Currents of world-making in contemporary art

Contemporary art issues from a new sense of what constitutes ‘the world,’ and from a radically expanded sense of what constitutes ‘art.’ It is distinct in these ways from art produced in any earlier period, including modernity. A limited number of specific worlds are contemporaneous with each other in contemporary life, and in contemporary art. This article offers some methodological ideas as to how we might understand the relationships between these worlds from an art historical perspective: as a worldwide but regionally varied shift from modern to contemporary art that has configured, at present, into three contemporaneous currents.