What is the Difference between Modern & Contemporary Art?

What is the difference between modern and contemporary art?

• And what is post-modern? How did those definitions come about?

• Answer:

  If you want the short and sweet skip down "To summarize"--all the following verbage is just elaborate qualification... Well, 'Contemporary Art' would be by definition what is happening right now, at the present time. It's a catch-all classifier and rather useless as a category--if you lived in 1880s in Paris, Contemporary Art would be Impressionism. Basically it serves a temporary bin to file the recent past that we haven't figured out how to file yet. Modernism as a period is pretty well understood. Nonetheless, Modernism's beginning in art is defined differently by different art-historians. The advent of Impressionism in France, the first movement in painting to be influenced directly by photography, is often used as a convenient starting point. When Impressionism began is subjective, the 1865-1880 period is the typical time frame. I find the death of Manet in 1883--a pivotal figure in the evolution of painting away from realism to be a convenient start for Modernity. Modernity lead to the rarefied 'High Modernity' which is traced back to the Constructivists/Suprematists and goes through Bauhaus to Pollock, Kline, Calder, Tony Smith, Caro, Moore, Hepworth, Noguchi et al. The end of High Modernity is generally agreed to be synonymous with the end of Modernism--I'd place the end somewhere in the mid-60's when Minimalism, Pop, Earth Art, and Performance all began to replace Ab Ex. 1969 is taken as a universal cultural landmark for obvious reasons--widespread disillusionment with institutions of Modernity, the apex of the space race, etc etc. 1969 works fine for the visual arts too but I'd argue that post-modernity was already underway by then, beginning in the art world in the early 60s. So I'd say Modern Art would be bracketed by the period 1880-1965--others might say 1875-1969, others still might say 1918-1960: same difference really. Post-Modernity comes afterwards (of course) and technically it is ongoing. For it to be useful as a category I'd consider the Post-Modern period ending in the 80s with the rise of a reactionary, commodity (i.e. painting) centric market reemerging in NYC, which saw a decline in the world of performance and installation. Everything occurs in cycles and these have come back but I think it's helpful to bracket PoMo to the years 1963-1987, with the beginning and end of Warhol's art career, who could conveniently serve as the poster boy for post-modernity. Again that's a subjective pair of dates and others would assert we are still in Post-Modernity (and theoretically they'd be correct). Likewise Contemporary Art is the most recent period--defined strictly as what is happening now. I'd stretch Contemporary Art back about 10yrs or so. This leaves a gap in the 90s between the end of PoMo and Contemporary--which I'd call for lack of a better term Post-Conceptualism (this is a very generic term). Some folks call anything from the late 80s Contemporary Art which is perfectly valid too--but including anything in the late 80s (now 25yrs ago) as 'contemporary' seems a bit of a stretch to me. As you can see there is a lot of historiography of the recent visual arts that needs to be done. Unfortunately we're probably too close to our recent art history to be able to discern and draw clear conclusions about what defined a given period. There are different theoretical motivations behind the discourse of the early 90s--which saw a lot work focused on semiotics, the 'gaze', institutional critique, narrative critique (basically beholden to the post-Structuralists), and the post 9/11 work that saw much of that supplanted by relational aesthetics--but when that transformation happened isn't at all clear. It's clear enough that Charles Ray, Hans Haacke, Rosemarie Trockel, Barbara Kruger, Jeff Koons and Sophie Calle belong to a 'generation' of artists distinct in their age and theoretical motivations from say Jason Rhoades, Rikrit Tiravanija or Andreas Slonimsky. What isn't clear is where Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Martin Kippenberger, William Pope.L, and Jimmie Durham who are of the same earlier generation go exactly. There's a reason calling it all Post-Modern makes sense. Art historians in 50yrs will be able to untangle and draw a distinction between late 20th cent periods that we are too close to be able to. The two canonical art-history texts by Adams and Stokstad are good references that I recommend you check out, at least for Modernity in art. To summarize: early Modernism around 1883-1918 late (or 'High') Modernism around 1918-1963 Post-Modernity 1963-1987 Post-Conceptualism 1987-2001 Contemporary 2001-present Doubtless you'll see the terms 'PoMo', 'Post-Conceptual', and 'Contemporary' used interchangeably since there is no universally accepted distinction at this time between them all. However you will not see 'Contemporary' and 'Modern' used interchangeably. The main takeaway is that Modern and Contemporary do mean very different things in the context of the art world and shouldn't be confused (its an immediate giveaway in the elitist art world that you are ignorant). When you think of Modernism think of early 20th cent work like Picasso, Matisse, Calder, Miro, or Pollock; Contemporary/PoMo would be more recent artists like Warhol, Koons, Ray, Hirst. There's a sharp break between the two groups in critical theory even though the work may occasionally appear formally similar. The only time you could use 'Contemporary' to correctly describe 'Modern Art' was 50+ years ago.