Introduction: Art Criticism After the End of Art

Around midyear 1984, I published an essay titled “The End of Art.” In October of that same year, I began a career as an art critic, publishing my first piece in The Nation. The view has sometimes been expressed that if the end of art has really come, there should be nothing to write art criticism about any longer, so my new practice was somehow inconsistent with the thesis of my essay. But it was never part of my thesis that art would stop being made—I had not proclaimed the death of art! “The End of Art” had rather to do with the way the history of art had been conceived, as a sequence of stages in an unfolding narrative. I felt that that narrative had come to an end, and in this regard, whatever art was now to be made would be posthistorical. The only kind of criticism the thesis ruled out was the not uncommon practice of praising something as showing what was to be art history’s next stage. I felt that my thesis was liberationist—that now that the end of art had come, artists were liberated from the burden of art history. They were no longer constrained by an imperative to carry the narrative forward. Nothing in art could any longer be invalidated by the criticism that it was historically incorrect. Anything and everything was now available to artists. Though it took awhile for the fact to dawn on me, I was in a sense the first posthistorical critic of art. There were of course plenty of art critics in the period we had now entered. What was special about me was that I was the only one whose writing was inflected by the belief that we were not just in a new era of art, but in a new kind of era. That meant that I had to be as open as the art world itself had become. If nothing was ruled out as art, I could rule out nothing as art.

As it happens, I was not the first philosopher to announce the end of art and then go on to write art criticism. Early in his Lectures on Aesthetics, delivered in Berlin for the last time in 1828, the great German metaphysician Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel claimed that art “in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.” But Hegel, no more than I, supposed that the practice of art criticism was invalidated by this thesis. Indeed, in the tremendous text that followed, he showed himself to be one of art criticism’s greatest practitioners. His critique of Raphael’s Transfiguration—until then regarded as a deeply flawed masterpiece—is an unparalleled exercise in artistic analysis. And the pages he devotes to the criticism of Dutch painting have never, to my mind, been matched. I would be very gratified indeed to believe that anything I have written as an art critic has come within range of what Hegel achieved in this genre. The difference is that Hegel did not attempt to write criticism of the art of his own time—of art after the end of art. In fact, his philosophy of art history really implied that he was living in an age when, for the first time in history, the approach of the art critic was exactly what the art being made called for. Art criticism as a modern practice was not very old in 1828. The fact that it existed at all was almost proof that Hegel’s theory of the end of art was true for his time. It will help clarify the difference between my views and Hegel’s—as well as of our era and his—if I take some time to explain what his views actually were.

What would Hegel have said had the actual future of art history been revealed to him—the great sweep of art history from Goya, Ingres, and Delacroix through Manet, Courbet, and the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists and the early Modernists, down to the art of our own time? Would he have considered that his declaration of the end of art was perhaps hasty and, not to put too fine a point on it, false? I think he would have said that it was not, that he was not making predictions about artistic production at all. Rather, it was a claim about our relationship to art, whatever its actual future. His point, as he says explicitly, was that art “has lost for us genuine truth and life. And has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its [previous] higher place.” In brief, it is a thesis less about art than about us. He goes on to write, “What is now aroused in us by works of art is not just immediate enjoyment but our judgment also, since we subject to our immediate consideration (i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation, and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of both to one another.” And he concludes, “The philosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for purposes of knowing philosophically what art is.”

Hegel believed, in a sense, that we have outgrown art. It no longer gives us what we need:

It is certainly the case that art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it, and found in it alone, a satisfaction that, at least on the part of religion, was most intimately linked with art. The beautiful days of Greek art, like the golden age of later Middle Ages, are gone … The point is that our whole spiritual culture is of such a kind that [the artist] himself stands within the world of reflection and its relations, and could not by any act of will and decision remove himself from it.

Whereas in ancient Greece or medieval Europe, Hegel believed, art satisfied humankind’s highest spiritual needs, he now believed that we have evolved beyond that and require what he called “reflection,” by which he meant, in effect, philosophy. In those golden ages art made vivid, through images, what men and women needed to know about themselves and the world they believed they lived in. We moderns, Hegel would have said, have to interpret what they understood immediately and intuitively. When Hegel was forming his views on art, he could see from his doorstep Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s great museum (today called the Altes Museum, the “Old Museum”) rising up. It would contain works of art from many historical periods, which in their time could be understood by those who lived a form of life in which their art sufficed what Hegel believed could now be derived only from philosophical reflection. Standing in the museum, we have to learn what the art means—what its content is—and why it presents that content as it does. We are external to that art and confront it as art critics or art historians. It has lost the power to communicate on its own. Really, we have no need for that art. Nor, more radically, have we need for any art. We now move on a higher, more intellectual plane than did those men and women for whose spiritual needs the art was sufficient. Even if the art of his time had been flourishing and stunning, Hegel would have felt that we had moved on to other, higher—more intellectual—things.

That, I think, was Hegel’s view, which I have tried to convey in his own words. His thesis was that whatever art now might do for us, it can no longer compare with what it once did for those who came before us. “Neither in content nor in form is art the highest and absolute mode of bringing to the mind the true interests of the spirit.” Rather, Hegel writes, “Thought and reflection have spread their wings above fine art.” And the reason that art remains, so to speak, earthbound is that it displays “even the highest [reality] sensuously.” It is tethered to the experience of some object or other—the material object in which the artwork is embodied—whereas philosophical reflection delivers us to a realm of pure abstract thought, which cannot be reduced to sense experience at all. We in effect have to translate what the senses show us into thought, through interpretation. We have to put art into words to grasp what it means. That is what Hegel did as an art critic, and I have to say that is what I try do as an art critic as well.

But my view of the end of art is radically different from his. I don’t, for example, believe that we have outgrown art. I believe, rather, that we have outgrown certain views of artistic experience that render it intellectually inadequate to our needs. And we have accordingly, I believe, outgrown Hegel’s invidious view of the relationship between art and philosophy. He felt that art is limited through its dependence on material objects grasped through the senses. His contempt for matter has a long philosophical genealogy, going back into ancient times. He was a philosophical idealist, which meant that he saw the universe as spiritual through and through. He saw that it was possible to think in the medium of matter, and indeed his conception of art acknowledges as much. But he believed this limits art in a disfiguring way since in its nature it must think in the medium of matter. His philosophy of art was hostage to his metaphysics.

I, to the contrary, believe that art has been able, through its evolution, to take us to the heart of its philosophy. My thesis on the end of art really is not a metaphysical thesis but a historical one. We have, as I say, not outgrown art at all. But art has certainly outgrown anything Hegel would have been able to conceive of as art in the 1820s! Indeed, had art not had the internal development that led to the art I experienced in the early 1960s—and most acutely in 1964—my view of the end of art would never have arisen. I felt, in specific connection with that art—Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism—precisely what Hegel declared: that the philosophy of art was needed in an especially urgent way.

To be sure, philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century was a far cry from the robust practice it had been in Hegel’s day. It had fallen very far away from something that could pretend to satisfy the highest needs of the spirit. Metaphysics of the sort that Hegel practiced had been declared intellectually bogus, and the sharpest philosophical minds of my time had been dedicated to its definitive overthrow. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “Most propositions and questions that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false but senseless. We cannot therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness.” The main philosophical movements of the century were based on a radical skepticism regarding philosophy itself and sought to provide something that philosophers could do instead of what Hegel believed was philosophy’s “highest vocation.” Phenomenology sought instead to describe the logical structure of conscious experience. Positivism dedicated itself to the logical clarification of the language of science. “Philosophy recovers itself,” the pragmatist John Dewey wrote, “when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.” Nietzsche regarded philosophy as little but the disguised autobiographies of its exponents, and Derrida evolved his concept of Deconstruction to lay bare the hidden agendas that lay behind philosophical systems.

If there was any group of figures who tried to deal with the deepest concerns of the spirit, it would not have been the professional philosophers at all but the great painters of my younger years, the Abstract Expressionists, who, in the words of one of them, Barnett Newman, aspired to find, through painting, a path to the Absolute. And when, as in a legendary encounter between artists and philosophers in Woodstock in 1952, the aestheticians there dared imply that they had something of interest to tell the artists, Newman contemptuously declared that aesthetics was for art what ornithology was for the birds. They were no longer in awe of philosophy, if they ever had been, and no longer felt they needed it.

In particular, the question of the nature of art, which had long preoccupied philosophy and constituted a traditional topic in aesthetics, was felt not to require an answer. Around that time, there was a view in philosophy that definitions of art were either useless or impossible. That view too derived from Wittgenstein, who had offered an almost paralyzing example in his posthumously published masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations. How would you define games? Wittgenstein asked. Is there anything common and peculiar to the set of games, as philosophers would have supposed the concept of games required? Don’t say there must be something, Wittgenstein said—Look and see if there is something. He then listed lots of games, and in such a way that there really was nothing obvious that they all had in common. Yet, he goes on to say, we all know which are the games. A definition will make us none the wiser. For those who felt insecure at this, Wittgenstein offered the idea of what he termed “Family Resemblances.” The set of games is a Family Resemblance class. His followers proposed that artworks constitute just such a class.

What struck me with the force of revelation in 1964 was that this view was entirely wrong. It hit me in particular with the exhibition I have so often written about, in which Andy Warhol displayed a large number of facsimiles of shipping cartons, among which the Brillo Box was the star item. What was thrilling for me in that show was the way it opened up, I thought for the first time, a way to think philosophically about art. Up until then, it seemed to me, works of art were thought to have a strong antecedent identity. They had gold frames around them, or were posed on pedestals, and one was expected to look upon them as pretty significant. Everyone knew, more or less, how to tell when something was a work of art, which could be picked out in much the same way shipping cartons could be picked out, and nobody could confuse the two. And now all at once here was a work of art that could not interestingly be told apart from a shipping carton. But that meant that recognizing something as a work of art was a perceptually more complex transaction than anyone had supposed. What family resemblance could be greater than that between Brillo Box and the Brillo boxes? They were like identical twins! And yet one was an artwork and the other just a throwaway container. In a recent essay I wrote on the Fluxus movement, I pointed out how games had become part of the Fluxus oeuvre. Not beautifully crafted chess sets, but the dumb little “Made in Japan” kinds of games in which you kill time by seating little metal balls in a set of holes in a cheaply printed picture of a clown. Who would have chosen that as an artwork? But in the Silverman Collection of Fluxus works in Detroit, there they are along with the other joke-shop items that bear the stamp of Fluxus taste. All at once, it seemed to me, the definition of art had become urgent. And all at once, it became clear that the great philosophical truth that Warhol had bestowed upon us was that you cannot base a philosophical definition of art on anything visual—or sensual in the extended use philosophers make of that term—since most of the visual properties of his Brillo Box are shared with the Brillo cartons of the supermarket, and those that are not shared—his are made of plywood—cannot conceivably ground a distinction as momentous as that between art and reality.

But this has the form of a classical philosophical question. My paradigm for this is the vexing question with which Descartes opens his magnificent work, Meditations. It is freshman philosophy but in a way all philosophy is freshman philosophy. The problem is one with which everyone is familiar. Descartes is sitting in his study, in his dressing gown, next to a stove on a winter day in Germany, writing his thoughts on a piece of paper. And now it occurs to him that he might be dreaming all this and that he is really naked, snuggled beneath his down comforter, dreaming that it is all taking place the way he has just described it. There is no internal difference between the two experiences. Any test you propose can easily be dreamt as having been performed. So here we have two pictures exactly alike, one a dream, the other waking experience. The difference between dream and waking experience is momentous. In my book Connections to the World, I argued that every philosophical problem has this form. That is what makes philosophy so fascinating and so difficult, and so different from science. That is why you cannot treat philosophical questions the way you treat scientific questions, as my teachers, who were logical positivists, believed that you could. They thought that meant that philosophical questions were meaningless—pseudoquestions. Whereas it was my view that the Brillo Box–Brillo box problem means that we can finally begin to understand what the definition of art should look like. My 1980 book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, takes the problem up in the intractable form I have just presented and manages to finesse two or three components of what seemed to me—and what still seems to me—to belong to a successful definition of art.

Interestingly, that definition coincides precisely with what Hegel said that our approach to art now must be: we are to concern ourselves with “(i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation, and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of both to one another.” The view I arrived at not only formulated a provisional definition of art, it also formulated the approach I was to take to art criticism. A work of art must in the first instance be about some-thing—have a meaning—and it must somehow embody that meaning in the way it presents itself to the viewer’s awareness. I sloganized this by saying that works of art are embodied meanings. As a critic, it seems to me, we need to ask what the meaning of a work is and then how the work embodied that meaning, and if, in Hegel’s terms, meaning and embodiment are “appropriate or inappropriate to one another.” With the art of the past, of course, when works of art constituted part of the form of life that those for whom the works were made actually lived, their users had no need for these questions. The works addressed them with an immediacy that left nothing further to do than to respond in the prescribed ways. But we do not and cannot relate to them in this internal way. The works were not made for museum display. They were not intended to be appreciated but, say, prayed to or worshipped. There was no room in their case for issues of connoisseurship. Consider, as an example, the furor caused by the exhibition “Primitivism and Modern Art” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1985, which juxtaposed Modernist works with figures from Oceania or Africa that had inspired them. The question was raised whether this was even a proper way to look at the latter works, which played so different a role in their cultures than Cubist or Fauve painting did in Europe or America. The very idea that they are “primitive” is the result of a forced and distorting comparison. There is no way we could relate to these objects as do those whose cultures they define or once defined.

When Hegel said that art invites us to intellectual consideration but not for the purpose of creating art again, I think he genuinely felt that there was no longer any way we could relate to art the way people had related to it in the past. He may very well have supposed that art could continue to be made for other purposes, for what he describes at one point as “the indulgence and relaxation of the spirit.” As such, “art appears as a superfluity” and a downright luxury that he found it difficult to defend. That is not an uncommon view—think of the way art is presented in the “Art and Leisure” or “Art and Entertainment” sections of important newspapers today. Think of the way it is widely regarded as frill when the place of art in the curriculum is addressed in school budgets. What Hegel obviously could not countenance was that works of art could play in modern life the central role he assigned to philosophy! But that is the role, as I see it, that art has increasingly insisted upon for itself, by raising the question of its identity as forcefully as I feel Brillo Box did, demanding a kind of intellectual engagement with itself. In truth, I felt that art had carried the responsibility of the philosophy of art further than the philosophers of art would have been capable. It was as if artists had to become their own philosophers in order to be taken seriously.

I am sometimes alleged to have said that art came to an end in 1964 with the appearance of Brillo Box, and I have to accept a certain measure of responsibility for this caricature. The truth is that my ideas on the philosophy of art began with that experience forty years ago. Warhol awoke me, to use a phrase of Kant’s, from my dogmatic slumber. That slumber was due as much as anything to my overall ignorance of much that was happening in the art world at that time. All across the art world in the early 1960s were examples that so closely resembled things that were not artworks that it would have been difficult to tell which was which. In music, John Cage was subverting the difference between musical sounds, narrowly considered, and the noises of mere life. Many of the members of Fluxus were students of Cage in his course on experimental composition at the New School. The Judson Dance Center was conducting experiments in the boundaries of dance: By what criterion, if any, can we tell when something is a dance movement? Can a dance not consist in someone just walking across the stage, or sitting in a chair for a certain length of time? It was an ambition of the New York avant-garde to “overcome the gap between art and life,” and many of its adherents derived inspiration from Dr. Suzuki’s seminars in Zen Buddhism at Columbia University. I too listened to Dr. Suzuki, and I know that when I wrote my first essay in the philosophy of art, I applied to the Brillo Box–Brillo box question certain ways of thinking that I derived from Zen. The difference between me and the avant-garde artists who were my contemporaries, and in a sense my peers, is that for them it was enough to erase the boundaries between the works of art they made and objects from ordinary life. That was not enough for me. My problem was what made such works of art art, when the objects they so exactly resembled were what I called mere real things? All that I knew is that the differences, whatever they were, could not meet the eye.

The best that I was able to do in that first essay, the title of which was “The Art World,” was to attempt to spell out some nonvisual differences. I thought that in order to see Brillo Box as art, one would need to see how the history of art had evolved to a point where it was now possible for such a work to exist. And one would have to know something of the state of discourse of the art world, within which that possibility existed. You would have to know about Duchamp, for example. You would have to know something about Clement Greenberg. And so on. None of this applied to Brillo cartons. They were situated in history in a very different way from Brillo Box, however much alike they looked. Imagine that someone close to you dies. Suppose someone tells you that there is a company that manufactures duplicates of anyone in the world. You can order a duplicate of your husband or your child. It takes a few weeks and costs a lot less than you would imagine. Would you order one? Would you love the duplicate just as much as its indiscernible “original”? This is the same kind of problem.

It may well be asked what this has to do with the end of art, and I realize now how completely philosophical my way of thinking at the time was when I consider what my reasoning was. I had begun to think of the history of modern art as a kind of Bildungsroman, to use the German term for a novel in which the hero or heroine attains an understanding of what he or she is. There is a kind of feminist novel, for example, in which a woman arrives at an inner understanding, or consciousness, of the meaning of her identity as a person as well as a woman. The end of the story is this advent of self-consciousness. What happens after that point, what she does in the light of this knowledge, is up to her. This idea is very Hegelian, which shows how really indebted to his thought mine has been. Hegel held a view that history ends in self-consciousness, in that state of affairs in which what he calls Spirit knows that it is Spirit, knows, that is, that it has misconstrued its nature but now has achieved self-knowledge. His great work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, is just such a story, in which Spirit goes through various adventures and misadventures of false knowledge until, at the end and as the climax, it breaks through into this kind of self-consciousness, which means the end of that history. Spirit will never again have to pass through such an agenda of self-education. The story is over though history will go on and on.

This was my view of the history of Modernism, which I read as a series of efforts at self-definition, in which each in a series of successive movements raised the question, What is art? There were so many movements, many of them accompanied by manifestos, in which art, so to speak, declares, This is what art is, this is what the past was and this is what the future will be, now that art knows what it is. As the sixties wore on, it seemed to me that such movements as were taking place were increasingly philosophical in nature. One of the exhibitions that affected me, if less momentously than Warhol’s, was a show of large, simple boxes, painted in dull industrial grays or tans, by the Minimalist artist Robert Morris, at the Green Gallery. In 1966 an important show of comparable sculptures was shown at the Jewish Museum—at that time the main venue for avant-garde art—under the title “Primary Structures.” As Minimalism evolved as a self-conscious movement, the objects in which it consisted grew less and less interesting, visually speaking, and more and more dependant upon texts, philosophical in nature, written by the artists, who often had the objects themselves fabricated in workshops. The objects were industrial: rows of bricks, areas of plain metal squares, fluorescent lightbulbs, plain metal modules, sections of prefabricated buildings. Unless you read the texts, you could have gotten very little out of the art, from which almost everything of visual interest had been expunged. One might almost suppose that the objects could have been dispensed with, leaving just the texts. In 1969, Conceptualism emerged as a movement. It really did away with objects altogether—or the objects were increasingly vestigial, as the thought became the fulcrum for the art. An extreme example was an untitled work of Robert Barry, consisting of “All the things I know but I am not at the moment thinking—1:36 PM; June 15, 1969.” The work would have consisted, among other things, in the Empire State Building, the Alps, and the Brooklyn Bridge, unless Barry was thinking of them, since they were among the things he clearly would have known.

Now Minimalism and Conceptualism were really both far more philosophical in intention than Pop Art ever was. The intention of Pop was more social than philosophical—it was initially concerned to overcome the difference between high art and popular or vernacular art. Indeed, Lawrence Alloway, who coined the term “Pop Art,” was persuaded that popular art—its music, films, literature, and art—is every bit in need of critical analysis as high art is. But all three of the movements of the mid- to late sixties served to purge the conception of art from many of the features it had acquired in the course of its history. Art no longer needed to be made by some specially gifted individual—the Artist—nor did it require any particular set of skills. It no longer needed to be difficult to make. And it no longer, as Robert Barry’s untitled work shows, had to be an object of some special kind. A sculpture could be a hole in the ground, as in a work by Dennis Oppenheim. It could be a hole in a wall, as in a work by Lawrence Wiener. It was, beginning with Fluxus, as if the sixties was a period of radical philosophical experimentation in which it was sought to discover how much could be subtracted from the idea of art. As with the Brillo Box–Brillo box problem, the artists were doing the philosophical work that the philosophers were unable or unwilling to do for them, so that it was not entirely a caricature to say that art, or at least avant-garde art, had turned into philosophy through the 1960s and into the next decade. By the 1970s it was possible to say, with Warhol, that anything could be a work of art, though much the same thing was said by the Conceptualists. It was possible to say, with Beuys, that anyone could be an artist. None of this meant that everything was art but that anything could be. It was no longer necessary to ask whether this or that could be a work of art since the answer would always be yes. And with that, it seems to me, there was no further need for this order of experiment. The concept of art had been purged of everything inessential. It would remain for philosophy to say what was left, if philosophers cared to worry about the problem. Artists were now free to make art out of anything in any way they chose.

This was the situation at the beginning of the 1980s, when I published “The End of Art.” I really had tried to identify, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, the few rather weak conditions that remained in the concept, or in the “definition” of art. They were so weak and general that they could be compatible with any work of art whatever, traditional or contemporary, Western or non-Western. The definition was sufficiently nonexclusive to be compatible with the recognition that there were otherwise no constraints on what a work of art look like, and with the situation that there would be no way of knowing when or whether one was in the presence of art. Since anything could be art, it seemed to me, we were in what one might call an end-of-art situation. It was the first time civilization had been in such a situation. It was a situation of perfect freedom. Artists could make of art what they wished. That at least was, to use a philosophical expression of the time, the deep structure of the art world we had lived into. The reason that the End of Art was not immediately embraced was that, for a time, the surface structure seemed rather different from the deep structure. This requires some comment.

In the early 1980s, there was a huge resurgence of painting. There was a sense of joy that painting was back, in the form of what was labeled Neo-Expressionism. Collectors, for example, who felt that they had missed the chance to acquire art in the fifties, when the New York School was turning out masterpiece after masterpiece, did not want to miss the opportunity to acquire an example of the new art and watch it appreciate in value over the years. Here was painting in the same heavily pigmented mode, large and brushy and figurative as well! The paintings went with the huge loft spaces that defined a new vision of urban life, in the kinds of lofts that artists had taken over from manufacturers when the art world colonized SoHo through the 1970s. The streets of SoHo were thronged at openings of figures like Julian Schnabel and David Salle. And the style seemed international—the inaugural exhibition of the redesigned Museum of Modern Art in 1984 made it appear as if Neo-Expressionism was a world phenomenon. It was a moment of institutional transformation in the art world, as two recent issues of ArtForum dedicated to the 1980s showed. Money flowed into art, and artists began to live like sovereign princes, patronizing the best restaurants, crossing the globe, with studios in spaces large enough to shelter a substantial workforce when they had been factories. The Neo-Expressionist label disguised deep differences, of course. The style had political causes in Germany that had no counterparts in New York. German artists deliberately painted badly in the hope of thwarting the market, but despite the fact that it was bad, “Bad Painting” was collected and cherished for its originality. In America, the idea of quality was felt in any case to be politically incorrect and unacceptably elitist. The leading theorists of the time, writing chiefly but not exclusively in the journal October, contended that painting was dead, largely because the society that patronized it—“Late Capitalism”—was believed to be in its last throes, to be replaced by a new Socialist society, whose art would be drab enough to be acceptable to Maoist aesthetics, under which none of those writers could live for five minutes.

Though I believed that art had come to an end, I did not believe that painting was dead. I merely felt that the new painting culture of the world was not an unfolding moment in the history of art, since that structure of history seemed to me to have played itself out. We were living in an end-of-art situation that, I had come to realize, was deeply pluralistic. Of course, painting was to be expected in such a situation. It was too deeply ingrained in our idea of art to pass out of the picture. Painting became sharply contested in the 1970s, largely for ideological reasons. In the associationist psychology of radical politics, it had become identified with the white male, colonialism, and all the bad things. And in the effort to purge the discourse of art of such concepts as the Masterpiece, the Genius, and even talent as unacceptably elitist, painting became charged with too many resentments to be any longer accepted as the defining medium of art. But there were no reasons inherent in the concept of art for painting not to exist, and if artists were prepared to face the heat of radical critique, there was nothing to keep them from painting, and a great deal to encourage them—like the very thing radicals found repugnant: money, acquisition, the pride of ownership, the art market. The fact that these forces even subverted Bad Painting in Germany is evidence for how powerful these are.

Notwithstanding these considerations, Neo-Expressionism did not last into the second half of the 1980s. Instead, artists began to work as though the idea of the end of art, as I had formulated it, had begun to define their consciousness of making art in the contemporary world. This of course does not mean that I was in any sense responsible for the way things worked out. My text on the end of art, though it gave me a certain fame, was not much read. It was not an influential text at all. What I had done is what Hegel said philosophers ideally do. We are all children of our times, he writes, but it is the task of philosophers to grasp their times as thought. I believe that is what I did in “The End of Art.” What I had not expected was to see what I grasped as thought become so palpably the way that art began to be practiced, when the deep structure I had intuited began to inflect the surface structure—not because I had intuited it but because it had finally to break through into general consciousness. It was the art that was created in terms of this consciousness that I was to face as a critic.

My practice as a critic has been to address art after the end of art in the way that Hegel addressed art before the end of art—to look for the meaning of the art and then to determine how the meaning is embodied in the object. From the perspective of this practice, writing about Leonardo or Artemisia Gentileschi does not differ from writing about Gerhard Richter or Judy Chicago. All art is conceptual art (with a small c), and always has been. Even in those golden ages that Hegel sentimentalized, there had to be a discourse that exactly resembled that of art criticism as he understood it. This would have been the discourse of the artists themselves, who needed to be able to discuss what they made with reference to the effect they meant their art to have. What Hegel’s discussion lacks is the conception of art that is made by artists with certain ends in view. The critic today occupies a double perspective, that of the artist and that of the viewer. The critic must recover what effect the art was to have upon the viewer—what meaning the artist meant to convey—and then how this meaning is to be read in the object in which it is embodied. I see my task as mediating between artist and viewer, helping the viewer grasp the meanings that were intended. There may have been ages when critics were not needed to interpret the art for the viewers, but as the history of art has evolved, the critic is needed more and more to explain to the viewer what is being seen. We have to treat the art of today the way Hegel treated the art of the past, when artist and viewer constituted—or ideally constituted—an actual community.

What the end of art means is only that we are at last conscious of this truth.