‘Exposability: On the Taking-Place in Future of Art’ (original) (raw)
Related papers
Futures, 2007
This article questions certain current assumptions taken as decisive for the future of art. One such notion is that the future of art can be predicated on media technologies. But art history is not a straightforward progression from one state of media practice to another. Art does not respond to the paradigm shifts which are normal to the advance of science. The impasse struck by early 20th century avantgarde modernist innovation would seem to underpin a necessary cultural transition to the timebased and networked collaborative practices of electronic technology in the aesthetic sector. This paper challenges that assumption and puts in question the very nature of art history itself. Artistic originality is not simply unpredictable but a conundrum of negative dormancy resistant to futurist study as explored in these pages. Art does not submit to forecasting, programming or normalization. In this sense, art has no future. r 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Art and its Publics, 2003
New Interventions in Art History is a series of textbook mini-companionspublished in connection with the Association of Art Historians-that aims to provide innovative approaches to, and new perspectives on, the study of art history. Each volume focuses on a specific area of the discipline of art history-here used in the broadest sense to include painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic arts, and film-and aims to identify the key factors that have shaped the artistic phenomenon under scrutiny. Particular attention is paid to the social and political context and the historiography of the artistic cultures or movements under review. In this way, the essays that comprise each volume cohere around the central theme while providing insights into the broader problematics of a given historical moment.
16 Sociology of Art: New Stakes in a Post-Critical Time
The international handbook of sociology, 2000
During a long period, sociology of art has been divided mainly between two major directions. Both show art as a social reality but they do so from quite different points of view: one is frontally critical and aims at revealing the social determination of art behind any pretended autonomy (be it the autonomy of the works, following the objectivist aesthetics, or the autonomy of the taste for them, following an aesthetics of subjectivity); the other is more pragmatic and, without pretending to make statements about the works or aesthetic experience, procedes through a minutious reconstitution of the "collective action" necessary to produce and consume art. Against a purely internal and hagiographic aesthetical commentary of art works, sociology has thus filled back an "art world" which formerly included only very few chefs-d'oeuvre and geniuses. Mainstream productions and copies, conventions and material constraints, professions and academies, organizations and markets, codes and rites of social consumption have been pushed to the front of the scene.
Anything Goes": The Work of Art and the Historical Future
Townsend Center For the Humanities, 1997
This year, since the Center is moving into a second decade and a new space, not to mention century and millennium, at the Center we are particularly interested in visions and versions of the future. Of course beginnings entail endings, and with that conjunction we are already on the turf of this lecture and lecturer. Arthur Danto's recent book on what he calls the "end of art" is importantly future-looking; his talk is importantly past-oriented because it looks back to the book and to a history of art and a history of the history of art that are in his view over and done with. The paradoxes of time are all in a day's work for a philosopher: If time is a measure of movement, as Aristotle thought, doesn't that mean that it must not be moving itself, in which case, it wouldn't be recognizable as time? But if time moves, how can we talk about past time, which is already gone, or the present, which is moving into a future that doesn't yet exist? Art has its paradoxes for philosophers too: Plato and a long line of philosophers have wanted to banish artists from utopia. They do so with good reason, though not necessarily for the reason most often put forward: that artists create, at best, pale imitations of truth and beauty. The philosophers' problem, one suspects, is that the images of art can be as powerful and persuasive as truth and beauty. Arthur Danto negotiates tensions such as these by living and thinking in their midst, mostly with genial good cheer and certainly with great verve. He has come to inhabit a polyglot and cosmopolitan Middle Kingdom of sensibility: art makers, art historians, teachers, philosophers, and critics of art have come to be so bound up with v
THE REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL OF THE END OF ART
A natural connection exists between the term ‘art’ and a sense of revolution: modernist European art, precursor to the contemporary, may be viewed historically as a series of progressive or revolutionary movements, where each new movement challenged and destroyed the boundaries and definitions of the art that preceded it. This revolutionary view of art relies on a sense of the meta-narrative, based on ideas of progress and a linear view of history. Current attempts to define contemporary art frequently position it as a challenge to the modern, an ahistorical, untimely or ‘post’-modern era that embraces multiple and diverse narratives from local, regional and particular sources over a central, patriarchal or Eurocentric view or practice. Paradoxically, these theories tend ultimately to replicate the idealism or utopianism of the modern, betrayed by their yearning to inhabit a new era and overthrow the outdated boundaries or practices of the previous. From the late 1960s until his death in 2013, philosopher Arthur Danto outlined an alternative theory for contemporary art, which he described as the ‘end of art’. As an idea, the end of art embraces the reality of the artwork’s contemporary conditions: its ultimate freedom of form, its visual resemblance to and disappearance within the everyday, its lack of a central narrative and absence of progress. It also accounts for the fact of the contemporary’s origins within the modern, in relation to a view of its end as having driven the entire modern project. This paper explores the idea of the end of art in relation contemporary art practice as post-conceptual practice. It examines the potential of this idea to challenge the institution of art altogether in line with conceptual ideals of art’s dematerialisation and its attempts to revolutionise the concept of creativity within the everyday and real-world practices.
The 'new sociology of art': Putting art back into social science approaches to the arts
Cultural Sociology, 2007
This article maps recent developments in social science writing about the arts and argues for seeing this work in terms of the label the ‘new sociology of art’. It considers four major lines of re-assessment being carried out by sociologists studying the arts: firstly, a reconsideration of the relationship between sociological and other disciplinary approaches to art; secondly, the possibility of an art-sociology as against a sociology of art; thirdly, the application of insights from the sociology of art to non-art ‘stuff ’; and, fourthly, the sociology of the artwork conceived as a contingent social fact. The argument is made that these developments represent an advance on the tendency to limit sociological investigations of the arts to contextual or external factors.The ‘new sociology of art’ is praised for framing questions about the aesthetic properties of art and artworks in a way that is compatible with social constructionsim.