From the modern to the contemporary: Art, or the possibility of the impossible

This article asks the fundamental philosophical question concerning contemporary art: what is contemporary art? The distinction between modern and contemporary art is defined as internal to modern art, with the logic of rupture inherent to modernity. With modernity in art, three possibilities arise: constructivism, abstraction and non-art. After this, all contemporary art is either self-critical, formal or revolutionary. Through subtraction and formalization, contemporary art negates reality through local experiments that function at an abstract level of symbolization, making visible the real that is specific to every work of art and that creates a new place in the world. This experimentation effects a displacement within the sensible, creating a displacement between the possible and the impossible. Not unlike politics, art displaces a place in which it installs the formal promise of a new world. However, unlike politics, art provides a provisional respite through its ability to displace the laws of the world without ever promising to topple the world. Four maxims are proposed that define a contemporary meta-aesthetic ethos of anticipation that is not on the order of politics.