Jackson Pollock dripped enamel paint from a stick onto a 17-foot canvas spread on the floor of his Long Island barn in 1948-50. Number 1A, 1948 and Autumn Rhythm (1950) were the breakthrough works of Abstract Expressionism — the first art movement to originate in New York rather than Paris and the conventional starting point of contemporary visual art. Modernism (brief 108) had run roughly 1900 to 1950; what came after has produced no single dominant style since 1970 and replaced the question of what a painting should look like with a stranger one: what should count as art at all.
Three claims organize the field. First, the question shifted from form to category. Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes in 1964 looked indistinguishable from the supermarket cartons stacked in any warehouse, and Arthur Danto's response in The Artworld that year argued that what made them art was institutional context — the gallery, the catalogue, the discourse — not anything visible in the object. Joseph Kosuth pushed the argument further with One and Three Chairs the following year, where a chair, a photograph of the chair, and a dictionary definition of chair sat as a single work; the concept had become the artwork, with execution delegated to fabricators in the manner Sol LeWitt would standardize with his instruction-based wall drawings. Second, stylistic succession ended around 1970. The decades after Pollock had run in a recognizable sequence — Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the New York School, Roy Lichtenstein in Pop, Donald Judd in Minimalism — but the field then broke into parallel practices that no longer cancelled each other. Land Art, Performance, the Pictures Generation, neo-expressionism, and the Young British Artists with Damien Hirst's shark in formaldehyde and Tracey Emin's My Bed all ran at once rather than in turn. Third, the canon globalized. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kara Walker, El Anatsui, Ai Weiwei, and a wave of African, Chinese, Indian, and Latin American practice expanded what counted as the centre. Biennials, museums, and art fairs adjudicate the result.
Contemporary art's commercial high end has reached scales unprecedented in the form's history. Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled (1982) sold for $110.5M in 2017, Jeff Koons's Rabbit (1986) for $91.1M in 2019, and Banksy's Love Is in the Bin — the half-shredded Girl with Balloon, shredded as it sold at Sotheby's in 2018, then resold for $25.4M three years later — is the perfect fable about the commodification it intends to critique. The 2021 NFT moment pushed Beeple's Everydays to $69.3M before the market collapsed roughly 98 per cent the following year. The live boundary fight in the mid-2020s is over AI-generated work: whether image-diffusion output counts as art at all, whether training on copyrighted human work is legitimate, whether the prompter is the artist.