writing a history of the present

I've been looking over for the past week Donald Kuspit's "The Contemporary and the Historical", a revised version of a talk he recently gave at the International Symposium on Contemporary Art Theory in Mexico City, now available at Artnet.  It's fairly long for an article on the internet, and alternately wandering and repetitive; but it also makes a number of good, and some other provocative, points.  I hope to give it some sustained attention soon, but for now, a few small remarks.  First, Kuspit's version of "history" is little more than a straw man offered to provide a strained antithesis to the "contemporary".  He implicitly assumes that any history of art means a global history of style, a grandiose positivism that few have ever endorsed, and hardly any do now.  More fundamentally, his attempt at a prima facie rejection of history on the grounds of its finitude, while well-meaning, is a narrow and hysterical position to take, and one that he can't even maintain himself through the article.  I will try to say more soon, but if you're inclined, take a look.

Comments

[George]

Let's start with... today is tomorrows history.
We live in the foam between his ocean and land.a