The Contemporary Age

The Contemporary Age describes art produced from roughly the early 1970s to the present, a period defined less by a single style than by pluralism, globalization, and the dissolution of the boundary between 'high' and 'low' culture that postmodern theory articulated. Where modernism sought universal, progressive narratives, postmodern and contemporary artists — from Cindy Sherman's staged photographic self-portraits to Jeff Koons's readymade-derived sculpture and Jean-Michel Basquiat's Neo-Expressionist, graffiti-inflected canvases — embraced irony, appropriation, identity politics, and the recycling of historical styles. Conceptual Art, Land Art, Performance Art, and Institutional Critique, incubated in the late 1960s by figures like Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, and Marina Abramović, shifted emphasis from the crafted object to idea, process, and context, a shift theorists trace back to Duchamp's Dada-era readymades. From the 1980s onward the art market itself became a defining feature of the era: Damien Hirst's 2008 Sotheby's sale 'Beautiful Inside My Head Forever' bypassed the traditional gallery system entirely and grossed roughly $200 million in a single event, while globalization brought artists such as Ai Weiwei into the mainstream Western canon as biennials and fairs — Venice, documenta, Frieze, Art Basel — proliferated worldwide. Since the 2000s, digital technology, street art (Banksy), and blockchain-based media have further expanded the field, most visibly when Beeple's purely digital NFT work Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold for $69.3 million at Christie's in March 2021. The era's legacy is still being written, but it has produced an art market of unprecedented scale and an art-historical canon far more geographically and demographically diverse than any preceding period.