The purpose of this webpage is to develop a situated terminology for the analysis of artistic practices under contemporary conditions. Each term is defined with a view to its explanatory force regarding artistic practice under contemporary conditions as well as to communicate what we mean by “artistic practice under contemporary conditions”.

Our writing is guided by the assumption that the relationship between artistic practice, sense-making, and the socio-political reality in which art takes place has undergone substantial changes during the transition from modern art to contemporary art. Hence, we believe that the study of art needs to revise traditional notions of its historicity, practice, and terminology, among others, to catch up with the phenomenon of contemporary art. Rather than defining what contemporary art is, the purpose of the situated terminology developed here is to qualify how we describe and interact analytically with contemporary artistic practices and their relation to non-artistic societal and eco-systemic realities. A main focus is on exploring and describing how the very diverse practices and works we designate as “contemporary art” function as art, and what qualifies them as artistic.

The past twenty–thirty years have seen thoroughgoing changes within art that have made it difficult to recognize its works as works of art in modern terms. Art can no longer be placed in specific genres and categories belonging to particular art forms. Often, it is no longer expressed in a delimited work, and it is no longer immediately given how to distinguish it from its surroundings and from what is not art. Modernist ideas about distinct works, a shared project, and a progressive history are no longer valid, or at least they no longer hold a monopoly on the conceptual framework of the work of art. The concepts and categories developed to describe and analyze modern art seem to have lost their explanatory force in relation to the art that concerns and speaks to our contemporary times. The emergence of contemporary art therefore necessitates a paradigm shift within the study of art in which the very notion of art is at stake.

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