Neo/modernism – philosophical awareness in art
Neo/modernism – philosophical awareness in art

Summary/Abstract: We are confronting a major problem with naming the artistic and philosophical mo¬ment we have found ourselves in. It should be perceived as significant that the numerous names for the artistic and philosophical responses to modernity pose as their goal the end of post-modernism – as if they were to heal modernism of its disease. Therefore, there have appeared numerous names for “the now”: metamodernism, hypermodernism, remodernism, transmodernism or neomodernism – to enumerate just some of the proposed ones. They position themselves in-between challenge and extension, providing a critique – but also constructive scenarios that appropriate certain themes and methods. The interplay of resistance and perpetuation is ambiguous in all these instances. Nevertheless, the general stance is that their emergence is an attempt to transgress modernism and postmodernism. The problem with neomodernism is already based on the problem with modernism and the unanswered, open questions inherited from it. We are probably living in a trap that we invented ourselves – an interpretation ad infinitum. We may argue, however, that the most important feature of modernist art is that it is philosophical. It has the all-questioning, anaesthetic character. It could be called self-awareness of art or iconoclasm of art. The gaze (seeing) and thinking become one, thought is in the forms. Neomodernism may be a better name for what is happening than the crisis of art.

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