The book was awarded The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Book Prize in 2010. Art continues to bemuse and confuse many people today. Yet its critical analyses are saturated with daunting analyses of contemporary arts exhaustion its predictability or its absorption into global commercial culture. In this book the author seeks to clarify this apprehensive perception of art. He argues it is a consequence not only of confounding artworks but also of the paradoxical impetus of a culture of modernity. By positively reassessing the perplexing or apprehensive features of cultural modernity as well as of aesthetic inquiry this book redenes the ambitions of art in the wake of this legacy. In the process it challenges many familiar approaches to art inquiry in order to offer a new understanding of the aesthetic social and cultural aspirations of art in our time.