This question started with Duchamp’s ready-mades and Dada: is there a future for art? Will progress in art eventually come to an end? Many have argued that the answer is yes, and even that the end is now.
Modernism was a type of idealist art which emphasized what was horrible or unjust about life in the attempt to make the rest of the world see that the institutions and traditions humans put their faith in were choking their freedom and pursuit of happiness. This grew out of Renaissance Humanist philosophy, which valued humanity over God (radical for the time) and thus shifted the paradigm on how people spent their time; rather than striving for heaven, people were striving for happiness. Modernism brought us out of the Classical period, where art was very heavy and measured and religious, and ushered ideals and other styles into Western thought. The goal of Modernism was to make a better world.
But such an idealistic view of the future didn’t make it through two World Wars and a major Depression unscathed, and by the end of the Second World War, Modernism was basically in shambles. By the time the Cold War came around, few artists that had initially supported Modernism even believed that there would be a future, with nuclear bombs hanging overhead. Thus came Dada: disordered art for a disordered world, nonsense born from nonsense. Influenced by Dada and a Postmodern world, conceptual art came to be.
This is where, shockingly, a lot of people draw the line. In conceptual art, the idea is valued over the execution, with the art itself only really serving as a vehicle for the concept. Anything can be art. ANYTHING can be, and is, art, when framed by a conceptual artist. This pluralism is often considered the end of art: if anything is art, what is left to be made?
The answer doesn’t exist. No one knows. Famous philosopher Hegel argued that art had reached it’s last stage in his lifetime, which would make up not even the conceptual, but solely the Modern. He believed that once art had become capable of transcending recreations of the visible world and moving into the spiritual, once a piece of art could reflect and hold spirituality, art was done. That was it. But have we made it there?
Hegel’s own dialectic fails him here. If Modernism was the thesis out of which pluralism and Postmodernism evolved, with help from a Dadaist antithesis, it follows that the pattern is not over. Pluralism, the new thesis, will synthesize into something else. It may take a while, but, as long as we still have questions about art--what is left to be made? can spirituality truly be crafted into an art form?--art will never die.
