Andrew McNamara

Surpassing Modernity (eBook, ePUB)

Ambivalence in Art, Politics and Society

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

For the past thirty to forty years, cultural analysis has focused on developing terms to explain the surpassing of modernity. Discussion is stranded in an impasse between those who view the term modernity with automatic disdain-as deterministic, Eurocentric or imperialistic-and a booming interest that is renewing the study of modernism. Another dilemma is that the urge to move away from, or beyond, modernity arises because it is viewed as difficult, even unsavoury. Yet, there has always been a view of modernity as somehow difficult to live with, and that has been said by figures we regard today as typical modernists.

McNamara argues in this book that it is time to forget the quest to surpass modernity. Instead, we should re-examine a legacy that continues to inform our artistic conceptions, our political debates, our critical justifications, even if that legacy is baffling and contradictory. We may find it difficult to live with, but without recourse to this legacy, our critical-cultural ambitions would remain seriously diminished.

How do we explain the culture we live in today? And how do we, as citizens, make sense of it? This book suggests these questions have become increasingly difficult to answer.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 264
• Erscheinungstermin: 29. November 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781350008359
• Artikelnr.: 55877183

Autorenporträt

Andrew McNamara is an art historian and Professor, Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. His publications include: Sweat-the subtropical imaginary (2011); An Apprehensive Aesthetic (2009); Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, with Ann Stephen and Philip Goad (2008). He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: the Surpassing Paradigm PART ONE Chapter One What Are We
Talking About? A Landscape in which Nothing was the Same Except the Clouds
Chapter Two Petty-bourgeois Revolutionaries: Reflections on Polke's Wir
Kleinbürger! (We Petty Bourgeois!) Chapter Three What is Art Supposed to
Do? The Modernist Legacy, the Arab Spring, a Censorship Case in Sharjah,
and Artist Arrests in the Year of the Protestor Chapter Four Inversions,
Conversions, Aberrations: Visual Acuity and the Erratic Chemistry of
Art-historical Transmission in a Transcultural Situation Conclusion
Bibliography