What is ‘contemporary’ in art appears to be nothing other than the market’s own understanding of time. Art is merely another commodity in an investment portfolio, a data point in the calculus of inflows and outflows by which solvency is determined. The contemporary is a way to express the probability of near-term profit. It is where aesthetic judgment becomes indistinguishable from economic valuation, a result of the aggregated tastes of the super-collector class and the pyramid of labor that they top. Institutional practices shape our encounters with the contemporary: a literacy in theory, in the titling of work,  writing a press release, a bio etc. Even as the contemporary extends to new demographics, crossing every frontier that the market can discover, contemporary art remains the product of a process that Marx called ‘centralization’, by which capital accumulates into the hands of fewer and fewer capitalists. Artworks are merely one of the things drawn toward the centres of capital.

But this is to view the contemporary from the perspective of the market and not the artist. There is another way of thinking about art’s relationship to the present. We could see ‘the contemporary’ as something that the market can only ever hope to appropriate, never to create, always following in art’s wake, monetizing its pearls. However, the conception of art as vanguard is compatible with the priorities of the market, which is always seeking new forms of newness. Art that is ‘ahead of its time’, is only a certain number of steps ahead of the market. Here, another, less obviously temporal sense of the contemporary presents itself: an aesthetic work that exists where the contemporary is not. Giorgio Agamben argues that the contemporary is what is invisible to the present, remarking that the human eye actually sees darkness and not just the absence of light. If it is alive to what is concealed in the present, art is contemporary only when it is most untimely, most timely when it exists in the shadows of the contemporary, in our time, but not of it.

Untimeliness seems like a luxury at a time when the reality of global climate change and neofascism should concern us all. The disaster projects an appearance of absolute contemporaneity—as some people say, #weareallinthistogether. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the pandemic and so many other recent events indicate, disasters affect people differently. The disaster that would change everything for everyone remains a thing of apocalyptic fiction, starring Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. The disaster reveals the extent to which, in a given historical moment, different groups assume multiple temporalities, an idea to which Ernst Bloch gave the gloriously wordy phrase ‘the contemporaneity of the contemporaneous’.  Bloch took this idea from the art historian Wilhelm Pinder, who described the coexistence of different artistic styles in any given historical period. What is true for art, Bloch said, is also true of our political lives and even our recreation: i.e. the German petty bourgeoisie, living in an advanced industry society and going to the woods to recreate medieval folk culture.

Our time is no less marked by the non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous. A recent example is the image of white men playing on a golf course while a wildfire consumes the hillside behind, and presumably a team of incarcerated firefighters are working somewhere in the distance. The interplay of orange and green in this image describes an important split in the temporalities in our time. The residents of North Bonneville, Washington State, or Berkshire, England, can accept or deny the science of climate change at their leisure, while people in the Bay of Bengal are living its consequences. The symbolic green of nature is a refuge from the symbolic orange of apocalypse, a balm for the catastrophe of the present. This has been the symbolic palette of the social media feed over the past five years: green and orange, refuge and catastrophe. Each has its own temptations.

After the 2020 election, a third aesthetic presents itself. It is an aesthetics of political harmony, in which liberal democracy is the safe middle way between the extremes of revolution and reaction. TJ Clark has traced this aesthetics back to the celestial blue of Giotto. A recent iteration of this symbolic palette can be seen in a painting by the artist Sketch, posted on Instagram on November 8th, the day that Biden declared victory. The painting draws on a meme format that has become popular in 2020, in which recently deceased celebrities are pictured in Heaven. This can be both feel-good and ironic, such as the meme in which a crowd of the blessed, including Anthony Bourdain and Princess Leia, welcomes Kobe Bryant to heaven. In Sketch’s more earnest artwork, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris embrace in front of the blue heavens, as four recently deceased dignitaries of American politics – John Lewis, John McCain, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Elijah Cummings – look down on them benignantly. The image contains no hint of the anti-fascist joy that greeted the election results on the streets of America and across the world: the eagles of the state are standing proud in the background, representing the USA restored to its true values. This picture recalls the ‘end of history’ proclaimed by Francis Fukuyama in 1992 after the downfall of the USSR, but it is more obviously fantastical. The celestial blue is a fantasy resolution of the opposition between orange and green, catastrophe and refuge.

A liberal triumphalism wants to treat the election result as a reconciliation of politics and virtue, Earth and Heaven. Sketch’s painting vividly renders the fantasy-content of this attitude, which must conceal the very existence of alienated millions who don’t believe they stand to benefit from either party, and must transform anti-fascist joy into gratitude for the state. The fantasy of liberal triumphalism may be the philosophy of history under this new government. In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Walter Benjamin critiques the teleological view of history among some Marxist theorists, in which history will inevitably deliver the wished-for outcome. Today it is not Marxists but liberals who have adopted that philosophy of history. Liberal triumphalism projects a blue-sky thinking in which the good triumphs, to quote Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, in this life or the next. If this is a false resolution to the opposition between catastrophe and refuge, how else could art relate to the contemporary?