Contemporary Art

From December 2023 to June 2025, two living artists kept studios inside the Louvre. Kader Attia, born in 1970 in Dugny, and Elizabeth Peyton, born in 1965 in Danbury, Connecticut, were invited as guests of the museum. Attia had wandered into the galleries as a teenager on a free admission day and found the painters of reality, the Le Nain brothers and Georges de La Tour. Peyton, who read a biography of Napoleon as a teenager, was struck by the museum’s portrait of Bonaparte, and in 1988 made a drawing after Rigaud’s Portrait of Louis XIV. The Louvre was reviving an old habit: artists had lodged and worked in the palace long before it became a museum in 1793.

That small programme says something about the field this section covers. Contemporary art is not a style. It is a moving window, and the institutions that collect it have never agreed where the window opens.

When does “contemporary” begin?

Tate notes the disagreement directly. London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, set up in 1947, treats that year as its starting line. The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York chose 1977. In the 1980s, Tate itself planned a museum of contemporary art that would define the term as the art of the previous ten years, on a rolling basis. Each choice is a statement about which past still counts as present.

The Whitney Museum of American Art took a different route: collect quickly. Founded in 1930 by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney after the Metropolitan Museum declined her gift of more than five hundred works, it opened in 1931 as a museum devoted to living American artists. It has often bought works within a year of their making. Its Biennial, begun in 1932 as an invitational survey of recent work, is the longest-running series of its kind for American art. In 1982 the Whitney became the first New York museum to give a major exhibition to a video artist, Nam June Paik, and it gave Jasper Johns, Jay DeFeo, Glenn Ligon, Cindy Sherman and Paul Thek their first comprehensive museum surveys.

Rooms you walk into

If one format defines the art of the last few decades, it is installation: large mixed-media environments that occupy a whole room and ask the visitor to move through them. Allan Kaprow made environments from about 1957, filling a gallery with plastic sheeting, cellophane, tape, cloth and the sound of five tape machines. Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, a set of rooms built inside his house in Hanover in 1933, is an earlier precedent. Ilya Kabakov put the principle simply: “The main actor in the total installation, the main centre toward which everything is addressed, for which everything is intended, is the viewer.”

Tate links the surge of installation in the early 1990s to the collapse of the art market at the end of the 1980s, which renewed interest in work built around ideas rather than saleable objects. Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall has since become one of the places where the form is tested at full scale, with commissions by Doris Salcedo, Richard Tuttle and Abraham Cruzvillegas, among others.

How we cover it

Writing about art made last year carries an obvious risk: the verdict has not come in. The articles below try to describe work precisely, place it among the artists and ideas it draws on, and say plainly what it does, while leaving room for the judgement of time.