CategoriesStyles and Movements
The Anthropocene
Art responding to the idea of a new geological age shaped by human activity, from mining and plastics to melting ice.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for The Anthropocene are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
The chemist Paul Crutzen popularised the term in 2000 for a proposed geological age in which human activity, from mining and fossil fuels to nuclear tests and plastics, marks the planet's rocks, air and oceans. Geologists voted in 2024 against adding it to the official timescale, but the word had already become shorthand in the arts for life inside environmental change.
Edward Burtynsky photographs mines, oil fields and tailings ponds from the air as abstract patterns. Olafur Eliasson and the geologist Minik Rosing left Greenland ice to melt in public squares for Ice Watch (2014). Chris Jordan photographed the plastic-filled remains of albatross chicks on Midway Atoll, and Jason deCaires Taylor sinks figurative sculptures that become artificial reefs. Earlier works now read differently, from Thomas Cole's The Course of Empire (1833–36) to the wheat field Agnes Denes planted on a Manhattan landfill in 1982.
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