Contemporary art is a global success story, routinely praised for its variety, its experimentation, its difficulty, and its intervention into the world beyond the gallery. However, the art historian Hal Foster remarks that, upon scrutiny, contemporary art also appears “to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgement.” The closer one gets to contemporary art, the more confused the category becomes, and the more questionable its claims to significance. In this thesis, I will use the tools of philosophy to provide an elucidation and defence of contemporary art. First, I give an account of what features make contemporary art distinct from other categories of art. Though many take contemporary art’s main distinguishing feature to be its absolute heterogeneity of material, art form, genre, or style, I propose that this is too narrow. I instead argue that the most critically tractable strand of contemporary art is  distinguished by its attempts to seriously engage with the crises of the historical condition of contemporaneity. Second, I attempt to make sense of how engagement functions, and how it affects the way audiences encounter and value contemporary art. I claim that engaged artwork make their audiences active participants in improving their own standing on affairs beyond the artwork. I elaborate this by focussing on the cognitive dimensions of this activity, arguing that rather than just provide their audiences with insights contemporary artworks more often invite their audiences to become active contributors to inquiry by laying out prompts and constraints that guide this activity. I argue that this leads audiences not to knowledge, but to understanding of the crises that they are implicated within. In the final part of the thesis, I turn to showing how foregrounding engagement with crises shapes the responsibilities of artists and audiences, and impacts what critics hold to be important in correctly appreciating and evaluating contemporary art. In shedding light on the phenomenon of engagement, this thesis aims to advance the sparse philosophical literature on contemporary art, giving a novel philosophical framework for understanding its aims, its methods, its missteps, and its achievements.