To coin a new term and have it, if not exactly universally established, then at least acknowledged in the already overcrowded vocabulary of contemporary art speak might be ambition enough for most critics. Indeed, to offer a name for a movement, a group or a new ‘spirit’ in art is something that most writers concerned with contemporary art would be very wary of doing, given that we live in an irreversibly pluralist age. Writer and übercurator Nicolas Bourriaud appears to know no fear, however, when it comes to generating terminology. Indeed, not only did he coin many of the most recent terms for the type of practices predominant among younger artists over the past two decades (‘relational aesthetics’, ‘postproduction’, ‘semionaut’), but now he appears to actually want to coin a term for the age that we – the artists, the theorists and the audience – find ourselves in. It’s as if Greenberg, not content with bestowing on the world a grand definition of modernist painting, then wanted to actually rechristen modernity too. Nonetheless, Bourriaud wants to give us ‘The Altermodern’, an alternative reading of the contemporary, global situation as it effects both the production and reception of whatever is left of the ‘avant garde’ in art
