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- Title
The End of Art Revised The video-footage from the Museum of Mosul as an ›end‹ of the theory.
- Authors
Sher, Kim
- Abstract
In his ›Lectures on Fine Art‹ from the 1820s, Hegel famously claimed that as a form of the ›Absolute‹, art has reached its final, most advanced, stage with the dissolution of romanticism. Following Hegel, art-critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto suggests in a series of essays from the late twentieth century that our conceptual art accords with the thesis of ›the end of art‹. That is, art has become, according to Danto, depended on theory and does not carry any historical importance anymore. The notorious video recorded by ISIS in 2015, in which the militant group violently destroys age-old sculptures at the museum of Mosul, serves as a point of departure for meditating on the meaning of Hegel’s thesis ›for us‹ in this essay. Although both the artifacts appearing in the video and the video itself are not considered by us as works of art, these artifacts were conceived as art in the past and, paradoxically, only as video-footage they survived their material destruction and appeared to us. On the one hand, the content of the video attests to Hegel’s claim that art »is for us a thing of the past«; on the other, the video itself points toward a new form of expression, beyond (the thesis of) the end of art.
- Subjects
MOSUL (Iraq); HEGEL, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831; HISTORY in art; CONCEPTUAL art; VIDEO recording; TWENTIETH century; MUSEUMS
- Publication
Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (ZÄK), 2021, Vol 66, Issue 1, p129
- ISSN
0044-2186
- Publication type
Article