Contemporary Art: World Currents argues that, in recent decades, a worldwide shift from modern to contemporary art has occurred. Artists everywhere have embraced the contemporary world’s teeming multiplicity, its proliferating differences and its challenging complexities.

This book shows how contemporary art achieved definitive force in the markets and museums of the major art centres during the 1980s. It then became a global phenomenon as artworlds everywhere began to connect more closely, to become contemporaneous with each other. New communicative technologies and expanding social media are now shaping the future of art. Terry Smith offers the first account of these changes, from their historical beginnings to the present day.

This book breaks new ground in tracing how modern, traditional and indigenous art became contemporary in each of cultural region of the world. The author argues that it is diversity, or the contemporaneity of difference, not a convergence towards sameness, which makes today’s art contemporary.

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Terry Smith is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh and Distinguished Visiting Professor, National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney. He was Power Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the Power Institute at the University of Sydney. A leading authority in the theory of contemporary world art, he is the author of a number of books most recently: 'What is Contemporary Art?' (University of Chicago Press, 2009).