10.2 Purpose and Audience in Global Contemporary Art

There are more places to see art now than ever: new museums of contemporary art on every continent, huge international shows such as biennials (held every two years), and the internet. That changes who the audience is. Many artists use appropriation, taking an existing image or object and putting it in a new context, which can make you see the original differently. Cities, meanwhile, hire famous architects to design eye-catching buildings that become the city's calling card, like Bilbao's Guggenheim.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington, D.C., U.S.; Maya Lin; 1982 CE; granite). Lin, a 21-year-old Yale student, won the design competition. Two polished black granite walls form a V cut into the earth, pointing toward the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. More than 58,000 names of Americans killed or missing are listed by date, beginning and ending at the center. Visitors see their reflections among the names, touch them and make rubbings. Some veterans first called it a "black gash"; a traditional statue was added nearby.

Shibboleth (Doris Salcedo; 2007–2008 CE; installation). The Colombian artist cut a crack 167 meters long into the floor of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in London, widening as it ran. A shibboleth is a test that marks outsiders, from a Bible story. The crack points to racism, borders and the divisions immigrants face. After the show it was filled, but a scar remains.

Summer Trees (Song Su-nam; 1979 CE; ink on paper). Vertical strokes of black and gray ink bleed into wet paper, suggesting a row of trees. Song led the Sumukhwa (ink painting) movement, reviving traditional ink to assert Korean identity amid rapid westernization, while looking as modern as Western abstraction. The Fall 2026 CED clarifications corrected its date to 1979.

A Book from the Sky (Xu Bing; 1987–1991 CE; mixed-media installation). Xu carved about 4,000 invented characters into wooden type that look Chinese but mean nothing, then printed traditional books and scrolls to fill a room. Literate Chinese viewers find they cannot read, sharing the experience of foreign viewers. It questions the authority of written language, sharpened by years of Cultural Revolution propaganda.

Untitled #228, from the History Portraits series (Cindy Sherman; 1990 CE; photograph). Sherman poses as the biblical heroine Judith holding Holofernes's severed head, a subject of Renaissance and Baroque painting. The obvious fake head and prosthetics expose how artificial old-master images of women are.

Earth's Creation (Emily Kame Kngwarreye; 1994 CE; synthetic polymer paint on canvas). Kngwarreye, an Anmatyerre elder from Utopia in Australia's Northern Territory, began painting on canvas in her late seventies. Layers of dots in greens, yellows and blues evoke her country after rain and her ancestral Dreaming. Made for the art market, it remains rooted in Indigenous knowledge.

Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (Spain; Frank Gehry (architect); 1997 CE; titanium, glass, and limestone). The Basque government paid for this branch of New York's Guggenheim to revive a declining industrial city. Gehry used aerospace software to design curving titanium forms. It drew so many tourists that the "Bilbao effect" names a building that transforms a city.

MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts (Rome, Italy; Zaha Hadid (architect); 2009 CE; glass, steel, and cement). Hadid, the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, designed flowing concrete galleries that curve and cross like streams, with suspended black stairs and a filtered glass roof. Visitors choose their own paths, a modern contrast to ancient Rome.

Pure Land (Mariko Mori; 1998 CE; color photograph on glass). Mori shows herself as Kichijoten, a Buddhist goddess of beauty and fortune, floating on a lotus above a golden view of the Dead Sea while six cartoonish alien musicians drift around her on clouds, mixing Buddhist imagery with pop culture and digital technology.

Darkytown Rebellion (Kara Walker; 2001 CE; cut paper and projection on wall). Black cut-paper silhouettes, an old, polite craft, show violent, grotesque scenes of slavery-era stereotypes. Colored light from overhead projectors casts viewers' shadows onto the wall, making them part of the scene.

Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds) (Ai Weiwei; 2010–2011 CE; sculpted and painted porcelain). About 100 million porcelain seeds, each hand-sculpted and painted by about 1,600 artisans in Jingdezhen, covered Tate Modern's floor. In Mao-era propaganda, people were sunflowers turning toward Mao; here mass production meets individual craft, and the one meets the many.