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Lorenzo Mammi /// Recents
Deaths of Art.
The idea that art might die and is
dying goes back, as everyone knows, to Hegel. In recent times it has
been taken up again by critics and historians from different tendencies
and with differing aims. Yet all of them start from one point in common:
that the art of the last thirty years has provoked an irrecoverable
fracture not only in relation to the languages of Modernism, but also
in relation to the history of art as a whole.
Among the authors who have defended the possibilities of a death of
art, I will try to analyse two who seem to me to occupy opposite poles
in the debate on this issue: Giulio Carlo Argan and Arthur Danto. From
Argan, I will particularly use a short text: 'A
crise da crítica e a crise da arte' [The Crisis of Art Criticism and The Crisis
of Art], the last chapter of Arte e crítica de
Arte [Art and
Art Criticism]; other contributions to the debate can be found in the
chapter 'A crise da arte como cincia européia' [The
Crisis of Art as a European Science], in Arte
moderna [Modern Art],
and several other texts by the author. From Danto, I am taking advantage
of a recent book, After the end of art, the result of a series of conferences
given in 1995. I have found it useful to add to these two authors an
essay by Hans Belting, a German historian, called The
end of the history of art?, which, although it starts from a slightly different question,
brings important elements into the debate. |
