Images Of The Future

By Belinda Luscombe

Islamic fundamentalism, race, cultural clashes--this is the stuff of today's front pages, but the men and women TIME has selected for the latest in its series on Innovators have been exploring issues like these on canvas and in other artistic mediums for a long time, in the process changing the way painting, sculpture, film and even sound are perceived. Although the artists were chosen in the weeks before Sept. 11, it's not surprising that their approaches seem so fitting in the weeks after, because in many ways artists are the Ur-innovators. They want to change the way we see everything. They explore the unthinkable or the not-yet-thought.

This is a particularly critical time for what are known as the fine arts, which lately had become more famous for being the coarse arts--using sensation to attract controversy and attention. Now contemporary art's taste for shock value looks puerile, and its major topic of discussion--itself--seems hideously irrelevant.

Yet more than ever, we need art to express our hopes and fears. In the months and years ahead, can we expect a Guernica, the masterpiece Picasso painted after an air attack killed 1,600 people during the Spanish Civil War? Will a movement rise from these horrors, as Modernism arose after World War I? With artists like the ones on the following pages, anything is possible.

--By Belinda Luscombe