What We Missed in Our List of the Best Artworks of the 21st Century

Standing beneath a 340-ton granite megalith that rests on the edges of concrete walls but appears to float against the clear California sky makes for a sublime kind of experience. So too does taking a moment to try to apprehend all that went into the seemingly Sisyphean task of setting such a rock in its current resting place. The latter is the subject of Levitated Mass: The Story of Michael Heizer’s Monolithic Sculpture, a 2013 documentary that follows, in granular detail, the narrative attached to Land art maestro Michael Heizer’s contribution to the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The work involved was formidable, from the artist identifying the choice rock in a quarry in Riverside County to the countless bureaucratic roadblocks that had to be negotiated to transport it on a specially constructed 206-wheeled trucking apparatus around highways, bridges, and overpasses that were barely up to the task. What I like most about Levitated Mass is how it both touts its own story and laughs away the spectacle, with a stone face that can be hard to read and rewarding to ponder. —Andy Battaglia

I really wanted this work by Seth Price to be on the list, where it hovered for some time before being bumped to the overflow. In addition to gold-toned, vacuum-formed polystyrene relief sculptures (of which this is one); Price’s multivalent output encompasses, among other things, a suite of generic-looking calendars featuring artworks by the likes of Thomas Hart Benton, computer graphics, and more; a series of music videos setting found footage—computer animation loops, and military, commercial and news footage—to soundtracks of his own music and readings from his fairy tales; and a ready-to-wear clothing collection (produced in collaboration with fashion designer Tim Hamilton) using fabrics based on security envelope patterns. Importantly, it also includes “Dispersion,” Price’s influential critical text on the place of art in the expanded field of distributed media—a limitless datascape defined by Price as the social information circulating across platforms and devices in our digital age. Dispersal is a central theme in Price’s work—the bomber jacket, for example, is both iconic and dispersed, appearing in multiple forms throughout 20th- and 21st-century as a symbol of cool—as well as a guidepost for new and perhaps subversive approaches to making art. —Anne Doran

It was only when I put up my hand to write this that I realized I’d become open to revising my former opinion about The Gates. When the piece went up 20 years ago in Central Park, where 7,500 gate-like structures draped in billowing fabric traced a 23 mile-long trail, I felt aligned with the observations of critics like New York Magazine’s Mark Stevens, who called the piece a “visual one-liner” and observed that “the artists and their fans call the color ‘saffron,’ …but it looks more like a Wal-Mart orange.” In retrospect, however, The Gates has grown on me. I’ve come to see the merits that a close acquaintance of mine has been trying to convince me of for two decades: that it was such a New York thing, such an urban thing; that it went up in a cold period (February) when winter is still there but ending, a hopeful moment; that it brought together an aesthetic experience of art with an aesthetic experience of nature, approaching the sublime; that it created an occasion for both reflection and perception; that it brought people together. —Sarah Douglas

I still vividly recall when my editor showed me Image Atlas in 2012. At the time, I had a limited understanding of net.art and digital art, and didn’t totally realize this collaborative project by artist Taryn Simon and computer programmer Aaron Swartz, commissioned by Rhizome, was an actual artwork, but I was enthralled by its provocative underpinning. On a simple website, visitors would type in a key word—“freedom fighter” or “masterpiece,” for example—into its search bar and receive the top five images from a given country’s most popular search engine (now 195, originally 17) based on real-time queries, which can then be sorted alphabetically or by GDP. The resulting set of images can be vastly different based on each country’s own specific culture. It’s easy to think that we are all accessing the same internet and receiving the same results, and it was especially easy to think that back in 2012. Image Atlas implodes that theory, showing that the internet is not—and never has been—the objective and neutral digital superhighway it has long been considered. With the transformations in the internet, search engines, and social media over the last decade the work seems even more essential to understanding our current visual culture than before. —Maximilíano Durón 

Geopolitical borders are often arbitrary, delineated by a powerful few and then imposed upon others, as was the case in 1947, when the British violently cleaved India into two states, forming what is now known as Pakistan. Zarina was among the many Indians who were forever altered by this event known as Partition, which displaced members of her family. And though these events are not explicitly depicted in Dividing Line, this woodcut is haunted by them, its titular line forming a black scar that runs down its white background. This slash has its roots in the Radcliffe Line, the border that was drawn between India and Pakistan, but Zarina’s line diverges slightly from it in form. That’s because she was not trying to be faithful to the Radcliffe Line. Of this haunted print, she once said, “I don’t need to look at an atlas, the line is inscribed on my heart.” —Alex Greenberger

Put me on the record as saying that, even now, after last year’s retrospective at the Tate Modern and with David Scheff’s biography releasing later this month, Yoko Ono is still under-appreciated as an artist. While she’s mostly known to the general public for protests and activism with late husband John Lennon, Ono should be remembered for her pioneering participatory artworks, which often have a strong feminist bent. The most powerful of Ono’s late works is undoubtedly ARISING, first presented at Palazzo Bembo during the 2013 Venice Biennale. For the installation Ono asked women of any age to send a “testament of harm done to you for being a woman.” While ARISING has been presented in multiple formats, the most common is simple, but profound: “Testaments” are printed on A4 paper and hung from lines or placed in an accompanying binder, each with an image of the woman’s eyes. Viewers are encouraged to slowly contemplate these stories, many of which concern rapes, domestic abuse, and sexual molestation. Often, they are written in the second-person, addressing the perpetrator. One is left thunderstruck both by the specificity of each harm, and its ubiquitousness. Years before the #MeToo movement, Ono saw the conversation the world needed to have—and began prying open the door. —Harrison Jacobs

It seems that animal liberation will never be a popular topic, even on the left, where it is regularly pitted against human suffering—as if you can only care about one. Which is too bad, as the future of our planet may well depend on it: right now, wild birds are dying en masse as food and dairy are producing a whopping 14.5 percent of global greenhouse emissions. But Lin May Saeed knew such inconvenient truths were unpopular, and so took a tactful approach, appealing to her audience not with facts, but “fables,” as she called them up until her untimely death in 2023. Take Girl With Cat (2019), a polystyrene sculpture of the titular scene. Inspired by the fact that ancient Egyptians had no word like “animal” that might ostracize nonhuman species, she made a sculpture of a young woman with a feline companion whose slender body resembles those in the ancient statuettes produced in cat-worshipping Egypt. She paired this with a framed copy of Birgit Mütherich’s essay “The Social Construction of the Other: On the Sociological Question of the Animal.” This sculpture, like her other works, showed that human-animal relations haven’t always been as they are today, in a subtle retort to those who’d defend human domination as “natural”—which means they can be different still. —Emily Watlington