The art history and contemporaneity of Terry Smith

This essay surveys 50 years of essays and books by art historian Terry Smith, arguing that his encounters with conceptual art and Australian Aboriginal art inform a concept of contemporaneity that has emerged in his writing in the twenty-first century as a description of the historical zeitgeist. The rise of contemporary art since the 1990s enables a thinking about a state of contemporaneity that describes a coevality of difference across geographies and states of duration. These durations correspond to the vast inequalities and irreconcilabilities of global life, the ontological and material strata by which capital implicates human beings across nations, times and spaces. While modernity and postmodernity were periodising concepts that emerged from combinations of economics, literary studies, sociology and geography, contemporaneity arises from art history. The discipline's phenomenal methods, its attention to sensual and visual experience, makes it ideal for thinking about the mediated experience of the twenty-first century