Samtidskunsthistorie? Noter om samtidskunst og kunsthistoriefaget i dag: Samtidskunsthistorie? Noter om samtidskunst og kunsthistoriefaget i dag

ABSTRACT “Contemporary art history? Notes on contemporary art and art history today” discusses the significant role played by contemporary art in art history as an academic discipline today, based on the understanding of both contemporary art and art history as informing the radical postmodern changes in conceptions of art, history, canon, gender, and colonialism. Taking as a starting point the case of art history at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark since the 1990s and the author’s experiences through more than three decades working as an art historian and art critic, the article draws on specific case studies of contemporary art projects and the art history journal Periskop to argue that contemporary art has played a key role in changing the traditional academic art historical discipline into a “new art history”. Moreover, the essay discusses why an (art) historical perspective is also vital for the contemporary understanding of and working critically with contemporary art by addressing discussions of key ideas formulated by international art historians, including Terry Smith’s “contemporaneity”, Claire Bishop’s “dialectical contemporaneity”, and David Joselit’s “strategies of re-authorization”

Denmark: Double Agendas

Denmark could be described as a small kingdom, a fairly homogenous democratic society with 5.3 million inhabitants, and a welfare state in which women have had “equal” rights for years and in which access to education, healthcare, and pensions is free and universal. However, change is taking place. People from other cultures have become a more visible part of society, and their presence has brought into focus cultural values. The growing importance of the European Union, of which Denmark is a member, has challenged notions of democracy and national identity. And everyday life has been transformed with the influx of the international media, especially television. But in spite of the internationalization of Danish culture and society, a certain notion of the particular is still evident—a particularity produced by the fact that the population is small, that the language has so few speakers, and that there is a continuous oscillation between the sense of being both at the center of a specific local culture and on the periphery of global culture in general