This article analyses the image of the waste picker in contemporary visual art in order to test the extent to which urban modernity can be viewed as a unified critical concept. Focusing on works by Surasi Kusolwong and Santiago Sierra, it examines confrontations between ‘modern’ and ‘non-modern’ sociological, economic and artistic practices within the urban environment. The analysis is located in the context of Bernard Yack’s The Fetishism of Modernities, in which the author teases apart different sociological, political, philosophical and aesthetic developments that are typically homogenised to support a globally coherent vision of modernity. Linking depictions of waste pickers to representations of the chiffonnier in 19th-century painting and literature, the article shows how Kusolwong and Sierra prompt reflection on the relationships between urban dwelling, cleanliness and global economic justice, while undermining a critical tradition that posits the 19th-century western metropolis as the embodiment of a unified concept of modernity.