What is the exact difference between modern and contemporary art?
specifically beyond dates, and the differences in painting and
sculpture?

There does not seem to be total agreement on the answer to your
question:

"Contemporary art is art created in our time. But defining modern art
is a dicier proposition. Some scholars say it's anything after the
Renaissance. But most cite its birth in the late-19th century with the
Post-Impressionists Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Georges Seurat. With his
concentration on the underlying structure of his subjects, Cézanne
inspired so many 20th-century painters that he's often called the
Father of Modern Painting."
from "The Scent of Art" by Norman MacAfee, Pnnsylvania Gazette,
Sept/Oct 1998.

Of course this also depends on how you define "our time" - is it the
current century, in which case contemporary art only covers the last
two and a bit years, or would you take it further back?

Sorry, forgot the URL: http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0998/macafee.html

Howdy gargag,

Probably no easy answer for your question.

Princeton University Press has an excellent excerpt from "After the End
of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History" by Arthur C. Danto
http://pup.princeton.edu/chapters/s5911.html

"... the distinction between the modern and the contemporary did not
become clear until well into the seventies and eighties.  Contemporary
art would for a long time continue to be "the modern art produced by
our contemporaries." At some point this clearly stopped being a
satisfactory way of thinking, as evidenced by the need to invent the
term "postmodern."  That term by itself showed the relative weakness of
the term "contemporary" as conveying a style."

You should read the rest of the well written excerpt at the link above.


Search Strategy:
Searched Google with the keywords: difference modern contemporary art

Looking Forward, denco-ga

The word "modern" is often used instead of "modernist" in relation to
the broad movement in the visual arts and literature which held sway
between about 1910 and the 1960s (being superceded in some people's
view by post-modernism. Modernism was characterised by stylistic
experimentation and innovation, and often inspired by progressive
political and social attitudes. Major examplars of modernism in
literature were James Joyce, T S Elliot and John Dos Passos; in
painting, Picasso, the Surrealists and the Abstract Expressionists;
and in architecture, the Bauhau School, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd
Wright. Clearly, these figures are no longer contemporary; but in many
peoples' eyes (including mine) their work is often far more "modern"
than that of today's practitioners.