Featured in How ‘Liquid Modernity’ Shaped Art and the World
Art and the climate share a crucial trait – rapid change. Carson Chan explores how a theory of ‘liquid modernity’ has made new waves in art and asks: What if art institutions acted like water?
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Liquid Modernity (2000), philosopher Zygmunt Bauman characterized the 21st century as marked by the dissolution of the ideological superstructures that long organized and dominated the Western world. ‘Fluids’, he wrote, ‘neither fix space nor bind time. Fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it.’ To dwell in change means to shed fixed axioms, a phenomenon we see readily in the way categories like gender, sexuality and race have become more self-defined, and structures of domination – white supremacy, patriarchy and speciesism – are actively being dismantled.