Who Will Teach Us How to Feel?

Most of the pieces selected are intellectual concepts or political attitudes expressed through video, photographs, installations or words. In 1982, for example, Jenny Holzer put the words “Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise” on a digital billboard in Times Square. In 1985, Barbara Kruger took an image of a ventriloquist’s dummy and printed “When I Hear the Word Culture, I Take Out My Checkbook” across its face.

Of the 27 artists recognized, 20 were born in the U.S.

The next thing you notice is that most of these artists haven’t captured or maybe even appealed to a mass audience. If asked to name the era-defining artists from the 49 years prior to 1970, most of us would come up with world-famous artists: Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, Alexander Calder, Edward Hopper, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, etc. The artists listed here, from the 49 years after 1970, are generally not well known outside the art world: for instance, Gordon Matta-Clark, Lutz Bacher and Michael Asher.

Most of the artists have adopted a similar pose: political provocateur. The works are less beautiful creations to be experienced and more often political statements to be decoded. In 1989, for example, Cady Noland made a silk-screen of the famous photo of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot. There are eight large bullet holes across his body and there’s an American flag stuffed in his mouth.

The most provocative pieces are in the realm of sexual politics, where the art world has had its biggest influence. Jeff Koons is recognized here for “Ilona on Top,” a painting showing him having sex with the porn star who would become his wife.

Several works redefine female power. In 1974, the artist Lynda Benglis posed naked with a dildo between her legs. In 1972, Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and others created “Womanhouse,” a living feminist manifesto. In 1993, Catherine Opie created “Self-Portrait/Cutting,” in which someone has carved two stick figures and a house into her back with a knife or razor. The figures depict an idyllic domestic dream that was hard for lesbians to realize at the time.

The general attitude is: Let’s smash injustice with a sledgehammer. What you see when all these works are brought together is how the aesthetic has given way to the political, how the inner life has given way to the protest gesture.

Artists have always taken political stands, but in some eras there’s more of a conviction that beauty yields larger truths about the human condition that are not accessible through politics alone — and these are the truths that keep us sane. Now one gets the sense that not only is the personal political, but that the political has eclipsed the personal. What’s missing from most of these pieces is human contact and emotional range.

Among these 25 pieces, 20 are impersonal and only five allow you to see what life is like for another human being, including works by Nan Goldin and Judy Chicago. Only a few explore relationships and emotional connection. There almost seems to be a taboo now against capturing states like joy, temptation, gratitude, exaltation, betrayal, forgiveness and longing.

The absence of that emotional range reminds you that one of the things art has traditionally done is educate the emotions. Lisa Feldman Barrett and other neuroscientists argue that emotions aren’t baked into our nature as things all humans share. They are constructed by culture — art and music, and relationships. When we see the depth of psychological expression in a Rembrandt portrait, or experience the intimacy of a mother and daughter in a Mary Cassatt, we’re not gaining a new fact, but we’re experiencing a new emotion. We’re widening the repertoire of ways we can feel and can communicate feelings to others.

Barrett uses the phrase “emotional granularity” to capture the reality that some people — and some eras — experience a wider range and specificity of emotions than others. People with highly educated emotions can be astonished by the complexity of other people without feeling the need to judge them immediately as good or bad according to some political logic.

This list fascinated me because it comes at a moment when everything is political — and our politics has brutalized the nation’s emotional life.

One of the pieces that stands out is Arthur Jafa’s 2016 video montage “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.” It’s an intense compilation of the African American experience — love, celebration, police shootings, religious frenzy, racism, dance, struggle. There are so many powerful emotions in a short burst, an overflowing of relationship. It’s a political work that transcends politics and reminds us: This is how life looks with human particularity left in.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.