Temporal Conflicts and the Purification of Hybrids in the 21st-Century Art Museum: Tate, a Case in Point

Abstract

Tate, and by implication the modern art museum in general, is struggling with a double paradox. How, on the one hand, can modernity’s notion of linear progressive time be maintained in a world where, through the proliferation of technology and networked mobile devices, our time horizon has shrunk to that of the present; and, on the other, can aesthetic modernism’s atemporal space of exhibition and display be maintained in the face of the multiplicity of times experienced within presentness?