Comics Versus Art

'Comics Versus Art is an absolutely terrific, very impressive book. Bart Beaty has produced a striking institutional history of comics, focusing on their movement from a position of low culture and marginality to their new place of prominence. It's a work of great sophistication, providing a broader, more nuanced sense of comics as a cultural form than we have previously understood. At the same time, Beaty explores these ideas with great clarity and focus in straightforward language.' -- Scott Bukatman, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University

Comics Versus Art examines the relationship between comics and the most important institutions of the art world; including museums, auction houses, and the art press.

On the surface, the relationship between comics and the ‘high’ arts once seemed simple; comic books and strips could be mined for inspiration, but were not themselves considered legitimate art objects. Though this traditional distinction has begun to erode, the worlds of comics and art continue to occupy vastly different social spaces.

Comics Versus Art examines the relationship between comics and the most important institutions of the art world, including museums, auction houses, and the art press. Bart Beaty's analysis centres around two questions: why were comics excluded from the history of art for most of the twentieth century, and what does it mean that comics production is now more closely aligned with the art world? Approaching this relationship for the first time through the lens of the sociology of culture, Beaty advances a completely novel approach to the comics form.