Metamodern Art, Culture, and Politics
A very brief intro to metamodernism
In this post, I celebrate the kinship between us, mainly political-philosophical metamodernists, and you, the cultural-critical movement closer to aesthetics, architecture, and film. I know I can speak not only for myself when saying that we political activists like you guys and your work, both the artists/designers described as metamodern and the academics who described the trend (rats in the cellar, you know who you are ☺). The good part is, in an intellectual and cultural context, you don’t even have to like us back. We can still use your ideas, your taste and your sensibilities to change society for the better.
DUTCH RENAISSANCE
Apparently, these words by cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker, appearing in a 2010 paper in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, hit a chord:
“Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.”
I believe this quote constitutes the core of what might be called a little Dutch Renaissance in its own right. These…
