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The Dark Side of the End of Art

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2022

Abstract

American philosopher Arthur C. Danto in 1984 proclaimed that by exhibiting the Brillo Boxes by Andy Warhol in 1964 the art and its history as we know it ended.

Danto was convinced that art's premises in re-presenting the reality as being the "other" beside the life dissolved into the life itself and thus the life began to be the form of art, without the need to form itself as something "other". Danto's enthusiastic and more importantly retrospective acceptance of the end of art, however, cannot be taken as granted, as it is possible to see through thinking and work of Romanian philosopher and art historian Robert Klein.

His approach toward art and its history was as well connected with life and with the notion of the end of art happening in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, the outcome of this process was for him quite opposite than it was for Danto - therefore, as the study suggest based on Niklas Luhmann's system theory adapted to art history, through Klein's work and life we can think about the dark side of the end of art.