The end of art

Art turns into philosophy

Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.

G.W.F. Hegel: Introduction to Aesthetics: The Introduction to the Berlin Aesthetics Lectures of the 1820s. Translation: T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 11.

At this highest stage, art now transcends itself, in that it forsakes the element of reconciled embodiment of the spirit in sensuous form and passes over from the poetry of imagination to the prose of thought.

G.W.F. Hegel: Introduction to Aesthetics: The Introduction to the Berlin Aesthetics Lectures of the 1820s. Translation: T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 89.

The major question that now arises is this: If true romantic art is no longer satisfactory, then what is to replace it?

Jack Kaminsky: Hegel on Art. An interpretation of Hegel's Aesthetics.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1962, p. 101.

Aus der Kunst eine philosophische Frage machen . . ., heißt das nicht die Herrschaftsgeste der Philosophie wiederholen, die immer schon die Kunst dem Logos und der Wahrheit unterordnen wollte und die bezeichnenderweise immer schon an die Spitze der Hierarchie die Sprachkünste, die Poesie gestellt hat?

Sarah Kofman: Melancholie der Kunst, Graz & Wien, 1986.
[@ Sigrid Schade: "Die Kunst des Kommentars." Kunstforum International Vol. 100 (April/May 1989).]

Art is abolished

Of course he has quite given up art. He only thinks about making life sane and healthy, and freeing the soul from the trammels of culture. Art seems to him now a malady. [. . .] He rests his hope of humanity on the Bicycle . . .

Oscar Wilde about Maurice Maeterlinck, 1898.
[Philippe Julian: Oscar Wilde. London: Paladin, 1971, p.324.]

Het Nederlandse Volk heeft voor zijn welzijn helemaal geen kunst nodig, ja: kunst kan gemist worden als kiespijn!
Een aantal vooraanstaande kunstenaars neemt thans het initiatief:
  1. besluit het vervaardigen van kunstvoorbrengselen te staken;
  2. de likwidatie te bevorderen van alle instellingen, die zich nog aan de kunst verrijken.

Cornelius Rogge, Armando, Bazon Brock, Henderikse, Arthur Køpke, Silvano Lora,
Piero Manzoni, Megert, Henk Peeters, Schoonhoven: Einde. Pamflet, ca. 1962.

Peter Weibel: "Der Ausstieg aus der Kunst als höchste Form der Kunst." Kunstforum 98 (Jan./Feb. 1989).

Art dies

Art is dead. Its present movements are not at all indications of vitality; they are not even the convulsions of agony prior to death; they are the mechanical reflex actions of a corpse submitting to galvanic force.

Marius de Zayas: "The Sun Has Set." Camera Work, 39:17 (July 1912).
[@ Arthur C. Danto: The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 81.]

Art turns into life

Het feit dat de kunst na met vorm gebroken te hebben haar einde nadert en gereed staat in het leven zelf over te gaan is een der onloochenbare verschijnselen van rijpende vormcultuur.

Piet Mondriaan: "De Jazz en de Neo-plastiek."
In: Yve-Alain Bois: Arthur Lehning en Mondriaan. Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1984, p. 88.

The future of art seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterworks but with defining alternative cultural strategies, through series of communicative gestures in multi-media forms. As art and non-art become interchangeable, and the masterwork may only be a reel of punched or magnetized tape, the artist defines art less through any intrinsic value of art object than by funishing new conceptualities of life style and orientation. Generally, as the new cultural continuum underlines the expendability of the material artifact, life is defined as art – as the only contrastingly permanent and continuously unique experience.

John McHale: "The Plastic Parthenon" Dotzero Magazine, Spring 1967.
Reprinted in: John Russell and Suzi Gablik: Pop Art Redefined. London: Thames & Huson, 1969, pp. 47-53.

Has the end come?

Duchamp (the imaginary), Rodchenko (the real), and Mondrian (the symbolic), among others, all believed in the end – they all had the final truth, all spoke apocalyptically. Yet has the end come? To say no (painting is still alive, just look at the galleries) is undoubtedly an act of denial, for it has never been more evident that most paintings one sees have abandoned the task that historically belonged to modern painting (that, precisely, of working through the end of painting) and are simply artifacts created for the market and by the market (absolutely interchangeable artifacts created by interchangeable producers). To say yes, however, that the end has come, is to give in to a historicist conception of history as both linear and total (i.e., one cannot paint after Duchamp, Rodchenko, Mondrian; their work has rendered paintings unnecessary, or: one cannot paint anymore in the era of the mass media, computer games, and the simulacrum).

Yve-Alain Bois: "Painting: The Task of Mourning." In: Exhibition Catalogue Endgame – Reference and Simulation in Recent Painting. Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, 1986. Reprinted in: Yve-Alain Bois: Painting as Model. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990, pp. 229-244. [p. 241]

    

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