"Contemporary arts" refers to recently produced visual arts. The term "contemporary art" has replaced the term "modern arts", which used to be used in the same way, but became identified with the period of work when it was first employed and has thus became a historical term. There is an overlap of usage of "contemporary art" with "Postmodern arts", which posits that a significant inflection point was reached in the history of arts in about the 1990s.

 

The term "contemporary art"

The phrase "contemporary art" is the preferred phrase for serious arts being currently produced. It contains the implication of avante-garde, following on from the "modern arts" tradition and is not necessarily applied to work outside this "mainstream", such as Outsider arts, Naïve arts, and Folk arts. A commonly recurring theme, again inherited from modernism, involves the two questions: is it arts? and is it good arts? The field of contemporary arts is wide, and almost anything can be considered "arts". It has become difficult to say that anything is not arts, although a defining characteristic of what reaches prominence is not its material or subject, so much as its addressing "issues" of concern to the contemporary arts public, namely that arts engages in "dialogue" with other arts to validate it.

Commentary about contemporary arts is primarily descriptive, rather than interpretive. Description can include taking note of unique identifying visual characteristics, such as types of marks, colors, overall visual impacts, and impressions. Description can be made about what is knowable about the materials used and the techniques used to bring the object into existence. Techniques might include general categories such as photography, video, painting, printmaking, and stone sculpture.

Contemporary arts has seen the arrival of the biennials and the triennials such as the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, São Paulo, the Asia-Pacific triennial, the Kwan Ju, the Havana, Echigo-Tsumari, and documenta in Kassel, Germany.

Arts terms

Some arts terms refer to "movements", some are descriptive, and some do both. "Hard edge" and "lyrical abstraction" are examples. Hard edge can be considered a specific movement; it is said that from the late 1950s through the 1960s a group of painters in the United States constituted the hard-edge painting movement. The term, however, can just as well be used to describe any painting in which abrupt color transitions occur between unmodulated color areas. Lyrical abstraction is known as a movement, but the term is just as useful to describe abstraction in which painted forms are modulated. That is a descriptive use of the term "lyrical". Of course a painting could have both lyrical and hard edge marks in it.

The advantage of using the names of movements when describing a new artwork is that there is shorthand involved, saving the writer the necessity of explaining all that the movement is about. The disadvantage is that it is unlikely that the concerns of the new artwork shares as much in common with the previous artworks as one assumes it does. Thus, when one refers to an artwork as, for instance, neo-Dadaist, one may be doing it as much a disservice as a service