Modern artists have radically extended the conventional media of sculpture and painting.

Following innovative ideas about representation and the free use of materials in Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism – particularly in the work of Duchamp – artists abandoned strict adherence to traditional media and embraced any means, including technology, which best served their purposes. Ideas about time and duration have reinstated narrative in art, via film-making and video, the theatricality of happenings, performance and installation art, digitally manipulated photography and virtual reality.

This pioneering book, now expanded and revised, discusses the most influential artists internationally – from Muybridge to Rauschenberg, Bill Viola and Pipilotti Rist – and those seminal works which have transformed the map of world art.