ART, CULTURE AND CONSERVATIS M
Richard Gilman
THE IDEA OF THE AVANT-GARDE
Art, seen in relation to its supreme
destination, remains a thing of the
past.
It
has hence lost for us what
once made it true and vital, its for–
mer reality and necessity. -
HEGEL
The history of art is drawing to a
close. -
HAROLD ROSENBERG
If
art is always dying, there is never any scarcity of theories
to explain why this should be so, but there is a shortage of insights into
the states of mind in which the obituaries arise. Art hasn'>t yet died, and
Harold Rosenberg is as likely to be proven wrong as was Hegel, that
philosopher so intent on systems and abstract perfections that he was
oblivious to wha t was happening almost in his very presence. In the
1830s in Germany Georg Buchner was writing plays that would inau–
gurate a new era of sensibility and that go on informing literary ima–
gination to this moment.
There is something especially ironic about the charge leveled against
certain critics of being "trendy" for championing new forms, when the
really fashionable intellectual pose is that of a steely-eyed, not-to-be–
taken-in defender of civilization against the new barbarians. The irony
is of course compounded by the fact that these pundits at the parapets
are mostly erstwhile evangelists for art and for new art in particular,
and that in defending the past against the present and future they
betray their own pasts and the natu re of the human activity we call
art or imagination or creativity, which whatever its transformations is
not likely to die and whose essence is to change - which can look like
dying.
