Four centuries after Greek tragedy was born out of Homer’s epic story of the fall of Troy, Plato sought to put an end to it by banning the poets from his ideal polis in Republic. The impetus behind Plato’s renunciation of the poets and their ‘inspired’ words is mixed. On the one hand, Plato placed works of art on the lowest rung of existence, at the lower extreme of the divided line, mere images of images “at the third remove from that which is” (1997, 598e). On the other hand, Plato saw a powerful but menacing force in poetry. At a time when the oral tradition was being challenged by the written tradition, the learning passed on by the poets—and perhaps those who would place too much authority in their cantos—seemed to impede the higher learning seen in reason and the written word. Aristotle’s defense of poetry showed its value to the polis, arguing that its purpose and creation lay within the confines of reason. Yet, after 2000 years, art’s status remains questionable under the critical scrutiny of philosophy. Despite the commitment of romantic philosophers to raise the status of the artwork, in the last 200 years the idea that art is at an end has emerged as a recurring theme.

The task of this book is to examine the end-of-art topic, which began in antiquity, from the perspective of three thinkers: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Danto. I do not defend art against assertions that it has come to an end. I don’t really see much need for that. My aim is to explain the reasoning of the philosophers who do make the claim that art has ended. What I have found common to these claims is this: when an object is recognized as art, a transformation occurs that changes how we relate to it, and this is always linked more to a transformation of thought than of perception itself. Each of the thinkers examined strives, with differing approaches, to overcome Cartesian dualism, negating the two-world perspective that emerged in the thought of Augustine. This attempt to overcome dualism relocates the transformative effect of art from the eye to the mind. To understand art is not to understand what we see, but how we see it.

The end-of-art theories of Hegel and Nietzsche represent opposite sides of the romantic drive to overcome the merely real with the creative power of the mind. Though Hegel sees art as an essential element in the triumph of Mind over the physical, in the end it is conceptual consciousness that pervades the world. Thus, the imaginative and sensuous knowing of art cannot rise to the level of philosophy when its material can no longer sustain spirit’s message. The antipode of Hegel’s idealism is found in Nietzsche’s nihilism. For Nietzsche, it is the individual’s creative power that provides life justification as an aesthetic phenomenon. For the early Nietzsche, confronted with scientific advancement, art’s enchanting power is diminished to the point at which he sees its end. With the encroachment of science on the realm of myth, art loses its ability to harness the inherent oppositions of existence that grant humanity the semblance of meaning. The absence of meaningful symbols, combined with the romantic artist’s reliance on inspiration, led to the loss of artistic methods that sustained the communicative medium of art’s transfiguring effect. Without art, the later Nietzsche writes, only the creative power of will can overcome life’s dearth of meaning in the one world we have left.

In the art of the late twentieth century, Danto sees Hegel’s prediction that art will end in its transformation into philosophy come true. Danto describes this end in terms of the fulfillment of the era of art’s internal narrative. Danto aims to resolve the mind/body divide that Hegel, following Kant, also will overcome. But Danto’s ontological approach is pre-Kantian, and though he ends up in a position similar to Hegel’s, he sees the essence of art, as humans, embodied in material that represents. The question of art’s essence, though resolved through history, is driven by the logic of the internal conversation chased on the medium of art. Danto interprets the change of art from the eye to the mind in terms of the locus of art theory, which becomes a conversation no longer apparent within the artwork itself. With the end of the narrative of art, art is free to express itself in any manner, marking the end of the era of art. Having reached the limit of its internal drive for self-definition, art is now defined philosophically and interpreted through the theories of the artworld. In some sense, this completes Hegel’s prediction. Because art has become aware of its definition, it is free from the driving constraint of finding a definition. The task of art’s definition is passed on to philosophy, releasing it from the sort of narrative drive that could lead to further development of its concept. The freedom of art is bought at a price though. In the world of art after the era of art, artworld concepts, which explain what makes art art, are explained by theorists or critics who act as mediators, interpreting and communicating the embodied meaning when it is no longer perceived directly by the audience.

The primary task of this book is to clarify what each of the thinkers examined means by the end of art. In the process, a better understanding of their theories of art is gained, along with, I hope, a deeper insight into the nature of art and how its embodiment is transformed over time. In the final chapter, criticisms of these theories are presented in the form an alternative narrative of twentieth-century art. While I agree that art has undergone profound morphological changes, I argue that what art is has not fundamentally changed. Our historical context, our ‘worldview’, if I can use the term, has changed drastically. I hold that the toolkit artists use to create art is linked to the culture in which they live. Clifford Geertz argues, “art and the equipment to grasp it are made in the same shop” (1976, 1497). ¹ If there is truth to his anthropological claim, changes at the level of our understanding of the world, likewise alter the tools and content with which art is made. I doubt that this is a controversial claim, and if we follow this notion that it is not art itself, but the tools and the shop in which they are made that have changed, we can make sense of the end of art with a slightly different narrative.

The approach mentioned above is not philosophical, and I want to remain within the bounds of philosophy. Different philosophical thinkers draw the boundaries of philosophy differently. However, within the boundaries drawn, a philosophical system must comport with the phenomenon to which it applies. Otherwise, ‘reality’ becomes a counterexample. Ernst Gombrich’s theory of pictorial representation demonstrates how an artistic language develops, showing that art, or as Danto notes, the pictorial image, has a history. Using primarily Gombrich’s theory, which views art as a language of sorts, I present a narrative that gives an alternative to Danto’s. Acknowledging the shortcomings of Gombrich’s theory, it still has considerable explanatory power, especially toward the end of what Danto calls the era of art. I use Gombrich’s theory to show that art is still exhibiting the problem-solving, conversationally-oriented, capacity of philosophy that Danto claims is absent in post-historical art. This does not show that Danto’s theory has failed. Rather, it is a reinterpretation of it in light of a different narrative. Insofar as in ‘post-history’, art still strives to solve problems presented by the lack of precedent available in the new age of artistic pluralism; the internal problem-solving drive used in presenting metaphors, visual or otherwise, for interpretation has not changed.

Plato’s relegation of art to the lower end of the spectrum of being led him to a critique of art that held it to be a copy of mere appearance. In Plato’s view, if the beliefs acquired through the senses were an inadequate guide for moral development, mimetic copies of the sensual could only lead one further astray. Because the poem’s cadence would bypass reason, it could never aid in showing the Good. Thus, the formal truths of the intelligible world must replace the shadowy images of mimetic art. Plato assessed the Homeric epics and the tragedies as inner appetite externalized. The poet aggrandized the gods, who were little more than the projection of human desire and weakness onto immortal beings. Reciting the poems brought the appetites back to us strengthened through repetition and intonation (Lear 1992, 209). In the appetite of the poet, Plato saw the appetite of the tyrant. Though the appetite of the tyrant acted itself out in the realm of society, the same tyrannical appetite existed in the poet, merely writ large in rhyme (Plato 1997, 568b). Plato hoped that by creating an ideal state with social roles that could rationally accommodate one’s desires according to personality type, the gods on Olympus would disappear. It was Plato’s argument that philosophy, not poetry, should be the source of moral values. It was at this juncture that art ended as a way of expressing the tragic truth of the world, and under the guidance of philosophy, art sought to show the world as a rational ideal, depicting the world as it should be.

Referring to the “ancient quarrel between [poetry] and philosophy,” Plato asks that one who loves poetry should prove its benefit to the polis (1997, 607). In Poetics, Aristotle meets Plato’s challenge by showing that poetry is a technē, that it is not an imitation that degrades reality, and that it ennobles rather than enflames the emotions. Thus, poetry does not threaten but serves to benefit the polis. It was not until the European Enlightenment, though, that the romantic quest to free the imagination posited the artistic creation, in a reversal of Plato’s schema, as the real world, in contrast to deceptive appearances. The romantic thinkers, seeing that the arts had mastered the illusion of replication, sought to take art one step further, and following a manifesto of “poetic imperialism” longed to conquer reality itself, imbuing all of reality with its aphoristic power. “Every aspect of the community of men—religion, science, politics—must, by direct attack or peaceful infiltration, become infused with the poetic spirit and in the end be transformed into a work of art” (Heller 1965, 92). Though Hegel was a romantic, his notion of reality would appear at face value to be closer to Plato than to his romantic contemporaries, for the tension between imagination and reason strongly divides these positions. Yet, their positions have more affinity than one would think. In the words of Erich Heller,

In both the early Romantics and Hegel, the human mind puts forward a total claim for itself, a claim in which revolution and eschatology are uneasily mingled. The world must become imagination and poetry, say the Romantics; and Hegel says, the world must become rational consciousness. (Heller 1965, 94)

The romantic vision foresees the permeation of all reality with art, but for Hegel, art merely paves the way for rational consciousness. Despite seeing the valuable role art plays in spirit’s progression, in the end Hegel falls on the side of Plato, noting “it was early in history that thought passed judgement against art as a mode of illustrating the idea of the Divine…even with the Greeks, for Plato opposed the gods of Homer and Hesiod starkly enough” (AE 103). For Hegel, the highest level of rational consciousness cannot be reached without negating all vestiges of imagination. Yet the reality of the romantics is still achieved through the power of mind to form a reality that is higher than what ‘is’. The early romantics and Hegel seek realities that are on opposite ends of the divided line; nonetheless, achieving these realities depends on the artistic imagination for actualization.

The end-of-art theme, which is explored in the following chapters, hinges on the power of art to effect change in how mind forms the world. Whether art functions to raise mind to a higher state of rational consciousness or serves to provide a saving illusion in light of life’s overwhelming meaninglessness, its end comes when it is no longer able to perform its task effectively. The end-of-art theories of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Danto are examined in the following pages in light of the interplay of two basic themes: where is art located in the one world/one substance perspective; and what is the active element in the work of art? For Hegel, spirit passes through the material moving toward the more highly organized form of conceptual consciousness. For Nietzsche, will becomes the locus of agency. Will is able to transform the world from the inside, whether as myth that transforms its adherents or the Übermensch with the power to view any landscape as fertile and green: new worlds are willed through the power to name. Danto’s ontological perspective sidesteps the normative questions posed by Hegel and Nietzsche. Art is transformed by perceiving an object as a new sort of thing. It is already transformed when interpreted as art. The embodied meaning, linked to the unique representation of one’s world, is represented in the artwork, much as the artist manifests it in the style of their own person. When works of art are interpreted, a conversation is activated through artworld concepts, which have a logic of their own.

For Hegel and Nietzsche, the end of art comes when the active element is no longer able to progress through the medium of art. For Danto, the end of art arrives when a self-reflective and self-defining process reaches its logical conclusion. At this point, the essential nature of art can be known, something that can only happen when the era of art is closed. Art, for Danto, is fundamentally different in post-history; there is a “triple transformation, in the making of art, in the institutions of art, in the audience for art” (AA 183). Viewing this transformation as the fulfillment of art’s essential nature, Danto suggests that ‘tribal’ tendencies of the pluralistic arts community should be overcome by complete openness to all forms of art. I do not argue with the claim that openness may be good per se, and I accept the last two claims about the post-historical art world; however, with the first claim, that art is made in a fundamentally different manner, I differ, for the following reasons. First, Danto seems to use a narrative explanation that does not completely cover the phenomenon. Other narratives ar...