ABSTRACT
Sarah Thornton, writer and sociologist based in San Francisco; author of Club Cultures: Media, Music, and Subcultural Capital (Wesleyan), Seven Days in the Art World (Norton), and most recently 33 Artists in 3 Acts (Norton)
Olav Velthuis, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology of the University of Amsterdam; author of Talking Prices: Symbolic Meaning of Prices on the Market for Contemporary Art (Princeton); editor, with Stefano Baia Curioni, of Cosmopolitan Canvases: The Globalization of Markets for Contemporary Art (Oxford)
Introduction
Contemporary art, understood as a period, if not a style (like modern art or Hellenistic art), is roughly 25 years old, and this poses an interesting set of challenges and questions, not the least of which is: What is the canon of contemporary art? As soon as one asks such questions, however, one must be mindful of what such “canon formation” might mean today, in our period of “contemporaneity.” What are its stakes? Immediately one must take into account important terms of contemporary debate
in the visual arts and culture and how they inflect and inform, both again and anew, any attempt to think the “canon.” For instance, the importance of “migrations” and multiple “modernities,” not to mention “postcolonialism” and “sustainability,” cannot be underestimated in any discourse on the contemporary canon and its formation. Perhaps even more importantly, however, “globalization,” “neoliberalism,” and “the market” are now understood to play an ever larger role, not just in the thinking of art’s practitioners and its commentators but also in the very political and ethical values that art is often given to embody, if not challenge.
