There are two general questions guiding this essay. The first is: what does it mean to be modern? To answer this question, I start with the contemporary debates about modernity in the European and Anglo-American contexts, in order to reveal a continuous form of exclusion, a "selective abstraction", that is the disregard of Latin America and Brazil as part of modernity. So the second question asks: what does it mean to be modern in Brazil? This leads us to the aesthetics of modernism and the post-modern discourses in Brazil, in which we find a new form of selective abstraction: they overlook the Brazilian cultural diversity, once emphasized by modernism. Based on this double finding, I try to call the attention upon the need to develop new meanings of modern, post-modern and their generatives, based on the recognition and elimination of selective abstractions.