Contemporary art museums prefer a very literal approach to what is contemporary: art made extremely recently by living or only recently deceased artists. I don’t disagree with this definition, and I too believe that very recent art is most definitely contemporary, but I also have come to incorporate some of Claire Bishop’s perspective into my understanding as well. To me, the definition of contemporary in terms of art is not just about the time stamp of the works themselves, but also includes a relevance and immediacy of the ideas and perspectives. Art created today must be contemporary because an individual with an immediate perspective creates it. The art comments on or reflects a current time period, the now. I believe that this perspective can incorporate curatorial and analytical perspectives as well. If a curator uses antiquated art to support or prove a new idea, then I believe this is contemporary as well. Perhaps each piece of this theoretical exhibition would not be contemporary individually, but the perspective of the gallery is. Only if the art and its curation remain stagnant would this then fail to meet my definition of contemporary.

However, not everything contemporary is interesting. Just changing the curation of old artwork is not necessarily radical enough to be interesting. In Claire Bishop’s book Radical Museology she recounts how “Artists picketed the [MoMA] and demanded more exhibitions of contemporary US art, rather than endless shows of early twentieth-century European painter and sculptures” in the 1940s (12). To these artists, turn of the century European art was not relevant, even if it had a new curation.

There is something more exciting and relatable about seeing very recent art, just like living in the moment has a thrilling if not occasionally irresponsible appeal to it. Works that have been sitting around for a few decades are still interesting, but not the same. The New Museum in New York, as Bishops observes, is branded as hip in part because they claim to be a “non-collecting institution,” despite having a collection of about 670 works (16). The reason The New Museum doesn’t advertise their collection is because the allure of abandoning the past in favor of the present is exciting and appeals particularly to a younger generation that strives to create a future instead of wallow in history. Therefore, I believe that there is a difference between contemporary art or curation and exciting contemporary. As long as new and hopefully radical ideas define art curation and analysis, then almost anything can be contemporary.

A current exhibition at the Block Museum—Keep the Shadow Ere the Substance Fade—would make Claire Bishop very happy. This exhibition utilizes a new perspective on different historical manifestations of mourning. The gallery opens with relics from the Victorian era (locks of hair, pictures of the deceased) that commemorate dead loved ones. The majority of the exhibit displayed collective and personal pieces of art made to represent gay men in the AIDS Crisis and mourn their physical and psychological absence. The curator applied a contemporary perspective to compare these two time periods and how mourning manifested; in the Victorian Era, mourning was fairly public and open, as death often occurred in the home and unfortunately often occurred. With the advent of modern medicine, death from disease became much less common, death occurred outside the house (in the hospital), and mourning was reserved for the funeral home. This sense of communal mourning was lost, until the AIDS Crisis renewed it. A community of people came together over death, and therefore collaborated in their mourning, which produced pieces such as Traveling Leather Memorial Quilt (1989)—a quilt composed in part of pant legs belonging to infected men across the world. Only with enough historical distance could an exhibition comparing two historical time periods be composed. Gaining perspective and collecting the important artistic mementos of a time period requires that it first become history. In this case the artworks themselves (some from the Victorian Era and some from the 1970s and 80s) are not contemporary, but their presentation and analysis is contemporary, making the gallery an interesting insight into a historic period.

Even when only new artworks themselves are on display, I don’t think non-collecting institutions are wrong. Claire Bishop would call this method irresponsible because in order to be in the present you must also acknowledge the past, and only through a synthesis of these things can you advance to the future. I agree that historical reflection is necessary for advancement, but I think contemporary institutions don’t have to fill all of these roles. People don’t need a Picasso slapped next to a very contemporary painting to appreciate it; relying on this immediacy of historical reminders is in some ways distrusting the viewer, treating them as if though they know nothing. Perhaps if something very specific influenced a piece of contemporary art then it would be valuable to give it context, but it is sometimes hard to discern context out of the present moment. Perhaps people should be allowed to create context of contemporary work for their own, present life instead of only creating meaning from the past.