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Surpassing Modernity

Ambivalence in Art, Politics and Society

Häftad, Engelska, 2018

AvAndrew McNamara

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For the past thirty to forty years, cultural analysis has focused on developing terms to explain the surpassing of modernity. Discussion is stranded in an impasse between those who view the term modernity with automatic disdain—as deterministic, Eurocentric or imperialistic—and a booming interest that is renewing the study of modernism. Another dilemma is that the urge to move away from, or beyond, modernity arises because it is viewed as difficult, even unsavoury. Yet, there has always been a view of modernity as somehow difficult to live with, and that has been said by figures we regard today as typical modernists. McNamara argues in this book that it is time to forget the quest to surpass modernity. Instead, we should re-examine a legacy that continues to inform our artistic conceptions, our political debates, our critical justifications, even if that legacy is baffling and contradictory. We may find it difficult to live with, but without recourse to this legacy, our critical-cultural ambitions would remain seriously diminished.How do we explain the culture we live in today? And how do we, as citizens, make sense of it? This book suggests these questions have become increasingly difficult to answer.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2018-11-29
Mått134 x 214 x 18 mm
Vikt340 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieBloomsbury 3PL
Antal sidor264
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN9781350008342

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Introduction: the Surpassing ParadigmPART ONEChapter OneWhat Are We Talking About? A Landscape in which Nothing was the Same Except the CloudsChapter TwoPetty-bourgeois Revolutionaries: Reflections on Polke’s Wir Kleinbürger! (We Petty Bourgeois!)Chapter ThreeWhat is Art Supposed to Do? The Modernist Legacy, the Arab Spring, a Censorship Case in Sharjah, and Artist Arrests in the Year of the ProtestorChapter FourInversions, Conversions, Aberrations: Visual Acuity and the Erratic Chemistry of Art-historical Transmission in a Transcultural SituationConclusionBibliography

Andrew McNamara has written a compelling book that situates the thirst for novelty that grew among vanguardist, cosmopolitan elites in the late 1980s and 1990s. Directing their animus against modernism, these thinkers, art historians and artists strove for a surpassing of the allegedly oppressive principles of modernist aesthetics. The novelty of surpassing modernism has worn off in an age of austerity, when the social democratic institutions that supported modernist experiments are in decay. McNamara does not offer a new term with which to deal with the historical thirst for the new: working in a highly interdisciplinary manner, he frames globalization of contemporary art practices in revealing and disquieting ways.