Study Modern and Contemporary Global Art: Forms, Contexts, and Analysis with 12 free online flashcards. Review key terms, definitions, and concepts with this interactive flashcard deck.
What distinguishes modern art from contemporary art?
Modern art generally spans the late nineteenth through much of the twentieth century; contemporary art usually spans approximately 1980 to the present, although the boundary is flexible.
What is abstraction in art?
Abstraction reduces, transforms, or eliminates recognizable representation while emphasizing qualities such as shape, color, gesture, texture, movement, or the medium itself.
Why is Duchamp’s Fountain significant?
Duchamp selected and repositioned a manufactured urinal, challenging the idea that art must be unique, handmade, beautiful, or produced through the artist’s physical labor.
How does Pollock’s drip technique create meaning?
Pollock’s poured and splattered paint records movement, gravity, rhythm, and chance. The large scale surrounds the viewer and makes the painting process central to its meaning.
What does hybridity mean in postcolonial art?
Hybridity is the formation of cultural identities through contact, conflict, and exchange. These exchanges are not necessarily equal because colonial violence and unequal power can shape them.
What defines installation art?
An installation is designed for a particular spatial situation and may combine objects, architecture, sound, light, video, text, or performance. Meaning depends on arrangement and the viewer’s movement.
What materials does performance art use?
Performance art uses actions, duration, the body, behavior, and audience relationships as artistic materials. It may be scripted, spontaneous, endurance-based, political, or participatory.
How can documentation function in performance art?
Documentation records an ephemeral action, but it can also be part of the artwork when the artist stages the action specifically for a photograph or video.
Why is photography not automatically objective?
Photography can appear factual while being constructed through framing, viewpoint, lighting, focus, posing, captions, editing, circulation, and technology.
What is new media art?
New media art uses technologies such as video, electronic sound, digital imaging, code, interactive systems, virtual environments, networks, or immersive projection.
Why might an artist choose recycled materials?
Recycled materials can address consumerism, colonial extraction, waste, and global commerce; their historical and political associations become part of the artwork’s meaning.
What does institutional critique challenge?
Institutional critique questions how museums, galleries, archives, markets, monuments, and the category of fine art establish cultural authority and artistic value.