．喬治 (Peter Gyorgy)

為布達佩斯羅蘭大學的美學與大眾傳播副教授。

傑拉多．莫斯奎拉 (Gerardo Mosquera)

為哈瓦那的藝評家、歷史學家與作家，以及紐約新當代藝術博物館的策展人。

高名潞 (Gao Minglu)

為「中國現代藝術展」與「蛻變與突破：當代華人新藝術展」的策展人。