Altermodern

Discussion

"As defined by the triennial’s curator, French cultural theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodernism is what comes after postmodernism. It’s an “attempt to reexamine our present, by replacing one periodizing tool with another.”

Bourriaud appears to be sincere in his effort to re-brand the blahblahblah-modern notion. His manifesto posits that art will cease to be a tool of deconstruction and will instead become an “editing table” for reality, enabling alt-artists to transform art galleries into globalized research labs for a more plastic tomorrow.

This is modern art’s theoretical bailout: a rhetorical restructuring that shouts “New! Better!” but preserves the original formula. It’s a more egalitarian xxxx-modernism that will complement a leaner, meaner, greener global capitalist machine – a machine running on fumes that’s about to grind to a halt, burst into flames and then just sit there and burn while we all eat popcorn and watch. But although altermodernism amounts to little more than shift in a prefix, Bourriaud is correct when he says that “postmodernism is dead,” because it is. Finally." (https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/88/the_coming_barbarism.html)

More Information

The birth of the altermodern, https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/88/birth-of-altermodern.html