What Is Contemporary Art? And Whether I Count as One

Somebody asked me a while ago whether I would call myself a contemporary artist. I said something vague and changed the subject, because in my head those two words meant a very large white room, a very small object in the middle of it, and a wall text I would have to read twice and still not get.

Then I looked the term up properly. It turns out I have been one the whole time, and the word means something much more boring and much more generous than I thought.

What contemporary art actually means

Contemporary art is not a style. It is a time frame. Museums usually apply it to art made from about 1970 onwards, some stretch it back to 1945, and the working definition is simply this: art made by artists who are alive now, responding to the world they are actually living in.

That is the whole test. Not the look, not the medium, not the price tag. A hyperreal oil portrait, a two hour video piece, a pile of wrapped sweets in a gallery corner and a painting of a pigeon eating pizza can all be contemporary art at the same time, because they were all made now.

Why the term sounds so intimidating

Because one dialect of it became the face of the whole language. Sparse, conceptual, institutional, explained in a paragraph you need to decode. That work exists and plenty of it is wonderful. It is just not the definition. It is one accent inside it.

What actually defines the era is the opposite of narrow. Since roughly the 1970s there has been no single dominant style, no officially correct next step, no movement everybody is supposed to join. Art historians call it pluralism. Everyone works in their own direction at the same time and none of those directions is the main one.

What most contemporary art does have in common

• It is made now, about now. Whatever else it is up to, it reacts to the present: technology, bodies, politics, memory, the internet, the specific way this decade feels.
• The medium is a decision. Nobody gets handed oil paint by default any more. Choosing to sit down and paint by hand in 2026 is a statement whether you meant it as one or not.
• Context is part of the work. Where it lives, who sees it, how it reaches them. That is not an afterthought, it is half the piece.
• High and low stopped being separate. Cartoons, tattoos, packaging, video games and comics all became legitimate material somewhere in the last fifty years, and nobody has managed to put them back in the box.

Where my work fits

I paint now, by hand, about things that are extremely now.

Bad reception and screens that do not quite deliver the picture. Memory going soft and plastic. Sweetness that is engineered, wrapped and built to be thrown away. Bodies that can stop working without giving notice. A brain that needs a lot of colour to feel comfortable in a room. Those are not timeless classical themes. They are 2026 themes, and I am living in the middle of them while I paint them.

The underlying question is ancient, of course. Memento mori, vanitas, the skull sitting next to the fruit, all of that is centuries old and I wrote about it in Memento Mori and Vanitas Art. But I run it through candy colours, cartoon logic and a rubber duck frozen in an ice cube, which is a very current way of asking it. Old question, contemporary accent.

The tradition I am actually standing in

There is a whole branch of contemporary art built out of exactly this. Pop art opened the door to advertising and comics. Lowbrow kicked it wider in California with hot rod culture, underground comix and tattoo flash. Pop surrealism turned that energy into painting careful enough for gallery walls, and Juxtapoz, the magazine that gave the scene a home, was co-founded by Robert Williams in 1994. Artists in that lineage show in museums now and sell at the big auction houses.

Meanwhile Takashi Murakami built an entire practice on smiling flowers, Yayoi Kusama fills rooms with dots and people queue around the block, KAWS casts cartoon characters in bronze. Cute is not the opposite of serious. That argument was lost decades ago by the people making it.

The long versions are in What Is Lowbrow Art? and What Is Pop Surrealism?

Where I do not fit, and why that is fine

Contemporary art is a time frame. The contemporary art world is an industry. Those are two different things and only one of them has a guest list.

No gallery represents me. I have no booth at an art fair, no edition of three at four thousand euro each, no curator writing about my practice in the third person. I sell hand-signed prints for 35 euro from my own website, I write my own wall texts, and most of my work ends up in bedrooms and kitchens rather than collections. By the industry's measure I am nowhere near the room.

By the actual meaning of the term I am completely inside it. Living artist, working now, responding to now. That is the entire requirement, and nobody has to nod first.

Why the word matters at all

Because it decides who feels allowed. I spent years assuming contemporary artist was a title handed to you once enough of the right people approved. It is not. It is a description of when you are working and what you are working about.

If you make things now, about the world you are actually in, you are in the same time frame as everyone else in it. Which shelf you end up on comes later, and other people usually take care of that part for you anyway. I collected all the shelves I have been put on in Every Label People Have Given My Art.

Take a piece of right now home

Everything in the hand-signed print collection was painted recently, by a person who is still here, about the world as it currently is. Every print is signed by hand for 35 euro. That is contemporary art by every definition that actually holds up, and it fits above a kitchen table.