Contemporary Art

What is Contemporary Art?

Contemporary art is art produced at this present point in time or art produced since World War II. The definition of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art commonly define their collections as consisting of art produced since World War II.

Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, with the advent of Modern and Postmodern art forms, distinctions between what is generally regarded as the fine arts and the low arts have started to fade, as contemporary high art continues to challenge these concepts by mixing with popular culture.

Contemporary art is exhibited by commercial contemporary art galleries, private collectors, art auctions, corporations, publicly funded arts organizations, contemporary art museums or by artists themselves in artist-run spaces. Contemporary artists are supported by grants, awards and prizes as well as by direct sales of their work. Source: Wikipedia

Features From Previous Issues

Today's Masters: Sublime Wilderness

The large painting on the easel is still somewhat inchoate. But it already evinces an impressive form and scale. It is the jagged outline of a majestic summit in the Himalayas. “I was trekking for several weeks last November in Nepal and Bhutan,” says Richard Estes in his matter-of-fact way, not acknowledging that such vigorous activity is at all out of the ordinary for a 72-year-old. Continue reading →

Today's Masters: Form and Feeling

“I did that one in ’28,” says Will Barnet, pointing to a drawing of an elegant young man in a double-breasted suit, one hand draped languidly across his lap. He was a poet named Sully De Vito who lived in Barnet’s hometown of Beverly, Mass. “I don’t know what happened to him,” muses Barnet. Nineteen twenty-eight was a long time ago; few people alive today were doing much of anything then, let alone creating serious artwork. Continue reading →

Metal Works

When race car driver Hervé Poulain asked his friend Alexander Calder to embellish the exterior of his 480hp BMW 3.0CSL for the 1975 Le Mans, Poulain’s car became Calder’s ultimate kinetic sculpture. The resulting colorful expression also launched BMW’s Art Car series, which has grown during the past three decades to comprise 16 cars by artists from several continents, including the most recent from Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, who encased a hydrogen-powered H2R in reflective ice and called it Your Mobile Expectations. Continue reading →