Blow Up!: The Explosion of Contemporary Art

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.