• ART & POPULAR CULTURE: The Warhol Effect
• ART & THE QUOTIDIAN OBJECT: The Transformation of the Readymade
• ART & ABSTRACTION: Retreat from Purity
• ART & REPRESENTATION: The Fiction of Realism
• ART & NARRATIVE: Postmodern Storytelling
• ART & TIME: From Real Time to Reel Time
• ART & NATURE & TECHNOLOGY: Remaking Land and Body
• ART & DEFORMATION: Celebrating Human Imperfection
• ART & THE BODY: From Subject to Object
• ART & IDENTITY: The Rise of the Hybrid Self
• ART & SPIRITUALITY: Rediscovering Transcendence
• ART & GLOBALISM: Negotiating A Borderless World
• ART & ARCHITECTURE: The Utopian Fallacy
• ART & ITS INSTITUTIONS: Art Reflects on Itself
• ART & POLITICS: The Rhetoric of Dissent
• ART & AUDIENCE: Reinventing the Viewer

The legacy of Andy Warhol persists in art that speaks to everything from celebrity culture and the pervasive power of the mass media to the destruction of the distinctions between high and low culture.

This chapter explores the revolutionary impact of Marcel Duchamp, whose readymades challenged the definition of art as an object distinct from everyday life. This also extends to artists' use of found and industrial objects and their interest in how context determines meaning.

The once privileged status of abstraction has long since melted away. For today’s artists it is simply one in a whole arsenal of potential approaches.

The exposure and dismantling of the conventions of representation have proved to be one of art’s most persuasive subjects.

Artists have adopted strategies from cinema, fiction, and theater to tell stories that unfold in time.

Art today draws on the changes to our physiological and psychological perception of time created by advances in science and technology. Virtual reality, instant replay, slow and fast motion, and the Internet are a few of the elements that mirror this shifting temporal relationship to the world.

Artists illuminate contemporary anxieties around technology and science, as they advance both for good and ill and threaten two of our most important anchors to reality: nature and the body.

Artists reveal a fascination with abjection, hybridity, and mutation. These states provide routes to escape the rigidity of reason and logic by putting us back in touch with our animal natures and the inevitable cycles of creation and destruction.

The human body becomes both art’s subject and, in the case of performance art, its medium. It serves as a vehicle to express contemporary conflicts over social mores, gender definitions, and expressions of sexuality.

Artists consider the complicated interactions with the social and political world, tracing the uneasy evolution from art that celebrates specific human identities to art that expresses postmodern skepticism toward selfhood and posits a more fluid definition if identity.

Despite formalism’s repudiation of art’s spiritual content, deep religious and spiritual beliefs continue to inform the work of contemporary artists.

This chapter considers the mixed effects of globalism’s sudden erasure of national boundaries and the tensions it creates between emerging sets of winners and losers.

This chapter examines the legacy of modernist architecture’s utopian aspirations and shows how artists find in its failed agendas a potent language for dealing with the complexities of existence.

Artists are considering their own role in the art system—how supposedly external factors like art patronage, modes of display, and critical theories play integral roles in shaping contemporary art.

This chapter examines the wide variety of approaches artists take as agents of social change.

This chapter presents artwork developed as a set of social relationships in which the idea of the art object is all but abandoned; works may involve developing temporary communities, organizing communal activities such as meals, marches, or house building, or creating conditions for social interaction among strangers.