ABSTRACT
When did the modern become contemporary? When did the story of modernism lose its purchase? To ask this question is to ask what replaced the grand narratives of European modernity. This question always lay in waiting in the inescapable paradoxes of a progress that constantly devoured itself — a progress that found the meaning of the past in the present and the meaning of the present in an ever-receding future. The paradox of progress ended in the contradiction of a post-modernism that had ‘progressed’ beyond progress without ever cutting the umbilical cord to the modern. With the final recognition of the distinctness of the contemporary, ‘contemporary’ as a term ceased to simply denote the most recent manifestations of the modern. The contemporary and its culture signaled the arrival in a present no longer defined in relation to what had gone before but a present that now defined the past and the future, a present that had acquired its own history.
