A global recession, a pandemic, 9/11, the Arab Spring, Brexit, the rise of Web 2.0, unrest in the face of economic stability, wars in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere: these were but a few of the many events that have defined the past 25 years, a period characterized by tumult and uncertainty. That all may explain why art appeared to change faster than ever all the while, with artists burning through styles and tendencies with each coming year.
With the 21st century now at the quarter point, we’ve taken the opportunity to pinpoint the greatest artworks of the past 25 years. Even though we set down some parameters for ourselves (more on that here), it was no small task—one made more difficult by the restless creativity of artists during this period.
Below, a look back at the greatest 100 artworks of the 21st century so far, as selected by the editors of ARTnews and Art in America.
#6 - Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010
Time flies when you’re having fun watching time—or so it seems when in the thrall of The Clock, a 24-hour assemblage of found footage starring timepieces of different kinds from the past century of film and TV. Drawing on his legacy as a maestro of remix culture (both musical and other), Christian Marclay spent three years combing the annals of moving-image history for brief clips he sequenced together. The result is a cinematic collage made up of appropriated scenes of actors glancing at their watches or waiting for seconds and minutes to tick down on clocks, alarms, and more. Each scene corresponds with the progression of a full day, so that the times in the clips sync up with the points at which they appear in Marclay’s work. While The Clock is an organizational and technical marvel (how did he find the thousands of clips, and how did he piece them all together?), the experience of watching the work as a movie of its own is just as awe-inspiring as the process. Taking stock of time manages to capture the essence of suspense and turn it inside out, leaving a viewer to wonder what it is about viewing that can leave us so rapt. —Andy Battaglia
#15 - Walid Raad, The Atlas Group, 1999–
The Atlas Group is credited with numerous artworks concerning the 1975–90 Lebanese Civil Wars. Often, these are detailed and painstakingly comprehensive research-based works: a journal tracking every car bomb detonated during the conflict, photographs of bullet-hole-pocked buildings overlaid with color-coded dots that correspond to different types of ammunition, clues to who fired the shots. The Atlas Group, though, was mostly the work of a single artist: a carefully crafted persona named so that you might trust its authority; the Group is an artwork unto itself. You might wonder how an artist could gather data this definitive or, perhaps, how anyone could. It takes only a mildly studious eye to catch the farce: the date of the group’s origin varies in different shows. The Atlas Group parodied the absurdism in claims to comprehension, and pointed to how facts and data can be hardest to procure when they are most urgent, most politicized. This may seem more obvious today than when the project began, but it isn’t any less essential. —Emily Watlington
#49 Paul Pfeiffer, John 3:16, 2000
If you needed a reminder of the sheer power of this artwork, you had a chance to see it last year during Paul Pfeiffer’s survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. I saw that show, and can report that John 3:16 has aged exceptionally well, given that, if anything, we revere sports stars even more now than we did at the turn of the millennium. On a tiny screen, a basketball appears to dart around a court in the absence of players, their hands merely hinted at. You have to get up close to see this little screen, as you would with a liturgical manuscript. (The piece is named for the famous biblical passage: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”) In casting basketball as revelation, Pfeiffer mined footage from the NBA, splicing together clips with the utmost meticulousness, doing for the game what Christian Marclay did for time with The Clock. —Sarah Douglas
#77- Sophie Calle, Impossible to Catch Death, 2007
In this 11-minute film, one of the most intimate artworks I’ve ever seen, we watch Sophie Calle’s mother’s final moments. At first, the French artist hadn’t meant for the video to be art at all; she had simply left a camera rolling in her mother’s final days, hoping to stay connected when she had to step out and run errands. But then she noticed something profound she thought was worth sharing: though in the footage you are watching someone die, death itself is impossible to see. In the video, Calle’s mother is shown lying still in bed, and after she dies, she simply lies still some more—this is a moving image that doesn’t move. Here, Calle managed to show me something I’d truly never seen before, even though it happens every day. —Emily Watlington