The long-lasting present: Art, duration, and contemporaneity

What constitutes the contemporaneity of contemporary art? Should we take the “contemporary” here as a simple reference to the historical period in which the art in question is produced or practiced? In this case, is it interchangeable with “present” or “current”? Or perhaps, beyond the sense of historical and chronological determination, the term contemporary indicates here something inherent to the specific way of being of certain works and artistic practices? This article charts the emergence of the notion of contemporary art and its underlying concept of contemporaneity in 1960s art criticism from a transregional perspective, taking the work of art critics Mário Pedrosa, Miyakawa Atsushi, and Michael Fried, as foci of comparative analysis.