It's pretty easy to spot an Impressionist painting or tell the difference between a Renaissance sculpture and a modern one. But when we try to categorize 21st-century art, it seems defined by diversity and pluralism more than similarity, which begs the question – what art movement are we living through now?
"There are no art movements today," says Michael Rooks, Wieland Family curator of modern & contemporary art at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. "There is no one dominant philosophy or ideology. Contemporary art is characterized by its global nature." It is also not media dependent. Today's art crosses boundaries in terms of discipline. For example, artists can be designers, focus on mass consumption, work in fashion or even collaborate with industrial designers.
In fact, the whole idea of art as a series of movements is "a modernist schema" more useful for scholars and others to understand the past than for artists working in the present, notes Alina Cohen on the art website Artsy. "Since the middle of the 20th century, the idea of movements has eroded as the art world has become increasingly fractured," she writes.
Art today is "incredibly diverse," explains Rooks. If the 1980s and 90s saw the importance of multiculturalism, today's diversity is much broader. It's about equity, inclusion and access, and the empowerment of traditionally underrepresented voices, not just representation.
Pop art of the 1950s and 1960s ushered in a narrowing of the gap between art and real life, according to Rooks. The style presented the notion that everyday objects and those we consume were worthy of artistic consideration. It seems from there, the word "art" has grown ever more fluid.