Blow Up!

A non-fiction graphic novel that tells the story of a century of revolutionary contemporary art.

How did a urinal become art? And a can of tomato soup, a tent, a pickled shark... How do you get at one of the world’s most powerful governments by smashing an old vase? How did what seemed like a prank at the New York Armory Show of 1917 explode to become today's global multi-billion dollar art world? This graphic novel answers these questions by following the lives of seminal contemporary artists and the stories behind their groundbreaking works.

Against a backdrop of armed conflict and rapid societal change, this book 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: canned excrement, a pickled shark, a stuffed hare, human blood.

The story moves from Paris to New York and London, and then captures the geographical spread of a rapidly globalizing cultural scene by jumping to events in Tokyo, Belgrade, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos and Beijing, and culminating in Miami – and in the ether, everywhere and nowhere, on the internet.

Chapters follow a series of chain reactions as artists meet or inspire each other across the generations and decades. Over a period of 100 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.

Review

If you've ever been curious about the history of contemporary art, there's no better introduction than Blow Up! The Explosion of Contemporary Art... This graphic novel collects the biggest milestones in contemporary art into a comic book primer with a straightforward narrative... For those unfamiliar with contemporary art, Blow Up! provides a thorough and authoritative background. But even if you're an expert, there's plenty to love... It's thrilling to see art-world figures like art historian Linda Nochlin and multidisciplinary artist Sarah Lucas rendered in comic form.-- "BookPage" (6/1/2025 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Robert Shore is the author of several books about contemporary art and photography, including Post-Photography: The Artist with a Camera (2014), Beg, Steal and Borrow: Artists against Originality (2017), Andy Warhol (2020) and Yayoi Kusama (2021). He worked for many years as an arts reviewer and also as editor of Elephant magazine.