Six hours in Naples
An evening at Studio Morra in Naples, 1974. Marina Abramović stands motionless in the room. Beside her is a table with 72 objects: a rose, honey, bread, a feather, lipstick, scissors, nails, a scalpel, a pistol and a bullet. A text explains that for six hours the audience may use the objects on her as they wish; she takes full responsibility. At first, little happens. Then visitors cut open her clothes, scratch her skin, and finally someone places the loaded pistol in her hand and points it at her. Others intervene.
Rhythm 0 shows what art could be from the late 1960s onwards: not an object on a wall but a situation with an open outcome, in which the audience itself becomes the material.
When does the present begin?
Where modernism ends and contemporary art begins is disputed. Some museums draw the line at 1945, others in the 1960s, still others in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the globalisation of the art world. There is broad agreement, though, that something fundamental shifted around 1970. The grand narratives of modernism, which seemed to produce one movement after another, lost their force. In 1984 the philosopher Arthur C. Danto spoke of the “end of art”. He did not mean that no one would make art any more, but that there was no longer a binding style against which it could be measured.
The idea as the work
Conceptual art drew the most radical conclusions from Duchamp and Pop Art. “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” Sol LeWitt wrote in 1967. In One and Three Chairs, Joseph Kosuth placed a chair next to a photograph of the same chair and the dictionary entry for “chair”, asking where the artwork actually lies.
Others left the exhibition space altogether. In April 1970, Robert Smithson had a 460-metre spiral of basalt rock and earth built out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Spiral Jetty lay submerged for decades and reappears depending on the water level. The work is inseparable from its site, and time is part of its material.
Düsseldorf as laboratory
For contemporary art in Germany, Düsseldorf became a centre. Joseph Beuys taught at the Art Academy from 1961. His “expanded concept of art” and the idea of “social sculpture” treated society as a whole as something to be shaped, and “Everyone is an artist” became his best-known motto. For documenta 7 in 1982, he launched 7000 Oaks in Kassel: every tree planted was to be paired with a basalt stone. The last tree was planted at the opening of documenta 8 in 1987, after his death.
At almost the same time, Bernd and Hilla Becher, with their sober photographic series of winding towers and water towers, shaped an entire generation. The photography class that Bernd Becher led at the academy from 1976 and taught together with Hilla Becher produced Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer and Thomas Ruff, who became world-famous as the “Düsseldorf School of Photography”. Gerhard Richter, also a professor at the academy, combined painting and photography like few others. One of his students, the sculptor Thomas Schütte, is the subject of a major exhibition at K21 from mid-November 2026; see the exhibition calendar.
Body, gender, politics
Since the 1970s, contemporary art has always also been about who gets to speak and who is seen. With a team of collaborators, Judy Chicago created The Dinner Party, a triangular table with 39 place settings for important women in history. In 1989 the anonymous Guerrilla Girls asked on a poster whether women had to be naked to get into the Metropolitan Museum: less than 5 per cent of the artists in its modern art sections were women, but 85 per cent of the nudes were female.
During the AIDS crisis, Félix González-Torres made quiet, deeply political works. In Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a pile of sweets lies in the corner, Its weight of about 79 kilograms, or 175 pounds, corresponds to the ideal body weight of his partner Ross Laycock, who had AIDS. Visitors may take a sweet; the pile shrinks and is replenished again and again.
Painting returns, the market rises
Around 1980, painting returned with force: in Germany the “Neue Wilde”, Georg Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer, in New York Jean-Michel Basquiat, who moved from graffiti into the galleries. At the end of the 1980s, the Young British Artists around Damien Hirst emerged in London. Hirst organised the exhibition “Freeze” in 1988, and the show “Sensation” at the Royal Academy made the group famous in 1997.
At the same time, the art market grew into a global industry of fairs, auction records and private collectors’ museums. Whether the price of a work says anything about its significance remains one of the enduring disputes of the present.
The world as exhibition
For a long time, the art world looked mainly at Europe and North America. That changed noticeably at the end of the 1980s. The Havana Biennial was founded in 1984 with a focus on the Global South. In 1989 the Paris exhibition “Magiciens de la terre” showed artists from every continent side by side. documenta 11 in 2002, led by Okwui Enwezor, its first non-European director, placed postcolonial perspectives at its centre.
Today, artists such as Yayoi Kusama from Japan, El Anatsui from Ghana and Ai Weiwei from China are among the best known in the world. In 2010 Ai Weiwei filled the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern with around 100 million hand-painted porcelain sunflower seeds. How contentious this opening-up can be was shown by documenta fifteen in 2022, when a banner containing antisemitic imagery had to be removed, followed by months of debate about curating, responsibility and artistic freedom.
Digital and artificial
The internet gave rise to new forms, from the net art of the 1990s to works that exist only as files. In March 2021, Christie’s sold a digital collage by the artist Beeple as an NFT for around 69 million dollars. Since then, debate has extended to images made with artificial intelligence: who is their author, who owns the images a machine learns from, and what remains of the artist when the machine paints?
Why it concerns us
Contemporary art can be confusing because it speaks no single language. That is precisely its strength. It negotiates, in real time, what preoccupies us: climate, migration, identity, technology, power. Encountering it, one need not know whether a work is “good”, but may ask what it does to oneself. That was its ambition from the very start.
Further reading
- Terry Smith: What Is Contemporary Art? (2009).
- Claire Bishop: Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012).
- Nicolas Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics (French original, 1998).