ABSTRACT
This chapter explores in-built tensions between art and politics in the context of spectacular displays attempting to operate as immediate activist sites. Contemporary art composes an ethos and a culture; it is an assemblage that interpellates actors in its codes, forms and vocabularies formulating a general ‘discourse of the contemporary’. The Athens and Berlin Biennales then can be understood as ‘contemporary’ not so much because they decide to talk about the present, but because they take up the challenge of the discourse of the contemporary, the challenge to actualise a critical moment in the name of the present. The anti-globalisation ethos that was incorporated into the critical art of the 1990s and the biennial circuit gave rise to a new class of travelling curators-superstars who found professional legitimisation and self-affirmation. The ‘contemporary’ then expresses a style and poetics of doing clustering around qualities of critique, reflexivity and self-consciousness as well as an urge to dissect and question the current moment.
