Hobsbawm and the end of painting
October 4 2012
Here's an interesting essay by Donald Kuspit on the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's 1998 article 'Behind the Times: The Decline and Fall of the 20th-Century Avant-Gardes'. In the article, Hobsbawm examines how the definition of modern and contemporary 'art' became so widely inclusive as to be almost anything. At the root of it all, perhaps, was the exhausted end of painting:
What could painting do once it abandoned the traditional language of representation, or moved sufficiently far from its conventional idiom to make it incomprehensible? What could it communicate? Where was the new art going? The half-century from the Fauves to Pop Art was filled with desperate attempts to answer this question by means of an endless succession of new styles and their often associated and often impenetrable manifestoes. Contrary to the conventional belief, they had nothing in common except the conviction that it was important to be an artist and, once representation was left to cameras, that anything was legitimate as art, so long as the artist claimed it as a personal creation.
