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They have cut off the hot water in the building where I teach. The rumor is that we will soon lose our office phones, as the Women's Studies department already has. In this underfunded public university, the global economic crisis could not be more local, immediate, and material. Given my current working conditions, I cannot help but think about the problem of" the contemporary" in relation to the urgencies of the troubled future. These destabilizing times are recalibrating my sense of temporality-and it is temporality above all that ramifies across the admittedly paradoxical formation" contemporary art history." We spend a lot of time debating about how to reconcile the presumed presentism of the contemporary with an attention to the past. But teaching" art now" does not mean simply mapping the current moment or grappling with history: it also involves forecasting about-and in some respects producing-the future …