georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

History of Art, Practice 43to say as a discipline—claims quite simply to find the answer in thehistory of art in the ‘‘subjective’’ sense, which is to say in the discourseand in the productions of certain artists who supposedly ruined, inthe twentieth century (or even the nineteenth), the serene orderingand historical specificity of the Fine Arts. In this sense, the ‘‘end ofart’’ is articulated by more or less iconoclastic objects such as Malevitch’sWhite Square on White Ground, Rodchenko’s Last Painting (1921),and Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, or, moving closer to us, byAmerican ‘‘bad painting’’ and the postmodernist ideology . . . But isthe understanding of the ‘‘end of art’’ consistent in all this? Doesn’twhat some call ‘‘the end’’ appear to others as a purified manifestationof what art still could and even should be? The ambiguity and sterilityof such pronouncements soon become obvious. 37‘‘The end of art’’ is, moreover, a strange expression: with equalaptness, one can readily imagine it serving as a rallying cry for theheralds (or heroes, I don’t know which) of postmodernism and as thefrantic shout of those who are, overall, horrified by contemporary art. . . It is as if the affectation of a value, positive-inflamed in one senseand negative-frightened in the other, were not enough to reduce theirony of one and the same phrase being brandished by two rival factions:which evokes a dialogue of the deaf (one party yelling: ‘‘Theend of art!’’; to which the other retorts: ‘‘Not at all! The end ofart!!’’)—even of an absurd battle in which two armies would hurlthemselves at each other while waving the same flag and soundingthe same charge.To be sure, the two armies do not ascribe the same meaning, eachin its clamor, to the meaning of the history of art when they brandishthe expression ‘‘the end of art.’’ However, what confers this samesound of the trumpet upon them both is that, each in ‘‘its meaning,’’yet together, they sing the glory of a meaning of history—a meaning ofthe history of art. Basically, the phrase ‘‘the end of art’’ can be utteredonly by someone who has decided or presupposed the following: arthas a history and this history has a meaning. The fact that art can beconceptualized as dying implies that it probably has been conceptualizedas nascent, which implies that it began and that it developeddialectically to its ultimate point, something that we might call its