Oddly enough, I remember exactly where I was sitting when I learned what the term “modern” meant in the context of music. My fourth-grade music classroom featured a timeline of musical periods, ending with “MODERN,” which did not have an end date like the other eras. One day, a friend of mine in the class asked the question I had always wondered: What will happen when we’re no longer in the “MODERN” period? What would the next era be if that word was already reserved for the past? Like my classmate, I understood the word to mean new and current, and saw no place for it on a historical timeline. The same concern would bother me, though to a much smaller degree, when studying Modern art in my high-school art history class.

I couldn’t have understood in fourth grade how simplistic such a timeline was to begin with, boiling down every musical experience of each time into one western classification based on the forms deemed most popular, or that were later realized to have the greatest historical implications. But with that critical flaw aside, two questions still remain: What do we call art that’s being made right now, especially if the artist does not declare him- or herself a part of a named movement at the time? How do we treat that work more generally in the context of art history?

These are the questions (mostly the latter) with which Claire Bishop grapples throughout her book, Radical Museology, or, What’s ‘Contemporary’ in Museums of Contemporary Art? She argues that “contemporary” as it’s used in art today signifies “the condition of taking our current moment as the horizon and destination of our thinking,” a definition which, according to Bishop, does not “grasp our moment in its global entirety” in positioning the art toward its viewers. She argues that a more responsible and accurate “contemporary” model, one of “dialectical contemporaneity,” takes a more radical, less linear look at temporality, using history (and older pieces of collected artwork) to create a more holistic picture of the present and, in turn, the future.

Bishop is in essence arguing for a repositioning of the word “contemporary” and its artistic applications — a conversation that falls on various art scholars and critics. Technical terms are much more easily defined within other fields; there exist hierarchies of associations with authority over terms and their usage, such as organizations like the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association for medicine and the American Bar Association for law. The American Psychiatric Association, for example, occasionally releases an updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with defined (or re-defined) terms on mental disorders and the like. The Bar Association is similarly responsible for holding its practitioners to the standards it sets and educating them on the current state of the legal system.

Art, however, is not such an institutionalized medium in practice — nor should it be — and therefore has continually run into this issue of timely historicization. How do we characterize what artists are doing today aside from calling everything “contemporary”? By grouping certain types of art together and and calling them something other than “contemporary,” a word that gives such art the satisfaction of being meaningful in this exact moment, are we betraying the art by stripping it of its temporality?

It may seem as though I’m making fairly inconsequential distinctions regarding semantics; however, the way in which experts and audience members alike discuss the cultural phenomena of their time is important to each craft’s development. I agree with Bishop’s more historical definition and application of “the contemporary,” not only in discussing visual art but any other aspect of our contemporaneous society. Speaking of the present with a deep, careful understanding of the past is not a novel idea; it’s good practice. Any institution that attempts to deal with contemporary issues and does not grapple with how we arrived at the present moment acts irresponsibly. However, in accepting Bishop’s definition, I hope that the term “contemporary” does not come to be linked to the art created now, when this definition is developing most quickly; instead, scholars, historians, and social critics should take the time to understand the art and categorize it when necessary in much more precise language than this. No need to force another “modern” situation.

All of this talk of “the contemporary” begs us to the question of whether or not the contemporary museum, in its sterile, institutionalized glory, even has the power to display the current climate that exists outside its walls. I agree with Bishop that, as museums go, those that look to the past to inform the present and look to the future do a greater service to the idea of “the contemporary” than those like The New Museum, which devote themselves to a more isolationist and less accurate view of the now. But just as the present can’t be divorced from the past, the art can’t be divorced from its situation. Yes, some artists still create art to hang on museum walls, but art which is made for another space should not be forced into that white-wall space. We should go out and attempt to understand the art in context, just as the contemporary museum should aim to do historically with its contemporary art.