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what happened to the architectects newspaper ? their online main page was last updated 11.16.2004.
ARTHUR DANTO
"Art Criticism After the End of Art"
Tuesday January 18 2005
Doors: 6:30, Lecture: 7:00
Space is limited, PLEASE email info@swissinstitute.net to reserve your entry
Arthur Danto is an American analytic philosopher and art critic who has spent the last half century teaching at Columbia University and has been an art critic for The Nation since 1984. In his role as philosopher, author, and art critic for The Nation, Arthur Danto has been a major shaper of recent aesthetic theory. He is best known for a contemporary version of Hegel's "end of art" thesis, first ennunciated by Danto in a 1984 essay called "The End of Art", and developed most recently in his After the End of Art (Princeton University Press, 1997). His numerous book credits include the 1990 National Book Critics Circle Award winner Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present and The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (2000).
"To further disconcert the public, the artists distributed a document which simply described the works displayed, refusing any commentary other than the “slogan” of the first event, which indeed had been staged with methods close to those used in advertising to launch a new product. The slogan was: “Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni are not exhibiting” (my emphasis). As Michel Claura would write during the fourth and last showing of this short-lived group, in the catalogue of the Fifth Paris Biennial in September 1967, for which the paintings reentered the galleries they had so hurriedly left a few months before: “Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni are the deliberate abandonment of sensibility, which has always been the attraction and driving force of art. All of Buren’s canvases – and the same holds for those of Mosset, of Parmentier, of Toroni – are identical. There is no more notion of perfectibility. Any search for an illusion would be in vain. A painting thus “reduced” is neither all nor nothing. Neither comfort or unease should be sought in these paintings. There is no communication. The spectator is left alone with himself. The contact with the artwork has lost its principle “quality”: its property as an emollient... The painting of Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, Toroni does nothing but exist.” [8] The four artists will separate on 5 December 1967.
Marcel Duchamp, who had witnessed the group’s third showing with some perplexity, passed away in October 1968, after having watched the students strike out against a society whose shortcomings he knew so well. The ideological agitation of Paris Spring had led to the creation of people’s studios at the School of Fine Arts and the School of Decorative Arts, whose productions are still on sale sometimes. No doubt more significant was the publication of Dubuffet’s book Asphyxiante culture [9] and of Jean Baudrillard’s Système des objets, is which consumption is defined as a “total idealist practice, which far exceeds our relations to objects and our relations among individuals, one that extends to all manifestations of history, communication and culture.”[10] These efforts to question habits of thought and vision, in which the world of representation counts for more than the representation of the world, could not help but lead artists toward more extreme avenues of research, allowing for a new apprehension of the artwork. At the same moment, Arte Povera was born in Italy with the action of Germano Celant, while in the United States, Joseph Kosuth and Mel Bochner were laying the foundations of “Conceptual Art”. One of the few French representatives of this latter group, Bernar Venet, himself lived in New York at the time, where he was creating mathematical diagrams."