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Contemporary art can be defined variously as art produced at this present point in time or art created since World War II. The description of the word contemporary would support the first view, but museums of contemporary art usually define their collections as consisting of art produced since World War II.

Contemporary art is exhibited by commercial contemporary art galleries, private collectors, corporations, publicly funded arts organizations, contemporary art museums or by artists themselves in artist-run spaces. Contemporary artists are maintained by grants, awards and prizes as well as by direct sales of their work.

There are close connections between publicly funded contemporary art organizations and the commercial sector. For instance, in Britain a handful of dealers represent the artists featured in leading publicly funded contemporary art museums.

Individual collectors can wield substantial influence. Charles Saatchi has dominated the contemporary art market in Britain since the 1980s; the subtitle of the 1999 book Young British Artists: The Saatchi Decade uses of the name of the private collector to define whole decade of contemporary art production.