Abstract
Departing from a critical assessment of the most widespread and initiated definitions of Contemporary Art from the last decade and a half, sustaining a world-wide discourse on contemporary art and contemporaneity, this article will deal with two aspects of an immodest proposal captured by the keywords actualization and anachrony. While current discussions on contemporary art are arguably reproducing modernist assumptions on the primacy of innovation, bolstered by a veiled avant-garde logic, the proposal to regard contemporary art as actualized art upsets not only ideas on what art after postmodernism might mean, but the whole edifice of historicist historiography. An anachronic perspective, a bi- or polychronic situatedness of the work of art, could be used to liberate art from being defined according to its unique descent, and to embrace, instead, a chronologic open to art’s continuous “life” through its successive aesthetic accessions and actualizations in time.
Highlights
One reason why the issue of contemporaneity has created such a stir among art historians is that our discipline has been obsessed with time – in the form of history – since its modern inception in the nineteenth century
Even Heinrich Wölfflin, who is typically dismissed as a psychologically inclined formalist, insisted that any form or stylistic combin ation had a double root, which could explain it: its internal morphology and its external embeddedness, i.e. an intrinsic history of style related to an extrinsic history of culture.[1]
When history in art history runs into crisis, is left behind or is itself relegated to a merely historical realm, it seems we are left with contemporary
Summary
One reason why the issue of contemporaneity has created such a stir among art historians is that our discipline has been obsessed with time – in the form of history – since its modern inception in the nineteenth century.
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