The Tate Liverpool Critical Forum series was established to present papers given at annual academic conferences organised jointly by Tate Liverpool and the University of Liverpool, and related to a current exhibition in the gallery.
This collection of essays, with contributions from several contemporary artists, examines and assesses the current status of painting within global contemporary art. The meaning and value of 'painting' as both a category and a set of practices is analysed by internationally renowned art critics, historians, and theorists including Griselda Pollock and Alison Rowley, Katya Garcia Anton, David Green and Jonathan Harris. Concerned with the internationalisation of contemporary art as a feature of globalisation, Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Painting sheds new light on fine art understood as a facet of a global culture and society dominated by northern and European-US power and history. What kinds of resistance to this hegemony might be possible for artists located in the 'third world' yet inescapably implicated in the big business of the 'art world'?