Metaphysical remains: Anti-materialism and cultural temporality

Three critiques against cultural timelessness, the notion of late style, recycled ready-mades, and minimalist preservation, are examined to show how they are all compromised by a latent idealism. Such idealism, based on the decoupling of time from materiality through removal, displacement or wilful ignorance of material markers of age, forecloses the kinds of radical change and innovation espoused by the above critiques. While they all embrace timeliness and decay in the materiality of artists’ bodies and cultural artefacts, the ideology of timeless bourgeois art persists in their maintenance of a separate immaterial, eternal cultural essence.