In the "Center for Contemporary Art" section, interdisciplinary project groups including artists work on current issues related to a specific annual theme.

The section "Center for Contemporary Art" works explicitly from the perspective of basic research, which is developed from the arts and art sciences and transferred into interdisciplinary and international working contexts. The results of the basic research-oriented, interdisciplinary collaboration between the participants are then incorporated into teaching with innovative teaching approaches and methods in a second step. The work area explicitly serves the - necessary - specialization of students in the Master's and, above all, in doctoral training. This is not only to compensate for the existing desideratum of specialized, research-led teaching in art history at the University of Graz, but above all to establish the academic location of Graz as a "beacon" not only in Austria, but in Europe and internationally, initially for North America, with this significant accentuation of the research area on contemporary art and culture and in concert with the focus of the Institute of Art and Musicology on modernism and the present.

While it is quite common in the USA for artists to be integrated into university life as researchers and teachers - and not only in the humanities, e.g. in art and literature departments, but also in some science departments or research institutes, such as Cal Tech (California Institute of Technology) or MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) - in German-speaking Europe, artists are at best active in art academies, i.e. as experts with practical experience in the arts.

However, since artists, like other specialists, deal with certain topics, technical and media problems, cultural or political issues, but from the field of art, the reception of their thematic contributions is left to individual reception. In order to organize a systematic, topic-centered exchange with scientists, forms of cooperation must therefore be tested in which these are not left to chance or selective encounters at events.