ONE THING is certain: The creation of a publishing house like TASCHEN  (www.Taschen.com) is ample proof that the printing of books in our age, dominated by electronic communication, is nowhere near obsolete, but an ongoing necessity and pleasure that is only proven after the fact of its continued existence. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and  ART NOW Vol:2 is further evidence that when, in 1980, young Benedict Taschen decided to open a shop in Cologne, Germany to market his huge comic book collection, aided by the printing of a modest catalogue, this was the first of a few quick steps which created a literate public’s interest, and led to the creation of the mostly art-based TASCHEN BOOKS, with branches now also in Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris and Tokyo.
Taschen’s breakthrough into art-book publishing began when he purchased 40,000  leftover copies of an art book on the famous Belgian surrealist modern painter, Rene Magritte and resold them at budget prices.
Art books have always been an exciting  high-priced educational commodity, because of their colour plates of paintings people in literate societies around the globe would rarely, or never, get the chance to see in reality.
Taschen grasped the chance to provide such books in colour, with texts in English as well, by able writers on art (also architecture, film, fashion, etc) at fixed low prices difficult to compete with in Europe and North America today.
However, Taschen still seems to publish volumes on the traditionally familiar names in art history: Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rubens, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Picasso, Miro, Chagall etc, and among the now classic abstract modernist painters: Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko, even a volume on the famous young recent Afro-American ghetto graffiti artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose stereotypical drug-abused urban lifestyle and ironic anger pervaded his powerful expressive graffiti-type paintings on canvas, wood, cardboard, etc.
Basquiat’s paintings found favour in the novelty driven American/European art market, and their value escalated when he died of a drug overdose at age 22; such a classic unconventional artistic background no doubt helped his selection as one of the youngest artists to have an art monograph printed by Taschen art books, so focusing on him is perhaps a good introduction to a large part of the disturbed mental temperament and mood evident in most of the 81 international artists, born since the 1960s, selected for exposure in ART NOW Vol: 2, and who made a name for themselves via recent museum and group shows in Europe’s and North America’s numerous exhibition spaces.
Because there are diverse approaches to the making of  all endeavours we call ‘art’, it is interesting to ponder what criteria lie behind shows which we see chosen by curators for art museums and private galleries, or art books which the editorial staff of publishing houses choose for publication.
Choices of inclusion are  obviously made from a gamut of people wanting to be, or professing to be artists because they have ‘studied’ in art institutions. The first fact we should notice about ‘Art Now Vol:2’ is that the 81 artists chosen for the book  have been part of shows which individual critics and curators have put together for art museums and galleries in London, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin,  Munich, Dusseldorf, Basel, Barcelona, Madrid, Milan, Dublin, Venice, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, Miami, Pittsburg, Ottawa, Sao Paolo, Mexico City, Tokyo, Sydney, and a few other cities in Europe and North America primarily.
Because the concept and definition of art has changed significantly since the late 18th Century with the advent of the American Revolution of 1776, and even more profoundly with the French Revolution of 1789,  a point developed nicely by Mary Ann Staniszewiski in her book, ‘Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art’, published by Penguin books in 1995, we have to acknowledge and admit that art has never been exactly what people thought it was, which is simply whatever paintings or sculptures people around the world happened to make.
Why call such things art at all? Perhaps only architecture, especially by the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Asians, and Pre-Columbian Americans came close to the concept of art since antiquity, because their mathematical and geometric  precision was rooted in function and practicality, rather than conceived as visual illustrations  of myth and ritual exercises concerned with the ‘supernatural’.
Neither was architecture dictated to totally by religious, political or State authorities such as monarchies or State academies, which is what so many paintings and sculptures, at least up to the late 19th Century, represented, and which we call ‘art’ today in order to define and classify them by an historical and so-called cultural concept.
In looking at Taschen’s ART NOW Vol:2, we see how art is no longer the expression of loyal Royal subjects, economic or political employers ever since the shift from Monarchial rule to a liberal democratic one, where people in nations and societies are no longer opportunistic sheepish followers, but free individuals and equal citizens with the same rights, and a free will governed by responsibility for one’s actions, as well as the safeguard of fellow citizens and society as a human value.
The individual artist became the exemplar of such basic human rights and values, and the work of art a representative of the freedom of the individual, especially in regard to the pleasure of selling and collecting art, which now was no longer a sponsored compromised illustration of a kingdom or political or economic property, but the property of the individual artist, then the free individual collector.
The rise of the economic and philosophical importance of art since the 19th Century is based on this fertile social premise. This does not mean that the State, or big corporations, or wealthy influential individuals only commission or purchase art that is subservient to their authority and power. It all depends on the art made by the type of artist that is commissioned and accepted by he patron/collector.
A good example is the fabulous kinetic style of mostly public art, which changes due to electronic neon, or the effect of wind, or especially by the movement and position of viewers in relation to it. This art, linked to the antique European figurative Baroque and geometric Moorish aesthetic traditions, reached its highest modern advancement and beauty in the hands of Latin American artists from three nations primarily: Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina.
Venezuela clearly produced the greatest of these kinetic artists in Jesus Soto, Alejandro Otero, and Carlos Cruz Diez, as well as many others. It is these artists’ many public works which made Caracas one of the most beautiful artistic and visually exciting modern cities to live in  the 20th Century, precisely because such works — primarily rooted in the most artistic optical weaving of Venezuela’s first native peoples, or remote native Indian tribes — make every spectator, every citizen, every individual, collectively equal by their purely physical, optical, bodily relationship to these works, which are devoid of appeal to racial, class, political or religious partisanship.
ART NOW Vol:2 presents the concerns of 81 visual artists from around the world, and of diverse racial strains; the criteria for their inclusion is based on their appearance in shows put together by curators and critics who formulate shows comprising works which support a theory or concept of their own.
Of course, this in no way proves that these 81 artists are the only artists making works of value and importance, though what this choice of artists, based on their ability to exhibit, does prove is that the old patronage of Monarchies, State, Church, Academies, and Museums is perhaps still alive in another form in competing curatorial choices made to prove polemical cultural viewpoints.