The traditional art movements that defined the 20th century—Cubism, Surrealism, Fauvism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism—have largely disappeared from contemporary art discourse. Manifestos, once common declarations of artistic intent, have also become increasingly rare. However, artistic movements, or perhaps more accurately described as tendencies, continue to emerge and evolve, often forming around conversations and debates about art's role in society and responding to ever-changing social and material conditions.
Nine distinct movements have emerged to define the 21st century art landscape so far. These movements reflect contemporary concerns ranging from digital technology and social engagement to environmental collaboration and alternative research methodologies. Each represents a significant shift in how artists approach their practice and engage with broader cultural issues.
Research-based art has become one of the most prominent movements of the century, characterized by mind maps, study rooms, essay films, and ephemera-filled vitrines. Also known somewhat dismissively as "biennial art," this genre sees artists adopting the roles of academics or journalists, increasingly turning to nonfiction forms. They pursue facts through art's anything-goes mindset rather than adhering to what they perceive as stifling disciplinary protocols and norms. Art historian Claire Bishop argues that artists were largely troubled by the master narratives offered by scientists, academics, and journalists. As authority became increasingly treated with suspicion, faith in facts began to erode altogether. With the internet providing unprecedented access to information, everyone became a researcher constructing their own truths. This sensibility manifests in works ranging from Forensic Architecture's quest to find hidden truths through alternative channels, Walid Raad's parodies of authoritative knowledge itself, and Gala Porras-Kim's advocacy for the restitution of Mayan objects not to museums but to the gods, thereby questioning whose wisdom is seen as legitimate.
Social practice emerged as another defining movement, transforming much of the ancillary activities surrounding art—discussion programs, community engagement, activism, pedagogy, and institutional framing—into an artistic medium. This genre deprioritizes art objects and focuses instead on impact and social change. Notable examples include Rick Lowe's Project Row Houses, a restoration and redevelopment initiative in Dallas that started in the 1990s and has expanded continuously since. Thomas Hirschhorn's four-part Monument series comprised outdoor sculptural arrays that doubled as education centers, culminating with Gramsci Monument in the Bronx in 2013. Theaster Gates established his socially minded Rebuild Foundation in Chicago in 2010, while Lauren Halsey founded her Summaeverythang Community Center in Los Angeles in 2020. Critics have debated the movement's effectiveness, with some arguing that art is ill-equipped to solve the problems it attempts to address, while others praise it for enlisting the art world to redistribute wealth and resources in service of social ambitions and political aims.
Digital photography gained institutional recognition in the 2010s through two pivotal museum exhibitions: "Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015" at the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center of Photography's 2013 Triennial. These shows marked the formal acknowledgment of a cohort of artist-photographers employing digital technologies in their work. While the use of digital image editing tools like Photoshop in photo-based art had begun as early as the 1990s, notably in the photographs of Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky, by the 2010s a rising crop of artists were addressing how images are circulated, shared, fragmented, and repurposed on the internet. This younger group, including Lucas Blalock, Michele Abeles, Seth Price, Trevor Paglen, and Andrea Longacre-White, inherited ideas from the Düsseldorf School regarding photography's relationship to painting, the Pictures and post-Pictures generations' appropriation of mass-media imagery, and early experiments with Xerox machines by Barbara T. Smith and Pati Hill. Utilizing not only digital software but also robotic cameras, iPads, and other cutting-edge devices, they ushered in a new era in photography.
Post-internet art emerged with a simple concept: as Gene McHugh explained in 2009, paraphrasing blog posts by artist Marisa Olson, it is art made "after one's use of the internet." Whether porting the sleek aesthetic of Web 2.0 offline or crafting sculptures and videos that conjured stock photography and Google Street View, artists involved in this informal movement, from Jon Rafman to Amalia Ulman, employed heavy doses of irony. Signature works appeared to relish the nonsense that resulted when screen life leaked into everyday experience. The tendency reached its apex with the DIS-curated 2016 Berlin Biennale, which critic Jason Farago memorably criticized for its "ultra-slick, ultra-sarcastic sensibility." That review effectively sealed the fate of a movement that Brian Droitcour had already called "boring to be around" in an Art in America essay.
Bio art represents a fundamental shift in how artists engage with nature. While nature has played various roles in art throughout human history, this century has seen artists intent on collaborating with rather than dominating other species, seeking new ways to survive ecosystemic collapse. This represents an effort to repair the effects of human dominion over the natural world—the kind of dominance underpinning works by 20th-century bio artists who played God via synthetic biology, like Eduardo Kac, and earth artists who molded land to their liking, like Michael Heizer. This latest wave of bio artists, whose canon and tenets were charted by the MIT List Visual Arts Center's 2022 exhibition "Symbionts," includes Agnieszka Kurant collaborating with termites to build sculptures. Anicka Yi swabbed the cheeks of 100 art world women for a sculpture that offered both a feminist critique of the artist as lone genius and a reminder that no organism can live without depending on others, noting that more than half the human body comprises nonhuman cells.
The NFT movement exploded into mainstream consciousness in early 2021 when Beeple sold "Everydays: The First 5,000 Days" at Christie's for an unprecedented $69.3 million. While not the first crypto artwork, this record-breaking sale triggered a boom for NFTs—encrypted digital works authenticated using blockchain technology and tagged with unique digital signatures. The impact of this seemingly short-lived crypto art movement has been twofold. First, the vulgar and irreverent visual culture of the internet, in the form of Pepe the Frog, Bored Apes, and CryptoPunks, became increasingly legitimized, finding its way into collections at LACMA, the Centre Pompidou, and ICA Miami. Second, NFTs created a funding mechanism for a generation of computer-based artists mostly ignored by the traditional art world. With the dust mostly settled, artists like Beeple, Refik Anadol, Snowfro (Erik Calederon), and Claire Silver have become blue-chip names for digital art collectors, even if critical and institutional attention has remained tentative. Some artists, like Jill Magid, took the problems and limits crypto offered as a conceptual challenge, creating NFT bouquets of video game flowers that function as a kind of digital currency.
Figurative painting experienced an avalanche of activity starting in the mid-2010s that continues today. One prominent mode to emerge during this period showed a very online sensibility through nonsense mashups of memeified imagery. This includes the airbrushed canvases of Jamian Juliano-Villani, which put pop cultural imagery through the blender, and the surreal paintings of Emily Mae Smith, where walking paintbrushes replace people in art-historical masterpieces. Simultaneously, there was a flood of less ironic portraiture that meditated on representation itself, with many artists creating images intended to afford their subjects dignity previously denied to them. Pointing to Jordan Casteel, who paints striking images of working-class Black men, women, and children, Christina Quarles told the New York Times that queer artists and people of color can now be "author of their own stories." Critic Barry Schwabsky traced the beginnings of meme-inspired figuration to the 2015 edition of MoMA PS1's "Greater New York" quinquennial, noting that this painting emerged in response to the zombie formalist abstraction craze of the early 2010s.
Artificial Intelligence art represents the most recent synthesis of art and technology, going by many names including generative art and algorithmic art. Some artists bend software like Midjourney or DALL-E toward social critique, while others build their own machine-learning algorithms to synthesize and make legible vast quantities of data. Still others don't use AI at all in their practice but rather take the technology and underlying philosophies like transhumanism or techno-optimism as their work's subject. AI art is united less by aesthetics than by recurring thematic concerns: questions about bias, shifting understandings of authorship, influence, and collective creativity, and the hyper-capitalist ethos underlying it all. Harold Cohen's AARON computer from 1973 and Vera Molnar's computer drawings from the 1960s are often cited as precursors, with contemporary artists like Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Anicka Yi, and Refik Anadol exploring AI's implications. This movement continues evolving with AI development, and with hundreds of billions being invested in the technology globally, artists will likely explore it for decades to come.
Fiber art has experienced a remarkable renaissance, with abstract weavings, knotted sculptures, expressive basketry, and shaggy wall hangings emerging from artists' studios and museum storerooms to lend warmth and complexity to exhibition spaces. Though the movement had an earlier institutional heyday in the 1960s and 70s, fiber art rose to its current status through renewed appreciation for artists like Anni Albers, Magdalena Abakanowicz, and Sheila Hicks. Landmark exhibitions like "Fiber Sculpture 1960-Present" at the ICA Boston in 2014 and "Foreigners Everywhere," which gave textile art prominent showing in the 2024 Venice Biennale, have elevated the medium's profile. As renown and respect increased, the rise of fiber art has helped illuminate how the privileging of painting over other mediums worked to marginalize work associated with women and non-Western cultures, making this movement both aesthetically and politically significant in reshaping contemporary art discourse.
