Contemporary art manifests the peculiarity of the time that defines it. Admittedly, the art of all times expresses the time in which it is produced, but what we call ‘contemporary art’ reveals its own character with radical evidence and through a clear break with previous art. It does so immediately, at first glance: coming into contact with a work of contemporary art means realising, from the outset, that one is dealing with an expression that belongs to the era in which it has been conceived and that, above all, it is categorically different from all art of the past. The feeling that distinguishes the perception of contemporary art from that of previous eras is that contemporary art embodies the rupture with everything that precedes it. Its existence speaks to a rupture greater in magnitude than that of previous revolutions in art history. If other ruptures also took on the previous eras and stood precisely in opposition to those that came before, here it seems that art has taken a totally different path. It claims to be a definitive and irreversible break, introducing and continuing to introduce something different and new in the field of art by those who produce it and in the perception of the public.

The most common experience of a standard viewer of contemporary art no longer condenses into an act of admiration for something beautiful, but is summarised in a question that, on several levels, tries to understand the intentions underlying a certain work, the reasons that led the artist to conceive it, the elements that make it a work of art, and the reasons that justify it as art. The experience of those who visit the MoMa in New York or move from one pavilion to the other at the Venice Art Biennale is radically different from those who admire the pictorial masterpieces of Renaissance art at the Louvre in Paris or wander through the ruins of the Parthenon in Athens: in front of a work of art the standard viewer no longer exclaims ‘how beautiful!’, but finds herself wondering ‘what does that mean?’, ‘is that art?’, or more simply ‘what is that thing?’.¹ Surprise, shock, often just disorientation. Something has happened: the exclamation has given way to the question.

The question arises not so much from the obvious diversity of contemporary art with the art of other historical periods, but from the nature of this diversity, which is expressed at various levels, for example: the breaking of the representational and mimetic modes, replaced by or mixed with abstract expressions; the advent of new audio, video or, in recent years, computer technologies, which have made it possible to broaden the expressive capacities and the possibility of technical reproducibility of works of art; the inclusion of art in the processes of industrial and mass society or in the society of entertainment, which profoundly changes its original power; the abandonment of the modalities that tradition has handed down as the acquired typologies of artistic genres, such as painting or sculpture, in favour of new artistic modalities such as performance art, installation art or land art; the introduction of everyday objects or their perceptually exact imitations as artworks; the passage from a dimension where the sensorial-emotional experience is central to one where the rational one is fundamental, specifically that of reflection.

Yayoi Kusama’s installations covered with infinite dots, Bruce Nauman’s neon installations, Marina Abramović’s performances, Jeff Koons’ giant painted steel balloons, Maurizio Cattelan’s irreverent sculptures, Damien Hirst’s animals in formaldehyde or Olafur Eliasson’s artificial atmospheres are just some of the most popular examples of a plural and heterogeneous art. This starts with the historical avant-gardes, with artists such as Marcel Duchamp, runs through the entire twentieth century, crosses countless other experiences, movements and figures such as Andy Warhol or Joseph Beuys, and comes down to today’s standard viewer, producing a completely different situation in the world of art. It has never ceased to embody the character of a decisive and, apparently, irreversible fracture compared to the art of previous centuries. If the history of art, from its origins until the end of the nineteenth century, especially until the appearance of inventions such as photography and cinema, follows a path certainly rich in extraordinary changes and revolutionary innovations, but still consistent with an internal logic that allows us to perceive as related artists across the centuries, the twentieth century has seen a multifaceted explosion of artistic expressions that seems to have broken inexorably with that logic.

Even though the artistic experiences just briefly mentioned are already very different from each other, what I want to suggest here is that the recognition of a sharp divide that contemporary art provokes compared to previous art history is familiar and easily perceptible. We can clearly see that most of the theoretical grids with which we interpreted past art have become difficult to apply and are unusable most of the time. The kind of art we have to deal with is something that has once and for all broken the conceptual barriers, hierarchies and genre distinctions to which we were accustomed, allowing us to enter into a ‘flow’, often difficult to interpret, which manifests itself first of all as contemporary, or as different from what was before.²

It is certainly not just a matter of detecting a change only in the experience made by a standard viewer. This common experience is just the clearest and most easily understandable epiphenomenon of a much deeper transformation. The fracture involves the aesthetic experience of both standard and specialist viewers as well as the mode and conception of artistic practice by artists, the political-institutional organisation of the world of art as well as its own notion. It is a transformation that concerns art in all its aspects and that stands as an epochal step in the course of its history.

To explain this historical-artistic phenomenon, in the theory and philosophy of art of the recent decades, the so-called end-of-art thesis has had renewed success. With reference to its famous origins in Hegel’s philosophy, this epochal upheaval was read in terms of the end of a certain narrative, which led to something absolutely different from everything prior. The expression ‘end of art’ was not, of course, meant to decree the cessation of artistic production (which probably has never had such an expansion as in this last period of history), but a profound change. In the words of the art historian Hans Belting: it ‘registers the fact that the end of a tradition, a tradition that had become a canon in its familiar form since modernity, is looming in art as well as in the conceptual images [Denkbildern] of art history’ (Belting 1994, 22).³

This kind of analysis, with different accents, has involved various perspectives in the last decades, from the most art-historical one (Belting 1994) to that most addressed to art criticism (Clair 1983; Kuspit 2004), up to the most strictly philosophical (Bürger 1974; Formaggio 1983; Vattimo 1985; García Düttmann 2000). It has also been shown that these positions constitute only the last chapter of a long tradition (Geulen 2002; Vercellone 2013; Vieweg et al. 2015) and it has continued to deepen, even in recent years, with the rediscovery and analysis of the positions that gave rise to this tradition, that of Hegel and the German philosophical context of the time (Werle 2011; Lesce 2017).

The majority of these studies take up art in general and, despite some differences introduced by particular artistic forms, develop a discourse on the end of art through understanding art as a unitary whole. Moreover, in testing the application of the thesis to specific cases, many have turned largely to figurative art, that is to say, to painting and sculpture, for which the quality of the epochal change seems more evident than in other media. The examples taken into consideration to support the end-of-art thesis derive mainly from that context and there is no doubt that the adoption of the thesis as a hermeneutic key to interpreting contemporary figurative art has given remarkable results. A recent example is Robert B. Pippin’s After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Pippin 2014). In this study, Pippin proposes a Hegelian interpretation of an artistic phenomenon that comes after Hegel’s death; namely, the great season of Impressionist painting. With the support of the contemporary art-historical perspectives of Michael Fried and T. J. Clark, and also in confrontation with the philosophical perspective of Martin Heidegger, Pippin discusses the thesis on the end of art, testing it with works by Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne, that is, figurative art, and in this case pictorial art.

Nevertheless, the thesis on the end of art is mostly directed at art in general, assuming and, in some cases, showing that the decisive phenomena of rupture occurred even for the arts that are not traditionally included among the figurative ones. In fact, examples of deep discontinuity can be found in music, from the dodecaphonic and atonal revolutions of the early twentieth century to the works of experimental and electroacoustic music by composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio or even those of aleatoric or chance-controlled music by John Cage, which have radically changed the production and listening of the musical composition. Not to mention here the fracture between so-called cultivated music and popular music, with a great variety of musical subgenres (not at all uncultivated, from jazz to pop music, from rock to film scores), which has been interpreted in terms of a possible end of art. Examples of profound innovation in what was previously conceived of as artistic can be found in dance, from Steve Paxton’s contact improvisation expressions to the reformulations of the Tanztheater, for example, with Pina Bausch, which reinvent the concepts of choreography and dance, developing the ideas of German Expressionism of the early decades of the twentieth century. Even in architecture one can find signs of a break—here too, developing in extreme terms some of the avant-garde concepts of the early twentieth century—with the works of architects trying to deconstruct the traditional meaning of this art, from Robert Venturi to Paolo Portoghesi, from Frank Gehry to Rem Koolhaas.

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