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 worlds 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 todays art contemporary.