Blow Up!: The Explosion of Contemporary Art

How did a urinal become art? And a can of tomato soup, a tent, a pickled shark. . . . How did what seemed like a prank at the New York Armory Show of 1917 explode to become today’s global multibillion-dollar art world? Blow Up! answers these questions by following the lives of seminal contemporary artists and the stories behind their groundbreaking works.

Against a backdrop of armed conflict (two World Wars, Japanese militarization, US troops in Vietnam, the Yugoslav Wars) and rapid societal change (democratization, successive waves of feminism, globalization), Blow Up! tells the story of contemporary art from Marcel Duchamp’s repurposed urinal to Maurizio Cattelan’s taped banana. Literal bombs explode and conventions go up in flames as a series of art objects shock and electrify society: a pickled shark, a stuffed hare, human blood.

Chapters follow a series of chain reactions as artists meet and inspire each other across continents, generations, and decades. Over a period of one hundred years everything changes–and yet the cry of “It’s not art!” never goes away. No matter how long people have had to get used to it, contemporary art continues to upset expectations and disrupt conventions–and inspire anew.