The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st-century Art World

These are exciting times in contemporary art: the market is resurgent; audiences are multiplying. But it's also harder than ever to get a handle on the art world; there's such a diversity of forms that an art work, an art career, or an art scene can take.

In The Contemporaries, author Roger White, himself a painter, shows there's no better way to understand art than through the artists themselves. White combines close observation with essential commentary -- both exuberant and skeptical -- as he takes us through the halls of RISD, where art drives discourse and vice versa; to New York, to pull back the curtain on the strange economy of art assistantship; to Milwaukee, to see a group of young artists trying to envision the possibilities of a local scene. And he gives us an intimate perspective on three select artists, whose careers reveal parallel traditions within art today: the emerging star who's reinvigorating painting; the roving artist who sits on the edge of feminist art and social practice, but firmly outside the market; and the former conceptual wunderkind who has either drastically limited or expanded his ambitions, depending on who you ask.

The Contemporaries reveals what artists are thinking and making this minute, and the multiple meanings and possibilities of the "contemporary" in contemporary art. It's a careful and colorful anthropology of a fascinating world, spun out from its very heart -- a classic in the making.