In today's era of retina and mass media, with the shift from the elite art to the mass art, contemporary art has become the field of symbolic operation. From the perspective of semiotics, combines semiotic aesthetics, art psychology, communication and phenomenology and other interdisciplinary knowledge, this article explores the relationship between artistic symbols, consumer culture, and popular culture, and discusses the relationship between artistic symbols and the consumer culture as well as the mass culture, and systematically analyzes and sorts out the causes and current situation of the symbolization of contemporary art, thus summarizing the problems faced by contemporary art symbolization, thinking about and discussing how artists can fully understand and use symbols in order to find their own painting language and form an independent artistic appearance.