So, why are all these critiques wrong? Because there's a quip by Wilde that suggests that the majority of the British public is insane?

Does that mean Bush was in fact right and sane because a whole mess of people thought he wasn't? (Thereby making all his critics babbling psychotics?)

"And here we must remember that -- for some -- the Sokal hoax proved once and for all that all discourse we don't understand is babble."

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough -- Albert Einstein

...and Einstein wasn't an anti-intellectual making excuses for his own inability, which seems to be what you're accusing these critics of.

Can you, with 100% certainty, explain to me what the hell that sentence which Rachel Campbell-Johnston quotes actually means?

Just as soon as I got my head around what a "heterochrony" was (eg. Frog A and Frog B both start to develop legs at the same time, however at a certain point Frog A's legs stop growing but Frog B's legs continue to grow -- this point is a heterochrony in the developmental cycle of Frog B relational to Frog A) I was completely thrown by "from a vision of human history as constituted of multiple temporalities"

Why is he using esoteric terminology used in Biology? If there is an assumed heterochrony, to what is it relational? what is he comparing precisely? The "multiple temporalities" of human history? Which ones exactly?

Does everything you've ever written make total sense, even when taken out of context? Why have some journalists reporting Bourriaud's ideas -- and nothing new ever happens without ideas -- seemed more keen to make them look impenetrable than to explain them? Might it be that their own ideas about contemporary art, the French, Nick Serota as a dictator, and so on, are more dear to them than Nicolas Bourriaud's ideas about archipelagos and heterochrony? And might politics have something to do with it? A kind of conservative populism combined with a mistrust of anything that isn't unrelentingly middlebrow?

Can you, with 100% certainty, explain to me what the hell that sentence which Rachel Campbell-Johnston quotes actually means?

You'd have to read it in context, but I wouldn't have bothered looking up "heterochrony" and getting confused by examples concerning frogs. Just parse the Greek roots. Hetero / homo we know, it means Different / Same (as in heterosexual / homosexual). Chrony means time. So heterochrony means "diverse times".

“Altermodernism can be defined as that moment when it became possible for us to produce something that made sense starting from an assumed heterochrony, that is, from a vision of human history as constituted of multiple temporalities, disdaining the nostalgia for the avant-garde and indeed for any kind of era - a positive vision of chaos and complexity.”

In context, Bourriaud is talking a lot about time-as-space and space-as-time -- that artists can explore the past as if it were a place, and a place as if it were a different time. History as geography and geography as history. So I'd say his point here is about a kind of cultural relativism applied to time rather than space; a model of a co-existing plurality of visions of time, rather than a single timeline. This has a bearing on notions like progress and the avant garde, which rely on a "single timeline" vision of history.

Think of the later rooms in the V&A's Modernism exhibition. Modernism has filtered out from its Western hubs to places like India and Brazil. It's the 1960s. There are simultaneous avant gardes in different places, each with its own character. Modernism and postmodernism overlap. At that point, the idea of there being an "avant garde timeline", a universal standard of the avant garde modeled on scientific discovery, breaks down. Instead, we get "heterochrony" -- a lot of different timelines for a lot of different avant gardes, co-existing in a kind of interesting chaos. There is no longer even the illusion of "progress" in art.

Next up: Why sourdough proposes multi-culturalism and/or multi-taste.

Have you actually seen this exhibition, Momus? Or are you just assuming it's good?

You do have to wonder whether this brave new era of the next fifty years or so is going to use exactly the same language and critical tools of the era just past. You yourself have criticised "curatorese" in the past, I think.

Also, it's a mighty stretch to call visitors to the Tate a "specialist audience". Just about any vaguely middle class person who lives in London or has been there more than once has been to the Tate. If this stuff is radical, who exactly in your opinion is it supposed to shock?

I haven't seen the show. I'm in Berlin, and won't be in London again until late April, just after it closes.

What I'm interested in during Altermodern Week is seeing what happens when someone proposes a new cultural era. I find it puzzling that the invective heaped on Bourriaud and contemporary art outstrips even the invective heaped on bankers, who screwed the world then paid themselves huge bonuses for doing so. I didn't see them getting compared to dictators in the mainstream press.

Actually, I think what we see here is a great example of the kind of moral panic which tends to signal a rude state of health for the medium involved. By putting "a Frenchman" with "a theory" in charge of the Tate Triennial, Serota has waved a very successful red flag in front of a very obdurate and foolish bull. And it has charged.

Since art schools stopped teaching theory in about 1992, Bourriaud could be accused of applying forty-something outlook to artists too freed up to care.

"Too freed up to care" meaning .. Spartacus Chetwynd

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/art_news/put_downs_and_suck_ups_matthew_collings_weekly_ventings_about_the_artworld_no_13_frieze_writer_attacks_ordinary_critics/5410

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/2009/02/put_downs_and_suck_ups_matthew_11.php

Witness Giantbum's fascist pisstake of Fiddler On The Roof below:

Idiot. Nathaniel Mellors is Jewish, Nathaniel is a Hebrew name meaning "God has given". There is tremendous irony in the work, did you not watch the videos?

This is all fine and dandy but as you yourself say ("with a little help from this article on the Frieze site") this blog entry is really just a re-hash of the Frieze article. What's your point? Increasingly you are just regurgitating stuff one can find on mainstream sites. Give me Stewart Home anyday.
psouper

Oh come off it, Home is a posturing reactionary quixotic twat of the highest order (albeit an entertaining and unwitting [self-] parody of anarchic radicalism). Whether his starting point is a regurgitation or not -- and we all know he's an old art world tart -- Momus has at least initiated a sustained conversation, which is vastly preferable to Home's rant with which you can only agree or disagree. One imagines that a disagreement with Home would be answered with another stream of ranted invective, not a conversation I'd want to have.

One of the problems with post-modern criticism is that it was obsessed with, rather than aware of, privileged positions and equivalence. Even if I disagree with him, I would prefer to listen to Bourriaud talk about art than say, Nick Cohen. This is because Bourriaud has studied art, researched and written books about art and curated two important galleries. Nick Cohen has not done these things.

I have seen the show, and reviewed a specific piece in the show here (http://goodasdead.org/2009/02/13/what-the-fuck-seth-price/). Overall, I found the show interesting and entertaining, but not necessarily challenging or indicative of a new era of contemporary art.

The idea, seems to me to be just a redefinition of post-modernism, in a positive creative sense, rather than a critical sense. The show is a triennial, so I doubt that most of the pieces were chosen post credit crunch, and therefore his reference to the economic climate in the leaflet for the show seems slightly tacked on.

The context is that things are changing because of technology, and will change because of the economy. So, this discussion is going to happen, and newspaper critics are stuck trying to nullify it. What we are doing, even the person posting x-ray specs videos, (she occasionally lectures for music and culture at UEL) is having a necessary conversation about possibilities, and in a nod to reflexivity (an important part of any critical theorizing) about how the conversation is proceeding already.

I think one of the big mistakes people make when they talk about postmodernism is in thinking that it is just one thing, or one way of looking at things. "Postmodernism" incorporates so many different critical lenses that, yes, share some of the same basic assumptions (such as the idea that things are not natural or of inherent value), but are actually quite wide-ranging and diverse.

This entry is dishonest, Momus. You've decided a scenario, and then set the evidence to fit it. You want the intellectual Frenchman to be crucified by the British mainstream press, so that's what you give us. In fact, all the critics you mention (with the exception of Januszczak and Cohen, who is not an art critic) had good things to say about the exhibition. Rather than downright negative, the response was 'mixed', as one would only expect from a big, provocative show such as this. Your stereotypes about British anti-intellectualism are increasingly stale, and not a useful means of answering sensible critiques of this show which, personally, I found interesting but hardly an earth-shattering dawning of a new world era.

the curators are all in rotterdam this week

http://tongues-in-cheek.blogspot.com/2009/01/curators.html

Surely the fact that everything is focused on the curator, the theory and/or marketing angle, the location/institution, the critical reactions around it and everything but the artists involved and the art itself makes this a perfect example of good old-fashioned postmodernism?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The French, as ever, have a phrase for it.

Watching this from across the pond, and being neither French nor English in ancestry, I (and many of my fellow North Americans might agree) find this quite amusing--whether Bourriaud is a charlatan or a genius (I did love his museum in Paris!), it's all rather like those scenes from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" with the French and English hurling insults (and dead animals) at one another.

Really, honestly, is it just because you're cousins who are just too much alike, deep down inside, and can't admit it? Or can't either of you get over 1066? Are you still upset that Serge got Jane?

Tomorrow's entry is a list of explanations for the hostility. People have been amazingly diverse -- sorry, heterochronically diverse -- in finding reasons for it. So we're going one layer of meta deeper.

The concept of 'altermodern' - as it's defined here and elsewhere - just seems too vague for the moment, but from what I've gleaned from it, I can in no way see how it constitutes a break from postmodernism, and why it can't perfectly well be accommodated within postmodernism. As someone said upstream, it's not enough just to say postmodernism is over, unless you can actually show a paradigmatic difference.

Postmodernism is over. Just look at any 'Postmodernism' syllabus at any university, and you'll find very few books written less than 25 years ago. It's over. But there's always a lag between something being over and the thing replacing it being satisfactorily described. That's because we have to wait for the generation that has actually grown up in this new era to be old enough to theorise it and write about it. Postmodernism kicked off in the late 50s, but we had to wait until the mid 70s before we got a good theoretical description of it. At the moment, there is a genuine cognitive gap between people who grew up in the 60s to the 80s, and the people who grew up in a world where the new connectivity - Internet, mobile phones etc. - was always there. When that new generation hits its thirties, when it starts replacing its elders in academe and elsewhere, then we'll start getting a clearer picture of what's been happening since postmodernism. I don't think it's 40something bathed-in-deleuze intellectuals who are going to be able to tell us right now.

Just to add: Nick Cohen is a philistine arsehole - why neocon types think they're in any way cut out to do arts coverage, I'll never know. Michael Gove on Newsnight, despite his 'compassionate Conservative' schtick, scares the bejesus out of me. Even British wingnut webzine Democratiya does album reviews in among the usual pieces about why everyone who has ever disagreed with them is an anti-semite.

France stinks of the 20th century. You won't find any real expression of this "altermodern" idea from any French intellectual, because I doubt they've actually sat down and talked to these mysterious "decentered non-Westerners" to actually understand what makes people from these other cultures different. and it's not because they're so exotic and interesting! this sure cures my boredom!

No, let's see somebody from, say... India, who has a mind developed by an oral rather than literary culture. Let's see what he has to say. It's the 21st century, and if we are going to go all "altermodern", I say: goodbye, France.

Why does everyone seem to think that altermodern as a movement actually needs art to be considered a valid art movement?

The people that occupy the art world are more theorists than artists. The fun for them is coming up with the theory, the direction, not the actual creation of works. The idea of coining the name for the upcoming phase of art before it's even happened is perhaps the ultimate (and hopefully final) gesture by the theory-minded art world.

The idea, as stated yesterday, that altermodern is basically a return to modernism is not terribly shocking because the art world is run by people who have modernist sympathies. They like art that has a veneer of artiness and experimentalism. That's their value set. But it stands to reason that any genuinely new movement will not be directed by the art world establishment, whose tastes are stuck in the 20th Century.

I said it yesterday, I'll say it again today: we in the West may have been gifted with the chance to name the movement that decentres us.

i want to know about the altermodern in literature. thank you.

The Book of Scotlands, coming soon!

The problem with "altermodern," as I see it, is that it buys too easily into the notion that distilling an historical moment and placing it under an absolute heading is a valuable thing to do. Sure, Bourriaud is posing questions, and the concept is open to suggestion, etc. but the overarching idea seems to be to capture all of this imput, and then once we have enough, it can all be gathered and unified as the "altermodern." Of course, this makes for good academic papers and books, but how good a description can it ever be of how things actually are? I thought we were past this idea transplanted from the sciences that it is of inherent value to distill and unify ideas into a single theory, explanation, description, etc. Certainly it makes it easier to talk about things over coffee, but we must use this lens knowing and acknowledging that it is, by necessity, be a serious distortion.

There is something about the statement of the "altermodern" that just seems premature and grasping. That postmodernism is dead seems more like a question than an actual assertion. The occurrence and level of internationalization and creolization seems to vary from place to place, making a unified statement about their cross-cultural influence dubious at best.

I think there's this tendency for people of Bourriaud's generation to adopt that essentially postmodern stance of declaring things "dead" before their time is really up, again, with a sort of implied question mark, on the chance that saying might make it so, that the shit might stick to the wall. Obviously, there is some value to this kind of intellectual experimentation, but it has a sort of Crying Wolf effect as well, in that I buy this type of assertion less and less the more it is made.

I'm not exactly resistant, I just don't think there's really enough there yet to conclude much of anything. It should be interesting to see where the "altermodern" ends up once more suggestions and ideas come into play. I'm definitely not going to be an early adopter on this one, but if some of the ideas make sense, I wouldn't hesitate to become more interested in the discussion.

To use a computer metaphor, artists create new files, curators create new folders. The first thing you have to do when you create a new folder is name it. I think that's basically what Bourriaud has done here; the old folder was getting too full. But just having a new folder with a new name can be inspiring. The 21st century itself is just a folder with a new name. But it might inspire us to fill it with new contents.

Bourriaud as Bin Laden is really handsome. Maybe he should grow a beard: then it'd be "An eclectic mix of bullshit and bad taste ... curated by a pretentious French git with a beard". Nothing sells art better than a cynic's indignation. I'm there!

Also, I think it's obvious to point out that the "altermodern," if it were to catch on at all, would live or die based on adoption by intellectuals at universities. Of course, what this means is that people who have built careers on postmodern theory would either have to switch gears and take up altermodernism, or be replaced by new blood in the form of young PhD holders. We're talking about a filtering process that could take upwards of 50 years, if not longer. It's one thing for postmodernism to flourish in universities, because it was a radical opposition to the New Critical/modernist model. But the problem is that postmodernism is still largely thought of as the radical model, so competition with another radical model isn't likely to result in a smooth transition, especially if the new model isn't offering a hybridization with the old (according to Bourriaud, after all, postmodernism is dead).

A more general comment here:

It always just comes down to "old" vs "new," doesn't it? The only sort of real art/life movement I can see as the current or coming thing is a combination of "splinterism"--the fragmentation of ideas and interests, everyone doing or appreciating their own thing--with "netism", possibly its polar opposite, the instant internet connection and melding of everyone's ideas and interests. My own lame labels, but not exactly my own fresh observations; anyone who's been looking around these past few years could see that this is the happening thing. It doesn't take any French, English, American, or whatever critic or curator to plant a flag and lay claim to this new territory.

Then again, you could argue that movements are just plain over, trends are just trends, and when you're too deep in the trees you can't see the forest.

Altermodern: "A bunch of 40-somethings clinging to 1930-1970s modernism (art being made about the process of art), trying to assert their fading will by instructing the next generation of 20-somethings that the art which they will do will exactly resemble the same Duchampian gags of yesteryear."

And as an addendum: these 40-somethings have generously passed the torch to the brown people of the world, giving themselves the additional glow of liberal moral righteousness.

I'm still keeping an open mind on this entire happening, but certainly this piece is a welcome rebuttal of some of the extraordinarily crass and reactionary critique Altermodern has received from the British press.

What exactly makes the press' critique "reactionary" rather than (gasp) progressive?