Styles, Movements and Conceptualism

The view has been expressed that everything has been accomplished in the realm of painting and that movements and mainfestos are no longer valid. 'Style' in painting, nevertheless, persists and can refer to the distinctive visual elements, techniques and methods that typify an individual artist's work or to a movement or school that an artist is associated with. Style can originate with an actual group that the artist was involved with or it can be a category in which art historians have placed the painter. The word used in this last sense has fallen out of favour among scholastics, though it continues to be used in popular contexts.

It used to be considered that art arose from dedication to learning the elements of painting, design, colour theory and the like. So-called "modern art" and "contemporary art" have moved away from the historic value of craft and documentation of nature in favour of concept. Effectively, this places the operation of painting in the hands of workmen rather than the artist. The repeated assertion of conceputalists has not prevented the majority of artists from continuing to practise in a somewhat traditional manner. Arguments over what constitutes art and its realation to craft have been forwarded by the modern and post modern schools.

Here is how Wikipedia sees the divisions of the art world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Painting