ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the cultural labour that ‘wonder’ has been made to undertake by contemporary artists – and the capacity for critical engagement that it currently allows for. I propose that ‘wonder’ has been an idea of renewed critical relevance in diverse forms of contemporary art ‘despite itself’ – that is, despite the meanings with which it is customarily associated in informal uses. I suggest that such contemporary art is, paradoxically, most productively understood, and most contemporary, when its curators and viewers ‘reactivate’ historical understandings of the idea of wonder. In tandem with the practitioners here, I suggest that the term has been effectively neutered by the set of connotations it was reduced to in the late twentieth and twenty-rst centuries. I also suggest, however, that only a return to the historical meanings of the word can begin to provide an adequate account of wonder. Re-reading ‘wonder’ through its submerged meanings allows artists and curators alike to lever open new connections and understandings.
