art, and the tendency within postmodernist art to invite the viewer to sustained active participation in the work of art. This is in direct opposition to the passive contemplation advocated by Modernist critics such as Fried who, in Art and Objecthood, claims that good art should be 'instantaneously present'. This idea of the importance of 'presentness' is contradicted by the title of Burgin's article, 'The absence of presence'. Taking Burgin's statement as a point of departure, it is possible to connect postmodern ideas to a diverse range of works of art, which are in turn associated with a series of contemporary concepts and concerns. While Burgin provides a means of distinguishing postmodernism from Modernism in art, there remains the problem of how to, or indeed whether, one ought to distinguish qualitatively between different postmodernist works. If social relevance is a characteristic of postmodernism, then degree or accuracy of social relevance may be used as an evaluative tool; however, as Harrison and Wood have pointed out (see Modernism in Dispute, p.240) radically critical work may become marginalised and lose its ability to challenge. Furthermore, if the main impact of a work depends on its contemporary relevance, it is likely to lose conceptual value with the passage of time; Haacke's The Safety Net (pl.D24) borrows its meaning from contemporary politics rather than conforming with Greenberg's idea of art as self-defining, and is hence now arguably of historic rather than artistic interest. The aesthetic of Greenbergian Modernism may never recover a dominant position within art history but, as Harrison and Wood have suggested, 'the contingency of the historical is only half the point of art'. ...
