Contemporary Art (Art History)

Introduction

As an art-critical or historical category––one that might designate a style of art, a tendency among others, or a period in the history of art––“contemporary art” is relatively recent. In art world discourse throughout the world, it appears in bursts of special usage in the 1920s and 1930s, and again during the 1960s, but it remains subsidiary to terms––such as “modern art,” “modernism,” and, after 1970, “postmodernism”––that highlight art’s close but contested relationships to social and cultural modernity. “Contemporary art” achieves a strong sense, and habitual capitalization, only in the 1980s. Subsequently, usage grew rapidly, to become ubiquitous by 2000. Contemporary art is now the undisputed name for today’s art in professional contexts and enjoys widespread resonance in public media and popular speech. Yet, its valiance for any of the usual art-critical and historical purposes remains contested and uncertain. To fill in this empty signifier by establishing the content of this category is the concern of a growing number of early-21st-century publications. This article will survey these developments in historical sequence. Although it will be shown that use of the term “contemporary art” as a referent has a two-hundred-year record, as an art-historical field, contemporary art is so recent, and in such volatile formation, that general surveys of the type now common for earlier periods in the history of art are just beginning to appear. To date, only one art-historiographical essay has been attempted. Listed within Contemporary Art Becomes a Field, this essay (“The State of Art History: Contemporary Art” (Art Bulletin 92.4 [2010]: 366–383; Smith 2010, cited under Historiography) is by the present author and forms the conceptual basis of this article. Contemporary art’s deep immersion in the art market and auction system is profiled in the separate Oxford Bibliographies article Art Markets and Auction. This article does not include any of the many thousands of books, catalogues, and essays that are monographic studies of individual contemporary artists, because it would be invidious to select a small number. For similar reasons, entries on journals, websites, and blogs are omitted. A select listing of them may be found in Terry Smith, Contemporary Art: World Currents (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011; Smith 2011 cited under Surveys). Books on art movements are not to be found because contemporary art, unlike modern art, has no movements in the same art-historical sense. It consists of currents, tendencies, relationships, concerns, and interests and is the product of a complex condition in which different senses of history are coming into play. With regret, this article confines itself to publications in English, the international language of the contemporary art world. This fact obscures the importance and valiance of certain local-language publications, even though many key texts were issued simultaneously both in the local language and English, and many others have subsequently been translated. In acknowledgment of this lacuna, a subsection on Primary Documents has been included.

18th and 19th Centuries

During these centuries, “contemporary” is almost entirely incidental to terms associated with “beauty,” “taste,” or, more controversially, “mainstream (juste milieu)” vis-à-vis “modern,” when it came to highlighting the qualities toward which art was understood to aspire, or, equally broadly, the social purpose it was understood to serve, as is demonstrated by the remarks in Carr 1878, Benjamin 1877, and Burty 1878. Yet, contemporaneity of one kind or another does appear as an element within some of the key moments of transformation in art––the defense of modern painting in Ruskin 1848, the famous definition of modernité in Baudelaire 2008, and in Courbet’s programmatic realism (see Nochlin 1971), for example––and as part of some of the most important developments in the organization of artistic practice, such as museums, profiled in Lorente 1998.

Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. 2d ed. Edited and translated by Jonathan Mayne, 1–41. Arts & Letters. London: Phaidon, 2008.
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Written in 1864, Baudelaire’s definition of modernité––“the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, the other half of which is the eternal and the immutable” (p. 12)––contains contemporaneity as its essential entry point, its temporal turning, the moment at which the truly modern artist subjects his experience of the impacts of modernity to a formal figuration that, he hopes, will create an art that has some chance of becoming, under criteria that it is helping to bring about, “eternal.” This edition originally published in 1964.
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Benjamin, S. G. W. Contemporary Art in Europe. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877.
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A collection of three articles that had recently been published in Harper’s Magazine, the author (a prolific American journalist) offers informative and engaging reports on the role of academies, the state of the art market, and major tendencies in the visual arts––from painting through sculpture and the graphic arts to the crafts and industrial design––in England, France, and Germany. Republished as recently as 1976 (New York: Garland).
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Burty, Philippe. “Gustave Courbet.” The Academy, 16 February 1878.
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In a lengthy obituary of the recently deceased Gustav Courbet in the “Contemporary Art” section of the February 1878 issue of The Academy, Parisian art writer Philippe Burty notes “Some of his pictures, apart from any influence of system, and under the free influence of his natural genius, are admirable works, worthy of the museums that do themselves the honor of welcoming contemporary art, and do not confine themselves exclusively to the study of ancient schools” (p. 153).
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Carr, Joseph Comyns. Examples of Contemporary Art: Etchings from Representative Works by Living English and Foreign Artists. London: Chatto & Windus, 1878.
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Reviewed by Frederick Wedmore in The Academy, 16 February 1878, as “an exquisite gift-book” consisting of images taken from the journal L’Art, with commentary by the author. Mixed levels of competence in the engravings are noted, but Wedmore remarks of the writing: “In the main his criticism is of the highest order of contemporary work, and it is contained in a volume which the well-to-do will offer to the fortunate” (pp. 151–152).
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Contemporary Review.
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A journal of politics and the arts, founded in 1866. Initially edited by Henry Alford, Anglican dean of Cambridge, it was intended as a church-related counterpart of the resolutely secular journal Fortnightly Review, edited by the novelist Anthony Trollope. Under its second editor, James Thomas Knowles, it embraced current discussions of evolution, and authors such as Gladstone, Huxley, and Ruskin. During the 1880s a series of articles on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood attracted controversy.
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Lorente, J. Pedro. Cathedrals of Urban Modernity: The First Museums of Contemporary Art, 1800–1930. Historical Urban Studies. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998.
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Surveys the establishment, in European capitals during the 19th century, of collections of the work of living artists alongside the permanent collections of art from the past. Beginning with the Musée des Artistes Vivants in the Luxembourg Palace, Paris, in 1818, annual exhibitions assessed the work of preferred artists for inclusion in state collections. From 1863 onward, independent salons showed work that officials refused to include in such exhibitions. Survey completes with the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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Nochlin, Linda. Realism. Style and Civilization. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971.
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Nochlin was the first art historian to locate the grasp of contemporaneity as an essential factor among those whom the French realist artists used to distinguish their art from the neoclassicism of the academies. Courbet’s goal was “to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of the epoch, according to my own estimation” (Gustav Courbet, “The Realist Manifesto,” 1855). Also cited in Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900: Sources and Documents, by Linda Nochlin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966). See especially pp. 25–33. Realism republished as recently as 1990 (London: Penguin).
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Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. Vol. 1. 4th ed. London: Smith, Elder, 1848.
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In the preface to the second edition, reprinted in this volume, Ruskin addresses those who criticized his argument that Turner’s exceptional achievement as an artist is as great as––and in landscape, greater than––any of his predecessors, ancient and recent. “He who would maintain the cause of contemporary excellence against that of elder time, must have every class of man in array against him” (p. xiv). Republished as recently as 1987 (New York: Knopf), edited and abridged by David Barrie.
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20th Century to 1980

Art discourse during the 20th century is dominated by terms that highlight novel subject matter, formal innovation, and relevance to the economic, social, and cultural transformations characteristic of modern life. With the rise of mass production and mass consumption in Europe and the United States during the early years of the 20th century, modern ideas and ideals became prevalent in high culture as well as in industrial design and commercial advertising. To identify change in the visual arts, a number of synonyms were used, among them “new,” “modern,” and “contemporary.” For the most part, the last term simply referenced occurrence in the present. At certain times and places, however, artists and critics place special importance on the word “contemporary” as a way of distinguishing valued qualities in current art––qualities that, they feel, are not encompassed by modernist attitudes or aesthetics.

1920s–1940s

For members of the societies of contemporary art that were established in Britain in 1910 and in British colonies or ex-colonies during the following decades, “contemporary” designated art no longer bound to traditional values or academic practices (Contemporary Art Society 1938). Elsewhere, “modern” and “contemporary” were used interchangeably––in Huyghe and Bazin 1935, for example. As the century progressed, there was a notable increase in the occasions on which the terms were used to distinguish among tendencies within current art. Barr 1929 insists that certain artistic approaches were more truly modern than others, provoking the authors of Aldrich and Plaut 1948 toward a more inclusive openness, for which the term “contemporary” was felt more appropriate. This incident and similar ones are reviewed in Meyer 2013.

Aldrich, Nelson W., and James S. Plaut. “‘Modern Art’ and the American Public: A Statement of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Formerly the Institute of Modern Art.” Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 17 February 1948.
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The Boston Museum of Modern Art was established in 1936 as the New England branch of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1948, believing that modern art had become “dated and academic,” and “unintelligible” to the public, it announced: “in order to disassociate the policy and program of this institution from the widespread and injurious misunderstandings which surround the term “modern art,” the Corporation has today changed its name from the Institute of Modern Art to THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART.” Cited in Institute of Contemporary Art, Dissent: The Issue of Modern Art in Boston (Boston: ICA, 1986), pp. 52–53.
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Barr, Alfred H., Jr. Letter to Paul Sachs, 5 October 1929. Alfred H. Barr Jr. Papers, Series 1: Correspondence, folder 1.4, Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
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Comments echoed in the Founding Statement, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1929. Barr insisted “the word ‘Modern’ is valuable because semantically it suggests the progressive, original and challenging rather than the safe and academic which would naturally be included in the supine neutrality of the term ‘contemporary.’” Letter cited in Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 366.
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Contemporary Art Society. “Constitution of the Contemporary Art Society,” 1938. Contemporary Art Society Archives, Melbourne, Australia.
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“By the expression ‘contemporary art’ is meant all contemporary painting, sculpture, drawing and other visual art forms which is or are original and creative or which strive to give expression to contemporary thought and life as opposed to work which is reactionary and retrogressive including work which has no other aim than representation.” See a brief history of the society. Cited in Bernard Smith with Terry Smith and Christopher Heathcote, Australian Painting 1788–2000 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 218.
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Huyghe, René, and Germain Bazin. Histoire de l’art contemporain: La peinture. Paris: Éditions Alcan, 1935.
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French histories of art since the French Revolution used the term “l’art contemporain” as the general term to convey the same sense of “modern art” in English; they continue to do so. See also Christian Zervos, Histoire de l’art contemporain (Paris: Éditions Cahiers d’Art, 1938). Huyghe and Bazin’s edition republished in 1968 (New York: Arno).
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Meyer, Richard. What Was Contemporary Art? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.
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A closely contextual study of key terms, especially “modern” and “contemporary,” as they were used by curators, critics, artists, and cultural commentators in the United States between the late 1920s and the late 1940s. Case studies include Alfred H. Barr’s teaching at Wellesley College, exhibitions of non-Western and Renaissance at the Museum of Modern Art, and the breakaway Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
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1960s and 1970s

During the 1960s, “contemporary” became the term of choice for individual artists, experimental groupings, and exhibitionary organizations that saw themselves as alternatives to an increasingly institutionalized modernism (Steinberg 1972). Meanwhile, artists and critics active in the art communities at a distance from those in the dominant metropolitan countries strove to produce art that was sufficiently innovatory in itself, in “universal” or at least “international” terms, to be regarded as contemporary with that being produced at the centers, as argued in Beier 1968, Smith 1974, Kasfir 1999, Kapur 2000, and Tomii 2004. These strivings are now being acknowledged as strategies that, in many instances and in most places, produced art that established its own, local, nonmetropolitan value, as shown, for example, by Clark 1998. See also Continental and Regional Cotemporalities.

Beier, Ulli. Contemporary Art in Africa. New York: Praeger, 1968.
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The optimism engendered by the liberation movements that brought an end to the colonization of Africa led to outbursts of artistic creativity across the continent. Beier was a German-born writer, teacher, and facilitator who helped establish art centers in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s, and who worked tirelessly to publicize the work that came out of them.
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Clark, John. Modern Asian Art. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998.
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A searching and subtle set of reflections on the interactions––over time, and, as is more often and more frequently the case, simultaneously––between the multiplicitous traditional, neo-traditional, modern, postmodern, and contemporary tendencies in the visual arts in a number of Asian countries from the late 18th century to the 1990s. Essential background to understanding the specific character of the contemporary art emergent in various Asian countries since then.
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Kapur, Geeta. When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India. New Delhi: Tulika, 2000.
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This collection, by that country’s leading art and film theorist, covers painting, sculpture, drawing, and film. Asking “when was modernism?,” Kapur links earlier artists who negotiated local inheritances and Western styles, such as Amrita Sher-Gil, to late modernists such as Nasreen Mohamedi and contemporary practitioners such as Nalini Malani, to suggest that Indian art has become truly modernist only in postmodern times.
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Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield. Contemporary African Art. World of Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999.
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Informative survey of art and crafts throughout the continent in the second half of the 20th century, noting the continuity of traditional practices, the growth of modern approaches, and the emergence of contemporary art in connection with African artists of the diaspora. Reprinted as recently as 2008.
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Smith, Terry. “The Provincialism Problem.” Artforum 13.1 (1974): 54–59.
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Describes an international system of contemporary art centered on the New York art world that distributes the opportunity for artistic innovation, and for recognition and reputation, according to prevailing geopolitical, economic, and social inequities. Argues that all artists, critics, and curators––from those practicing in the peripheries to the “stars” in the center––are subject to “the provincialist bind” (p. 54) and should resist it.
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Steinberg, Leo. “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public.” In Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art. By Leo Steinberg, 3–16. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972.
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In a 1960 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the famous art historian defines “plight” as “simply the shock of discomfort, or the bewilderment or the anger or the boredom which some people always feel, and all people sometimes feel, when confronted with an unfamiliar new style” (p. 5). This is what is contemporary about the work of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and others: it invites us into a new temporality and insists that the time for this kind of art has arrived. Republished as recently as 2007 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
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Tomii, Reiko. “Historicizing ‘Contemporary Art’: Some Discursive Practices in Gendai Bijutsu in Japan.” Positions: east asia cultures critique 12.3 (2004): 611–641.
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The multiple values of contemporaneity in Japanese art during the 1970s and since are plotted with precision. Gendai bijutsu (“contemporary art”) replaced both kindai (“modern”) and zen’ei (“avant-garde”) as the preferred term for what was seen as a new kind of art that was contemporaneous with international art being produced elsewhere––in the West, and then globally. This was known as kokusai-teki dōjsei (“international contemporaneity”). Available online by subscription.
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Postmodernity

Announcing the “end” of modernity as a general social condition, and of modernism as the prevalent cultural and artistic dominant, theories of postmodernity and postmodernism emerged in philosophy, linguistics, architecture, and the visual arts during the 1970s and 1980s, having been abroad in literary theory for decades. Literary theorist Fredric Jameson (Jameson 1984), philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (Lyotard 1984), and geographer David Harvey (Harvey 1990), among others, aimed to discern the generative structures that remain in play just as they seem becoming impossible to sustain. The paradox of their implication in an anachronistic modernity, rather than their openness to contemporaneity, was the object of analytical fascination. For many, this paradox remains the most pertinent account of our being-in-time today. Yet, postmodern theories may also be regarded, in retrospect, as signs of the global shift to contemporary art, and, some argue, to the general condition of contemporaneity––see Smith, et al. 2008, cited under Critical Debate.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990.
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A Marxist social geographer, Harvey outlines the most thorough and acute account of postmodernity as a set of global economic, social, and cultural conditions. He offers definitive descriptions of space-time compression, the transformative and speculative logic of capital, and the work of art in the age of electronic reproduction and image banks. Reprinted as recently as 2001 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell).
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Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (July–August 1984): 53–92.
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Interprets the merging of high and mass culture as signaling that late capitalism has produced postmodernism as a cultural dominant. Citing Warhol’s deadpan imagery, decentered narrative in Doctorow’s novels, and disorientation in Portman’s hotels, Jameson calls for a global cognitive mapping as a political response. An expanded version may be found in his collection Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). Article available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature 10. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984.
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Originally published in 1979; republished as recently as 2010 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Philosopher Lyotard profiles a general shift in human thought, characterized above all by a rejection of master narratives, especially those, such as a belief in progress, that drove modernity. He also wrote sensitive essays on art and artists, mainly with a view to keeping interpretation open to the possibility of sublimity, and organized an exhibition, Les immatériaeux (The Immaterials) (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1985), that explored the impact of technologies––ancient and contemporary––on aesthetic consciousness.
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Postmodernism in Art

While heralded as a style change in the history of architecture, notably in Jencks 1977, in the visual arts more generally, postmodernism signaled awareness of the institutionalization of modernism, the likely end of viable avant-garde strategies, and the impact on artistic practice of post-structuralist and deconstructive theories, leading to preferences for appropriation, historicism, parody, and pastiche. Danto 1997 and Belting 2003 theorize the implications for art history, Bürger 1984 contrasts contemporary-art strategies to those of the now-historical avant-garde, while Krauss 1986, Foster 1983, and Buchloh 2003 were written by those who became the leading critical analysts of neo-avant-garde art. Pedrosa 2005 recognizes some experimental art in Brazil as postmodern. Erjavec 2003 highlights the use value of postmodern theories in central and eastern Europe after 1989.

Belting, Hans. Art History after Modernism. Translated by Caroline Saltzwedel and Mitch Cohen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
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An elaboration of the author’s famous essay, The End of the History of Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), which argued that changes in art since the 1970s had also undermined presumptions, both traditionalist and modern, on which the history of art was founded. This collection traces further undermining by more media innovation, artists’ interest in art history, and the impact of non-Western art.
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Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
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Drawing on Bürger’s distinction (Bürger 1984) and the theories of the Frankfurt School of social critics, as well as his own formation as an art critic in West Germany, the author offers searching and sometimes trenchant studies of the work of key artists such as Dan Graham, Michael Asher, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Yves Klein, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, and others. Most essays were written in the 1980s.
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Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Theory and History of Literature 4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
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Originally published in 1974; reprinted as recently as 2009. From a New Left Marxist perspective, the author introduces an important and highly influential distinction between the anti-establishment, anticapitalist artistic radicalism of the early-20th-century avant-garde groups and the artistically experimental yet politically timid, ideologically complicit movements in post–World War II, late modern art, which he labels “neo-avantgarde.”
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Danto, Arthur C. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
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Argues that contemporary art has become posthistorical: “So just as ‘modern’ has come to denote a style and even a period, and not just recent art, ‘contemporary’ has come to designate something more than simply the art of the present moment. In my view, however, it designates less a period than what happens after there are no more periods in some master narrative of art, and less a style of making art than a style of using styles” (p. 10).
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Erjavec, Aleš, ed. Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicized Art under Late Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
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Leading scholars Boris Groys, Misko Suvakovic, Aleš Erjavec, Péter György, Gerardo Mosquera, and Gao Minglu explore the relevance of postmodernist strategies to the transitions from socialist to postsocialist or quasisocialist regimes in Russia, central Europe, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Cuba, and China, respectively.
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Foster, Hal, ed. The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Post Townsend, WA: Bay, 1983.
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Prescient collection of highly influential texts that together outline the elements of a resistant as opposed to complicit postmodernism, named by Foster as an “anti-aesthetic.” Key essays by Jürgen Habermas on modernity as an incomplete project, Kenneth Frampton on critical regionalism, Rosalind Krauss on sculpture’s expanded field, Douglas Crimp on museums as ruins, and Craig Owens on feminist discourse, plus Fredric Jameson’s first essay on postmodernism, as well as others by Jean Baudrillard, Gregory Ulmer, and Edward Said. Republished as recently as 2002 (New York: New Press).
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Jencks, Charles A. The Language of Post-modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1977.
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The definitive text on postmodernism in architecture, tracking its characteristics––historicism, revivalism, neo-vernacular, ad hoc urbanism, metaphor metaphysical, and postmodern space––from 1960 forward, in six editions up to 1991. In subsequent texts, such as The Story of Post-modernism: Five Decades of the Ironic, Iconic and Critical in Architecture (Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), Jencks expands the concept to include most contemporary architecture, culture, and thought.
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Krauss, Rosalind E. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986.
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A collection of essays written between 1973 and 1983, mainly for the journal October, that register the author’s movement from a structuralist formalism to an overtly poststructuralist methodology that is applied, vigorously, rigorously, and with considerable subtlety, to avant-garde modernist art––notably Rodin, Duchamp, the Surrealists, and Pollock––and to postmodern art––for example, Richard Serra and Sherrie Levine. Reprinted as recently as 2010 in paperback.
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Pedrosa, Mário. “Environmental Art, Postmodern Art: Hélio Oiticica.” In Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970. Edited by Donna De Salvo, 182–183. Translated by Michael Asbury. London: Tate, 2005.
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In this essay written for the newspaper Correio de Manhã, 26 June 1966, Pedrosa takes US pop and Brazilian neoconcretism as evidence of a “new phase” in art, an “anti-art,” in which “actual aesthetic values tend to be absorbed into the formal character of perceptive and situationist structures” (p. 182). He celebrates Hélio Oiticica’s performative works involving samba dancers and environments that created experiences of pure color and texture as primary exemplars.
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Transition into Contemporary Art, 1990s Onward

Contemporary art did not arrive suddenly, on or about a certain date and all over the world, as an all-at-once paradigm shift within the history of art. Transitions from late modern to contemporary art occurred in many ways, varying according to the situation in each local art world, including the scale and tenacity of its institutional infrastructure, and the degree and kind of its internationalization. These changes were everywhere contested by those committed to existent practices and understandings, while also leading to a reinvigoration of them, including efforts to renovate modernism (see Remodernism). Social and political change in Africa and South America, and throughout Asia and in central and eastern Europe, interacting with a globalization of the world economy led by Euro-American centers, precipitated a seismic shift in geopolitical arrangements, ending the Cold War and opening an era in which cultural differences became strikingly contemporaneous (see Postcoloniality, Continental and Regional Cotemporalities, and National Cotemporalities). The internationalization of art was figured through important temporary exhibitions (see Exhibiting Cotemporality and Contemporary Exhibitionary Form) and the creation of a circuit of biennials organized by itinerant curators (see Contemporary Curating). The nature of these changes continues to be intensely debated among artists, critics, curators, and historians (see Critical Debate).

Remodernism

Challenges to modernist attitudes and practices by postmodern theorists and those adopting “pomo” (postmodern) stylistics led the authors in Varnedoe, et al. 2000 to insist that contemporary art revised modernist foundations, the author of Foster 1996 to discern conformist and resistant strands within postmodernism, and curators such as the author of Duve 2001 to show that the innovations of contemporary art were prefigured in earlier modernisms.

Duve, Thierry de. Look, 100 Years of Contemporary Art. Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Ghent, Belgium: Ludion, 2001.
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A leading postmodern theorist revisits the history of avant-garde art since Duchamp, identifying a sequence of relationships––here I am, here you are, here we are––designed to register artists’ paradoxical efforts to alienate their publics and seek their love. Originally in French (Voici, 100 ans d’art contemporain, Brussels: Ludion, 2000).
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Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. October Books. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
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Taking minimalist art not as the end of modernism but as the crux of a shift to a resistant postmodernism, and refusing the 1980s absorption of art into commercial culture and social conservatism, these essays trace a genealogy that emphasizes how artists in the United States since Warhol have sought to figure psychic, social, and economic realities. Key essays about the idea of the neo-avant-garde, the artwork as text, abjection, and the artist as ethnographer are included.
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Varnedoe, Kirk, Paola Antonelli, and Joshua Siegel, eds. Modern Contemporary: Art at MoMA since 1980. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000.
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Chief curator Kirk Varnedoe asserts: “There is an argument to be made that the revolutions that originally produced modern art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have not been concluded or superseded––and thus that contemporary art today can be understood as the ongoing extension and revision of those founding innovations and debates. The collection of the Museum of Modern Art is, in a very real sense, that argument” (p. 12).
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Postcoloniality

A century of struggle on the part of colonies around the world against the imperial masters in Europe culminated in the mid-20th century with the decolonization of most of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. Canclini 1995 observes that strategic relationships between colonized and colonizers were always definitive. Enwezor 2009 argues that decolonization has brought about a world state of affairs in which the complexities of postcoloniality prevail in all relationships, including those involving art.

Canclini, Néstor García. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
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In the pivotal chapter, “Latin American Contradictions: Modernism without Modernization?” (pp. 41–59), Canclini argues that modernist culture throughout the continent has been a strategy used by elites to negotiate their relationships to colonial and, later, external powers, not an expression of the economic, social, or political modernization of each country. Reprinted as recently as 2008.
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Enwezor, Okwui. “The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition.” In Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Edited by Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, 207–234. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
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Advances the important argument that not only recently independent countries but also the entire world geopolitical order has been shaped, irrecoverably, by “globalization after imperialism” (p. 208). Contemporary art and curatorial practice is “constellated around the norms of the postcolonial, those based on discontinuous, aleatory forms, on creolization, hybridization . . . [all] operating with a specific cosmopolitan accent” (p. 209).
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Mercer, Kobena, ed. Cosmopolitan Modernisms. Annotating Art’s Histories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
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The first of a series of collections of studies of artistic modernisms in non-Western cultures, and minority cultures within Western countries, which explores their relatively autonomous development as well as their relationships to prominent tendencies in Western art. Each chapter focuses on an individual work or artist. Discrepant Abstraction (2006) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008), also edited by Mercer, follow in the series and include more-current studies.
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Continental and Regional Cotemporalities

Postcoloniality is foundational to the interplay between the local and the global that is a core dynamic of international art: the cotemporality of different art-producing centers highlights their differences as to values, methods, and interests, while also enabling the possibility of productive exchanges. Turner 2005 and Brunt and Thomas 2012 show these interactions occurring in the Asia-Pacific region; Njami 2005 and Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu 2009 profile local and diasporic art relating to Africa; while East Art Map and Piotrowski 2012 trace these relationships within central and eastern Europe, as does Sloman 2009 for the Middle East.

Brunt, Peter, and Nicholas Thomas, eds. Art in Oceania: A New History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.
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A well-presented collection of essays by expert anthropologists and art historians, tracing major developments in the region from the earliest human settlement to the present. The last hundred pages are devoted to informative and inquiring studies of “Art in Oceania Now 1989–2012,” by Peter Brunt, Sean Mallon, and Damien Skinner and Lissant Bolton.
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East Art Map.
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Initiated in 2004 by Group Irwin, an artists’ collective based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, East Art Map is a research, exhibition, book, and online project that has enabled artists, critics, and curators from eastern Europe to compile a fifty-year history of the art of their region.
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Enwezor, Okwui, and Chika Okeke-Agulu. Contemporary African Art since 1980. Bologna, Italy: Damiani, 2009.
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A thorough theoretical and historical exploration of key themes within contemporary African art, which is seen, in the words of a chapter subtitle, as situated “Between Postcolonial Utopia and Postcolonial Realism.” Profusely illustrated with the work of 130 artists.
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Njami, Simon. “Chaos and Metamorphosis.” In Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent. Edited by Simon Njami, 13–23. London: Hayward Gallery, 2005.
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Important essay on the complex positioning of African artists in relation to their societies, and both to internal and external perceptions of “Africa,” since the 1960s, when a majority of countries became independent. A major survey, Africa Remix traveled to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.
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Piotrowski, Piotr. Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe. Translated by Anna Brzyski. London: Reaktion, 2012.
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Argues that the 1989 implosion of the Communist societies of central and eastern Europe opened up a “spatial” or “horizontal” approach to the art histories of the various regions of the world. None, including “the West,” are to be privileged. Art in central and eastern Europe today––by Ilya Kabakov, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Marina Abramovic, for example––is not postmodern but neo-avant-garde in its forms and ambitions.
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Sloman, Paul, ed. Contemporary Art in the Middle East. Artworld. London: Black Dog, 2009.
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Well-illustrated and indicative collection of works by artists from North African, eastern Mediterranean, and Arab countries from Algeria to Afghanistan. Four strong, interpretive essays, as well as interviews with key players in the region, completed by an extract from Edward Said’s famous 1978 volume Orientalism, and critical commentary on it.
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Turner, Caroline, ed. Art and Social Change: Contemporary Art in Asia and the Pacific. Canberra, Australia: Pandanus, 2005.
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Collection of essays from writers active throughout Asia and the Pacific, profiling recent developments in art centers throughout these regions, usually mapped in concert with political events and social changes. Edited by a key cofounder of the Asia-Pacific Triennials, staged at the Queensland Gallery of Art, Brisbane, Australia, since 1993.
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National Cotemporalities

Within nations, distinctions as to class, race, gender, and even location can lead to the formation of distinctive cultural identities, as Powell 2002 and Jones 2011 demonstrate. English 2007 shows that, while visual artists often use signifiers of such identities in their works, it can be liberating to work against such stereotyping. Siegel 2011 and Wagner 2012 profile the broader cultural currents within which contemporary art has developed in the United States in the post–World War II period. Wu 2008 and Gao 2011 argue that even within a divided society, a peculiarly national outlook toward artistic innovation is possible, especially when there is awareness of developments occurring in art elsewhere. Although these examples are confined to the United States and China, complex relationships between local and international values are prevalent throughout contemporary art worlds, as other entries in this article amply demonstrate.

English, Darby. How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
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Close and careful readings of artists––David Hammons, Isaac Julien, Glenn Ligon, Fred Wilson, Kara Walker, and William Pope. L––whose works treat a range of widely significant issues––such as the limits of representation, the nature of difference, cultural history and consciousness, and the performance of selfhood––in ways that register the realities of racism but are not confined by them, or to them, or are representative of them.
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Gao Minglu. Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
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Argues that Chinese conceptions differ from the Western historical periodization of modernity, and from modernist conceptions of a critical avant-garde, in that a pragmatic openness to current necessities has always been present, subject to the overall requirement of the national project. In the 20th century, this has amounted to a “total modernity.” An in-house participant, curator, and historian, Gao offers a detailed account of these aspects of Chinese modern and contemporary art.
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Jones, Kellie. EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
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Engaged writings and recollections by New York–based critic and curator that profiles her growing up within the black arts movement of the 1970s, and her commitment to presenting the communities that have sustained African American artists since then.
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Powell, Richard J. Black Art: A Cultural History. Rev. ed. World of Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.
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Survey of African Americans from colonial times through the Harlem Renaissance, the “New Negro” ideal, abstract expressionism, the black art movement, and postmodern questioning of identity signifiers, to connections with the contemporary art of the African diaspora. Originally published in 1997 as Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century.
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Siegel, Katy. Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art. London: Reaktion, 2011.
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Argues that the existential annihilation threatened by the atomic age echoes in risky, open-ended procedures and “unfinished” look (Willem de Kooning), as well as the preference for black and white abstraction (Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman), that resonates at present (Bradley Walker). Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Matthew Barney parodied and embodied models of corporate man and mass society. Other themes include the use of old vis-à-vis new things, and images of the first and the last man.
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Wagner, Anne Middleton. A House Divided: American Art since 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
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Proposing that “contemporary makers understand the artwork as a contingent historical thing,” Wagner explores what it has meant for US artists to be “a citizen of Empire” during a period when their country held hegemonic sway over world economics, politics, and culture (p. 5). Works by Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Gordon Matta-Clark, Maya Lin, and Bradley Walker manifest “a house divided,” whereas others––from sculptor David Smith to recent video and performance artists––have sought personal places of safety.
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Wu Hung. “A Case of Being ‘Contemporary’: Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art.” In Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Edited by Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, 290–306. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
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Leading scholar Wu Hung argues that certain tendencies within Chinese avant-garde art have, since the late 1970s, been contemporary in their heterogeneity and multiplicity, and that they represent “a new kind of artist, who creates contemporary art through simultaneously constructing his or her local identity and serving a global audience” (p. 291).
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Exhibiting Cotemporality

Decolonizing geopolitical change has led to sharply increased awareness in Europe of the contemporaneity of art produced in the former colonies, a change first registered in an exhibition titled Magiciens de la terre (Martin 1989). Political independence and resurgent nationalism inspired exhibitions showing lateral interconnections among artists in the Third World, notably the Bienal de la Habana (Godoy, et al. 1989). The opening of closed totalitarian societies was marked by exhibitions that featured local innovation, as in China/Avant-Garde Exhibition, or recuperated repressed local histories, as in Pejić and Elliott 1999, Ramírez and Olea 2004, and Basualdo 2005. Decline in Euro-American economic and cultural dominance has led to exhibitions of contemporaneous global developments, such as Global Conceptualism (Camnitzer, et al. 1999). Throughout the world, forgotten histories of many kinds have been recovered and connected with contemporary needs, notably by feminist artists and historians such as in Reilly and Nochlin 2007.

Basualdo, Carlos, ed. Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture (1967–1972). São Paulo, Brazil: Cosac Naify, 2005.
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To accompany the exhibition that traveled to major museums in Chicago, London, Lisbon, and New York, this catalogue combines interpretive texts and original documents concerning the critical flowering of the arts and their close relationship to popular culture during the period of the dictatorship in Brazil.
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Camnitzer, Luis, Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss, et al. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s. New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999.
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Showing works by 135 artists from 30 different countries, this influential exhibition challenged the notion that “conceptual art” was primarily a European and US phenomenon, by arguing that a variety of quite specific kinds of “conceptualism” emerged throughout the world during the time period, in response to local conditions and international exchange.
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China/Avant-Garde Exhibition. National Art Museum of China, Beijing, 5 February 1989.
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Curated by a team of artists and curators led by Gao Minglu, the exhibition was the first large-scale, national survey of the ’85 Movement, a broad, informal coalition of experimental artists who worked in media ranging from abstract painting to installation and performance art. It has been seen as part of the democracy movement that led to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, violently suppressed on 4 June 1989. It is discussed in detail by the curator in Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), chapter 4.
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Godoy, Llilian Llanes, et al., eds., Bienal de la Habana 1989: Modernity and Contemporaneity, various venues. Havana, Cuba, 1989.
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Curated by a collective led by Godoy and Gerardo Mosquera, this exhibition emphasized interaction between art from Third World and nonaligned countries. While centered on a main exhibition titled Three Worlds, it also featured numerous satellite shows at venues throughout the city. It is discussed in detail in Rachel Weiss, Making Art Global (Part 1): The Third Havana Biennial 1989 (London: Afterall, 2011).
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Martin, Jean Hubert. Magiciens de la terre. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1989.
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Curated by Martin, the exhibition juxtaposed works––mainly paintings, objects, and installations––by Euro-American artists interested in “spiritual” issues with ritual objects, artifacts, and performances by artists and shamans from indigenous cultures all over the world, which had been recently produced or were made for the exhibition, often in its venues. Attacked by some critics as colonialist, it also introduced a number of indigenous artists who have since built international reputations.
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Pejić, Bojana, and David Elliott, eds. After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe. 2 vols. Moderna Museets Utställningskatalog 287. Stockholm: Modern Museum, 1999.
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Two-volume publication related to the exhibition that traveled from Moderna Museet, Stockholm, to the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest, in 2000. Commissioned texts by the most-active curators in eastern and central Europe join recent writings by artists, theorists, and critics from the region to form an invaluable anthology. The catalogue shows striking installation, performance, video, and photography by artists responding to all aspects of the massive social transformations underway since 1989.
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Ramírez, Mari Carmen, and Héctor Olea. Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
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Taking as their inspiration Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García’s famous inverted map of the two Americas, the authors bring together an unprecedented collection of works, documents, and statements from Latin American avant-garde artists, highlighting their commitment to utopian social transformation.
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Reilly, Maura, and Linda Nochlin, eds. Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art. London: Merrell, 2007.
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Published to accompany the Brooklyn Museum exhibition that celebrated the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Featured work made since 1980 by eighty women artists from fifty countries, demonstrating the cultural specificity of feminist practice in different places, and the diversification of women’s art since the essentialist 1970s and the theory-driven 1980s.
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Contemporary Exhibitionary Form

The declarative and confrontational exhibitions favored by avant-garde groups during the early 20th century––profiled in Altshuler 1994––continued for decades as the model for those seeking to precipitate radical artistic change. This practice was historicized in a number of significant survey exhibitions at major museums, notably the Museum of Modern Art, New York, during the mid-20th century. Since the 1960s and 1970s, artists have shaped innovative exhibitionary practice in museums, leading to the emergence of “curator-artists” such as the author of Szeemann 1969, and subsequently the institutional critique tendency (see Themes, Tendencies, and Concerns). The variety of exhibitionary forms called for by the diversity of contemporary art worldwide is evident in mega-exhibitions, such as documenta, exemplified most emphatically in Enwezor, et al. 2002, and in biennials, the most prominent exhibitionary vehicle for the dissemination of contemporary art. Among the latter, Bonami and Frisa 2003 is an inventive instance. Characteristic of current conditions, there has been sharp decline in exhibitions claiming to identify a new national school or a widespread change of style; exceptions include Rosenthal, et al. 1997 and Flood, et al. 2007.

Altshuler, Bruce. The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century. New York: Abrams, 1994.
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Traces provocative exhibitions organized by independent artist groups, from the 1905 Salon d’Automne showing of Fauvist paintings in Paris, through 0,10, known as the Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting (Petrograd, Soviet Union, 1915), the Dada Fair (Berlin, 1920), and the Degenerate Art exhibition (Munich, 1937), to When Attitudes Become Form (Bern, Switzerland, 1969). Republished in 1998 (Berkeley: University of California Press).
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Bonami, Francesco, and Maria Luisa Frisa, eds. Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer; 50th International Art Exhibition. Venice: Skira/Marsilio, 2003.
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Perhaps the most ambitious of Venice Biennales in recent decades, director Bonami and his team of eleven invited curators created an archipelago of loosely connected exhibitions, ranging from the director’s survey of “Painting: From Rauschenberg to Murakami” through “Contemporary Arab Representations,” curated by Catherine David, to “Utopia Station,” an ensemble of transitory works by sixty artists coordinated by art historian Molly Nesbit, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.
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Enwezor, Okwui, Carlos Basualdo, Jean Fisher, et al. Documenta 11, Platform 5: Exhibition, Catalogue. Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2002.
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Staged across five “platforms”––four of which were conferences on themes of world significance––on different continents, Documenta 11 culminated in Platform 5: Exhibition at Kassel, Germany. The majority of works explored the contemporary operations of the “postcolonial constellation” noted above, and as explicated in the director’s introduction, “The Black Box” (pp. 42–55).
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Flood, Richard, Laura J. Hoptman, Massimiliano Gioni, et al. Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century. London: Phaidon, 2007.
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Based on the catalogue of the opening exhibitions at the new venue of the New Museum on the Bowery, New York. An absorbing survey of “post-sculptural” installations by known but also new-generation artists that remains relevant to current concerns.
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Rosenthal, Norman, Simonetta Fraquelli, Brooke Adams, et al. Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997.
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Exhibition selected by Rosenthal; exhibition and catalogue coordinated by Fraquelli. Catalogue of the Royal Academy of Art exhibition, surveying key works by “Young British Artists” such as Jake and Dinos Chapman, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, and Rachel Whiteread, drawn entirely from the collection of advertising mogul Charles Saatchi. When it traveled to the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 1999, city funding was withdrawn from the museum.
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Szeemann, Harald. Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form; Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information. Bern, Switzerland: Kunsthalle Bern, 1969.
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This exhibition, held 22 March to 27 April 1969 at Kunsthalle Bern, brought together works by sixty-nine artists from Europe and the United States, most of whom created new works on-site or provided documentation of works made off-site. A version curated by critic Charles Harrison was shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in September 1969. It remains very influential as an early model of artist-curator interaction.
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Critical Debate

During the first decade of the 21st century, awareness began to grow that, while art practice was contemporary in all senses of the word, its inventive energy and diversity had not been theorized in depth, nor had it been seen from historical perspectives. While some argued that theory should accompany art practice, not analyze it, and that contemporary societies––and therefore the arts they produced––were no longer subject to historical interpretation, others began to challenge both viewpoints. In recent years, these debates have found expression mostly in anthologies, such as Smith, et al. 2008; Foster 2009; Aranda, et al. 2010; and Avanessian and Skrebowski 2011, which seek to link changes in art to broader social and geopolitical changes. A few authors have tackled the issues from their individual perspectives, as seen in Groys 2008, Smith 2009, Agamben 2009, Lee 2012, and Osborne 2013.

Agamben, Giorgio. “What Is the Contemporary?” In “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays. By Giorgio Agamben, 39–54. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Meridian. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
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On the basis of his lecture “On Contemporaneity,” delivered at the European Graduate School in 2007, the Italian philosopher offers an engaging reflection on the nature of “contemporariness.” Drawing on Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations (originally published in 1874–1876), a poem by Osip Mandelstam, the neurophysiology of vision, current astrophysics, and fashion, he emphasizes the sense of displacement, heterogeneity, and anachronism experienced by those who truly grasp the present.
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Aranda, Julieta, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, eds. What Is Contemporary Art? New York: Sternberg, 2010.
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Compiled from a series of lectures organized by Anton Vidokle at Shanghai in 2009, these thirteen lively, searching essays by artists (Martha Rosler, RAQs Media Collective), theorists (Boris Groys), curators (Cuauhtémoc Medina, Zdenka Badovinac, Hu Fang), and critics (Carol Yinghua Lu, Dieter Roelstraete) were first published as “What Is Contemporary Art?,” in the journal e-flux. Part 1 in Vol. 11 (December 2009) and Part 1 in Vol. 12 (January 2010) available online.
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Avanessian, Armen, and Luke Skrebowski, eds. Aesthetics and Contemporary Art. Berlin: Sternberg, 2011.
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Noting that philosophical aesthetics has returned to contemporary-art discourse after some decades in eclipse, the editors have assembled a brilliant collection of essays by philosophers such as Peter Osborne, critics such as Julianne Rebentisch, curators such as Dorothea von Hantelmann, and artists such as Luis Camnitzer and the Art & Language group.
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Foster, Hal, ed. Special Issue: Questionnaire on “The Contemporary.” October 130 (Fall 2009).
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Noting that recent contemporary art “seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment” (p. 3), the editors asked US and European critics and curators to comment on these impressions and suggest possible causes and consequences. Thirty critics and two curators responded, all displaying an aversion to the “floating free,” each offering descriptions, concepts, and critiques of various kinds.
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Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
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In provocative and insightful essays written since 1997, the German-born, now New York–based Russian philosopher offers fresh readings of concepts such as “the new,” “modern,” and “contemporary” and of role switching among artists, curators, and critics, exploring key differences between art produced in market as distinct from nonmarket systems, especially in post-Communist conditions.
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Lee, Pamela M. Forgetting the Art World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
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Argues against dumping postmodernity as the overarching descriptor of our current condition, on the grounds that a neoliberal version of contemporary life would then prevail. Explores closely the engagement with various globalizing forces and effects in the work of three individual artists—Takashi Murakami, Andreas Gursky, and Thomas Hirschhorn—and of artist groups such as the Raqs Media Collective.
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Osborne, Peter. Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso, 2013.
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The most comprehensive consideration to date of core aspects of contemporary art practice and theory from a philosophical perspective, specifically that of German rationalism, English empiricism, and some Continental critical theory. Using pertinent examples, the author argues that contemporary art is, in expanded but precise senses, post-conceptual art.
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Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
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Examining key artists, exhibitions, museums, and markets around the world, the author argues that three major currents may be discerned within the diversifying variety of contemporary art. These are institutionalized contemporary art, primarily Euro-American, which subdivides into remodernism, retro-sensationalism, and spectacle; the arts of transnational transition created throughout the world since decolonization, and now predominant; and the network cultures of a younger generation, shaped by globalization but concerned about world issues.
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Smith, Terry, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds. Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
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A collection of essays from a 2004 conference that asked: “In the aftermath of modernity, and the passing of the postmodern, how are we to know and show what it is to live in the conditions of contemporaneity?” (p. xiii). Three generations of philosophers, theorists, curators, and art historians explore this question from a variety of perspectives.
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Contemporary Art Becomes a Field

Despite the fact that there is little agreement among artists, curators, theorists, or scholars as to what counts as contemporary art, or what is to be valued within it, this article is evidence that a field of practice, dissemination, and interpretation has come into being. This fact is readily recognizable from outside art worlds and takes distinctive forms within the cluster of activities and institutions that constitute them. Museums, markets, universities, schools, and publications have, for the most part, striven to incorporate the work of contemporary artists into their ongoing structures, usually by adding it onto a traditional or modern narrative, or a postmodern counternarrative. This is the case with most of the texts listed in the following subsections on anthologies, compilations, and surveys. Among these, too few have sought to vary their approaches in response to the fundamentally different relationships to the world that, some argue, much contemporary art is attempting to figure.

Historiography

Smith 2010 is, to date, the only text that proposes a historiographic methodology for contemporary art as a field within the history of art. The future of art history as a discipline remains an open question: contemporary art, and contemporary conditions in all spheres, might transform to such an extent that the structures through which the history of art have been written, to date, would need to follow suit.

Smith, Terry. “The State of Art History: Contemporary Art.” Art Bulletin 92.4 (2010): 366–383.
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A prolegomenon to contemporary art as a field within the history of art, noting the burgeoning interest in contemporary art in markets, media, museums, and art scholarship; exemplifies certain contemporary artists’ use of art history as subject matter, traces the meanings of “contemporary” within art discourse since the mid-19th century, highlights recent debates between curators over the scope of art, and introduces the hypothesis that three contemporaneous currents structure art today. Available online.
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Anthologies

Although invaluable as collections of statements by modern and contemporary artists, and of relevant theoretical and other contextual texts, the term “contemporary” in the titles of Stiles and Selz 2012 and Jones 2006 simply substitutes for “modern.” Alongside Harrison and Wood 2003, they are collections pertinent to the study of the transitions from high modern through late modern to contemporary art. This becomes more evident as they are updated in new editions. Robinson 2001 and Kocur and Leung 2012 focus their collections, respectively, on feminism and themes in contemporary art since the 1980s.

Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. 2d ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
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The best anthology of texts by artists, theorists, and critics on the interaction between art and theory during the 20th century as a whole. Very strong on modernism, adequate on postmodern ideas, poor on feminist art and postcoloniality.
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Jones, Amelia, ed. A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945. Blackwell Companions in Art History. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
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A wide range of commissioned essays covering the period by decade, then through key concepts in aesthetics, politics, identity, methods, and technology.
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Kocur, Zoya, and Simon Leung, eds. Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985. 2d ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
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Similar in scope to Harrison and Wood 2003, but focusing on the two decades prior to 2012, this is a collection of texts by leading scholars, artists, and critics, specifically commissioned to explore the interaction of art and theory during this time. First published in 2004 (Oxford: Blackwell).
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Mosquera, Gerardo, and Jean Fisher, eds. Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture. Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art 6. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
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Useful collection of essays and projects by writers, critics, curators, and artists living in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East, and working mostly outside of dominant cultural institutions and circuits. Includes key essays by known scholars such as Geeta Kapur and John Clark, by curators such as Apian Posyananda, and by lesser-known curators such as Lee Wang Choy and Rustom Bharucha, as well as artists such as Pam Johnston and Jalal Toufic.
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Robinson, Hilary, ed. Feminism-Art-Theory: An Anthology, 1968–2000. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
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An outstanding collection of primary and secondary texts from the women’s movement and feminist art practice and theory, which also highlights broader impacts. Texts are organized into sections on gender within culture, activism and institutions, art-historical revisionism, the question of a feminine aesthetic, practical strategies, identity and race, theories of representation, body imagery, sexuality, and spirituality.
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Stiles, Kristine, and Peter Selz, eds. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. 2d ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.
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An essential collection of statements by key late modern artists concerning their creative processes, and their more general understanding of art. Collected from the late 1940s and 1950s, but concentrating on the 1960s and since, the statements are organized into sections: gestural abstraction; geometric abstraction; figuration; material culture and everyday life; art and technology; installations, environments, and sites; process; performance art; and language and concepts. Originally published in 1996.
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Compilations

Responding to the urgent demand for unfettered access to things as they are happening that typifies contemporary consumption, some publishers invested heavily in attractive compilations of images and information about contemporary art (Grosenick and Reimschneider 1999). Others sought to engage viewers through public media and the Internet (Storr 2001). Another popular strategy is to feature compilations of selections of artwork by high-profile curators, as is done in Birnbaum, et al. 2011.

Birnbaum, Daniel, Connie Butler, Suzanne Cotter, et al. Defining Contemporary Art. London: Phaidon, 2011.
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Eight curators choose twenty-five works that they consider “pivotal” to the art of the twenty-five years prior to publication, write brief comments on them, and then engage in a discussion about the reasons for their choices. This is a picture book about contemporary art, designed on the model of an exhibition curated by a committee of curators.
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Grosenick, Uta, and Burkhard Reimschneider, eds. Art at the Turn of the Millennium. Cologne: Taschen, 1999.
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The first of a series of annual albums, updated each year to 2005, of images of contemporary artwork, selected according to simple principles: more than one hundred artists whose work is regularly chosen for exhibition by young curators, a brief biographical listing, a short statement, and a few images of works by each, assembled in alphabetical order.
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Storr, Robert, ed. art:21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Abrams, 2001.
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This volume collected the output to 2001 of Art21, a nonprofit organization dedicated to “introducing broad public audiences to today’s visual artists” by “stimulating critical reflection as well as conversation through the production of films, books, multimedia and Internet-based resources, educational programs, and special events.” It produces the engaging and informative primetime PBS television series Art in the Twenty-First Century (sixth series, 2012), online short-format films as well as useful curricular resources, and other online materials.
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Primary Documents

In reaction against hasty generalization and essentialist stereotyping of art made in the various regions of the world, a number of critics, curators, and scholars from each region have gathered judicious selections of primary documents in order to show the depth, density, and complexity of local art discourse, and to serve as foundations to future art-historical research. Most initiatives in this regard occur in local languages, but some appear first in English-language translations or through Euro-American institutions, such as in Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Arts. Only English-language collections are listed here. Hoptman and Pospiszyl 2002; Wu 2010; and Chong, et al. 2012 are exemplary collections of statements by artists and others that have accompanied first presentations of their work. Mosquera 1996 and Chiu and Genocchio 2011 assemble texts by critics and theorists that reflect on specific artwork, exhibitions, and historical themes.

Chiu, Melissa, and Benjamin Genocchio, eds. Contemporary Art in Asia: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
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A well-selected, useful compilation of important interpretive texts, mostly by Asian scholars with international perspectives, written between 1990 and 2009. They offer insightful, precise, and at times confrontational analyses of developments in modern and contemporary Asian art, reading them as complex traditions and renovations, which change according both to local necessities and external impacts.
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Chong, Doryun, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya, and Fumihiko Sumitomo, eds. From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945–1989; Primary Documents. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012.
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Collection of artists’ statements, manifestos, and critical responses from a fertile period of transformation in Japanese art and intense interaction with changes in Western art, including the Gutai and Hi Red Center collectives, video and performance artists, and photographers. Useful interpretive texts by active scholars frame each section.
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Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Arts.
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Led by curator Mari Carmen Ramírez and theorist Héctor Olea, this is an ongoing archival and publication project that, with the cooperation of local scholars and archivists, scans key primary documents relating to the visual arts, culture, history, and politics of countries from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, and to the artistic expression of Latino communities in the Caribbean, the United States, and elsewhere.
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Hoptman, Laura, and Tomáš Pospiszyl, eds. Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002.
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Introduced by Russian avant-gardist Ilya Kabakov, this groundbreaking collection translates into English pivotal texts by artists, critics, curators, and commentators active during the late Soviet and post-Soviet eras in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia.
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Katzenstein, Inés, ed. Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004.
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A fascinating collection of texts by artists and critics active within each of the tendencies animating this vital period of Argentine art, from the “destructive art” of Kenneth Kemble through the “informal art” championed by museum director Jorge Romero Brest, to the pop art and “happenings” theorized by critic Oscar Masotta, to the political art of Léon Ferrari and the “experimental art” of Graciela Carnevale and others.
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Mosquera, Gerardo, ed. Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.
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Outstanding collection of key texts by leading Latin American theorists, artists, critics, and curators, including Nestor-García Canclini, Nelly Richard, Luis Camnitzer, and Ticio Escobar. Topics include continental divisions, “other” modernities, feminism and periphery, multiculturalism, and relativities in the distribution of global cultural power. First published in 1995 (London: Institute of International Visual Arts).
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Wu Hung, ed. Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010.
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A thorough and detailed collection of statements by artists, critics, curators, and others (including some official documents and proclamations), relating to the various stages in the development, since 1979, of Chinese contemporary art (Zhongguo dangdai yishu), as distinct from official art, mainstream academic art, and traditional art, including ink painting, that was also produced during these years.
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Surveys

As critical debate concerning the nature of contemporary art and its complex relationships to contemporary societies continues, and resources are gathered to enable deeper understanding of the transitions from the regional and local modernities, a small number of surveys of contemporary art are beginning to appear. Foster, et al. 2011 updates previous narratives of 20th-century art; Fineberg 2011 does so for late modern art. Taylor 2005, Archer 2002, Hopkins 2000, and Stallabrass 2004 survey art since 1980. Smith 2011 is global in scope, regionally organized, and local in its treatments of artworks.

Archer, Michael. Art since 1960. 2d ed. World of Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002.
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First published in 1997. A lucid, thorough survey of mainly European and US material, with especially useful discussions of British art since the YBAs (Young British Artists).
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Fineberg, Jonathan. Art since 1940: Strategies of Being. 3d ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011.
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First published in 1995. A personally engaged, existentialist approach to art making, mainly in New York, that focuses on individual artists rather than movements or theories. Stronger on art prior to the 1970s.
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Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. Vol. 2, 1945–2010. 2d ed. New material by David Joselit. London: Thames & Hudson, 2011.
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First published in 2004. Cowritten by a coalition of university-based critics who are the key editors of October, the influential US journal, Art since 1900 expands the prevailing New York–centered narrative of formalist modernism in the United States, by matching it with a parallel story of informal, Californian, abject, and resistant postmodernist practices, and by regular reference to similar developments in European art, but not elsewhere.
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Hopkins, David. After Modern Art: 1945–2000. Oxford History of Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
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A well-written, informative survey of major tendencies in post–World War II art, from an independent viewpoint. Good bibliography, timeline, and website list.
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Smith, Terry. Contemporary Art: World Currents. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011.
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The global shift from modern to contemporary art that has been occurring since the late 1960s is traced through its distinct manifestations in Europe and the United States, Russia and (east of) Europe, South and Central America, the Caribbean, China and East Asia, India, South and Southeast Asia, Oceania, Africa, and the Middle East. Responses of contemporary artists to geopolitical conflict, climate change, clashes between cultures, asynchronous temporalities, and official and commercial immediation are profiled.
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Stallabrass, Julian. Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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Powerful critique of contemporary art as a cultural expression of life under conditions set by late capitalism or neoliberal globalization. Reissued as Contemporary Art: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
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Taylor, Brandon. Contemporary Art: Art since 1970. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005.
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Revised edition of Brandon Taylor, The Art of Today (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), and Contemporary Art (London and New York: Penguin, 2004). Well-written study of major artists and main tendencies in Europe and the United States, with some reference to artists from elsewhere.
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Themes, Tendencies, and Concerns

Although contemporary art has become a distinctive set of practices and a distinguishable interpretive field, it continues to be extremely diverse when considered from the inside, and entirely open ended when considered as a whole. Overviews such as those offered in Lucie-Smith 2002, Heartney 2008, and Robertson and McDaniel 2013 tend to be mixed listings of topics, mediums, interests, theories, and relationships between art and the world. Texts oriented to teaching, such as Perry and Wood 2004, are more critically selective. The themes, tendencies, and concerns that follow these overview texts are organized to reflect a historical shift within art-critical writing since the late 1980s or so, from primary interest in the ways art mediums are being mixed and transformed to a focus on relationships between artists and audiences, and between art making and aspects of contemporary life.

Heartney, Eleanor. Art & Today. London: Phaidon, 2008.
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Recognizing that today’s “art can no longer be understood as an isolated phenomenon,” nor as “a set of developments all arising from a common point,” the author nominates sixteen themes, each reflecting one of the “diverse and unruly interactions between art and the world” (p. 11): popular culture, the quotidian object, abstraction, representation, narrative, time, technology, deformation, the body, identity, spirituality, globalism, architecture, institutions, politics, and audience.
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Lucie-Smith, Edward. Art Tomorrow. Paris: Pierre Terrail, 2002.
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A rather generalizing essay accompanies a plethora of illustrations. An unusual concentration on figurative painting, body imagery in performance art, and sexualities as a theme.
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Perry, Gill, and Paul Wood, eds. Themes in Contemporary Art. Art of the 20th Century 4. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in association with the Open University, 2004.
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Devised for courses at the British correspondence university, it has well-written, theoretically informed chapters by a number of fine scholars, including Charles Harrison, Kristine Stiles, and Steve Edwards, that pursue the legacies of conceptual art from the 1960s to the 1990s.
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Robertson, Jean, and Craig McDaniel. Themes of Contemporary Art: Visual Art after 1980. 3d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
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A concise introduction for undergraduates, through chapters that focus on identity, the body, time, memory, place, language, science, and spirituality in art since 1980. Brief definition and contextualization of each theme is followed by a detailed exploration of it in the work of two artists.
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Indigeneity

During the modern period, art by indigenous peoples inspired a number of important modernist artists, notably Picasso, Nolde, and Pollock. Works by indigenous artists were valued for their apparent “otherness” or were found to be curious if they depicted interactions with nonindigenous colonizers. Since the 1960s, however, indigenous artists in certain parts of the world, including North America but most notably Australia, have exerted increasing agency, both in renovating traditional practices, as Penney 2004 and Morphy 1998 show, and in developing distinct forms of contemporary art, as argued in McMaster and Martin 1992, Ryan 1999, and McLean 2011.

McLean, Ian, ed. How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art. Australian Studies in Art and Art Theory. Sydney, Australia: Institute of Modern Art, 2011.
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A provocative argument that the art produced by Australian Aborigines since the 1970s is unique among that of surviving indigenous peoples, in that it “simultaneously maintained its tribal commitments and, in a most unlikely way, significantly shaped mainstream contemporary art discourse” (p. 21). A lively collection of written responses to this phenomenon by indigenous and nonindigenous artists, critics, curators, and others, completed by the editor’s essay, which argues the case claimed in the title.
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McMaster, Gerald, and Lee-Ann Martin, eds. Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives. Vancouver, BC: Douglas & McIntyre, 1992.
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The catalogue of an exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Hull, Quebec. This is an early example of a display of work by indigenous artists working in contemporary modes, from painting to video installation. All historical recollections, commentary, and statements are by Indian, Inuit, and Metis artists, curators, and historians.
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Morphy, Howard. Aboriginal Art. Art & Ideas. London: Phaidon, 1998.
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Noting that “the recent history of Aboriginal art has been a dialogue with colonial history, in which what came before––an Aboriginal history of Australia with its emphasis on affective social and spiritual relationship to the land––is continually asserting itself over what exists in the present” (p. 4), the leading anthropologist in the field vividly introduces ancient, modern, and contemporary art by Australian Aboriginal artists.
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Penney, David W. Native American Indian Art. Thames & Hudson World of Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2004.
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Introductory survey of indigenous art in the North American continent, from ancient times to the present, with an emphasis on the 19th century, divided according to the arts of peoples in geographic regions. A final chapter, “Artists of the Modern and Contemporary World” (pp. 189–212), covers Indian artists who depicted white incursions, and those working in modern and contemporary modes since the 1960s.
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Ryan, Allan J. The Trickster Shift: Humour and Irony in Contemporary Native Art. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999.
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An engagingly written and theoretically enterprising survey of the widespread use of visual and verbal punning in the work of indigenous artists seeking to communicate to their own peoples and to nonindigenous viewers. The author’s insights are laced with apt quotations from artists and theorists. Featured artists include Jane Ash Poitras, Gerald McMaster, Jim Logan, Bill Powless, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Carl Beam, and Shelley Niro.
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New Media Art

Since the 1960s, as computer-based technologies advanced in sophistication and scope, they attracted the attention of steadily increasing numbers of experimental artists as platforms for specific works, or as media for installations. Shaw and Weibel 2003, Wands 2006, and Shanken 2009 review these developments, while Stallabrass 2003 profiles artists’ engagement with the Internet. Manovich 2001 outlines a theory of new media tied to structuralist film, while Grau and Veigl 2011 relates digital imagery to the broader visual culture.

Grau, Oliver, and Thomas Veigl, eds. Imagery in the 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011.
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Edited by a central theorist and historian of new media (Grau), this volume collects essays by key writers in the field, such as Sean Cubitt, and artists such as Eduardo Kac, Christa Sommerer, and Laurent Mignonneau. Essays are organized into sections dealing with image phenomena, critical terms, and strategies for image analysis in the 21st century.
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Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Leonardo. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
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A pioneering study of late-20th-century innovations in digital media arts, through the lens of early-20th-century experimental film and Russian formalist theories. Emphasizes continuities and hybrid usages as much as the transformative implications of databases, coding, and “open source” human-computer interfacing.
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Shanken, Edward A. Art and Electronic Media. Themes and Movements. London: Phaidon, 2009.
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Following a thorough introduction, this volume is a useful sourcebook of profiles of a broad range of art and technology projects, mostly made since the 1950s, along with relevant documents. Sections focus on motion, duration, and illumination; coded form and electronic production; networks, surveillance, and culture jamming; and bodies, surrogate, and emergent systems.
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Shaw, Jeffrey, and Peter Weibel, eds. Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film. Electronic Culture—History, Theory, Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
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Wide-ranging, well-illustrated anthology edited by foundational new-media artist (Shaw) and performance artist (Weibel), long-time colleagues at the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, or ZKM). Key texts from 20th-century practitioners of experimental cinema, expanded cinema, new media, and digital arts.
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Stallabrass, Julian. Internet Art: The Online Clash of Culture and Commerce. London: Tate, 2003.
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Reflections by an early scholar of “net.art” on the subversive potentialities available to artists who wish to contest the corporations and governments in Internet space.
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Wands, Bruce. Art of the Digital Age. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006.
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After a historical introduction, a well-illustrated survey of more than one hundred artists worldwide who work in digital imaging, installation, and animation. Includes a timeline of breakthroughs, useful bibliography, and list of websites.
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Art Photography

Since photography became a self-conscious contemporary-art practice in the 1970s, it has evolved through a number of phases, most of which continue to resonate in current practice: conceptualist usage, postconceptual tableaux, records of performance, large-scale spectacle, identity imagery, critical documentary, and meditations on mediation. Anthologies such as Bolton 1989, Fogle 2003, and Leet and Hill 2011 trace these developments, while Fried 2008 offers a unique perspective on them. As surveys such as Cotton 2009 and Bright 2011 show, photography has also become strongly oriented to art world structures, notably museums and markets, while continuing to saturate the broader visual culture, primarily through digital formats. The rise of new kinds of documentary is profiled in Weski 2006 and Demos 2013.

Bolton, Richard, ed. The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
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Fourteen accomplished authors––including Douglas Crimp, Christopher Phillips, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Sally Stein, Rosalind Krauss, and Martha Rosler––contest formalist and aestheticized appreciations of photography, by emphasizing its roles in the construction of sexual difference and in the promotion of national ideologies and ruling class interests, as well as in the clash of political perspectives. Includes Allan Sekula’s classic essay “The Body and the Archive” (pp. 343–389). Reprinted as recently as 1999.
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Bright, Susan. Art Photography Now. 2d ed. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011.
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A general introduction to issues in interpreting contemporary photography is followed by images—mostly in color, often parts of series—created by a broad range of accomplished practitioners, organized according to seven themes: portrait, landscape, narrative, object, fashion, document, and the city. Originally published in 2005 (New York: Aperture).
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Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph as Contemporary Art. World of Art. London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2009.
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A sound, well-illustrated, introductory survey of the work of a broad range of contemporary-art photographers, organized into chapters devoted to these themes: implied stories, temporalities, the deadpan aesthetic, improvisation, intimacy, historical significance, remaking earlier art, and exploring the materiality of the medium.
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Demos, T. J. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during the Global Crisis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.
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Traces the reinvention of documentary modes in photography, video, and installation art by artists concerned with figuring the impacts of globalization on people forced to live mobile lives: refugees, economic migrants, migrant workers, and the stateless. Close studies of the work of Steve McQueen, the Otolith Group, Hito Steyerl, Emily Jacir, Arlam Shibli, Walid Raad, Ursula Biemann, Ayreen Anastas, and Rene Gabri.
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Fogle, Douglas. The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982. Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2003.
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Based on an exhibition of two hundred works by fifty-seven artists, this book offers the most comprehensive coverage of the use of photography by conceptual artists since the 1970s, and the subsequent use of conceptualist protocols by photographers, particularly the “Pictures Generation” artists of the 1980s. Includes key essays such as Jean-Françoise Chevrier’s “The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography” (pp. 113–127) and Jeff Wall’s “Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art” (pp. 32–44).
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Fried, Michael. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.
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Argues that when, in the late 1970s and 1980s, large-scale, wall-mounted photographs became a concern of many artists, core issues of beholding––those crucial to his own influential readings of early modernist painting and to high modernism and minimalism­­––became definitive for art photography. Draws on philosophers including Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Barthes to examine artists such as Wall, Ruff, Gursky, Delahaye, Struth, Dijkstra, Sugimoto, Welling, and others.
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Leet, Sri-Kartini, and Alison Hill, eds. Reading Photography: A Sourcebook of Critical Texts, 1921–2000. Art in Context. London: Lund Humphries, 2011.
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Extracts from a hundred key texts relevant to the entire history of photography, from its origins to current digital forms. Thirteen of its eighteen sections are related to postmodern and contemporary photography. Timelines and bibliographies are also helpful in this introductory anthology.
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Weski, Thomas, ed. Click Doubleclick: The Documentary Factor. Cologne: Walther König, 2006.
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Catalogue of an exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, devoted to the increased interest among contemporary artists––including David Claerbout, Taryn Simon, Paul Graham, and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, among many others––in deploying modes that depict and record aspects of the world while maintaining strong aesthetic, affective, and interpretive dimensions.
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Institutional Critique

As the selection of texts in Alberro and Stimson 2009 demonstrates, institutional critique has evolved through a number of phases since the 1960s and 1970s attacks on art world institutions, especially museums, as custodians of cultural power and ideological conservatism. During the 1980s, artists critiqued the institutionalization of art world structures, while in the 1990s, museums responded by exhibiting the phenomenon itself, notably in McShine 1999. Kosuth and Freedberg 1992 and Wilson 1994, among many other publications, brought critique inside the institutions, a process theorized by artist Andrea Fraser (Fraser 2005). Since then, many artists have sought extra-institutional, alternative, and external settings for their work (see Participatory Art and Activism).

Alberro, Alexander, and Blake Stimson, eds. Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artists’ Writings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
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A careful selection of key texts by key artists active in each of the phases of institutional critique, including Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, the Guerilla Art Action Group, Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, Group Material, Critical Art Ensemble, and the Yes Men.
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Fraser, Andrea. “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique.” Artforum 44.1 (September 2005): 278–283.
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A leading “institutional critique” artist mounts a stringent and influential argument that the critique of art institutions inevitably becomes institutionalized. Artists who used the museum as a site to critique social inequities find themselves, decades later, making works for museums that expose the mystifications perpetuated by conventional display protocols within museums.
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Kosuth, Joseph, and David Freedberg. The Play of the Unmentionable: An Installation by Joseph Kosuth at the Brooklyn Museum. New York: New Press, 1992.
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In 1990, leading conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth rehung works from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum to expose censorship of the visual arts. Works of art from many periods and places that had been deemed politically, religiously, or sexually objectionable were juxtaposed with utterances about the role of art in society, by pundits ranging from Oscar Wilde to Adolf Hitler.
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McShine, Kynaston. The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999.
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Traces the complex relationships between artists and art museums, from the anti-institutional gestures of Marcel Duchamp through the critical questioning of Hans Haacke to more-recent take-it-or-leave-it attitudes. But the main focus is on artists such as Thomas Struth, Barbara Bloom, and Candida Höfer, who take spectatorship as a core subject, and those such as Susan Hiller and Mark Dion, who are fascinated by the archival processes of museums.
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Wilson, Fred. Mining the Museum: An Installation. Edited by Lisa G. Corrin. New York: New Press, 1994.
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For a number of months in late 1992 and early 1993, Fred Wilson reinstalled a sequence of rooms at the Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore, using items from the collections that were rarely shown, and relabeling some that were, to make visible the institution’s complicity in the history of racism in the city and the region. This installation continues to resonate both in contemporary art and museum installation more generally.
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Public Art, Site Specificity, and Installation

Outside the context of museums, galleries, and markets, public art has moved from official commemoration and architectural decoration through, as Kwon 2004 and Doherty 2004 show, exploration of specific sites and situations toward engagement with particular publics on their common grounds. Exemplified by Jacob, et al. 1995, new-genre public art was theorized by artist Suzanne Lacy (Lacy 1995). Meanwhile, artists working in art world exhibitionary venues imported values, items, and attitudes from public spheres, creating installations, which, as Oliveira, et al. 1994; Reiss 2001; and Bishop 2005 demonstrate, expanded sculpture and architecture into this new modality, one that is specific to contemporary art.

Bishop, Claire. Installation Art: A Critical History. New York: Routledge, 2005.
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A searching and strongly argued analysis of the main currents in contemporary installation art, relating them to relevant precedents. Important examples of works that evoke psychological immersion, heightened visual perception, and bodily engagement and that activate spectatorship are discussed.
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Doherty, Claire, ed. Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation. London: Black Dog, 2004.
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Through commissioned essays by artist Daniel Buren and curator Nicolas Bourriaud, and interviews with artists, English curator Doherty profiles current thinking about artworks emergent from “situations”––contexts of production such as those discussed by Miwon Kwon—rather than as objects adding to traditional studio-based practices.
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Jacob, Mary Jane, Michael Brenson, and Eva M. Olson. Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago. Seattle, WA: Bay, 1995.
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Pioneer public art program curated by Mary Jane Jacob for Sculpture Chicago. All projects were located in neighborhoods away from the city center: they ranged from feminist history through urban health care to self-made videos in an area dominated by gangs. A community video-broadcasting station and an ecological project continue to be active.
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Kwon, Miwon. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
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Traces the decline in the critical and aesthetic force of the idea of “site specificity,” from the engagement with the physical attributes of a place by artists during the 1960s, through social criticism during the 1970s, institutional and discursive critique during the 1980s, and “new genre public art” during the 1990s, to the challenges of maintaining locational identity, particularly in urban settings, within a world of international exhibitions and nomadic artists.
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Lacy, Suzanne, ed. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle, WA: Bay, 1995.
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A collection of essays and documents by a leading participatory artist, tracing the shift from public art understood as fixed objects commissioned for official social spaces to temporary activities and environments created in carefully considered concert with local communities, usually from underprivileged areas of cities.
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Oliveira de, Nicholas, Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry. Installation Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1994.
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A well-illustrated survey of the burgeoning variety of artworks that, during the 1980s and 1990s, used any and all mediums to place a “space in active dialogue with the things and people it contains” (p. 8). Organized under these loose headings: site, media, museum, and architecture.
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Reiss, Julie H. From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.
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Tracks the emergence of installation as a specific genre, from the 1970s environments of Kaprow, Dine, Oldenburg, Samaras, and Kasuma, through gallery presentations of minimal sculpture and the spaces of antiform and performance art, to the arrival of installation works in institutional settings such as museums during the 1990s. First published in 1999.
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Land Art, Environments, and Ecology

In the 1960s, artists, particularly sculptors, in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere sought to explore continuities and differences between natural and cultural processes, by enacting art gestures in natural settings and introducing natural phenomena into galleries. Kastner 1998, Tufnell 2006, and Kaiser and Kwon 2012 trace the evolution of this impulse into large-scale earthworks and environmental installations. Lippard 1983 highlights relationships between these works and prehistoric landmarks. Manacorda and Yedgar 2009 and Demos 2013 focus on activist artists motivated by concern over climate change, including those profiled in Thompson 2009.

Demos, T. J., ed. Special Issue: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Third Text 27.120 (January 2013).
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A powerful corrective to the culture versus nature paradigms usually employed for conceptualizing the challenges of climate change, and to the usual focus on art from the United States and Europe, this collection of essays by leading artists, theorists, and activists “investigates the intersection of art criticism, politico-ecological theory, environmental activism and postcolonial globalization” (p. 1), with attention to projects in areas such as the Arctic, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Europe, and Mexico. Articles available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Kaiser, Philipp, and Miwon Kwon. Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974. Munich: Prestel, 2012.
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An exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Haus der Kunst, Munich, offering a revisionist account of the early years of the “land art” movement, arguing that it was international in scope, engaged cities rather than opposed them, did not escape the art system, and was a media practice as much as a sculptural one. Case made.
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Kastner, Jeffrey, ed. Land and Environmental Art. Themes and Movements. London: Phaidon, 1998.
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Thorough compilation of art by US and European artists, from land art during the 1960s and 1970s (such as that of James Turrell, Dennis Oppenheim, and Walter de Maria) to more environmentally conscious work during the 1980s and 1990s (such as that of Patricia Johanson and Mel Chin). Many contemporaneous texts are included, along with a useful survey essay by Brian Wallis.
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Lippard, Lucy R. Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory. New York: Pantheon, 1983.
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A personal meditation by a leading “socialist/cultural feminist” critic (p. 1) on the resonances between the shapes and the ritual purposes of ancient sites and the forms taken, and meanings sought, in contemporary experimental art. Lippard offers extraordinarily detailed, highly suggestive readings of a vast range of examples. Republished as recently as 1998 (New York: New Press).
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Manacorda, Francesco, and Ariella Yedgar, eds. Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 1969–2009. London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2009.
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Comprehensive survey of environmentally conscious artworks by major early practitioners such as Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, Antfarm, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Agnes Denes, and Helen and Newton Harrison, leading up to more-recent projects by Mark Dion, Tue Greenfort, Simon Starling, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Useful introductory texts by Manacorda and T. J. Demos.
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Thompson, Nato, ed. Experimental Geography: Radical Approaches to Landscape, Cartography, and Urbanism. New York: Melville House, 2009.
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An engaging, useful collection of more than one hundred recent artworks, projects, essays, and reports by “radical cartographer” artists and activists such as Trevor Paglen, the Raqs Media Collective, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy. Also a traveling exhibition distributed by Independent Curators International.
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Tufnell, Ben. Land Art. London: Tate, 2006.
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Useful introductory survey of land-based art in the United States and Europe from the 1960s to the early 20th century, focusing on works that offer “an immediate and visceral interaction with landscape, nature and the environment” (p. 16).
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Participatory Art and Activism

The concept of “relational aesthetics” coined in Bourriaud 2002 pointed to the widespread interest among artists in bringing the dynamics of social situations into art world settings. In contrast, Kester 2004 shows that political activism, interventions into communities outside the art world, is an important, and increasing, strand with contemporary art, as artists respond to the occlusion of political systems and the threat of climate change, among other concerns. Thompson and Sholette 2004 offers a user’s manual for artist-activists, while Mogel and Bhagat 2010 profiles radical cartographers. Thompson 2012 is a small encyclopedia of “socially engaged” artists and artist groups. Bishop 2012 locates these developments in a history of similar precedents throughout the 20th century.

Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.
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A history of participatory art from the Italian futurists to the present. Expanding on her article “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” in Artforum 45.6 (2006), pp. 178–183, Bishop develops her argument that interventionist art must count as art as well as being socially effective.
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Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Documents sur l’Art. Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002.
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A highly influential essay, first published in French in 1998, that identifies a widespread tendency in art since the 1990s and takes “as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (p. 14). Curator Bourriaud presented a number of exhibitions featuring direct, convivial interaction between participants­­––including, often, the artists––that functioned as “so many hands-on utopias” (p. 9).
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Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
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Advancing a vigorous and combative theory of “dialogical aesthetics,” Kester profiles the growing number of artworks created by artists and community activists in contested social settings around the world. Among them, Stephen Willats, Suzanne Lacy, Loraine Leeson, WochenKlausur, Carole Condé, and Karl Beveridge.
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Mogel, Lize, and Alexis Bhagat, eds. An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics & Protest, 2010.
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Ten acts of critical remapping of terrains and territories, by ten artists or artist/activist collectives, including maps locating the surveillance cameras dotting Manhattan, infiltration routes across the US-Mexican border, and the global connectivity of water distribution in Los Angeles, culminating in Ashley Hunt’s extraordinary A World Map in which we see . . . (2005), a conceptual diagram of our lived entrapment within the structures of contemporary capitalism. First published in 2007.
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Stimson, Blake, and Gregory Sholette, eds. Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
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Scholarly studies of post–World War II artist collectives, each with social engagement specific to their situation, in Europe (CoBrA), Japan (Hi Red Center), the United Kingdom and the United States (Art & Language), Chicago (Paper Tiger), Cuba (Arte Calle), Mexico (Grupo Proceso Pentágono), New York (Art Workers Coalition), Dakar (Huit Facettes), and internationally (Continental Drift).
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Thompson, Nato, ed. Living As Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011. New York: Creative Time, 2012.
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A lively compilation of “socially engaged” art projects from around the world, ranging from Ai Weiwei’s invitation to 1,001 Chinese to visit Kassel, Germany, for “documenta 12” (2007), to Women on Waves, a health-care advocacy group that has sailed the oceans with their message since 2001.
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Thompson, Nato, and Gregory Sholette, eds. The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
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Accompanying an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, this is a collection of artworks operating as constructive actions within everyday contexts. They range from Lucy Orta’s survival gear through the Critical Art Ensemble’s demonstrations against genetically modified food to the absurdist disruptions of the Yes Men.
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Art and Architecture

Since the 1990s, interactions between the visual arts and architecture have generated many of the most spectacular images of contemporary culture and have shaped many of its public and private spaces, as Jodidio 2001 illustrates. Celant 2004 provides a history of these interactions throughout the 20th century. Vidler 2000, Bruno 2007, and Lavin 2011 explore the psychological resonances of the interaction, while Smith 2006 examines its resonances during the aftermath of 9/11. Foster 2011 traces exchanges between outstanding late modern artists and architects, while Rendell 2006 concentrates on artists concerned with public spaces.

Bruno, Giuliana. Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts. Writing Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
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A collection of subtle and searching essays that explore the affective aspects of recent intermediation among architecture, film, and the visual arts. Close readings of installations by Jane and Louise Wilson, Rebecca Horn, Rachael Whiteread, Mona Hartoum, and Guillermo Kuitca evoke their creation of public spaces in which personal intimacy and cultural memory may be found.
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Celant, Germano, ed. Architecture & Arts 1900/2004: A Century of Creative Projects in Building, Design, Cinema, Painting, Photography, Sculpture. Milan: Skira, 2004.
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Drawn from the exhibition Arte & Architettura 1900–2000, which filled the Palazzo Ducale, Genoa, Italy, with works of art and drawings, models, and plans and photographs of projects and buildings. The expanded book illustrates the deep and wide-ranging immersion of 20th-century architecture in art practice contemporaneous with it and emphasizes the often-visionary outlook shared by all concerned.
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Foster, Hal. The Art-Architecture Complex. New York: Verso, 2011.
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Following up the critique of image and surface advanced in his Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2002), Foster identifies three positive aspects of recent art-architecture interactions: global style in the work of Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, and Renzo Piano; art as inspiration for the original architecture of Zaha Hadid, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Herzog and de Meuron; and the impact of architectural spatiality on sculptors such as Richard Serra.
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Jodidio, Philip. Architecture Now! Cologne: Taschen, 2001.
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The first in a series of volumes that profile current projects in the familiar Taschen mode: brief introductory texts, statements by the creators, and beautiful photographs. Architects inspired by contemporary art, such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, are featured, as are crossover practices such as Asymptote and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The most recent volume is Architecture Now 8 (2012).
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Lavin, Sylvia. Kissing Architecture. Point. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011.
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This lively polemic explores the recent presence of artworks within architectural settings as a shift from art serving decorative and supplementary purposes to its taking an integral role in creating the sensual settings that are often desired today by those commissioning public buildings. Focusing on multimedia installations within museums, and projections onto their surfaces, she discusses the work of Douglas Aitkin, Pipilotti Rist, and UN Studio, among others.
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Rendell, Jane. Art & Architecture: A Place Between. London: I. B. Taurus, 2006.
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Reads the art-architecture interaction from the perspective of artists and enablers concerned with public sculpture, alternative galleries, and the creation of “critical spatial practice” (p. 191). Close studies of works by artists and architects, mostly English and often lesser known, such as Jane Prophet, Sarah Wigglesworth, and Paul Carter.
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Smith, Terry. The Architecture of Aftermath. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
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Profiles tendencies in late modern, spectacle architecture before, during, and after the 9/11 attacks. Chapters on Jørn Utzon, Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Daniel Libeskind, Minoru Yamasaki, and others emphasize the interplay between art and architecture, and the role of terrorist media events, within the contemporary image economy.
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Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
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A collection of pioneering studies of the psychological character of architectural space, especially agoraphobia, during modernity. The theories of Freud and Benjamin are explored, as are key connections between architecture and film. Contemporary artists who work with architectural or urban space are closely examined: these include Vito Acconci, Rachel Whiteread, Mike Kelley, and Martha Rosler.
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Performance and Reperformance

As Goldberg 2011 shows, performance has been an important component of experimental art practice throughout the 20th century. Within contemporary art, it has matched installation as a preferred format and is often mixed with it in gallery settings. Because some of the innovators of the 1960s and 1970s remain active, the repetition, reenactment, and revision of earlier performances are not uncommon. Jones and Heathfield 2012 explores the paradoxes and challenges of current forms of live performance and reperformance.

Goldberg, RoseLee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. 3d ed. World of Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2011.
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The classic text on the subject (first published in 1979), by the director of Performa, the annual festival in New York. It tells the story of performance art throughout the 20th century, with a new chapter covering the early 21st. Arguing that performance was an essential component of avant-garde art, and that it has always been animated by close relationships to experimental theater and dance, the author profiles historic events from the Dadaists to Laurie Anderson, and more-recent performance art by Abramovic, Fraser, Kentridge, Sehgal, and others.
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Jones, Amelia, and Adrian Heathfield, eds. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History. Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2012.
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Edited and introduced by a leading theater scholar and an engaged art historian, this lively and engaging anthology collects recent texts by key scholars in performance art, or “live art” as it is known in Britain, from the 1960s to the present, along with documents and statements by artists from many countries, including China. Current questions such as the roles of documentation, and of reperformance, are explored in detail.
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Affect Theory and Radical Aesthetics

Ordinarily understood as emotion or feeling that is physically expressed by individuals, recent theorizations in Massumi 2002, among other works, have emphasized circumstances in which affect also works cognitively, and as a shared or even collective state. Bennett 2005 and Bennett 2012 examine artists’ meditations on trauma as experienced by peoples or nations under stress, joining Kelly 2012 in calling for acknowledgment of the aesthetic dimensions of affect. Seth Price’s Dispersion is by an artist who reflects, illuminatingly, on this kind of subversive practice.

Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
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Taking up the interest on the part of many contemporary artists in trauma as it is experienced by groups of people, even nations, who have been subject to horror, disaster, or misrule, Bennett explores the work of Dennis del Favero, William Kentridge, Sandra Johnston, Doris Salcedo, and Willie Doherty, among others.
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Bennett, Jill. Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11. Radical Aesthetics Radical Art. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012.
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Arguing for a creative, interpretive, practical aesthetics focused on registering the personal and collective worlds of affect in which we actually live, Bennett highlights the value of contemporaneity, interdisciplinarity, and connectivity. She explores a variety of public media responses to 9/11, and artworks made in its aftermath by artists including Thomas Demand, Shona Illingworth, Harun Farocki, Mark Boulos, and Alfredo Jaar.
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Kelly, Michael. A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
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Elaborating the claim by Susan Sontag, advanced in Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), that photographs can be affective through their aesthetic modality, Kelly demonstrates such affect, and thus a moral purpose for art, in the work of artists such as Gerhard Richter and Doris Salcedo, which is often interpreted as anti-aesthetic.
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Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Post-contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
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Drawing on the phenomenology of Spinoza, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and Guattari, Massumi develops a constellation of terms for the analysis of embodied affect and deploys them in ruminations on a variety of intensities: notably, performances by Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra, and the Australian artist Stelarc, who works with actual and virtual prostheses.
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Price, Seth. “Dispersion.” 2002–.
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In this online essay, which has been continually revised since 2002, New York–based artist Seth Price takes up the legacies of conceptualism to ruminate on ways of creating the kind of art called for today: art that does not register first of all as art, but as an image, event, process, or idea that might attract nonart audiences, however briefly, in the occluded, compromised, yet not entirely closed fields of media-saturated information within which we all subsist.
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Contemporary Curating

Contemporary curators, operating mostly independently of collection-based museums, have become increasingly important art world agents, which has led to the emergence of a new field of creative practice: exhibition making by independent curators (see Obrist 2008). Greenberg, et al. 1996 is a classic anthology of texts about the exhibitionary complex, updated in Altshuler 2005 on the contemporary-art museum. O’Doherty 2010 and Marincola 2006 explore exhibitionary formats, while Filipovic, et al. 2010 profiles the ubiquitous biennial, and Vanderlinden and Filipovic 2005 documents the nomadic version. O’Neill 2012 and Smith 2012 are the first historical and theoretical studies, respectively, of contemporary curatorial discourse.

Altshuler, Bruce, ed. Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.
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Includes a useful historical introduction to the modern and recent relationships between museums as collecting institutions and the constant production of contemporary art, which is followed by a set of essays by leading curators such as Robert Storr and Lowery Stokes Simms and conservators such as Glenn Wharton.
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Filipovic, Elena, Marieke van Hal, and Solveig Øvstebø, eds. The Biennial Reader: An Anthology on Large-Scale Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2010.
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The outstanding resource book on its topic, gathering writings by authors ranging from critic Lawrence Alloway on the history of the Venice Biennale to the most active and influential contemporary curators and critics. Prepared for a 2009 conference at Bergen, “To Biennial or Not to Biennial,” where the underlying issue was whether or not to institute a biennial in that city. A small associated volume summarizes discussions at the conference itself.
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Greenberg, Reesa, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne, eds. Thinking about Exhibitions. New York: Routledge, 1996.
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Collected on the cusp of a major change in the nature of museums and exhibitions, this still-vibrant anthology features brilliant essays on the history of exhibitions, the emergent phenomenon of the curator as auteur, the growth of “ahistorical” and mega-exhibitions, the initial impacts of globalization and postcolonial perspectives, and the place of each of these developments within spectacle culture.
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Marincola, Paula, ed. What Makes a Great Exhibition? Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, 2006.
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The Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a program that funds visual-arts exhibitions in the city, brings together a strong group of curators, mainly from the United States and England, and including Robert Storr, Lynne Cooke, Thelma Golden, Iwona Blazwick, Mary Jane Jacob, and Carlos Basualdo, to explore the “techniques and procedures of curatorial tradecraft” (p. 9) that lead to sound, effective, and memorable exhibitions.
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Obrist, Hans Ulrich. A Brief History of Curating. Edited by Lionel Bovier. Documents 3. Zurich, Switzerland: JRP/Ringier, 2008.
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Ubiquitous international curator Obrist interviews curators whose practice, since the 1970s, has transformed the profession. Casual yet revealing conversations with, among others, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hultén, Harald Szeemann, Seth Siegelaub, Lucy Lippard, and Anne d’Harnoncourt. The best of many recent collections of such discussions.
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O’Doherty, Brian. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
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Three influential essays by the Irish artist/critic, first published in Artforum in 1976, that identify the neutral-seeming gallery spaces (“the white cube”) favored by museum directors and curators in Euro-America since the 1920s as the exhibitionary setting mostly closely aligned with the inner visual logic of modernist art. First published in 1976 (San Francisco: Lapis).
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O’Neill, Paul. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
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English curator/historian O’Neill, known for his work on the “educational turn” in art making and curating, tracks the evolution of curatorial discourse since the 1960s; the impacts of globalization and the phenomenal, worldwide growth of biennials; and the convergence between artistic and curatorial practice since the 1990s.
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Smith, Terry. Thinking Contemporary Curating. New York: Independent Curators International, 2012.
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Surveys statements by curators and others in pursuit of the question “What is contemporary curatorial thought?”; outlines the venues, institutions, and practices constituting the current exhibitionary complex of the visual arts; traces the vital interactions between artists and curators in recent decades; and concludes with descriptions of, and comments on, the most-urgent issues driving curators today.
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Vanderlinden, Barbara, and Elena Filipovic, eds. The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-wall Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.
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Launched in 1995 in response to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the growth of the European Union, Manifesta biennials are staged in a different European city each time, by curators fresh to such challenges. Most exhibitions have been staged outside capital cities, but only one has been beyond the borders of the previous Europe, in Ljubljana, Slovenia. One projected for Cyprus was unrealized due to local political tensions.
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Frameworks, Issues

While most writing about contemporary art is focused on the concerns listed in the previous section, certain questions about how it might be understood to operate within larger cultural, social, and political frameworks continue to preoccupy some authors. In recent years, they have taken the form of (1) discussion about the roles of art within the visual cultures of particular societies, and within visuality and countervisuality, understood as universal or at least widely shared phenomena (see Visual Culture); (2) debate over the impact of globalization on art practice and art institutions (see Globalization); and (3) a nascent exploration of whether longer-term tendencies in visual symbolization and the current concentration on contemporaneities of difference call for a more worldly art that might contribute to the growth of a planetary consciousness (see World Art, Worlding, World Picturing, Planetarity).

Visual Culture

While vision and visuality have been of interest to artists and scholars for centuries, the increasing prominence of visual communication, the continual invention of new technologies and mediums, and the increasing permeation between high art and popular imagery during the 20th century have led to the emergence of an interdiscipline known as “visual culture studies.” While embraced by some art historians (Bryson, et al. 1994), picture theorists (Mitchell 2005), and cultural theorists (Mirzoeff 1998, Mirzoeff 2011), it has been rejected by others, including many respondents to a questionnaire in the journal October (Alpers, et al. 1996).

Alpers, Svetlana, Emily Apter, Carol Armstrong, et al. “Visual Culture Questionnaire.” October 77 (Summer 1996): 25–70.
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A variety of thoughtful responses by a number of art, film, and literature scholars, historians, and theorists, including Svetlana Alpers, Thomas Crow, Susan Buck-Morss, Michael Ann Holly, and Stephen Melville, to four questions skeptical of visual culture as, perhaps, an antihistorical interdisciplinary project that may be “helping, in its own modest, academic way, to produce subjects for the next stage of globalized capital” (p. 25). Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Bryson, Norman, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, eds. Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations. Essays originally written for a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute held at the University of Rochester in July and August 1989. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994.
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Essays by major scholars tackle questions raised for art history by the pervasiveness of the visual image in modern and contemporary cultures, including implications for understanding past art and artifacts. Writers include Kaja Silverman, Whitney Davis, Mieke Bal, David Summers, and Keith Moxey, all of whom have written significant, indeed path-finding, books on aspects of this subject.
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Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
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Offers a periodized, historical account of visuality as the top-down exercise of power within Western societies, along with descriptions of historical reactions against it. By insisting that the face-to-face exchange of gazes is fundamental to any grasp of reality, and thus to all political possibility that would be ethical and democratic, Mirzoeff highlights the core role of the visual in history. This combination leads directly to the present—indeed, to the “Occupy” movement, in which he is an active participant.
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Mirzoeff, Nicholas, ed. The Visual Culture Reader. 3d ed. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
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“Visual culture is concerned with visual events, in which information, meaning or pleasure is sought by the consumer in an interface with visual technology”; that is, with “any form of apparatus designed either to be looked at or to enhance natural vision, from oil painting to television and the Internet” (p. 4). This definition is from the first edition of an anthology that has grown (2d ed. published in 2002; 3d ed. in 2012) to meet a rapidly expanding field of study.
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Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
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A lively collection of essays by the leading theorist of word-image relationships in art and literature, exploring the question of agency in pictures presented in official, commercial, popular, private, scientific, and artistic media. Includes the important essay “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture” (pp. 336–356).
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Globalization

Globalization is the widely accepted name for the emergence, since the end of the Cold War in 1989, of an economic and geopolitical order within which nation-states negotiate with international agencies, multinational corporations outsource their operations, new technologies have connected communities and individuals to unprecedented degrees, and commodities and cultures are rapidly and widely exchanged. Belting, et al. 2006–2013; Harris 2011; and Belting and Buddensieg 2009 critically interrogate the consequent rise of a global art world, Bydler 2004 examines biennials as its primary distributive mechanism, Benningsen, et al. 2009 profiles some of its leading players, while Meskimmon 2011 and Papastergiadis 2012 show that it has driven some artists toward a critical cosmopolitanism. The essays in Dumbadze and Hudson 2013 locate globalization within a larger range of concerns shared by contemporary artists, curators, educators, and others.

Belting, Hans, and Andrea Buddensieg, eds. The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets, and Museums. Papers presented at the “Interplay of Art and Globalization” conference held at IFK Vienna on 25–27 January 2007, and at the “Where Is Art Contemporary?” conference held at ZKM Karlsruhe on 19–20 October 2007. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009.
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Second in a series of publications by the Global Art and the Museum project, this is a rich collection of essays by curators, critics, and historians from most regions of the world. Especially notable is the essay by Hans Belting, “Contemporary Art as Global Art” (pp. 38–73), which identifies a worldwide infrastructure that, reflecting but also resisting globalization, connects locally specific art forms. “World art” is dismissed as a Western name for the art of the rest of the world.
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Belting, Hans, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel, conveners. GAM—Global Art and the Museum project. ZKM (Center for Arts and Media), Karlsruhe, Germany, 2006–2013.
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A searching inquiry into the impacts of globalization on the international art world since the 1980s. An intensive schedule of conferences, workshops, exhibitions, website postings, and publications culminated in the exhibition The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds after 1989 (ZKM, September 2011) and the book The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds, edited by Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg, and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013).
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Benningsen, Silvia von, Irene Gludowacz, and Susanne van Hagen. Global Art. Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2009.
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Will globalization change art forever? The authors pursue this question through interviews with a selection of prominent players within the global art world: artists including John Baldessari, Neo Rauch, and Ai Weiwei; collectors including Eli Broad, Dakis Joannou, and John Kaldor; gallerists such as Arne Glimcher, Pearl Lam, and Gerd Harry Lybke; auctioneers such as Simon de Pury; and Art Basel organizer Marc Spiegler. The answer: mostly, no.
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Bydler, Charlotte. The Global ArtWorld Inc.: On the Globalization of Contemporary Art. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis 32. Uppsala, Sweden: Uppsala University Press, 2004.
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This is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation and is the first comprehensive survey of the impacts of globalization on contemporary art, paying particular attention to the plethora of biennials and the emergence of a cohort of nomadic artists and curators who are the most-active agents of these exhibitions.
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Dumbadze, Alexander, and Suzanne Hudson, eds. Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
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Fifty artists, critics, historians, and curators explore fundamental differences in the conditions bearing on the visual arts since the historic events of 1989 in central Europe, China, and elsewhere. Texts are organized into sections on contemporary art and globalization, art after modernism and postmodernism, formalism, medium specificity, art and technology, biennials, participation, activism, agency, the rise of fundamentalism, judgment, markets, art schools, and scholarship.
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Harris, Jonathan, ed. Globalization and Contemporary Art. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
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Thirty-three essays by scholars, critics, and theorists, examining in broad theoretical terms as well as through detailed case studies “the remaking of artists, art practices, styles, institutions for art collection, exhibition, sale and pedagogy” within “a single, globalized order” that the editor sees as “a convergence of people and ideas” (p. 1).
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Meskimmon, Marsha. Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. London: Routledge, 2011.
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Applying a feminist and affect theory approach to cosmopolitanism in contemporary art, the author offers close, astute, and sympathetic readings of the persistence of local, homely, and domestic motifs, and the treatment of themes such as passaging between cultures, in the work of internationally prominent artists such as Do-Ho Suh from South Korea, Zwelethu Mthethwa from South Africa, and Doris Salcedo from Colombia.
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Papastergiadis, Nikos. Cosmopolitanism and Culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012.
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Opposing the “aestheticization of politics” during the War on Terror period following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Australian cultural critic Papastergiadis explores “the role that art has played in reigniting cosmopolitan ideals” (p. 10) through commentary on work by artists such as Jimmie Durham and William Kentridge and collectives such as SUPERFLEX and Stalker.
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World Art, Worlding, World Picturing, Planetarity

Reacting against the presumption that globalized capitalism is the definitive, all-pervasive world order, certain scholars such as Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfried van Damme, the editors of World Art (see Zijlmans and van Damme 2008), and curators such as Jan-Erik Lundström and Johan Sjöström (see Lundström and Sjöström 2008) seek approaches that emphasize the variety and complexity of the intersecting worlds that constitute the contemporary condition. Anderson 2009 shows that interaction between cultures, and between artists and art worlds, has been constant throughout the history of art. All references contain sections of direct relevance to world picturing today, a major concern of contemporary artists.

Anderson, Jaynie, ed. Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence; The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress of the History of Art. Papers presented at the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, CIHA, held at the University of Melbourne on 13–18 January 2008. Carlton, Australia: Miegunyah, 2009.
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Two hundred papers by scholars from all over the world explore instances of contact between cultures across the globe throughout history, as registered in works of art, artifacts, and visual symbols. The first truly global meeting of the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, founded in Vienna in 1873. An important step toward building a record of contemporaneous artistic exchanges throughout history.
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Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn. dOCUMENTA (13). Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2012.
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Spread between four cities—Kabul, Afghanistan; Alexandria/Cairo, Egypt; Banff, Canada; and the main center, Kassel, Germany, where work made at these other sites was shown—this mega-exhibition took “a spatial or, rather, ‘locational’ turn . . . an exploration of micro-histories on varying scales that link the local history and reality of a place with the world, and the worldly.” Information available online.
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Lundström, Jan-Erik, and Johan Sjöström, eds. Being Here, Mapping the Contemporary: Reader of the Bucharest Biennale 3; 23 May–21 June 2008. 2 vols. Bucharest, Romania: Artphoto Association, 2008.
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This also appeared in Pavilion 12 (2008), a special issue of the journal. Volume 1 is a collection of texts by important critics of globalization, including Brian Holmes, Achille Mbembe, and Marina Gržinić. Volume 2 illustrates artworks concerned with mapping, by Lia Perjovschi, hackitectura.net, Mona Hatoum, Ashley Hunt, Bureau d’Études, Armin Linke, and others.
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World Art. 2011–.
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Produced by the Department of World Art Studies at the Sainsbury Institute for Art, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, the journal publishes articles on contemporary artists who conceive their works as “of world relevance” and as “acts of cultural translation” (Vol. 1.1, p. 5), reflections on method relative to contingent disciplines, and historiographic studies. First issue appeared March 2011. Vol. 1.2 (2011) includes Terry Smith, “Currents of World-Making in Contemporary Art” (pp. 171–188), and related essays by Ian McLean and Marsha Meskimmon.
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Zijlmans, Kitty, and Wilfried van Damme, eds. World Art Studies: Exploring Concepts and Approaches. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008.
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A pioneering collection of historiographic studies of efforts, by art historians and anthropologists, to imagine histories of the art of the world during the early years of modern art history in Germany around 1900, in China throughout the 20th century, and in more-recent times, under the impact of globalization and through the growth of intense international connections between art worlds.
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