Peter Osborne

The distinction between modern and contemporary was first stabilized after 1945 not in Western art history, but in Eastern Europe, as part of the Soviet reaction against the categories of modernity and modernism. For Georg Lukács, for example, in the 1950s, socialist realism was ‘contemporary realism’, since the actuality of socialism defined the historical present.

In Eastern Europe, ‘modernity’ was considered an ideological misrepresentation of the historical time of capitalism, covering over its internally antagonistic class forms of historical temporality and representation.

argument, broadly speaking, is, first, that the mode of attention appropriate to the conditions of contemporary art is best conceived in terms of a historical dialectic of boredom and distraction, rather than the strictly transcendental timelessness of the model of ‘contemplative immersion’ historically associated with the exhibition-value of modern art. Or, to put it another way: the apparently transcendental timelessness of the artwork, which constitutes it as ‘art’, is in each instance the product of a specific set of idealizing social and historical relations, practices and processes, which produce it as ‘timeless’.