HEGEL’S END-OF ART THESIS.
“Art , considered in its highest voc ation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place.” - Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford; The Clarendon Press, 1975. 10. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Hegel’s writing are to this superb translation.This is the most forceful of Hegel’s many formulations of what we may designate his End-of-Art Thesis, and it appears very near the beginning of the published version of his Lectures on Aesthetics - his Vorlesungen über die Aesthetic - delivered for the fourth and final time in the Winter Semester of 1828, at the University of Berlin.
The thesis is so intricately woven into the texture of Hegel’s text, however, that it must be regarded as a central and indeed as tructural feature of his philosophy of art, rather than a critical obiter dictum regarding the art of his time. And it as much addresses what other philosophers have said about art, as art itself.
Of course art will go on being made. There will be art after the end of art.
"Art can be used as a fleeting play, affording recreation and entertainment, decorating our surroundings, giving pleasantness to the externals of our life, and making other objects stand out by artistic adornm ent.’ - Ibid., 7.
So understood, art will play any number of roles in what Hegel terms the objective spirit of a society - the system of meanings and practices that constitute the form of life its members live. But Hegel was not speaking of art in terms of objective spirit when he advanced the End-of-Art Thesis.
“The universal need for art … is man’s rational need to lift the inner and outer world into his spiritual consciousness as an object in which he recognizes again his own self.” - Ibid., 31.
That is art’s ‘highest vocation’,to which alone the End-of-Art Thesis has application. So the truth of the thesis was consistent with art, and even great art, continuing to be made. In the Epilogue to his lecture, [i]Origins of the Work of Art /i, Martin Heidegger wrote:
“The judgment that Hegel passes in these statements cannot be evaded by pointing out that since Hegel’s lectures … we have seen many new art works and art movements arise. Hegel did not mean to deny this possibility. The question, however, remains: is art still an essential and necessary way in which truth that is decisive for our historical existence happens, or is art no longer of this character?” - Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”. Translation by Albert Hofstadter, Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger. Edited by Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns. New York; The Modern Library, 1964. 700.
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