The Most Important Artworks of the 2010s

10. Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, 2013
When historians of future generations attempt to understand what it felt like to be alive in the 2010s, I hope they will devote substantial time to watching Camille Henrot’s Gross Fatigue (2013), which captures the peculiar mixture of pleasure and tension of a time in which inconceivable levels of interconnected communication, and knowledge, were being birthed at the same time that environmental collapse loomed. A deep dive into the Smithsonian’s archives, with images and videos appearing one after another in window after window, set to an irresistible soundtrack by Joakim Bouaziz, it is a work that contains many worlds. (The narrative text—written by the artist and Jacob Bromberg, and entrancingly voiced by Akwetey Orraca Tetteh—adds even more magic.) It was a genuine hit—a very rare thing in the art game—and a sign of an exciting new world in which immaculate, culture-shifting videos would hit the road, racking up new fans as they went. —Andrew Russeth

9. Nicole Eisenman, Sketch for a Fountain, 2017
Having long been known best as a painter, Nicole Eisenman has recently become one of our finest sculptors. Her characteristically playful five-part sculpture Sketch for a Fountain, which was first presented at the Skulptur Projekte Münster in 2017, is an ode to leisure and quiet contemplation. The artist’s bronze and plaster figures, situated beside a small water feature, enact their own idiosyncratic modes of relaxation, with one lying on its back, enjoying a large beverage, and another standing, with its head tilted gently skyward. Reimagining the format and social function of sculptural fountains, Eisenman invites visitors to engage in a moment of rest alongside her characters. And engage people did—though not always in positive ways. Visitors to the display in Münster, Germany, beheaded one of the figures and painted a swastika on another. In the end, however, the residents of the city fell in love with the work, along with the slew of critics, curators, and dealers who came by to see it, and locals even began to fundraise to keep it in 2018. Versions of the sculpture have since found permanent homes at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and a park in Boston. —Claire Selvin

8. Marina Abramović, The Artist Is Present, 2010
As part of her 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Marina Abramović presented a new, interactive performance: The Artist Is Present. The artist sat in the museum’s atrium for eight hours a day over the course of almost three months, offering visitors the opportunity to sit across from her and engage in a kind of silent, emotionally charged communion. The work, Abramović’s longest continuous solo performance, aligned with the artist’s longstanding interest in testing the limits of the body and the mind. The performance became something of a cultural moment, drawing thousands of visitors to the museum for the express purpose of gazing into the artist’s eyes for as long as they pleased. It was also an online sensation, leading to the establishment of a blog titled Marina Abramović Made Me Cry. In short, it was an early, exemplary instance of an artwork as a public spectacle and a hot ticket, a trend that would be integral to the coming decade. —Claire Selvin

7. Christian Marclay, The Clock, 2010
With The Clock, Christian Marclay made a spellbinding artwork about a subject to which many would not give the time of day. The simultaneously simple and mind-bending collage of movie scenes showing clocks and watches from throughout cinema history (from Late Night Shopping to High Noon) accounts for every minute of an extremely odd 24-hour period, making stars of certain chronological occurrences. 12:02! 1:37!! 9:41!!! And the effect of flitting between scenes that can be scintillating or totally banal makes it all riveting in a way that only grows more mysterious as it goes on and on and on. The long lines The Clock occasions when it screens have become part of the work itself, as does the fact that no artwork like it could have been made in an age before so much was searchable and sortable and ready to be remixed. —Andy Battaglia

6. Cameron Rowland, Attica Series Desk, 2016
Cameron Rowland’s sculptures might seem like spare readymades—scuffed glass cubes, lined-up pews, clean tables—but when one reads into his strangely alluring offerings, they curdle in the mind and turn nasty. Attica Series Desk, which was part of a 2016 show about mass incarceration at Artists Space in New York, is Rowland at his finest. It takes the form of an office desk that a text reveals was produced by the Attica Correctional Facility, which paid its incarcerated makers of products of the kind as little as 10 cents an hour. What could easily have been misconstrued from a distance as a Minimalist sculpture is instead a deeply horrifying statement about how many art objects are built on unequal power dynamics and exploitation. The work imprints itself on viewers slowly, and then lingers. —Alex Greenberger

5. Amy Sherald, First Lady Michelle Obama, 2018
When Amy Sherald’s luminous portrait of Michelle Obama debuted at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. in February 2018, the artist was relatively little known. Her intimate work would quickly change that. The former First Lady is seated before a light blue backdrop, donning a flowing dress patterned with dynamic shapes and abstract formations. The details captivate, like her lustrous purple polish, carefully rendered on the subject’s fingernails. Since the work’s unveiling on the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s 209th birthday, the artist has won the Pollock Prize for Creativity and joined the powerhouse gallery Hauser & Wirth, with whom she recently had a lauded solo exhibition in New York. —Claire Selvin

4. Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013
In just under 16 minutes, Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File covers a mindboggling array of subjects—the circulation of images online, the oppressive use of digital surveillance by the U.S. Air Force, and the ways that class struggle infiltrates the internet, to name just a few. It’s a barrage of information only appropriate to our chaotic times, and Steyerl delivers it all with Chris Marker–esque wit, occasionally appearing in a robe against crudely rendered computer-generated backdrops. Is this meant to be ironic, disturbing, sad, funny? It’s all of the above, and then some. The video also features one of the all-time great endings: a film crew becoming half-visible and cipher-like, via digital effects, as appropriated footage of ’70s pop group the Three Degrees is silhouetted onto a green screen. As the people manning the cameras start to disappear, the singers croon, “When will I see you again?” —Alex Greenberger

3. Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Studio), 2014
In 2016, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Studio), 2014, for its permanent collection. Shortly after, they asked him for his thoughts on the acquisition in a video interview. “When you’re on the outside you have to prove you belong in there,” he said, as the white subjects of Old Master paintings and 18-century portraiture appeared on screen. The subjects of Marshall’s works are unmistakably, universally Black. Untitled (Studio) depicts a Black artist’s studio as a place of possibility—of collaboration and image-making. A nude man prepares to pose, while a woman—the artist, it seems—positions another model just so. The Met’s acquisition was the latest sign of a major arts institution beginning to address a long history of neglecting artists of color; Marshall’s picture provides one glimpse of the incredible work that they have been doing all the while. —Tessa Solomon

2. Kara Walker, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, 2014
The sculpture’s physicality immediately overwhelmed when one entered the former Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn: it was 75 feet long and 35 feet tall, with 80 tons of polystyrene coated in white sugar. The densely layered historical allusions took more care to unpack. Sugar Baby dominated a hall of the refinery, the spot of one of the city’s longest labor strikes, and the factory was slated to be demolished after the exhibition for condominiums. The air smelled of burnt sugar and molasses dripped from the ceiling. The boldly female sphinx-like figure was given the features of a Black “mammy,” the antebellum-era stereotype employed by manufacturers for molasses and other products, here reimagined as an irrepressible force. It was an indictment of the enduring vestiges of racial exploitation, blown up to discomfiting scale. Some viewers were offended, others moved. Though it was destroyed at the end of its run, it remains an indelible, unforgettable work—a piece people will be talking and arguing about for decades to come. —Tessa Solomon

1. Arthur Jafa, Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death, 2016
Arthur Jafa’s seven-minute video Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death is a stare down and a sizing up at once. It’s hard to watch but even harder to stop—and everyone winds up implicated in its mélange of moving images of Black pride and horrific violence handed down through the ages. To get to the end is to suddenly feel pulled by some unidentifiable force to want to start again, and it’s so intensely sad but also so inspiring in different registers that it gives rise to feelings that can be difficult to reconcile after the screen goes dark. In a back-and-forth dialogue published in his gargantuan book A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions, Jafa says of Black Visual Intonation, the editing technique he enlisted in the video and others like it: “I began to learn that what I was manipulating was not the images but the space the juxtaposition of the images was opening up, or disrupting. Think about a river: the river ain’t the bank and it ain’t even really the water.” Fred Moten, the artist’s friend, responds, “The river, the flow, is the bank and the water muddying one another, channeling one another. The images are like the banks of the river, and their content is the water.” Take us all to that river and wash us in the water in the hopes that it might cleanse our troubled but also salvageable souls. —Andy Battaglia