Global Contemporary, 1980 CE to Present
What this domain tests
Art since 1980: installation, performance, video, digital and internet art, relational and participatory practices, identity politics, postcolonial critique, institutional critique, site-specificity, biennials and the global market, and activist art. Concepts: the viewer as participant, ephemerality and documentation, the body as medium, appropriation, commodity critique, and decolonization of museums and canons.
Traps
- Documentation ≠ the work: for performance and ephemeral works, photos and video are records; the work is the event. Questions test this distinction.
- Appropriation is a deliberate strategy with critical intent, not accidental similarity.
- Institutional critique targets museums, galleries, and markets from within them - note the paradox.
- Don't assume "contemporary" means only Western; global biennials and non-Western artists are central.
Rule of thumb
Ask who is the audience, what is the site, and what does the work do rather than depict? Contemporary questions reward verbs (engage, implicate, document) over nouns.
Worked example
A performance known only through photographs and testimony is ephemeral, body-based work; the images document an event that cannot be re-exhibited as the original.