"This book began as a two-part issue of e-flux journal"--Page 9. Includes bibliographical references. "This book began as a two-part issue of e-flux journal"--publisher's website.
Contents:
Standing on the gates of hell, my services are found wanting / Jan Verwoert. Contemp(t)orary : eleven theses / Cuauhtémoc Medina -- Comrades of time / Boris Groys -- Now and elsewhere / Raqs Media Collective -- Manifestos for the future / Hans Ulrich Obrist -- New species of spaces / Hu Fang -- Torture and remedy : the end of -isms and the beginning hegemony of the impure / Jörg Heiser -- Take the money and run? : can political and socio-critical art "survive"? / Martha Rosler -- Contemporary extracts / Hal Foster -- Contemporaneity as points of connection / Zdenka Badovinac -- Back to contemporary : one contemporary ambition, many worlds / Carol Yinghua Lu -- What is not contemporary art? : the view from Jena / Dieter Roelstraete -- Standing on the gates of hell, my services are found wanting / Jan Verwoert.
Summary:
"What is contemporary art? First, and most obviously: why is this question not asked? That is to say, why do we simply leave it to hover in the shadow of attempts at critical summation in the grand tradition of twentieth-century artistic movements? The contemporary delineates its border invisibly: no one is proud to be 'contemporary', and no one is ashamed. Indeed, the question of where artistic movements have gone seems embedded in this question, if only because the 'contemporary' has become a single hegemonic '-ism' that absorbs all proposals for others. When there is no longer any artistic movements, it seems that we are all working under the auspices of this singular -ism that is deliberately (and not literally) not one at all ..." -- book cover.
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