At the end of the nineteenth century, the French writer Arthur Rimbaud urged us to be modern, nothing but modern, with a phrase that was as idiomatic as it was programmatic: “Il faut être absolument moderne” (1873). Recently, the French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, known for his non-conformist critique of postmodern relativism, took up the challenge to …
The ecosystem is severely disrupted, the financial system is increasingly uncontrollable and the geopolitical structure has recently begun to appear as unstable as it has always been uneven. CEOs and Politicians express their ‘desire for change’ at every interview, voice a heartfelt ‘yes we can’ at each photo-op. Planners and architects increasingly replace their blueprints …
Paper addressed at Thinking in Unity Conference LMU Munich Read More »
Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker‘s foundational essay ‘Notes on metamodernism’ was published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Culture in October 2010. It opens thus: The ecosystem is severely disrupted, the financial system is increasingly uncontrollable, and the geopolitical structure has recently begun to appear as unstable as it has always been uneven. CEOs …
Over the last few months, there has been much discussion online as well as at parties, galleries and conferences, about the meaning of the prefix meta- in metamodernism. Now, of course, each and everyone is free to define, re-appropriate and use it in any one fashion. Metamodernism as a term – but not as a …
It has become somewhat of an axiom to associate certain artistic practices to specific discourses, and specific artists to certain sensibilities. It has become a truism, for instance, to link practices as diverse as eclecticism, parody, pastiche, detachment, flexi-narrative, and parataxis to the postmodern, and strategies like ‘optimism’, self-consciousness, formalism, functionalism, purism, and streams of …
Hard-boiled wonderland, blue velvet and the end of postmodernism Read More »
The modern is associated with politics as diverse as utopism, formalism, functionalism, seriality, art for art’s sake, the flaneur, syntaxis, restlessness, alienation, streams of consciousness, the cinematic apparatus, cubism, Reason, trauma, mass production, and schizophrenia. The postmodern tends to be associated with strategies as varied as dystopism, late capitalist flexibilisation, the ‘end of history’, formalism, …
