What do the metamodernists want?

Metropolis M just published an interview with Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in which they speak about the present and future of metamodernism. You can buy the magazine here.

Internationally, their theory is finding ample response, from the columns of the British art magazine frieze, for example, but not much has been written about them in the Netherlands. Who are the cultural philosophers Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen and how relevant is their theory on Metamodernism?

Daniël van der Poel:

How did you come up with the idea of Metamodernism?

Timotheus Vermeulen:

‘Around 2005, we discovered the work of such artists as David Thorpe and Dennis Rudolph. Thorpe proposes new, impossible utopias, put together out of the fragments of the past’s disastrous dreams of the future. Rudolph, a German artist, works with symbolism from the pre-Nazi era. He seems to be creating an almost nationalistic narrative with concepts that are today very heavily laden. When we saw it, we asked ourselves, what is going on here? At more and more exhibitions, we saw a new generation of artists who are making a new kind of art. People do not just want to deconstruct, be ironic or play with conventions. They also – perhaps against their own better judgment – want to build something up again. This development has proven not to fit into Postmodernist concepts. It requires a new idiom.

’Robin van den Akker:

‘Metamodernism is not an art movement, but a …