contemporary art definition of contemporary art in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

contemporary art, the art of the late 20th cent. and early 21st cent., both an outgrowth and a rejection of modern art modern art, art created from the 19th cent. to the mid-20th cent. by artists who veered away from the traditional concepts and techniques of painting, sculpture, and other fine arts that had been practiced since the Renaissance (see Renaissance art and architecture ).
..... Click the link for more information. . As the force and vigor of abstract expressionism abstract expressionism, movement of abstract painting that emerged in New York City during the mid-1940s and attained singular prominence in American art in the following decade; also called action painting and the New York school.
..... Click the link for more information. diminished, new artistic movements and styles arose during the 1960s and 70s to challenge and displace modernism in painting, sculpture, and other media. Improvisational and Dada Dada (dä`dä) or Dadaism
..... Click the link for more information. -like styles employed in the early 1960s and thereafter by Robert Rauschenberg Rauschenberg, Robert (rou`shənbûrg'), 1925–, American painter, b. Port Arthur, Tex.
..... Click the link for more information. and Jasper Johns Johns, Jasper, 1930–, American artist, b. Augusta, Ga. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp in the mid-1950s, Johns attempted to transform common objects into art by placing them in an art context.
..... Click the link for more information. had widespread influence, as did the styles of many other artists. The most significant of the often loosely defined movements of early contemporary art included pop art pop art, a movement that first emerged in Great Britain at the end of the 1950s as a reaction against the seriousness of abstract expressionism . British and American pop artists employed a common imagery found in comic strips, soup cans, and Coke bottles to express
..... Click the link for more information. , characterized by commonplace imagery placed in new aesthetic contexts, as in the work of such figures as Andy Warhol Warhol, Andy, 1928–87, American artist and filmmaker, b. Pittsburgh as Andrew Warhola. The leading exponent of the pop art movement and one of the most influential artists of the late 20th cent.
..... Click the link for more information. and Roy Lichtenstein Lichtenstein, Roy (lĭk`tənstīn'), 1923–97, American painter, b. New York City.
..... Click the link for more information. ; the optical shimmerings of the international op art op art (ŏp), movement that became prominent in the United States and Europe in the mid-1960s.
..... Click the link for more information. movement in the paintings of Bridget Riley Riley, Bridget, 1931–, English painter. Associated with the pop art movement, Riley covers large canvases with interlocking bands, undulating curves, scattered discs, or repeated squares or triangles.
..... Click the link for more information. , Richard Anusziewicz, and others; the cool abstract images of color-field painting color-field painting, abstract art movement that originated in the 1960s. Coming after the abstract expressionism of the 1950s, color-field painting represents a sharp change from the earlier movement.
..... Click the link for more information. in the work of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly Kelly, Ellsworth, 1923–, American painter, b. Newburgh, N.Y. He moved to New York City in 1941, studying at Pratt Institute, and later attended the Boston Museum Arts School.
..... Click the link for more information. and Frank Stella Stella, Frank, 1936–, American artist, b. Malden, Mass. In his early "black paintings" Stella exhibits the precision and rationality that characterized minimalism, employing parallel angular stripes to emphasize the rectangular shape of his large canvases.
..... Click the link for more information. (with his shaped-canvas innovations); the lofty intellectual intentions and stark abstraction of conceptual art by Sol LeWitt LeWitt, Sol (ləwĭt`), 1928–2007, American artist, b. Hartford, Conn.
..... Click the link for more information. and others; the hard-edged hyperreality of photorealism photorealism, international art movement of the late 1960s and 70s that stressed the precise rendering of subject matter, often taken from actual photographs or painted with the aid of slides.
..... Click the link for more information. in works by Richard Estes Estes, Richard, 1936–, American painter, b. Evanston, Ill. One of the best-known American exponents of photorealism , Estes is noted for his street scenes.
..... Click the link for more information. and others; the spontaneity and multimedia components of happenings happening, an artistic event of a theatrical nature, but usually improvised spontaneously without the framework of a plot. The term originated with the creation and performance in 1959 of Allan Kaprow's "18 Happenings in 6 Parts.
..... Click the link for more information. ; and the monumentality and environmental consciousness of land art land art or earthworks, art form developed in the late 1960s and early 70s by Robert Smithson , Robert Morris , Michael Heizer, and others, in which the artist employs the elements of nature in situ or rearranges the landscape with earthmoving
..... Click the link for more information. by artists such as Robert Smithson Smithson, Robert, 1938–73, American sculptor, b. Passaic, N.J. After first making modular, serial sculpture, Smithson began to design large-scale earthworks (see land art ) in the 1960s.
..... Click the link for more information. . One of the most long-lived of these movements was the abstract development known as minimalism minimalism, schools of contemporary art and music, with their origins in the 1960s, that have emphasized simplicity and objectivity.

Minimalism in the Visual Arts

..... Click the link for more information. , which emphasized the least discernible variation of technique in painting, sculpture, and other media.

Taken together, these many approaches to art represented a wholesale rejection of the tenets of modernism—e.g., its optical formalism, high seriousness, utopianism, social detachment, invocation of the subconscious, and elitism—and marked the beginning of a new era in art. In their many manifestations, these movements and those styles that followed have come to be grouped under the umbrella term of postmodernism postmodernism, term used to designate a multitude of trends—in the arts, philosophy, religion, technology, and many other areas—that come after and deviate from the many 20th-cent. movements that constituted modernism.
..... Click the link for more information. . For the most part, this art is one of pluralism and eclecticism. In fact, the very lack of a uniform organizing principle or ideology is one of the most important hallmarks of postmodern art. Nonetheless, within the enormous diversity certain tendencies, trends, and movements can be discerned.

One of the products of the almost universal dismissal of modernism by contemporary artists has been the development of a new historicism, ironic and detached, which has spawned a number of artistic "neoisms." These include the neoexpressionism neoexpressionism, term given to an international art movement, mainly in painting, that began in the 1960s and 1970s, was a dominant mode in the 1980s, and has continued into the 1990s.
..... Click the link for more information. of such German artists as Georg Baselitz Baselitz, Georg (gāôrkh` bä`zəlĭts'), 1938–, German artist, b. Deutschbaselitz, Germany, as Hans-Georg Dern.
..... Click the link for more information. and Anselm Kiefer, of Italians including Francisco Clemente and Sandro Chia, and of the American Julian Schnabel Schnabel, Julian (shnä`bəl), 1951–, American artist, b. Brooklyn, N.Y. He studied art at the Univ.
..... Click the link for more information. . Among other contemporary "neo" styles are the cool "neo-geo" abstractions of Peter Halley and others, the stark structures of neoconceptualism, the slick neopop of such artists as Jeff Koons, and the landscape revival represented by Diane Burko and April Gornik, among others.

Many new artists have simultaneously invoked and challenged art history, rejecting the heroic stature of the singular work of art and the single (usually white male) artist and invoking the ubiquity of mechanically produced reproductions by employing sophisticated "quotations" or "appropriations" from prior works. This can be found, for example, in Cindy Sherman's photographic recreations of paintings, in the multiple quotations of historic images of David Salle Salle, David, 1952–, American painter, b. Norman, Okla. One of the artists whose reputation reached its peak during the 1980s, he studied at the California Institute of the Arts (1970–75) and settled in New York City in 1975.
..... Click the link for more information. 's paintings, in the postmodern takes on Barnett Newman Newman, Barnett, 1905–70, American artist, b. New York City. A member of the New York school, Newman was one of the first to reject conventional notions of spatial composition in art. Often using monumental scale, he took abstraction to its farther reaches.
..... Click the link for more information. by Philip Taaffe and on Manet Manet, Édouard (ādwär` mänā`), 1832–83, French painter, b. Paris.
..... Click the link for more information. by Yasumasa Morimura, and in the nearly identical representations of famous images such as Picasso Picasso, Pablo (Pablo Ruiz y Picasso) (pä`blō pēkä`sō; r
..... Click the link for more information. 's icon of modernism Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Mike Bidlo.

Also widespread among contemporary artists has been a repudiation of the idea that underlies most works of pure abstraction—that the work of art is a self-sufficient entity. Rejecting the exclusively self-referential images of abstraction and the constricted commercialism of the art world (yet often embracing the wider commercialism of a consumer society), the new art has sometimes manifested a marked if somewhat detached social consciousness, often expressed in issue-driven minority, gay (frequently AIDS AIDS or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, fatal disease caused by a rapidly mutating retrovirus that attacks the immune system and leaves the victim vulnerable to infections, malignancies, and neurological disorders.
..... Click the link for more information. -related), and feminist imagery. By and large, the inroads achieved by feminism feminism, movement for the political, social, and educational equality of women with men; the movement has occurred mainly in Europe and the United States. It has its roots in the humanism of the 18th cent. and in the Industrial Revolution.
..... Click the link for more information. in the 1970s have been reflected in later decades not so much by the insistently female, body-derived 1970s imagery of Judy Chicago Chicago, Judy (Judy Gerowitz Chicago) (gĕr`əwĭts', shĭkä`gō, –kô`–)
..... Click the link for more information. or Miriam Schapiro as by the full participation in the once mainly male-dominated art world of such varied artists as Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Jennifer Bartlett, Elizabeth Murray, Judy Pfaff, Sherrie Levine, Barbara Bloom, Katharina Fritsch, and others.

Arising from the multimedia experiments of the 1970s, the widespread use of a variety of technology-based media has persisted into the art of the new century. Often included are elements of film, video, sound, performance (see performance art performance art, multimedia art form originating in the 1970s in which performance is the dominant mode of expression. Perfomance art may incorporate such elements as instrumental or electronic music, song, dance, television, film, sculpture, spoken dialogue, and
..... Click the link for more information. ), and architecture (principally in installation art). Another trend that has widened the definition and scope of contemporary art has been the conceptually driven use of both photography and language as the substance of numerous works of art—in Kiefer's photographic collages, in Kruger's words and photographic images, in Bruce Nauman's neon phrases, in Lawrence Weiner's painted words, in Holzer's billboarded, carved, electronically reproduced, or otherwise created linguistic neotruisms, and in many other artists' works. Another contemporary art movement, digital art digital art, contemporary art in which computer technology is used in a wide variety of ways to make distinctive works. Digital art was pioneered in the 1970s but only came into its own as a viable art form with the widespread availability of computers, appropriate
..... Click the link for more information. , was pioneered in the 1970s but did not become prevalent until the beginning of the 21st cent. Digital artists make use of sophisticated computers, software, and video equipment to create an extremely varied body of works.

Postmodern art has also blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture (and sometimes architecture), with artists often including in their works a host of wildly nontraditional materials. Since the 1960s shaped paintings and painted sculpture have become commonplace, while the materials of art have ranged from Rauschenberg's stuffed goat to Joseph Beuys Beuys, Joseph (yō`zĕf bois), 1921–86, German artist, b. Krefeld; one of the most influential of postmodern artists.
..... Click the link for more information. ' globs of fat to the smeared body fluids of various contemporary artists. Moreover, a wide variety of spaces and places, both private and public, have become arenas for the frequently ephemeral work of many contemporary artists.

Later 20th-cent. and early 21st-cent. sculpture has assumed a central position in contemporary art and has followed the patterns of the various postmodern art movements, for example, the three-dimensional pop icons of Claes Oldenburg Oldenburg, Claes (klăs), 1929–, Swedish-American artist, b. Stockholm.
..... Click the link for more information. , Koons's purposely banal, often erotic figures, and the minimalist constructions of such artists as Carl Andre Andre, Carl (än`drā), 1935–, American sculptor, b. Quincy, Mass.
..... Click the link for more information. , Donald Judd Judd, Donald Clarence, 1928–94, American artist, b. Excelsior Springs, Mo. His sculpture, allied with the minimalist school of the late 1960s (see minimalism ; modern art ), has the appearance of industrial fabrication.
..... Click the link for more information. , and Robert Morris Morris, Robert, 1931–, American artist, b. Kansas City, Mo. He settled in New York City in 1960 and was allied in his early work with the simple, impersonal forms of minimalism , e.g., an untitled 1965 work consisting of four blocks of gray fiberglass.
..... Click the link for more information. . Other important trends in contemporary sculpture include an increasing use of mixed media and the creation of works that draw their meaning and impact from their architectural context and also emphasize the role of the spectator. This is as significant in the room-centered examples of installation art as it is in such large public works as Maya Lin Lin, Maya Ying (mī`ə), 1959–, American architect and sculptor, b. Athens, Ohio.
..... Click the link for more information. 's Vietnam Veterans Memorial Vietnam Veterans Memorial, war memorial in Washington, D.C., built 1982. Designed by the American sculptor and architect Maya Ying Lin, it is a sloping, V-shaped, 493-ft (150-m) wall of highly polished black granite that descends 10 feet (3.
..... Click the link for more information. .

Bibliography

See Papadakis, Farrow, and Hodges, ed., New Art: An International Survey (1991); E. Lucie-Smith, Art Today (1995); J. Cerrito, ed., Contemporary Artists (4th ed. 1996).