In this landmark collection, world-renowned theorists, artists, critics, and curators explore new ways of conceiving the present and understanding art and culture in relation to it. They revisit from fresh perspectives - key issues regarding modernity and post-modernity, including the relationship between art and broader social and political currents as well as important questions about temporality and change. They also reflect on whether or not broad categories and terms such as modernity, post-modernity, globalization, and decolonization are still relevant or useful. Including twenty essays and seventy-seven images, "Antinomies of Art and Culture" is a wide-ranging yet incisive inquiry into how to understand, describe, and represent what it is to live in the contemporary moment. In the volume's introduction the theorist Terry Smith argues that predictions that post-modernity would emerge as a global successor to modernity have not materialized as anticipated. Smith suggests that the various situations of decolonized Africa, post-Soviet Europe, contemporary China, the conflicted Middle East, and an uncertain United States might be better characterized in terms of their 'contemporaneity,' a concept which captures the frictions of the present while denying the inevitability of all currently competing universalisms. Essays range from Antonio Negri's analysis of contemporaneity in light of the concept of multitude to Okwui Enwezor argument that the entire world is now in a postcolonial constellation, and from Rosalind Krauss' defence of artistic modernism to Jonathan Hay's characterization of contemporary developments in terms of doubled and even para-modernities. The volume's centrepiece is a sequence of photographs from Zoe Leonard's Analogue project. Depicting used clothing, both as it is bundled for shipment in Brooklyn and as it is displayed for sale on the streets of Uganda, the sequence is part of a striking visual record of new cultural forms and economies emerging as others are left behind.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Editors; Preface Terry Smith / Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question Part I: The Politics of Temporality 1. Antonio Negri / Contemporaneity between Modernity and Postmodernity; 2. Geeta Kapur / A Cultural Conjuncture in India: Art into Documentary; 3. Rosalind Krauss / Some Rotten Shoots from the Seeds of Time; 4. Boris Groys / The Topology of Contemporary Art Part II: Multiple Modernities 5. Monica Amor / Notes on the Contingency of Modernity and the Persistence of Canons; 6. Suely Rolnik / Politics of Flexible Subjectivity: The Event-Work of Lygia Clark; 7. Jonathan Hay / Double Modernity, Para-Modernity; 8. Gao Minglu / "Particular Time, Specific Space, and My Truth": Total Modernity in Chinese Contemporary Art; 9. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie / The Perils of Unilateral Power: Neomodernist Metaphors and the New Global Order; Centerpiece: 10. Zoe Leonard / The Analogue Project (introduced by Helen Molesworth) Part III: Afterworlds 11. Okwui Enwezor / The Postcolonial Constellation; 12. Nancy Condee / From Emigration to E-migration: Contemporaneity and the Former Second World; 13. Colin Richards / Only Human: Violence and Vulnerability in Contemporary South African Art; 14. Wu Hung / A Case of Being "Contemporary": Conditions, Spheres and Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art Part IV: Cotemporalities 15. Bruno Latour / Emancipation or Attachments? The Different Futures of Politics; 16. James Meyer / The Return of the Sixties in Contemporary Art and Criticism; 17. Lev Manovich / Info-Aesthetics Takes Command; 18. McKenzie Wark / The Giftshop at the End of History; 19. Nikos Papastergiadis / Spatial Aesthetics: Re-Thinking the Contemporary Contributors; Bibliography; Index

Prizes

Essays by art historians and cultural theorists on what it means for art to be contemporary in the wake of postmodernism.

Reviews

"This remarkable orchestration of voices, visualities, and political visions lays bare the antinomies and contradictions that haunt the sovereign claims of globalization. Each consummate essay is an artful reflection on the complex resistances and revisions that emanate from cultural practices that transform the aesthetic and ethical realities of embedded and embattled localities. I warmly recommend Antinomies of Art and Culture."--Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University "This is a provocative and indeed challenging assessment of the relation between 'art' and 'culture' (in scare quotes because both concepts are questioned) in the post-postmodernist moment. The essays successfully reposition discussion in a genuinely worldwide perspective, redefine modernism on a global scale, and push avant-garde thinking in new directions."--Hayden White, University Professor Emeritus, University of California, and Professor of Comparative Literature, Stanford University "Anyone wishing to assess the state of contemporary art and its relation to institutions, politics, social movements, and indeed, to the entire project of imagining and naming the world at the present moment will find this brilliant book essential and disturbing reading. It offers no grand synthesis but provides a shattered mosaic of the crucial elements that will have to be assembled by any future historian looking back on the early twenty-first century."--W. J. T. Mitchell, author of What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images