From modernism to presentism: On the destination of art

Abstract

The idea of modern art presupposes the rise of historicism and the sense of progress since the Enlightenment. Once art, however, conceives itself as progressive and hence modern, it is confronted by the paradoxes of progress: progress renders the modern obsolete at the same time as it seeks to give itself meaning by positing a goal, a destination that would be the end purpose and hence the end of progress. As a consequence, modern art is impelled to constantly transcend its own achievements and limits in a utopian quest for the artwork of the future, the ultimate work of art. But what happens to art when the grand art-historical narrative of modernism collapses? I argue that the ‘modern’ mutates into the ‘contemporary’ and that art now defines itself not in relation to the future but to the present. Contemporary art understands itself as operating in the present, that is, as an art for the present. It finds its destination now in the latest institutionalization of the paradoxes of progress: the museum of contemporary art.

Let me start with the paradox built into the word ‘modern’ when we apply it to art. The paradox is the following: in the Introduction to the exhibition catalogue Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage, Albert Kostenevich (2018: 21) asks how is it that we are still using the term modern art in the 21st century to refer to the same impressionist paintings discussed by Joris-Karl Huysmans in his L’Art Moderne of 1883 (Huysmans, 1883). Once the idea of modern art becomes frozen in time we are left with the conundrum: how can there be an art more modern than modern?

If the modern is the defining art-historical category, it is because the concept of Art in the singular and the concept of History in the singular are both tied to the dynamics of a cultural modernity that defines itself through its difference to the past. The standpoint of the present, the moving finger of the modern, is the condition of the construction of the art history of the past at the same time as it sets the art of the present in motion. Emancipated from the religious and social demands and constraints of the past, modern art is born from the idea of progress. This birthright makes the modern the ultimate category of art history – ultimate in the immediate sense that it is unsurpassable. What can be more modern than the modern and its latest vanguard? But what could be more self-defeating than the accelerating obsolescence of the new, whose logical endpoint is the total contradiction built into the idea of a museum of contemporary art? Modern is the ultimate art-historical category, however, in the deeper sense that a progressive art gives itself meaning, indeed has to give itself meaning and define itself through its telos. The destination of art is intrinsic to what the French philosopher Jacques Rancière calls the aesthetic regime of art, that is, art that has become its own end. For Hegel art had already reached its destination, its sublation in thought, and can no longer claim our highest interest. It has become merely art, that is, art that is merely aesthetic. And if art after Hegel is to put Hegel’s end of art behind it, it must find its own end in the destination of art.

In taking art as the expression of modernism since Hegel, more generally since the watershed of the French Revolution, I am expanding the scope of the term modernism beyond the usually accepted parameters. Literary scholars like to quote Virginia Woolf’s declaration that human nature underwent a fundamental change on or about December 1910. It certainly fits with the beginnings of atonal music with Schoenberg in Vienna or the beginnings of the non-figurative paintings of Kandinsky in Munich or of Cubism in Paris. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913) always figure, along with Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (Marinetti 2006[1909]), as the representative moment of the modernist revolution. So did human nature undergo a sea change in December 1910 or should we think of 1910 as the pivot of a larger movement from the 1880s to the 1920s and beyond, the most generally accepted dating for the modernist movement in the arts? Thus, to take a recent example, The Cambridge History of Modernism starts with a chapter on ‘Modernist temporality: The science and philosophy and aesthetics of temporality from 1880’ (Sherry, 2016: 31-46). The editor of The Cambridge History, the literary scholar Vincent Sherry, is not so sure, however. He observes that the term, first used after the First World War to describe the new experimental writing of Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Virginia Woolf, has continually expanded in scope to become:

the label for an entire tendency in literature and the arts, sometimes indeed for a whole period in cultural history, stretching as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century and continuing at least to the middle of the twentieth (Sherry, 2016: 2).

We should not be surprised by this process of expansion. The term modernism aims to capture the spirit of the new age set in motion by its industrial and political revolutions; a cultural modernity that knows itself as culture and that is as such conscious of its own historicity. Modernism is so closely tied to this new historical and temporal consciousness that it is difficult to circumscribe its limits. Even if we recognize the centrality of the decades from the 1880s to the 1930s, there are as many pre-modernists as post-modernists. Looking back in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin and the American cultural critic Clement Greenberg each saw Baudelaire in poetry (and for Greenberg Manet in painting) as the key figure. Of particular interest here is Baudelaire’s attempt to define modernity in terms of its temporality in his 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (Baudelaire, 1965). The task of the painter of modern life, says Baudelaire, is ‘to distil the eternal from the transitory’ because only this paradoxical union of opposites can define the art of modernity as the conjunction of ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable’ (p. 13). Ironically, Baudelaire’s paradox is anything but modern. It reaffirms the Platonic-Christian duality of body and soul, the material and spiritual halves of existence. Baudelaire’s paradox is nevertheless absolutely modern because it is aimed not only at the false historical consciousness of the academic imitators of classical beauty or the illusory historicism of historical paintings, it is aimed above all at the modern doctrine of progress, whose true mirror he finds in fashion. The painter of modern life, he says, should make it ‘his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry in history’ (p. 12). Baudelaire illustrates his argument by reference to fashion-plates from the time of the French Revolution that capture for him ‘the moral and aesthetic feeling of their time’ (p. 2). Read retrospectively, fashion becomes the ironic relativization of the cult of progress and of the equation of modern art with the new and the revolt against the old that became the leitmotif of the artistic movements and manifestos from the middle of the 19th century on, culminating in the competitive frenzy of avant-garde programmes triggered by Marinetti’s (1909) Futurist Manifesto.

The spectre haunting all these avant-garde programmes is that of the most famous manifesto of them all, The Communist Manifesto of 1848 with its enthusiastic celebration of the driving forces of modernism:

constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disruption of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations […] are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. (Marx, 1977: 224)

It is but one step from Marx to the constant revolutionizing of the artistic means of production that set free the dynamic of experimentation and unfettered creativity that we associate with the ‘shock of the new’ in modernism and that lives on in the creative destruction of contemporary entrepreneurial capitalism. If we think of Baudelaire’s duality as the vertical version of the inherent contradiction of modernism, then the self-devouring spirit of progress is its horizontal or linear expression. Put Baudelaire and Marx together and you have Benjamin’s last, posthumous essay ‘The concept of history’ (Benjamin, 1969). In this essay theology returns as the hidden animating spirit of history. Baudelaire must come to the rescue of historical materialism from the original sin of progress – the storm that blows from Paradise leaving nothing but ruins in its wake. Only when the runaway train of progress is brought to a stop will we recover the duality of every fugitive moment of time that contains within itself the possibility of redemption, of the entry of the Messiah into history that will destroy the empty continuum of linear time.

How else is progress to realize its goal of bringing progress to an end? How else is modern art to reach its destination? Modern art, the art of modernism, has its end written into it in a double sense. Its birthright, or if you prefer its constitutional deficiency, its original sin is Hegel’s thesis of the end of art that can only be redeemed by art’s end purpose, by the destination that art sets itself. And this I would like to suggest took two basic forms that correlate closely with the two basic tendencies of cultural modernity – Enlightenment and Romanticism. The one was the phantasm of the absolute work of art, the other was the phantasm of the total work of art. Hegel’s own philosophy of art had already proposed the historical process of enlightenment by which art is destined to end in the theory that comprehends and supersedes it, relegating it to the museum, the pantheon of dead gods.

Hegel’s verdict left the post-Hegelian narratives of art caught between the disastrous alternatives of utopian anticipation or progressive degeneration, progress or decadence. Lukacs managed to combine the two, first in 1919 in his Theory of the Novel (Lukacs, 1974) and then in 1923 in History and Class Consciousness (Lukacs, 1972). Like Nietzsche he contrasts Greek greatness and modern degeneration in The Theory of the Novel but where Nietzsche looked to Wagner to bring about the rebirth of Greek tragedy from the spirit of music, Lukacs looked to Dostoevsky as the utopian anticipation of a future community beyond the alienation of modern society. In History and Class Consciousness the proletariat becomes the herald of the new human and social totality beyond capitalist abstraction and reification, for which Lukacs’s model is the fusion of form and content in the concrete totality of the art work. Lukacs’s identification of capitalist rationalization with reification became in turn the inspiration for Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music (Adorno, 2006), a companion piece to his and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer, Adorno, 2002). I analysed at length in Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (Roberts, 1991) so I will just note here that Adorno’s two defining poles of the new music, ‘Schoenberg and Progress’ and ‘Stravinsky and Restoration’ repeat the disastrous schema of progress or decadence. Adorno equates musical progress with the progressive rationalization of what he calls the musical material. The result, however, is a tragic process of enlightenment. Schoenberg’s will to the total rationalization of music in his 12-tone system is inescapably irrational. Enlightenment ends by destroying progress, musical time and philosophy itself.

The self-destructive dialectic inherent in the quest for the ideal work of art was already grasped by Balzac in the 1830s in his famous short story The Unknown Masterpiece (Balzac, 2006), in which the painter Frenhofer spends 10 years working on his masterpiece but when he is finally induced to show it to two other painters all that there is to see is a canvas covered by thick layers of paint. The masterpiece is invisible, the only possible image of the obsession with the absolute that has driven the painter mad (Balzac identified Frenhofer with his own impossible plan to create a complete picture of society in The Human Comedy but we could also see the story as a dystopian anticipation of Malevich’s painting Black Square of 2015). In his book The Invisible Masterpiece the German art historian Hans Belting (Belting, 2001: 125) has taken Balzac’s story as the parable of modern painting’s impossible quest ‘to make art itself visible in an authoritative and definite epiphany’. This impossible quest is for Belting (2001: 8) the paradox at the heart of modern art, the expression of the utopian spirit of modernism that impelled modern art to constantly transgress or transcend its own limits ‘towards the idea of absolute art or of an art that was to appear at some later date’.

Belting’s reference to the idea of an art that was to appear at a later date immediately calls to mind Wagner’s manifesto for the total work of art: The Artwork of the Future (Wagner, 1993). With The Artwork of the Future and Art and Revolution (Wagner, 1993), Wagner presented his vision for the regeneration of society to be sealed and consecrated by the great and unique artwork that can only come from the creativity of the people. Wagner’s romantic-revolutionary vision of a free and harmonious community that will negate and overcome the egoism of existing society – its politics, its commerce, its oppressive social relations – was inspired by ancient Greek tragedy, the great collective artwork of the Athenian people. Wagner’s utopian artwork of the future presupposes, however, the disastrous schema of degeneration. All history since the downfall of the unsurpassed example of fifth-century Athens is a history of decadence, of negative progress that does not spare modern art. Modern art, art for art’s or for the market’s sake, is dismissed by Wagner as the purely egoistic practice of an artistic class.

If the absolute work of art was carried by the idea of ‘making art itself visible in an authoritative and definitive epiphany’, the total work of art was carried by the idea of an art that will transcend its aesthetic limitations as merely art to become the redemptive art religion and/or the redemptive art politics of regenerated society. In The Total Work of Art in European Modernism (Roberts, 2011) I set out to reconstruct the theory and history of the phantasm of the total work as the other, romantic tendency of modernism from its origins in the French Revolution and in German Idealism to its conclusions in Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism. This is of course not to say that art does not continue after the failure of the avant-garde dreams of the self-redemption or the self-destruction of art. But where do we go after modernism, what new narrative of modern art is left after the demise of the idea of progress and with it the demise of the whole self-understanding of art history?

This is the point at which my Art and Enlightenment: Aesthetic Theory after Adorno (Roberts, 1991) stopped: the impasse of postmodern theory struggling to come to terms with the end of the grand narratives of the modern age and its implications for art and for aesthetics. Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music (Adorno, 2006) provided the paradigmatic text for the crisis of aesthetic modernism, not only because of its enormous influence into the 1960s, but because the paradoxes of Adorno’s negative aesthetics continued to haunt postmodernist debates. For Adorno the crisis of progress revealed in the new music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky across the decade of the First World War lay in the ‘progressive’ decline of the integration and mastery of musical time since Beethoven. Schoenberg’s attempt to realize the complete rationalization of music in his 12-tone system (1922) led to the paradox of the simultaneous affirmation and destruction of musical progress. Debussy’s transformation of musical progression into soundscapes (that has become a staple of contemporary music) and Stravinsky’s Cubist juxtaposition of heterogenous musical material from Petrushka (1908) to The Rite of Spring (1913) signalled ‘the retreat of time into space’. Against Stravinsky’s wilful ‘regression’ Adorno identified with the (supposedly) immanent logic of Schoenberg’s ‘progress’, which he interpreted as the self-sacrifice of authentic music, that is, he embraced in Schoenberg and Beckett what Gianni Vattimo called in the 1980s the ‘suicide of art’: ‘in a world where consensus is produced by manipulation, authentic art speaks only by lapsing into silence and aesthetic experience arises only as the negation of all its traditional and canonical characteristics’ (Vattimo, 1988: 56). Art’s destiny is to affirm its self-negating destination. Adorno’s negative aesthetics ends in the total antithesis of authentic art and the culture industry, an opposition that leads to a fatal overburdening of authentic art with the task of social protest and political resistance that it cannot fulfil and the fatal overburdening of the ‘culture industry’ with the guilt of its complicity in an impersonal system of domination (Markus, 2011: 631).

If Adorno’s aesthetics represents the extreme pole of art for art’s sake, then its other, the idea of engaged art also finds its destination in the avant-garde’s self-negating goal of art merging and becoming one with life (Bürger, 1984), already present in the young Wagner’s dream of the reintegration of art and life in the total work of art. In these two opposed ends of art Rancière (2009: 43) sees an ongoing and persistent tension between what he calls the two great politics of modern aesthetic art:

the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form. The first identifies the forms of aesthetic experience with the forms of an other life. The finality it ascribes to art is to construct new forms of life in common, and hence to eliminate itself as a separate reality. The second, by contrast, encloses the political promise of aesthetic experience in art’s separation, the resistance of its form to every transformation into a form of life.

Both these ‘politics of aesthetics’ bracket, however, the underlying reality of the market as the condition of modern art since the 18th century, or more exactly, as Benjamin recognized, the growing reciprocity of aesthetic and exchange value, so crucial to the progressive aestheticization of commodity production and consumption. This is the other, undramatic end of modern art in the age of technological reproduction. In the words of Gianni Vattimo (1988: 55):

The idea that aesthetic experience is decisively transformed in the era of mass reproduction, as Benjamin contends, represents the moment of the passage from a utopian and revolutionary meaning for the death of art to a technological one instead, which ultimately takes the form of mass culture.

In this third version, the disappearance of art into a ‘generalization of aestheticity’ (Vattimo, 1988: 54), art escapes its institutional confines through the advent of new technologies that enable and underpin this process of the aestheticization of life. Not only does this ‘dis/appearance’ of art reflect the explosion of the boundaries of art but more importantly, it brings to the fore the question of time at the heart of the explosion of progress. As Vattimo (1988: 100) writes, ‘faith in progress, understood as a kind of faith in the historical process that is ever more devoid of providential and meta-historical elements, is purely and simply identified with faith in the value of the new’. And once progress is identified with the new, it is reduced to the eternal return of the new, that is, to precisely the temporality of the market place – fashion.

And this brings us back to the impasse of aesthetic theory after the end of progress. In Art and Enlightenment (Roberts, 1991) I argued for the necessity of paradigm change and turned to Leonard Meyer’s Music, the Arts, and Ideas for an alternative reading of the consequences for the arts of the ‘demise of the idea of Progress’ (Meyer, 1967: 146). His thesis is the following: ‘the paradigm of style history and cultural change which has dominated Western thought since the seventeenth century does not seem able to illuminate or make understandable the situation of the arts today’ (Meyer, 1967: 171). Writing in 1967, Meyer identifies the First World War as the watershed, art since then has brought to an end the preceding five hundred years of ordered sequential change. We have entered ‘a period of stylistic stasis, a period characterized not by the linear, cumulative development of a single fundamental style, but the coexistence of a multiplicity of quite different styles in a fluctuating and dynamic steady-state’ (Meyer, 1967: 98). This paradigm change from the time of progress to the space of multiple coexisting possibilities signifies in turn a new relationship between the past and the present: ‘the past, whether recent of remote, has become as available as the present’; ‘Past and Present are chronologically separate but epistemologically equal’ (Meyer, 1967: 149, 151). Hence the fluctuating steady state of the arts since 1914, in which the coexistence of styles has replaced the illusory temporal sequence of modernism and postmodernism and the repertory of available styles grows to include earlier western art and the art of non-western civilizations (Meyer, 1967: 173–4).

Meyer subsumes art since 1914 under the idea of a fluctuating steady state, which involves a new configuration of past and present, emancipated from the shadow of progress or decadence. We can think of this steady state as defined not only by a multiplicity of styles but equally by a multiplicity of times, which the English cultural theorist Peter Osborne has characterized as ‘the coming together of different, but equally “present” temporalities or “times,” a temporal unity in dysfunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times’ (Osborne, 2013: 44). Meyer’s ‘steady state’ thus anticipates more recent attempts to go beyond postmodernism’s negative continuation of modernism by means of a rethinking of relations between past, present and future for which the French historian Francois Hartog has coined the term ‘presentism’, as opposed to futurism, to describe the contemporary preoccupation with the present. He reads our focus on the present as the sign of the emergence of a new relationship to the past, the emergence, that is, of a new regime of historicity.

In Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experience of Time, Hartog (Hartog, 2015 [2002]) posits three fundamental regimes of historicity since the Greeks, oriented respectively to the past (the ancients), to the future (the moderns) and to the present. Hartog’s presentist regime has expanded to incorporate the past and the future. It is thus characterized by a consciousness of the con-temporary comparable to Osborne’s different but equally present temporalities. And this brings us to what we might call the final destination, the final paradox of modern art: progress ends in the museum of contemporary art.

I would like to explore the end of modernism in relation to the metamorphoses of the museum of modern art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and its ‘origin myth of modernism’, which perpetuated that history long after modern art had ceased to be modern. In 2002 the chief curator of the exhibition Modern Contemporary Art at MoMA since 1980 stated:

Contemporary art is collected and presented in this museum as part of modern art – as belonging within, and responding to, and expanding upon the framework of initiatives and challenges established by the earlier history of progressive art since the dawn of the twentieth century (Smith, 2009: 27).

In 2004 MoMA could still deny that the distinction between modern and contemporary art signifies the end of European modernism, an end that was both prolonged and confirmed by the ascendency of American modernism after the Second World War. By 1970 American Pop Art and Warhol’s Brillo Boxes had ironically celebrated the fusion of high and mass culture and the marriage of art and commerce. This was the key moment for Arthur C Danto, the moment of ‘the end of art’. Or perhaps we could say the moment of the endgame of modernism, evident across the arts, from Beckett’s novels and plays to the requiem for revolution in Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade (1961), from John Cage’s experiments to Steve Reich’s minimalism or Philip Glass’s opera Einstein on the Beach (1976). Since Warhol and Pop Art nothing has happened, says Danto, because the history of art is over: ‘Painting, as a vehicle of history, has had a long run. . . . Now, however, everything is possible. Anything can be art’ (Danto, 1997: 115). Danto situates himself ‘after the end of art’. Before we consider what comes after the end of art, it is worth pausing for a moment on this question of the end.

MoMA’s plot, its origin myth, has now been consigned to history with the museum’s recognition that contemporary art has left this art history behind. When MoMA reopened in October 2020, the chronological frame is retained, dividing the hundred years of modern art into early (European) modernism (1880–1940) and mid-century (American) modernism (1940–80), followed by contemporary art (1980–). Only now is the contemporary finally divided from the modern. The reconfiguration of galleries and the rehanging of the collection to replace the separation of media by bringing together in one space painting, sculpture, architecture, photography, design, film and performance aim to refresh aesthetic experience just as the plan to rotate the entire collection over three years aims to offer fresh art experiences to returning visitors. The message that rotation sets out to demonstrate is that modern art exceeds any one single or complete history. Even more, the end of the grand narrative of art history is transforming the Museum of western cultural modernity into the Museum of global multi-cultural modernity. MoMA is now opening its doors to all that it formerly ignored and excluded: female and minority artists and the art worlds of the global contemporary.

If the revamping of MoMA ratifies the exhaustion of the art-historical logics of modernism, Hans Belting (2003: ix) draws the theoretical conclusion in his Art History after Modernism: museums of contemporary art no longer function as explications of art history.

Art history gave meaning and direction to art by gathering all the art of the past that neither knew it was art or that it partook of art history into the exhibition frame of the museum. Cultural modernity is thus the age in which the artist lived with the museum, the age in which after Hegel artists had to create art’s own history in the form of the aesthetic revolution, the ideology of the avant-garde and progress (Belting, 2003: 132), the age in which modern art lived in thrall to and revolt against the idea of art history. The caesura of the Second World War separated modernism in its classical, European form from its second, mid-century American reincarnation, which completed the avant-garde’s deconstruction of the concept of the ‘work’ by dissolving the boundaries between high and mass culture and between art and commerce. Art criticism today can no longer keep up with the rapidly changing trends of the art market (Belting, 2003: 49).

The consequences of the loss of the authority of art history on the art-historical museum are profound. I want to highlight the demise of the master concepts of Art and of History in terms of the transformation of the museum of modernism into the transaesthetic and the transhistorical forms and spaces of the contemporary. These two forms and spaces co-exist, interpenetrate and merge in the museum of contemporary art, in which art past and present is exhibited. I say contemporary, because all art is contemporary in the transhistorical museum.

The museum no longer exhibits art history, it stages art history as a spectacle of cultural history for a post-historicist audience (Belting, 2003: 8). Without the life force of progress, the arts no longer possess a framing historical narrative, other than in the form of recycling and remakes, in which artists today use the history of art in order to recollect –against the ubiquity of popular art and taste – ‘what the meaning of art has been’ (Belting, 2003: 11). The museum of contemporary art thus embodies the truth of the ultimate paradox of progress: the progress that consumes itself to finally reveal the identity of the ever new as the ever same. That is, the contemporary museum operates with the temporality of fashion. The defining boundaries of aesthetic art that separated high from popular culture, artistic capital from market value no longer hold; the transaesthetic museum and the transaesthetic economy share the one spacetime of the ever new.

The transaesthetic museum has two distinct but practically inseparable meanings. It is transaesthetic in the wider sense that it denotes a change of regimes: historically, from the modern to the contemporary regime of historicity, aesthetically, from the aesthetic regime of modern art to the non-aesthetic regime of contemporary art (that may recollect what the meaning of art has been). The transaesthetic museum in this first, wider sense signifies, Belting (2003: 53) says, the absorption of art history into cultural and social history, an absorption that is the key to the meta-politics of contemporary art across all its cultural and geographical diversity. The second meaning of the transaesthetic museum derives from Lipovetsky and Serroy’s (2013: 27–34) use of the term in relation to the fourth, contemporary stage of the aestheticization of the world, ‘l’age transesthétique’, in which the staging of spectacle, authenticated by the museum, serves the self-advertisement of the culture industry.

The idea of the transhistorical is nicely captured in the self-understanding of the Amos Rex Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, which opened in August 2018: ‘Amos is an art museum where the past, the present and the future meet.’ This purpose defines the time and space parameters of the transhistorical. The museum has become a time machine: ‘The goal will be for the past, present and future to produce unique experiences and surprising encounters.’ In addition, the museum becomes the space of possibilities: ‘The goal of the design has been to create as flexible facilities as possible to conform to the needs of ever-changing contemporary art’ (Amos Rex, 2018). The ghost in the time and space machine is of course the curator in search of a new paradigm to reinvent the museum. Most obviously, it authorizes the curator, for whom the museum collection becomes raw material for the space of possibilities, raw material because it is alienated from its art-historical identity and location within the museum. The curator is now the stage manager, director, artist-author and star of the show, tasked with riding the latest fashion wave in the competition for market success in the transaesthetic culture industry (Farago, 2019), what Warhol liked to call the ‘art business business’.

Let me conclude with a few words on the globalization of contemporary art as described by the German systems theorist, Rudolf Stichweh (2014). Stichweh offers a cogent and concise account of the contemporary artworld as a functional system of society, which foregrounds the temporality of its operations. He starts from the distinction between the modern and the contemporary as an indicator of an epochal shift confined to the sphere of the arts (art, music, dance, theatre, literature but also history). The dominance of the temporal connoted by the concept of the contemporary aligns, as indicated, the arts with fashion and mass culture, which have always operated in the present tense. It means that contemporary art production can no longer be understood by reference to its own history and memory. It is now subject to the treadmill of continuous renewal and continuous depreciation:

The system of contemporary art does not guarantee the works, which make up its ongoing present, it simply carries on: from work to work, from event to event, from temporary relevance to temporary relevance – and in this sense it is largely without history, because it operates in the present, in its ever changing actuality (Stichweh, 2014: 915).

Stichweh’s example for the ever faster turnover and obsolescence of individual artists, styles and trends: of the 1000 artists exhibited by leading galleries in New York and London between 1980 and 1990 only 20 appear in the 2007 auction catalogues of Sotheby and Christie. This temporalization of the system is refracted through the prism of social relevance, such that artists are called to take up political positions and produce cultural statements for exhibitions, events, fairs, festivals in order to further the inter- and cross-cultural dialogue between positions, themes and generations. Stichweh considers the system of contemporary art with its emphasis on synchrony and contemporaneity as a prime example of a system that operates in the present tense and functions in the mode of self-observation that closely resembles the system of science. And this is to be understood in two, mutually determining respects: if the science system may be defined as the sum of all ongoing research projects and the system of contemporary art comparably as the sum of all ongoing artistic projects, this is because both systems have assimilated and incorporated the differences of diverse traditions. The longer history of the globalization of science is now being followed by the rapid globalization of contemporary art.

Stichweh concludes by comparing the modern and the contemporary systems of art. In the modern system the art centres of the metropolis were the sites of the integration of the world’s cultures into a central world system and the historical idea of world art. The contemporary art system has replaced this hegemony of the centre by international networks that are linked together by hubs, defined by Stichweh as the switchboards of a system that operates across the spatial distances and differences of geography and cultures. And this means that the internal dialectic of modernism, that is, of the aesthetic regime of art has mutated into the dialectic of the global and the local in the global art system. If there is one persistent thread to the cultural meta-politics of contemporary art, it is to be found in all the variations on the recurrent theme of identity politics as it unfolds between the poles of the global and the local. The dialectic at work here is integral to the life of a global cultural modernity, defined by the tensions between local and global identities, that is, between the Romantic identity politics of difference and the cosmopolitan politics of the one common humanity.