Seeing Global Warming: Contemporary Art and the Fate of the Planet

Contemporary environmental artists are increasingly turning their attention to climate change. Focusing on an exhibition curated by the renowned art critic Lucy R. Lippard, this essay places selected works in dialogue with mass media framings of environmental problems to reveal how contemporary art can generate new ways of seeing global warming. I argue that the show sought to forge perceptual links between local and global environmental change and to use both doomsday and inspiring modes of address in a dialectical fashion. By melding science, aesthetics, and politics in an imaginative way, many of the artists represented the humanistic dimensions of the crisis and, at times, even gestured toward a promising vision of environmentalism.