OBJECT The Contemporary

Distance is not a safety zone but a field of tension. It is manifested not in relaxing the claim of ideas of truth, but in delicacy and fragility of thinking. ... The distance of thought from reality is itself nothing but the precipitate of history in concepts.

— Theodor Adorno

John Dewey, in his Logic, makes an informative distinction between things and objects. Things are simply in the world. Objects are the products of inquiry. Dewey writes:

The term objects will be reserved for the subject-matter so far as it has been produced and ordered in settled form by means of inquiry; proleptically, objects are the objectives of inquiry. The apparent ambiguity of using "objects" for this purpose (since the word is regularly applied to things that are observed or thought of) is only apparent. For things exist as objects for us only as they have been previously determined as outcomes of inquiry. When used in carrying on new inquiries in new problematic situations, they are known as objects in virtue of prior inquiries that warrant their assertibility. In the new situation, they are means of attaining knowledge of something else. In the strict sense, they are part of the contents of inquiry. But retrospectively (that is, as products of prior determination in inquiry) they are objects.

This somewhat idiosyncratic but perfectly coherent use of the term object thus indicates that the term covers both the products of inquiry as well as forming the objects, so to speak, of further inquiry.

Throughout this book I will follow a pattern of introducing Object sections. They will present to the reader the products of assembled syntheses that constitute the objects in virtue of prior inquiry and observation. They are the proverbial data. They are not a list of facts, although they are factual. They are not examples, although they are meant to be indicative, in a specific manner, of elements in a larger configuration. Thus, in my use, objects are a type of evidence. Being products of prior inquiry, it is fair to say, they are empirical. To that degree, they can be used to diagnose and define with more clarity the parameters of a subsequent stage of inquiry.

Objects and Objectives 1: The Contemporary

The first such object concerns the contemporary. Furthering an understanding of this object, how it might best be approached and to what end, constitutes a central objective of my efforts.

The venerable avant-garde journal October devoted a large portion of its Fall 2009 issue, number 131, to "A Questionnaire on the Contemporary." Hal Foster, writing on behalf of the journal's editors, sent out the following questionnaire to seventy critics and curators. He notes that very few curators responded. The questionnaire reads as follows:

The category of "contemporary art" is not a new one. What is new is the sense that, in its very heterogeneity, much present practice seems to float free of historical determination, conceptual definition, and critical judgment. Such paradigms as "the neo-avant-garde" and "postmodernism" which once oriented some art and theory, have run into the sand, and arguably, no models of much explanatory reach or intellectual force have risen in their stead. At the same time, perhaps paradoxically, "contemporary art" has become an institutional object in its own right: in the academic world there are professorships and programs, and in the museum world departments and institutions, all devoted to the subject, and most tend to treat it as apart not only from prewar practice but from most postwar practice as well.

Is this floating-free real or imagined? A merely local perception? A simple effect of the end-of-grand narratives? If it is real, how can we specify some of its principal causes, that is, beyond general reference to "the market" and "globalization"? Or is it indeed a direct outcome of a neoliberal economy, one that, moreover, is now in crisis? What are some of its salient consequences for artists, critics, curators, and historians — for their formation and their practice alike? Are there collateral effects in other fields of art history? Are there instructive analogies to be drawn from the situation in other arts and disciplines? Finally, are there benefits to this apparent lightness of being?

1a. Consensus

All of the responses — thirty-two out of the seventy invited — are conspicuously staid. Although the majority of the respondents are cutting-edge academic critics (most of them employed in the elite institutions of the American university system), in their responses none take any stylistic liberties of any significance and none experiment with form. It is as if they had been sent a questionnaire, which they took literally in the way that deep down they knew was what they excelled at doing: writing academic prose and agilely performing in situating themselves as cutting-edge. The tone, and the undertones, of disquiet of the replies reveals that there are felt to be vital stakes involved in the issues raised; the reason perhaps for the gravity of the responses rides as well on the fact that how to answer these questions both within the critical university establishment and in the art world of museums, galleries, auction houses, and festivals remains unsettled. In fact, the negotiated distance or lack thereof between these diverse fields of symbolic and monetary capital, to use Pierre Bourdieu's terms, is a principal stake, a source of anxiety, and a fountainhead of uncertainty for those concerned.

Although there are nuances of tone, of insight, and of fervor to be found in the range of responses, almost all of them insightful, a consistent broad thematic does run across the replies; few, if any, contest October's tentative diagnosis of the state of things in the world of art and art criticism. Significantly, none of the respondents actually directly takes up Hal Foster's challenge to move beyond "general references to the 'market' and 'globalization.'" This lack of engagement does not mean that "globalization" or the "market" are not being constantly invoked and evoked, only that no sustained, serious sociological or economic analysis is provided (or even referenced). This absence of scholarly curiosity, or felt necessity, to engage a vast literature on these topics is striking and revelatory: this is a self-referential peer group that has internalized the existing genre constraints at work in their disciplines. Or perhaps, these critics are so dependent and connected to the turbulent effects of these myriad market forces and the venues and trends they create that to take the time to address them in an adequate manner would be to exclude oneself from the current hyper-accelerated game of contemporary art. Time is of the essence, and timeliness is mandatory. Apparently, being untimely is too risky professionally at this conjuncture for these contemporaries.

There is broad...