Rethinking Modernism and Modernity Now

Abstract

Revisiting modernism today requires us to leap backwards in time over three displacements of its centrality to artistic practice and theory: late modern transformations, postmodernism, and the recent prominence of contemporary art. Rather than ignore these moments, the author explores the changing ideas about modernism at each moment, and the residual effects of these changes within contemporary thinking. Drawing on key texts, including some of his own, he links artistic modernism to the broader frameworks of social and geopolitical modernity. Given the Western values and power structures inherent in “the modern,” he argues that the “multiple modernities” project should define all related terms from inside its own project, not by inference from EuroAmerica. A detailed, supportive yet critical theorization of this project is offered, and some new terms proposed. In conclusion, the essay examines the relationships between this project and the author’s recent theorizations of contemporary art within the contemporaneity of difference which, he argues, defines our world condition today.