Marina Abramovic

Yogoslavian performance artist based in New York who began her career in the early 1970s. Her work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind.

A well-known work of hers is 'The artist is present', where she sat in a room on a chair next to rooms filled with her other works, and people could queue up to sit in front of her.

Really recently she had a show called 'Generator', where it's visitors were made to put on blindfolds and headphones. It's an artwork that focuses on nothingness, at it's simplest. Her artist's statement reads as follows:

'It took me 25 years to have the courage, the concentration and the knowledge to come to this, the idea that there would be art without any objects, solely an exchange between the performer and the public'.

I found this quite interesting in the New York Time's 'arts beat' blog: 
In a brief interview, she explained that “Generator” was born out of “512 Hours,” when she became taken with the idea of removing herself and her art-star status from the work. “This is the thing: people want to see you, and then go home,” she said. “This is not about that.”

Here's a youtube video I found where she talks a little bit about being a young artist, and appreciating things as you do them. Even something as simple as drinking water:

Christian Marklay

Clocks:

Goeffrey Farmer

Farmer is a Canadian artist, based in Vancouver. He creates instillation-based artworks using heaps of different elements, like drawing, photography, video, sculpture, performance, and found materials. He combines all that with chaotic soundtracks and flashing lights - sometimes things move, sometimes they're still. I haven't been into any of his instillation works, but I'm sure it would be quite overwhelming, but magical too see his work for real. Here's a good little video of Let's Make The Water Turn Black:

Bruce Nauman

Bruce Nauman can do everything, it seems. Much of his most famous work deals with his neon elements and sculpted hands, but he's has worked in almost every medium. He's experiented with performance, holograms, film,  interactive environments and paintings. His work is often criticized as being unattractive, with unappealing aesthetic, but I disagree. I like his placement, despite it often looking quite busy. He tends to focus on the meaning of the piece though anyway. His neon pieces often use word play to make them entertaining and interesting. 

Richard Prince

This dude likes to 're-photograph' things.
So many times when I read about an artist it seems like a waste of time to rewrite a perfectly good description of the history of that artist, so here's a very good description found at metmuseaums.org

'In the mid-1970s, Prince was an aspiring painter who earned a living by clipping articles from magazines for staff writers at Time-Life Inc. What remained at the end of the day were the advertisements, featuring gleaming luxury goods and impossibly perfect models; both fascinated and repulsed by these ubiquitous images, the artist began rephotographing them, using a repertoire of strategies (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to intensify their original artifice. In so doing, Prince undermined the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the images, revealing them as hallucinatory fictions of society's desires.'

He's arguably most famous for his piece 'Untitled (Cowboy)' from 1989. It got sold in New York and was the first 'rephotograph' to raise over $1 at an auction, in 2005. The photo was originally taken by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement. Here's a very respectable explanation about the meaning and story behind the work. (also from met museums.org)

'Untitled (Cowboy) is a high point of the artist's ongoing deconstruction of an American archetype as old as the first trailblazers and as timely as then-outgoing president Ronald Reagan. Prince's picture is a copy (the photograph) of a copy (the advertisement) of a myth (the cowboy). Perpetually disappearing into the sunset, this lone ranger is also a convincing stand-in for the artist himself, endlessly chasing the meaning behind surfaces. Created in the fade-out of a decade devoted to materialism and illusion, Untitled (Cowboy) is, in the largest sense, a meditation on an entire culture's continuing attraction to spectacle over lived experience.'

And here's the image:

He does a lot of other cool stuff, and has tried out a range of different styles, but generally it seems his strongest and most common theme is picking out interesting pictures, quotes, and silly little things often found in the news that you wouldn't generally have noticed otherwise. Often he will just write one of these lines on a colored or even simply a white canvas in quotation marks, and that's his artwork:

They're often funny, but always interesting. You should definitely check out his website for more.

Miranda July

THIS LADY WRITES, DIRECTS, AND STARS IN HER FILMS. WHAT A GENIUS. Oh my goodness. I am so ashamed to say that I've never seen any of her films before, so I don't feel like I can talk about her very much. I remember reading about how brilliant she was in a magazine once, and then making a mental note to myself to look her up later, but then I never remembered again. I think I lost the mental note. So now I'm just going to post this trailer which looks like an absolutely incredible movie, and then I will watch her films. Hopefully I can find that and read it. Oh man, I have been missing out. What have I been doing with my life?!?! Maybe after I've read/seen everything I'll add to this and write about her a bit more.

Her movies are called 'You me and everyone we know' (2010) and 'The future' (2011). She also has a heap of books. And a super recent film called 'Somebody'. And she's worked with LENA DUNHAM and THERE'S SO MUCH MORE. Look at this site and your mind will break into five hundred million pieces: http://mirandajuly.com/ She seems to do something amazing practically every month. Wow.
Oh and she's also super super super adorable:

Jenny Holzer

Holzer is mostly known for her huge public artworks that include billboard advertisements, projections on buildings & other architectural structures, and illuminated electronic displays. 
She uses text in her work and is well known for her short statements called 'truisms'. These statements often address themes like consumerist impulses, describing torture, and lamenting death and disease. Her work is quite provocative, which I think is important if you want people to notice it and questions the ideas and meanings.