What Is Contemporary Art?
The Museum of Modern Art · View on Coursera ↗
Taught by Sophie Cavoulacos, Sean Anderson, Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Erica Papernik-Shimizu, Christian Rattemeyer
Arts and HumanitiesPersonal DevelopmentSocial Sciences
About the course
See the world through the eyes of today’s visionaries. Contemporary art can be challenging, but artists working today provide us with a direct lens to see the social, political, and technological shifts of our time. Whether you are a student building your academic foundation or a professional looking to sharpen your creative intuition, this course is structured around enduring themes to help you understand art being made today. This course from The Museum of Modern Art will lead you to go bey
The dissent
The most-upvoted critical review (16 votes, 2.0★).
“Very narrow view of what art is. Political positions front and center a central requirement for inclusion. Most examples require a back-story or long explanation of the artist's intentions to begin to appreciate, as the work does not stand on it's own merits. Most examples are descendants of Duchamp, so you need to be excited by his nihilism to appreciate these selections. The Architectural examples are the strongest work.”
Coursera's 4.7 comes from 1,911 ratings. Of those, 1.3% are 1–2★.
Starisk reads the reviews learners voted most helpful, and weights each by the square root of its votes: a review with 80 upvotes counts about five times one with 2. Unvoted reviews are not skipped out of laziness — by this model they carry no evidence that other students endorsed them.
That measures what the most-endorsed reviews say, not “true quality.” The rating distribution above is the whole population, so you can see the sample next to it.
Reviews read on 23 Oct 2026.Read them on Coursera ↗