What does “American Art” even mean anymore?
A panel discussion that really got me thinking about what “American Art” even means anymore?
By Carrie Scott
I was invited by the Royal Academy to join the remarkable artist Alvaro Barrington, curator and all around cultural thinker Zoé Whitley and the incredibly astute journalist Rebecca Jones to discuss American art as part of the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby Collect initiative to invite institutions to look critically at what is American art, its history, its future, and its evolution.
And our discussion fundamentally got me thinking about what “American Art” even means anymore. When most people hear the phrase “American art,” I think they still picture a very particular thing of big canvases, gestures and egos. I think I do. We picture Jackson Pollock splashing paint in a barn. Mark Rothko bathing rooms in existential dread. Willem de Kooning wrestling with abstraction. The mythology of postwar New York still dominates the global imagination of what American art is supposed to look like. A heroic, masculine, individual and mostly white pastiche.
And there’s good reason as to why that’s the case. The first image of America that was exported visually came through the Farm Security Administration photographs during the Depression. Photographers like Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks were commissioned to construct a visual language around hardship, labour, migration, and survival. The FSA created one of the first coherent visual identities of America itself. It mythologised resilience and aestheticised struggle. It built a kind of emotional architecture of “Americanness.”
Then came Abstract Expressionism, and one of the most fascinating stories to both art and non-art people alike because the CIA, yes the CIA, is purported to have helped make Abstract Expressionism famous. After World War II, the United States needed cultural dominance as much as military dominance. The Cold War wasn’t just being fought with weapons. It was also being fought through ideology, aesthetics, and culture. America needed to prove itself as the land of freedom, individuality, and unrestricted thought. And what better symbol than massive, emotionally explosive abstract paintings that appeared to reject all forms of state control? And - more than that - these paintings were abstract so you could ascribe meaning to them with ease in a way a realist painting just wouldn’t allow.
The irony is wild here of course, because many of these artists were deeply alienated from American society. Pollock was a rebel. Barnett Newman identified with anarchist ideas. Rothko distrusted capitalism entirely. But their work became useful propaganda anyway. The CIA, often through indirect channels and cultural organisations, helped fund international exhibitions that circulated American abstraction across Europe. The Museum of Modern Art played a critical role. And everyone, collectors, institutions, critics, museums, and government aligned around the idea that America was now the centre of modern art. And the world believed it. By the late 1950s, New York had overtaken Paris as the cultural capital of the art world.
The market followed and, though I am obviously oversimplifying here as well as skipping decades of detail, today the American art market still absolutely dwarfs almost everyone else. The scale of collecting, institutional funding, private philanthropy, museum infrastructure, and auction power remains unmatched. The latest Art Basel and UBS report shows the US still accounts for 43% of the global art market by value, maintaining a level of dominance no other country comes remotely close to. Even as the wider market contracted from $64 billion to $57.5 billion in 2024, America remained the undisputed centre of high-end art sales.
And the mythology around “American Art” still carries enormous financial weight. Just last week, another Pollock sale reminded everyone how powerful this exported version of “American art” still is. Pollock is no longer simply an artist. The drip paintings became symbols of freedom, rebellion, masculinity, and postwar American dominance, and the market continues to price them accordingly.
But here’s the thing: I’m not sure the definition of American art actually holds anymore. Or maybe more accurately, the idea of a national aesthetic itself is collapsing. And nowhere do we see that more clearly than at the Venice Biennale. Two years ago the central exhibition was titled “Foreigners Everywhere”. This year the curatorial framing shifts again toward “In Minor Keys.” Both exhibitions move away from certainty, monumentality, and fixed identity. The emphasis is no longer on dominant national narratives but on fragmentation, softness, hybridity, and overlapping histories.