Love Rising: The Transformation of Emotions in Contemporary Art

Abstract

This essay surveys the shifting emotional regimes in Western art from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first, concentrating on the place accorded social affections. In particular, it calls attention to a significant change underway in recent decades as the suppression of the full range of emotions instigated by modernism has been challenged and the tender emotions re-embraced. Important contemporary artists, such as Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Hass, are invoking and exploring themes of love, care, empathy, and concern and, in many cases, making creative use of them to advance social, political, and environmental justice.