Arts & Culture: Contemporary Art History

The specialisation in Contemporary Art History focuses on visual, process-based and digital art from the 1960s until today. This specialisation trains you as an art historian who is equipped to tackle this complex but fascinating field. Not only will you develop thorough knowledge of today’s visual, process-based, and digital art, but you will also develop the skills to research, present and write about today's art. You will be well-equipped for a career in the cultural sector (museums, festivals, art galleries, archives), as an art critic or as a freelance cultural entrepreneur.

What unites contemporary art forms is that they directly address the complexity of today’s society, in which information technologies and globalisation play an ever-increasing role, leading to networked forms of artistic practice that transgress national and cultural borders. At the same time, artists are very aware of the heritage they build upon, deconstruct, commenting on, or appropriating art history, leading to various attempts to describe contemporary art with terms such as post-modern, post-conceptual, post-medium, and more recently even post-internet and post-digital – and post-contemporary.