The concept of contemporary art has long been a fashionable designation for influential art. Although the present never remains still, but constantly shifts forwards, the use of the term, if it is to remain valid, must subsequently be adjusted to designate art in the past. That is to say, outdated art. If one uses the concept of contemporary art, one must know when it arises and at what point it has exhausted its artistic potential.
In any event, contemporary art will after a time end up as the past. Present and past are connected here in a reciprocal temporal progression, which at the leading edge defines the new, and at the trailing edge draws a line under all innovative art. Contemporary art as a historical epoch resembles all other epochs in history. It begins with something innovative and ends up out of date and irretrievably in the past. Such is the course of history, or, more precisely, the course of art history.
The problem for an art historian is that he does not know when an epoch ends, nor when it begins. The transition from future to present presupposes that the new represents something entirely different from the now superseded present. One must first draw a line under the existing present, and then demonstrate that the new in the future represents a different focus on the contemporary from that of the one just concluded. Such is the course of history in the field of art history. Time comes and time goes, while the new always remains.
The breakthrough of modernism in the early 20th century opened up the category of the ‘new’ in the understanding of art. Previously, it was understood only that artists created and disappeared from history, while their works lived on in a kind of empty timelessness, together with other selected works of art. The use of the ‘new’ as a concept of classification and quality assurance immediately gained acceptance in the understanding of art. Here was a tangible concept that could immediately locate and determine the qualities of a newly selected work of art.
The future was no longer a problem; the new was already exposed in the present as an aesthetically modern marker. The great problem lies in the end of the present. Logic dictates that the new, too, will one day become outdated, for otherwise the future will have no function. The present must shift at both ends. For the new cannot exist in the same time as the outdated. The solution may be to shrink the present so that it highlights only the new, but then the present itself has no points of reference for determining what is new or outdated.
The concept of contemporary art is a deconstruction of art’s situation in time and space. Here the present is a static period of time that establishes the new as the norm and removes the outdated, without this occurring through artistic evaluation. The present is open at both ends; here time moves entirely independently of artistic novelties. Dating is of course possible, but artistic qualification is not dependent on time. If it were, time, which is in permanent motion, would not be able to set boundaries for a present and a contemporary art.
The concept of contemporary art grows out of modernism’s monomaniacal pursuit of the new. It is a strategic method for preventing the art of the past from revitalising the future-oriented creativity of the present. In this sense, the future has become a normative governance of the present, in the sense that all art possessing the character of novelty both represents the present and adjusts the boundary with the past. But since the boundary is always there and the present is constantly expanding at its leading edge, the past must also be shifted backwards, far backwards, to the point when the new marks its contemporary-historical validity in the early 20th century.
In this way, the hatred of the past becomes consistent and actualised, just as the longing for the future identifies the new in complete freedom, without having any present to set boundaries. The only thing that now exists is a massive past that threatens to swallow up the creative renewal of the future. The situation is absurd. The new becomes the past before it has become the present. When the whole of history thus becomes the past, perhaps we must search for something in the past that is more artistically timeless, something that can fill the present and history with a deeper meaning.
