What is Contemporary art?
And how would you define a contemporary artist?
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The loose, simple definition is: art that has been made in the present day or in the relatively recent past. However, the term contemporary art indicates more than that. Before delving into it, it is necessary to understand the difference between contemporary art and its previous artistic period: Modern art.
The fact that “contemporary” and “modern” in vernacular English are synonyms does not help. In fact, it often leads to confusion and conflation of the terms modern art/artists and contemporary art/artists. In the art world, these two terms refer to two distinct times of creation and to very different scopes and approaches to art production. The term Modern Art describes art made from around the 1860s to the 1970s. In this period, art started breaking rules and traditions as well as embracing experimentation with different materials. Modern artists developed a new way to intend art, moving away from figurative art towards abstraction.
There is no definitive agreement on when contemporary art started. For many, the cut-off period marking the end of Modern Art, and so the beginning of contemporary art, is identified with the birth of Postmodernism in the 1970s. Rejecting a uniform organising principle or label, contemporary art is eclectic and diverse. Contemporary artists usually work with different materials and methods as well as with a variety of concepts and subject matters that challenge the boundaries of what art and an artwork can be.
In comparison to Modern Art and other historical art periods, contemporary art lacks a shared idea and vision as well as unified modes of expression: contemporary artists continue to experiment, question and re-evaluate the notion of art itself. Notwithstanding the wide scope of contemporary art, there are some common themes that are typical of contemporary artworks. The topics explored by contemporary artists very often reflect relevant and heated issues that define our society, such as technology and the digital world, identity politics, the body, globalisation and migration, time and memory.
Another important element of contemporary art, which really differentiates it from modern art, is the relevance given to the viewer’s experience of the artwork. Contemporary artists often center their works on the effect that they can have on the viewer. Art is not anymore about the “genius” artist behind it, or about the artwork’s beauty and form. Art now has different forms, sometimes ephemeral ones (such as performance art or street art) and lives outside conventional spaces.
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