The World as a Stage

The World as a Stagepresents a key group of international contemporary artists—Pavel Althamer, Catherine Sullivan, Tino Sehgal, and others—who reinvigorate the rich historical relationship between visual art and theater. Challenging negative associations made between the notion of theatricality” and the realm of visual art in recent decades, the artists in this book make visible the extent to which a sense of theater, or spectacle, now permeates the spectator’s role in the museum or gallery and how this carries through to their experience of the contemporary urban environment. Considering a variety of media including installation, sculpture, performance, participatory works, and events, this book deals with issues such as the framing of human presence in the experience of art.

Catherine Wood and Jessica Morgan are both curators at the Tate Modern.