The 21st Century’s Biggest Art Trend is Not a Style. But Once You See It, You’ll Notice It Everywhere.

An ARTnews essay argues that “systems art”—a term coined by critic Jack Burnham in Artforum in 1968—has become a defining 21st-century art trend focused less on style than on making invisible structures like algorithms, global finance, and supply chains legible. Burnham linked the approach to artists associated with Minimalism, including Kenneth Noland, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin, whose rule-based methods used seriality, repetition, and modular units to mirror the era’s expanding Cold War protocols. The article highlights Hans Haacke and Adrian Piper as key bridges between early systems art and later Conceptual and Institutional Critique practices, citing Piper’s Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square (1968) and Haacke’s Weathercube (1963), later refigured as Condensation Cube, which visualized atmospheric processes inside a Perspex box. It also notes how systems art shifted after the political upheavals of 1968 toward analyzing social systems, “liquefying” the artist’s centrality in favor of context-driven, logical procedures.

Read the full article at ARTnews.com