Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Post-Modernity, Contemporaneity in Leonardo Reviews Giugno

Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Post-Modernity, Contemporaneity
by Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, Nancy Condee, Editors
Duke University Press , Durham, NC, 2008
456 pp., illus., 77 b/w. Trade, $99.95; paper, $27.95
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4186-4; ISBN: 978-0-8223-4203-8.

Reviewed by Giuseppe Pennisi,
Rome, Italy
Professor of Economics Università Europea di Roma

giuseppe.pennisi@gmail.com

What is to be considered "modern"? and what "post-modern"? and what "contemporary? The 18 papers published in this book, as well as the extensive (22 pages) introduction by Terry Smith, are the result of a conference held in Pittsburg in November 2004, just a few days after the U.S. presidential elections that gave George W. Bush a second term. From the introduction, I gather that there were some political undertones during the conference, especially the question if post-modernism was at its twilight due to the resurgence of both modern imperialism and ancient fundamentalism. Although this rather basic question appears here and there in the papers, it was most likely left the background to the conference sessions, especially of that dealing with the "afterworlds of post-modernities". The papers themselves deal with the theory and case studies (e.g. art in Indian documentaries, value and violence in contemporary Southern African art; return to the Sixties in contemporary art and criticism") not with political science neither with politics (or with aesthetics policy and politics).

The collection of papers is an excellent attempt to understand, describe and represent, in a pluralistic and multidisciplinary approach, what is the art and culture to live in the contemporary moment. Predictions that post modernity would emerge as a global successor to modernity have not materialized as anticipated; thus, as Terry Smith purports in his introduction, we are on a rather unclear path. His suggestion is to focus on a new concept "contemporaneity," more apt to capture the frictions of the present while denying the inevitability of all current competing universalisms. "Contemporaneity" is, indeed, the theme underlying the papers by Antonio Negri (on the analysis of multitude), Okwui Enzewor (on the XXI world as a postcolonial constellation), by Rosalind Krause (on artistic modernism), by Jonathan Hay (on double and paramodernities). The concept molds quite well with the last section of papers - a section dealing more specifically with the political orientation in these initial decades of the XXI century: Bruno Latour sees a return of consensus building based on the ecological model; James Meyer a revival, among artists , of strategies of political engagement proposed (but not generally applied during the 1960s and the 1970s); Lev Manovich delves into "Infoaesthetics" as a means to move from artists' individuality and individualism to the society; McKenzie Wark lauds hacker intervention into the seeming dominance of the vector class; soberly Nikos Papastergiadies sums up the way how today's artists are attempting the face the XXI century challenges.

The book is quite useful to "take the temperature" of the loneliness of artists' long distance running in the present context. To a professional economist, interested in the economics of art and culture, its main limitation is to deal with aesthetics and the political dimension of aesthetics but not with the economic side of art and culture, in a world where the share of wealth and value added of Western economies is being reduced for the first time since the Renaissance - viz six centuries. This may require also a re-balancing of basic concepts like modernity, post-modernity, contemporaneity.