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 postmodernity, 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, postmodernity, 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 postmodernity 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's argument that the entire world is now in a postcolonial constellation, and from Rosalind Krauss's defense of artistic modernism to Jonathan Hay's characterization of contemporary developments in terms of doubled and even para-modernities. The volume's centerpiece 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.
Contributors: Monica Amor, Nancy Condee, Okwui Enwezor, Boris Groys, Jonathan Hay, Wu Hung, Geeta Kapur, Rosalind Krauss, Bruno Latour, Zoe Leonard, Lev Manovich, James Meyer, Gao Minglu, Helen Molesworth, Antonio Negri, Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Nikos Papastergiadis, Colin Richards, Suely Rolnik, Terry Smith, McKenzie Wark

Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, and Nancy Condee, eds.

List of Illustrations ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments svii
Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question / Terry Smith 1
Part I: The Politics of Temporality
1. Contemporaneity between Modernity and Postmodernity / Antonio Negri 23
2. A Cultural Conjuncture in India: Art into Documentary / Geeta Kapur 30
3. Some Rotten Shoots from the Seeds of Time / Rosalind Krauss 60
4. The Topology of Contemporary Art / Boris Groys 71
Part 2: Multiple Modernities
5. On the Contingency of Modernity and the Persistence of Canons / Monica Amor 83
6. Politics of Flexible Subjectivity: The Event Work of Lygia Clark / Suely Rolnik 97
7. Double Modernity, Para-Modernity / Jonathan Hay 113
8. "Particular Time, Specific Space, My Truth": Total Modernity in Chinese Contemporary Art / Gao Minglu 133
9. The Perils of Unilateral Power: Neomodernist Metaphors and the New Global Order / Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie 165
10. Analogue: 1998-2007 / Zoe Leonard, Introduced by Helen Molesworth 187
Part 3: Afterworlds
11. The Postcolonial Constellation: Contemporary Art in a State of Permanent Transition / Okwui Enwezor 207
12. From Emigration to E-migration: Contemporaneity and the Former Second World / Nancy Condee 235
13. Aftermath: Value and Violence in Contemporary South African Art / Colin Richards 250
14. A Case of Being "Contemporary": Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art / Wu Hung 290
Part 4: Cotemporalities
15. Emancipation or Attachments? The Different Futures of Politics / Bruno Latour 309
16. The Return of the Sixties in Contemporary Art and Criticism / James Meyer 324
17. Introduction to Info-Aesthetics / Lev Manovich 333
18. The Giftshop at the End of History / McKenzie Wark 345
19. Spatial Aesthetics: Rethinking the Contemporary / Nikos Papastergiadis 363
References 383
Contributors 413
Index 417