Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts and subjects that continue the challenging of boundaries that was already well underway in the 20th century. Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform, organizing principle, ideology, or "-ism". Contemporary art is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger contextual frameworks such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, and nationality.

In vernacular English, modern and contemporary are synonyms resulting in some conflation and confusion of the terms modern art and contemporary art by non-specialists. 

Some define contemporary art as art produced within "our lifetime," recognizing that lifetimes and life spans vary. However, there is a recognition that this generic definition is subject to specialized limitations. 

The classification of "contemporary art" as a special type of art, rather than a general adjectival phrase, goes back to the beginnings of Modernism in the English-speaking world. In London, the Contemporary Art Society was founded in 1910 by the critic Roger Fry and others as a private society for buying works of art to place in public museums. A number of other institutions using the term were founded in the 1930s, such as in 1938 the Contemporary Art Society of Adelaide, Australia, and an increasing number after 1945. Many, like the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, changed their names from ones using "Modern art" in this period, as Modernism became defined as a historical art movement and much "modern" art ceased to be "contemporary." The definition of what is contemporary is naturally always on the move, anchored in the present with a start date that moves forward, and the works the Contemporary Art Society bought in 1910 could no longer be described as contemporary.

Sociologist Nathalie Heinich draws a distinction between modern and contemporary art, describing them as two different paradigms which partially overlap historically. She found that while "modern art" challenges the conventions of representation, "contemporary art" challenges the very notion of an artwork. She regards Duchamp’s Fountain (which was made in the 1910s during the triumph of modern art) as the starting point of contemporary art, which gained momentum after World War II with Gutai’s performances, Yves Klein’s monochromes and Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing.

Contemporary artwork is characterized by diversity: diversity of material, of form, of subject matter, and even time periods. It is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform organizing principle, ideology, or - ism that is seen in many other art periods and movements. The focus of Modernism is self-referential. Impressionism looks at our perception of a moment through light and color, as opposed to the attempt to reflect stark reality in Realism. Contemporary art, on the other hand, does not have one, single objective or point of view, so it can be contradictory and open-ended. There are nonetheless several common themes that have appeared in contemporary works, such as identity politics, the body, globalization and migration, technology, contemporary society and culture, time and memory, and institutional and political critique.