Until quite recently, modern artists regularly took a step back into the past, the better to confront the present. James Joyce, in his utterly contemporary novel Ulysses, stepped back about as far as it was possible to go, to Homer’s Odyssey, to give structure and resonance to his novel of a single day.

Twentieth-century artists such as Picasso, Brancusi, Modigliani, Hepworth and Moore delved into the distant past, the time of the Cycladic figurines and still further back, the cave painters of Lascaux and Altamira, to give form to their contemporary visions.

Now the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, suggests that they had it right, and, in a strange twist, that the contemporary artists who are interested solely in the contemporary are not really contemporary at all. Agamben, who studied with Heidegger in the 1960s and lives in Paris, has just brought out the French edition of a suggestive, poetic monograph entitled “What is the contemporary?” His answer is that it consists of “the singular relationship with one’s own time to which one adheres by keeping one’s distance”.

¶ 12:58 PM