ABSTRACT
Temporality has become perhaps the most significant priority in the determination of "style" value in the nineties. This is not to suggest that other categories which have previously served as the basis of discrimination—artistry, functionality, authenticity, rarity—are no longer operative in the constitution of cultural value, but, rather, that all of such categories are now defined in reference to new temporal paradigms that are a response to the accessibility and reproducibility of the past, a past that now includes Modernism. Retro-Modernism, then, is an especially useful case study for understanding taste-making in the nineties, because it allows us to "see the sites" of evaluation. Modernism still retains its freshness and radical edge because it challenges: the prevailing aesthetic and socio-cultural order, thus provoking reevaluation, overturning conceptions and offering new perspectives and values.
