Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks (Phaidon)

Eight prominent tastemakers—including peripatetic curators Hans Ulrich Obrist, Bice Curiger, Okwui Enwezor and Massimiliano Gioni—map out exactly who and what matters in art. For example, Jeff Koons’s stainless-steel Rabbit held court in 1986 as “an icon of the entire decade,” says Gioni. New York’s New Museum curator flags Jeff Wall’s Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), a monumental 1992 photographic tableaux chock full of references to Théodore Géricault’s 1819 masterpiece The Raft of the Medusa. Wall staged the photo shortly after the conclusion of the Gulf War, yet, as the title suggests, it encapsulates a preceding conflict—and eerily predicts many more to come. $75; phaidon.com.