The End of Art: Postwar Culture and Criticism in the US
Instructor: Timothy R. Quigley

Rothko, Robert Mann Gallery, 1949, Aaron Siskind Foundation

Course Description

In the mid-1980s, the American philosopher and critic Arthur Danto and the renowned German art historian Hans Belting—unaware of one another's activities—declared the end of art and asked whether the history of art had reached a similar fate. Others jumped on the bandwagon declaring the death of painting, modernism, narrative, and even history itself. In the wake of an unprecedented, dramatic, and influential wave of artistic production and criticism in the U.S. after the Second World War, which included the work of New York School painters, the writings of formalist critics such as Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, and the "postmodern" critiques of the '60s and '70s in Artforum and October magazine, the age of the epilogue was born. In this course, we critically re-examine post-war visual culture with particular emphasis on the transition from "late modernist" to contemporary art and criticism. Through careful study of the images and essays that have shaped the present discourse, we assess the meaning and implications of the claim that art is exhausted and consider the prospects for constructing new ways of understanding and experiencing visual culture "after the end of art".