Art of the Aughts

The term “contemporary art” lacks boundaries. If modern art has come to denote a period from the late nineteenth century through roughly the 1960s, what follows is a long contemporary. The features in our November/December issue break up that undifferentiated present by treating the first decade of the twenty-first century as a discrete period, one that is neither the present anymore, nor fully past.In stories that continue on A.i.A.’s website, we examine how the era’s br