Art And Contemporaneity

Although art always takes place in time, its manifestations, actual works of art, can be characterized by the specific and close connection they maintain between contemporaneity and timelessness. In the first place, their relation to time must be differentiated in a twofold manner: on the one hand, there is the relation to the time in which they are embedded, and, on the other, the relation to the time that they themselves create. In particular historical conditions (political and material conditions, conditions of production and of reception, the history of possibilities and impossibilities) a specific temporality of the artwork emerges. Both temporalities -- this is the hypothesis and the wager of this volume -- are superimposed on by one another, namely as a timelessness of artworks as such. The book assembles a variety of thinkers that all share one and the same starting point, namely that one of the most crucial questions to arise when dealing with the very definition, concept and operativity of art is how to link it to the concept of the contemporary