Chapter in P. Meecham, ed, A Companion to Modernism, Wiley Blackwell forthcoming 2016 (draft) 1 Extensive Modernity: On the Refunctioning of Artists as Producers Angela Dimitrakaki The impossibility of a break Can art cease being modern before capitalism ends? I begin with the question initially imagined as a possible conclusion to this chapter which is intended to pursue ‐ elliptically and concisely‐ the connection of capitalist globalisation, crystallised triumphantly after 1989, to artistic production. In the instutional knowledge regimes of globalisation, the distinction between the modern and the contemporary is ubiquitous: the distinction is so widely accepted in the art historical imaginary as to habitually come across university course titles on “modern and contemporary art”. That university course titles on “medieval and contemporary art” are not that popular implies (if someone devotes much thought to the historically and conceptually unclear role of “and”, which is unlikely) a nebulous affinity between “modern” and “contemporary”, but the nature of this affinity remains mostly undisclosed and only marginally debated. By way of contributing to the de‐marginalisation of a debate that I find politically essential, I must clarify that the decision to open the chapter with what I had assumed to be its ending betrays the realisation that the question was, ultimately, rhetorical: artistic production in times defined by capitalism as the dominant mode of production is necessarily modern. It is modern historically, aesthetically and critically. It is modern historically in that globalisation, as the culmination of century‐old processes, affirms the impossibility of leaving behind the colonial model and industrialisation which defined modernity. That China extends Europe’s colonial project in Africa, as Paolo Woods’ photographic series Chinafrica (2007) documents, (see Fig. 1) [please insert Fig. 1 near here] simply proves that colonialism, in globalisation, is not a white prerogative. As Julian Stallabrass (2004), among others, has asserted, the global art world relies on the colonisation of cultural diversity in order to diversify and expand its markets. In more general terms, the announcement of the advent of postcolonial times, at some point in the twentieth century, was to be