Differentiation of Modern, Postmodern, and Contemporary

I chose to use a simple lay out of text to visualize a differentiation between modern, postmodern, and contemporary.

Contemporary can be thought of as the new modern because it is a product of modernity. As if modernity while looking to the future ran into itself while time traveling. This interaction with itself through the years of postmodernism joined to create the contemporary. I know this reads as a bit of a stretch but it seems logical that if a movement is so fixated on the future than at some point there is a moment of self recognition placed in the now.

In Terry Smiths Contemporary Art and Contemporaneity it is explained that remaining parts of modernism and postmodernism are embedded within the cultures of art makers and observers which shapes the idea of contemporaneity. Modernism and postmodernism allow for the differentiation of the contemporary.

"tiring juggernaut" refers to the DIA:Beacon which is commenting on its want to hold on to modernity and "swarming of attack vehicles" in relation to Documenta 11 which is compared to the place where culture meets contemporary art. DIA:Beacon holds tight to the history of a clunky and much less connected world while Documenta 11 is the collective effort of an entire group of swarming vehicles that come from a networked but diverse people. It is decolonization and the start of globalization that Smith really pin points as the back bone of contemporary. These entities create the mass influx of ideas as well as a place for them to be harnessed and developed.


Reviews discusses Fried's book as pertaining to the spectators distance to an image and Azoulay's engages with the idea of the ethical responsibility of a photographic spectator. The works are however paralleled for they both discuss the ideas that revolve around the photographic spectator. Fried presents the idea that contemporary photography as art does not directly address the viewer therefore does not solicit a response. Azoulay's book about the obligation of a viewer discusses the responsibility of a spectator when confronted with a loaded depiction of loss or destruction. This book is about how images confront viewers yet its civil power is lost when the viewer remains only a spectator. Essentially the power of an image is lessened by passiveness.