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Defining Contemporary: From History to Future
What is contemporary? If someone asks me, I cannot help but ask back: in what terms? Do you want the dictionary definition? Philosophical definition? One knows such question of categorization cannot be answered succinctly (unless the person who answers isRead more…
Contextualizing Contemporary
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 anRead more…
Where Art is Now.
Not what, not who, not how, but where. Where Art is Now. The MCA’s tagline is quick and cheeky—a definition of the contemporary that is comfortable, explicit, accessible, and, well, objectively true. In 2011 the MCA Vision Campaign reformulated theRead more…
The Contemporary as “The Present in Drag”
On the sidewalk outside of the KW museum in Berlin, my friend Justin and I walked past two girls that looked familiar. “I think those were the girls we saw on the train,” he said. One day earlier, during aRead more…
Musings on the Contemporary from the Heart of the Past
I have been thinking a lot about the concept of a “dialectical contemporary” since reading Radical Museology by Claire Bishop. After following her on a flighty journey through three “contemporary” museums and discussing the benefits and drawbacks of their methods,Read more…
History’s tomorrow
I was really surprised when I finished reading Radical Museology because it was not what I expected at all. Sometimes, I found myself immensely interested in what Claire Bishop was saying and aggressively taking notes and nodding my head inRead more…
No Contemporary Art, Only Contemporary Interpretation
Con: together with Tempus: time Three years ago when I was a freshman taking my first history course, Professor Melissa Macauley talked about one moment she recalled from 1989, China, when she was a visiting student at Beijing: “IRead more…
Common and the Contemporary
Defining the contemporary could be really simple. If someone broke into my house, shook me awake and asked what it meant, I would probably just tell them it means belonging to or occurring in the present. If that same personRead more…
A Personal Contemporary
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 definitelyRead more…
The Contemporary: Technology of the Grand and Mundane
Looking up from my desk I see an old and familiar photo, pinned and curling. I remember seeing it for the first time leafed between a stack of musky, sepia portraits—people I’ll never know, nor really care to. This photo—aRead more…
Can we define the contemporary?
Often when I tell people I’m applying to Ph.D. programs in contemporary art I get one of two responses. Either they say with vague congratulations, “Wow,” or the more pesky ones ask: “What’s the difference between contemporary and modern art?”Read more…