This course surveys contemporary art from the mid-twentieth century to the present. Drawing on an array of primary source readings, scholarship, and media sources, we will trace the ideas, conflicts, and social transformations that have defined artistic practice in our exceedingly interconnected world. We will grapple with questions of representation, displacement, cultural difference, appropriation, institutional power, consumerism, the body, the environment, technology, and globalization to build the critical tools needed to interpret art that is often purposely complex, contradictory, or unsettling. Among the questions guiding this course are not only what contemporary art is and what it looks like but also how it operates in the world and the ways in which it intervenes in political debates, challenges authority, and negotiates the relationship between the local and the global. The course loosely follows a chronological arc, but chronology and geography are not its organizing principles; discourse and inquiry are. Contemporary art is a global conversation, and part of the work of this course is learning to map its resonances across varied times, cultures, and artistic expressions.