The notion of ‘contemporaneity’ suggests that we are living in what Peter Osborne has termed “a planetary present” where similarities and differences between geopolitically diverse forms of social experience are being represented and explored within the parameters of a common world. The argument being that if the postcolonial world was characterised by the parallel existence of a multiplicity of times, today is characterised by the interconnection of times that together constitute a global present. In discussions of contemporaneity the question of capital is often downplayed in favour of a focus on art, culture and technology. The lecture will try to approach the question of contemporaneity and capitalism with a special focus on the question of crisis. A side-note will be the complicated question of the presence, disappearance or re-emergence of the avant-garde that historically was characterized by mixing and critiquing different temporalities, aristocratic, bourgeois and popular in the attempt to realize art.

Mikkel Bolt is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen. The author of, most recently, Crisis to Insurrection (Minor Compositions, 2015), Samtidskunstens metamorfose (Antipyrine, 2016) and Trumps kontrarevolution (Nemo, 2017). Co-editor of K&K and Mr Antipyrine.