The Most Influential Contemporary Art Groupings (& My Next Book)
Part IV of The Art & Artists Report
Hi Everyone,
I hope you’re well, and welcome back to The Art & Artists Report.
Thank you all so much for subscribing.
Before we get into this week’s subject, I wanted to share the following update about the sale of my next book, which was announced a couple of weeks ago on Publishers Marketplace:
No New Ideas (which is a working title) is the fruit of a decade-plus “side interest” in self-help books and my persistent desire—which you may have noticed throughout this newsletter—to “speak history” to the topics that fascinate me. I’m writing the book I wanted to read, structured by my own experiences of using self-help books to support myself and my family.
The project traces the historical foundations of “contemporary” self-help ideas such as mindfulness, the cultivation of joy, and exercise as therapy. These notions originate in, among other things, the philosophies of ancient Greece, Christianity, Buddhism, and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the book tells their “origin” stories. The goal is to give readers a much more nuanced understanding of self-help, encourage humility and curiosity towards history, and provide a better means for helping themselves. My deepest thanks go to Jan Baumer and Lauren Hall at Folio Literary Management and Gabriella Page-Fort at HarperOne for their belief in (and support of) this project. I expect the book will come out in Spring 2026, and I very much look forward to sharing it with all of you.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming...
This week’s portion of The Art & Artists Report focuses on answers to the following question:
What are some of the most influential “tendencies” or groupings of artists you think one needs to pay attention to right now and which you think will have long-term resonance—and, if you could expand, why?
Before we move on to the answers, I want to briefly share why I asked this question. Some people hesitate to make groupings of artists because they believe they compromise art’s nuances and inherent mysteriousness. Yet classification is central to understanding the order of things, particularly their relationships and similarities. Years ago, when I was working on The Art Genome Project at Artsy, the esteemed art historian and curator John Elderfield shared the following Steven Jay Gould quote with me on this topic, and it explained this point of view much better than I could:
“Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing—with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.”
Categories have been central—maybe even foundational—to what art history is. One wonders how we would start to make sense of art of the past without categories such as Abstract Expressionism, Impressionism, or the Renaissance. They can be useful, even if we consider them a starting point and even if we understand (as we often do in the art of today) that multiple movements happen simultaneously.
I also share my rationale for this question because I received a lot of interesting pushback from people who objected to the idea of contemporary groupings.
One respondent expressed how it’s more “necessary to think of the artists who fall outside of categories.” Since “categories are generally formed by art historians and critics, [they are thus]...a lagging indicator,” they explained. They also questioned whether or not art experts were still qualified to make categories when “visual culture is so ubiquitous” and “the divisions of high and low culture are not so simple.”
This feedback caught me by surprise, as it was offered by someone I assumed would want to defend a critic’s ability to define categories. I also was surprised by (and don’t agree with) their belief that art experts were not qualified to define categories because the field is just too large. I wonder how they think cultural analysts should make sense of culture without categorization. Should they just give up?
A few others mentioned that categories are less important than the larger (often commercial) forces that can help determine them. One respondent commented:
“I don't think we live in a time of tendencies but rather of structures and networks by which the art industry operates, so I suggest that these networks (galvanized and determined by the shape of the private companies that own social networks) ought to be paid attention to. It is they that will come to define what the art of the present moment was, and we won't be able to understand it otherwise—just as we can’t really understand [Édouard] Manet without having some knowledge of exhibition culture and the role of print in late 19th century Paris.”
I appreciated this feedback and agree that such structures and networks (which I understood as institutional and commercial structures) are important. However, I can’t fully “define” art according to outside forces, and wouldn’t, for example, see the art of today as being wholly attributable to something like Instagram, just as the respondent doesn’t fully define Manet according to the outside forces they cite.
Other people had more predictable responses that condemned the practice of putting artists in boxes because it dumbed down art. Respondents dismissed categories as being just for marketing, or “cringy,” or “simplifications” that downplay the full picture of what “each artist brings…to the table.” One dealer explained how “in the instance of Black figuration, for example, [it] has been quite damaging to lump artists together.”
An advisor urged that we move past categories because they are also making artists create bad art. They explained that while “important socio-political issues have been and continue to be addressed through the production of art…unfortunately many art objects rendered are thinly veiled dressings that rely too much on single note topics that are recycled ad-infinitum.” (In the future I will follow up with this person as I am curious what these “single note topics” are.)
Another curator was OK with categories but said making such judgements right now was tough. They explained it was “hard to judge [what is happening right now] given the market. A year ago, [I] would have said artists of color but [I am] feeling a lack of confidence right now from collectors.”
A final comment, from a dealer, was the most dismissive of categories. It’s a familiar response from the point of view of contemporary galleries, which must demonstrate how their artists are unique and thus worth an investment. (This is different from a dealer promoting or creating a program around a particular movement, which happened often in the past.) The dealer explained: “I don’t think there is any particular grouping of artists, techniques, media or practice that one needs to focus on over others. It’s sometimes comfortable to pigeonhole different artists into groups so that we can think about them simultaneously, yet as history always proves, you only ever really get to properly experience and perhaps (if we’re lucky) understand an artist by taking a long…look at their work in isolation. I tend not to think about art in clusters such ‘Black Figuration’ or ‘Female Abstraction.’”
Even with this substantial feedback, most people still answered the question and responded with multiple categories. The “most important” tendencies were as follows:
Indigenous artists (19)
Black artists (7)
LGBTQIA+ artists (6)
Asian artists (4)
Female artists (4)
Artists using technology (4)
Artists working across disciplines (2)
Art from the global south (2)
Female artists over 50 (2)
Figurative artists (2)
Textile artists (2)
One note before we move on: While there were only seven votes above for Black artists, there were a number of votes for more specific subcategories, such as Black abstract artists and Black figurative artists.
The above list is not surprising. It reflects current market trends, particularly in the wake of the selection of Jeffrey Gibson—a gay and indigenous artist—to represent the United States at last year’s Venice Biennale. It also reflects the recent critical and market tendency to rarely, if ever, identify groupings that focus on particular formal qualities unconnected to identity. One wonders if that will change, given the full governmental attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
My sense (and hope) is that the art world will double down on these interests in the face of the current administration, as there is still a significant lack of equal representation in the art world. As the Burns Halperin Report of 2022 argued, even though “triumphant” art world headlines have proclaimed the diversification of the cannon and current exhibitions, “a few high-profile exhibitions and auction results obscured a far more entrenched system of racism and sexism that was not changing anywhere near as quickly as the…headlines suggested.” And I would argue, in 2025, we are still very much in the same place.
What was surprising, or perhaps more exciting about the results of this question about categories, was the variety of responses in the longer tail of answers, which I include below:
Artists engaged with the surreal and spiritual
Artists creating public art
Artists focused on urban space and real estate
Artists focused on our relationship with the natural world
Artists using natural materials and regenerative/sustainable processes
Black abstraction
Black figuration
Contemporary landscape artists
Craft artists
Decorative artists and furniture artists
Disability artists
Diverse voices
Eco-Artists
Feminist art
Futurism
Generative artists
Geometric Abstraction
Hybrid national identity
Individual heritage
Lesser-known and overlooked artists from the past
Marginalized artists
Migrant artists
Performing artists
Self-taught artists
Street artists
Tech-utopian meets rights-of-nature artists
I loved some of these groupings. While I don’t want to deprioritize the more popular groupings above, I was inspired by some of these answers, especially “Artists engaged with the surreal and spiritual,” and the range of ways art professionals are seeing artists engage with the planet. I also wanted to know more about which artists people would identify as “Tech-utopian meets rights-of-nature artists.”
That’s it for this week. I hope that my current book project is of interest and that both the categories discussed and the pushback against the overall question were engaging. I look forward to seeing you back here in a couple of weeks.
Next time, I’ll share what is probably the most anticipated post of The Art & Artists Report, which will focus on artists and answer the following question:
If someone wanted to engage more deeply with modern and contemporary art, who are 4-5 artists they should know about, who will have a lasting presence in 5-10 years? Why did you choose them?”
In the meantime, let me know if there are any categories you think should have been included in this list. Also, how do you think that ideas about identity are shaping contemporary art history, and how might this change going forward?
Best,
Matthew