“Realism,” Embodied Subjects, Projection of Empathy

The Question of Modernity A question that is worth a moment of reflection: why does raising the issue of r e a l i s m as a central problem in art (or literature) invariably require a certain gesture of withdrawal, for us to place it in brackets, or quotes? As if we were uncertain what we had in mind when w riting this word, as if we did not know what it meant, or were opposing its standard, common-sense meaning. Therefore, when Hilde van Gelder and Jan Baetens open their 2006 anthology of texts devoted to CriticalRealism in Contemporary Art with the words “20th-Century art [...] is at odds with realism, at least with the term,” it is this final phrase that seems key. The authors' thesis is that after the adventures of modernism, the avant-garde and postmodernism, realism returned in contemporary artistic practices. It returned as a result of the exhaustion