ABSTRACT
A justified scepticism has spread in aesthetic discourse regarding concepts of
universality and historical evolution, linear chronology and homogenous
periodisation. This scepticism is directed in equal measure against artists’ own
self-understanding and against historical description relying on such vocabu-
lary. This is particularly true in the case of the modern avant-garde, insofar as it
contained, in its very concept, ideas of the superiority of the new and the notion
that it is possible today to determine which art is ‘ahead’, thus to help map out
the future. But does this partly justified criticism mean that history – what Hegel
called ‘the fury of disappearance’ – has outplayed its role? History is itself a modern product. History, modernity and art are
contemporary and intertwined concepts, and we cannot have one without the others. The very history that made art possible also generated modernism in art, in which the past itself became a problem. When today – from an allegedly postmodern vantage point – we historicise modernity or declare ourselves to have reached a postmodern state, this itself is a modern impulse. The cunning of history is possibly even greater than the cunning of reason.
