A friend points to an article in Archaeology: “Modern Human Burial in Spain Dated to Upper Paleolithic Period.” His remark: “My notion of modern is outdated.”
“Modern” is a strange term. In some contexts it means “middle twentieth century.” In some contexts it means “having to do with Homo sapiens sapiens.” In some contexts it means “Renaissance and after,” as opposed to “antique,” the Middle Ages being presumed to be a big blank space. There are some unusual cases where it even means “late” or “recent.” And Dr. Johnson points out that in Shakespeare it can mean “vulgar; mean; common.”
I suppose the thing that prevents it from falling into utter meaninglessness, like “transgressive,” is that it always means something specific in a given context. An art historian means something definite by “modern”—namely, a style of art that died out about fifty years ago, having been fashionable “during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s,” as Wikipedia puts it. A paleontologist means something definite by “modern human”—namely, a creature of our own species. Once you establish the context, you can have a meaningful conversation.
But it does confuse people outside your discipline. “No, I mean modern art. You know, the old-fashioned stuff.”
The Wiktionary article on “modern” offers only two meanings—one of them “recent,” and the other a meaning I didn’t come up with, namely “Pertaining to the modern period (c.1800 to contemporary times), particularly in academic historiography.” Merriam-Webster does a little better, adding “of or relating to modernism,” and one of the definitions of “modernism” is “modern artistic or literary philosophy and practice…especially : a self-conscious break with the past and a search for new forms of expression.” But neither Wiktionary nor Merriam-Webster is remotely adequate in describing how the word is used today, or for that matter how it’s been used at any given period. Neither one even mentions the meaning on which the Wikipedia article on “Modern art” is based.
I think “modern” has so many meanings because there are really two underlying meanings: “right” and “wrong.” The great division in human thought is between the people who place the golden age in the future and the ones who place it in the past. (Every two-party system in politics seems to be based on that division.) For the modernist, it’s obvious that our age, with all its technical and intellectual improvements, has got things figured out. Therefore the current style is the right style. For people of conservative tastes, “modernism” is a heresy; the word encapsulates everything that is wrong with the world today, and we can save ourselves only by going back to the good old values of the good old days. As the argument progresses, both sides define which characteristics are “modern,” and modern comes to mean having those characteristics (as in the Merriam-Webster definition, “a self-conscious break with the past and a search for new forms of expression,” which described current fashion only at a particular time in history). Then those characteristics go out of fashion, and we’re left with terms like “postmodernism” and “post-postmodernism” to describe the current fashion—terms that give up on the notion of “modern” as “recent” and acknowledge that “modern” means having a particular set of characteristics that used to be fashionable.
All this means that you have to be careful of your audience when you use the word “modern.” A general audience, even a fairly intelligent one, may assume that you mean “art of today” when you say “modern art.” An intelligent reader may be puzzled if you use the term “modern” to mean “from 14,000 years ago” without some introductory explanation. It’s very easy in any discipline to absorb the jargon and think that everybody knows what it means. But there was a time when you didn’t know, and you were horribly embarrassed. You can spare other people that embarrassment with a little thoughtful explanation, without making things too dreary for people who do already know the terminology.