In this article, we use topic modeling to systematically explore topics discussed in contemporary art criticism. Analyzing 6965 articles published between 1991 and 2015 in Frieze, a leading art magazine, we find a plurality of topics characterizing professional discourse on contemporary art. Not surprisingly, media-or genre-specific topics such as film/cinema, photography, sculpture/ installations, etc. emerge. Interestingly, extra-artistic topics also characterize contemporary art criticism: there is room for articles on new digital technology and on art and philosophy; there is also growing interest in the relationship between art and society. Our analysis shows that despite evolutions in the field of contemporary art -such as the 'social turn', in which contemporary art starts paying more attention to social forms and content -the prevalence of certain topics in contemporary art criticism has barely changed over the past 25 years. With this article, we demonstrate the unique value of topic modeling for cultural sociology: it is both a powerful computational technique to generate a bird's-eye view of a huge text corpus and a heuristic device that locates key texts for further close reading.

We use topic modeling to explore changes in discourse on contemporary art. Topic modeling is an inductive statistical technique that allows to detect ‘hidden’ thematic structures or topics in large text corpora. We analysed articles published in two leading magazines on contemporary art, Frieze and Artforum, between 1991 and 2015, and found a plurality of topics to be present in professional art criticism. Not unexpectedly, genre and media-specific topics emerge, e.g. painting, sculpture/ installations or performance/dance, but also extra-artistic topics are present in the discourse. We see that in the last 25 years, there is growing attention for the relationship between art and society, for war and ideology, and for digital technology within the pages of Frieze and Artforum. Despite the ‘social turn’ since the nineties – i.e. social forms and content are gaining more attention in contemporary art – ‘autonomous’ discourse continues to be dominant in contemporary art critique. So, in describing and analysing contemporary art, it is still the esthetical and formal characteristics of artworks that make up most of the discourse.