This article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.

中文翻译：

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当代艺术与音乐问题：迈向当代音乐艺术

本文阐述了“当代”的艺术理论概念以及当代音乐与当代艺术之间的形式差异。当代艺术源于历史前卫和新前卫的激进转变，这些转变导致了后概念艺术——一种超越特定媒介的通用艺术，优先考虑话语意义和社会过程——而当代音乐则与其作为一种从审美现代主义和绝对音乐中继承其概念的非观念艺术形式。这篇文章还考虑了声音艺术的范畴，并讨论了它与当代艺术的一般性和后概念性状况不一致的一些方式。我认为，尽管他们各自声称是同时代的，声音艺术和当代音乐都不是艺术理论所阐述的历史意义上的当代音乐。作为这些类别的替代品，我提出“音乐当代艺术”来描述以相应方式与新/当代音乐和声音艺术相背离的实践。