Contemporary Visual Art

Jackson Pollock laid a seventeen-foot canvas on the floor of a Long Island barn and, between 1948 and 1950, dripped and flung house paint across it from a stick. Works like Autumn Rhythm made Abstract Expressionism the first movement born in New York rather than Paris, and the usual place to begin the story of contemporary art. Modernism (brief 108) had run from about 1900 to 1950; what followed produced no single reigning style, and quietly swapped the old question — what should a painting look like? — for a stranger one: what should count as art at all?

The defining move of the era was to shift the question from how a work looks to whether it counts as art in the first place. Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes, in 1964, were indistinguishable from the shipping cartons in any stockroom, and the philosopher Arthur Danto drew the unsettling conclusion: what made them art was nothing the eye could find, but the invisible frame around them — the gallery, the catalogue, the conversation. Once that was granted, the making could be handed off entirely; a work could be an instruction, a concept, a chair set beside a photograph of the chair and its dictionary definition. And once art became a matter of designation rather than craft, the old orderly march of styles simply stopped. Where the decades after Pollock had moved in a clear sequence — Abstract Expressionism, then Pop, then Minimalism — the field after about 1970 broke into parallel practices that no longer replaced one another: land art, performance, installation, and shock-pieces like Damien Hirst's shark suspended in formaldehyde all ran at the same time. The center of gravity globalized too, as artists from Africa, China, Latin America, and beyond widened what the Western canon would admit. There is no longer a mainstream to rebel against — only a marketplace of biennials, museums, and fairs that decides, after the fact, what mattered.