Paintings

"Contemporary art" refers to recently produced visual art. The term "contemporary art" has replaced the term "modern art", 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 art", which posits that a significant inflection point was reached in the history of art in about the 1990s.
 
 
 The term "contemporary art"
 The phrase "contemporary art" is the preferred phrase for serious art being currently produced. It contains the implication of avante-garde, following on from the "modern art" tradition and is not necessarily applied to work outside this "mainstream", such as Outsider art, Naïve art, and Folk art. A commonly recurring theme, again inherited from modernism, involves the two questions: is it art? and is it good art? The field of contemporary art is wide, and almost anything can be considered "art". It has become difficult to say that anything is not art, 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 art public, namely that art engages in "dialogue" with other art to validate it.
 Commentary about contemporary art 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.