Предыстория, история и постистория бесконечной дискуссии. Тезис о конце, или смерти, искусства до и после Гегеля / Pre-history, history and post-history of endless discussion. The thesis of the end, respectively, of the death of art before and after Hegel

This paper aims to reflect on a controversial “endless discussion” on the end or death of art, highlighting its main stages and most significant resonances from antiquity to the present. Indeed, Hegel is often considered a philosophical precursor of the end and a prophet of a future cultural apocalypse. Our intent will be to refute this view of a visionary and prescient Hegelian philosophy-and especially aesthetics-for the sake of the cultural-historical and educational (formal) value Hegel attributes to art even in dissonant and hyperintellectualistic modernity. It should be remembered that important reflections on the (apparent) end of art have been taking place since antiquity as Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) well demonstrates in the Naturalis Historia. It will then be Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455) and Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) in the Vite de’più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (1550) who will develop a cyclical paradigm that will be later taken up by Winchelmann: that of the infinite deaths and infinite rebirths of art. Although Hegel, like many of his contemporaries, was a follower of Winckelmann, he could not be so without criticism. It was in fact Hegel, as a theorist of dissolutions without end to defend another fluid, progressive and multifaceted paradigm of endless dissolutions, because art is firmly anchored at the apex of the system, it remains (and resists) in the sphere of absolute spirit. Thus, it is not art that dies to be reborn, as in the first biological-parabolic paradigm, but are its historical particularities that dissolve to make way for new traits. With Hegel’s death (1831) a glorious epoch closed forever and a more modest one of epigones began, in which the thesis of the end or death of art became increasingly widespread and fashionable. Gradually, in fact, this thesis becomes an indisputable “topos” of modernity, not only among the old post-Hegelianists but also in the work of great philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries such as Benedetto Croce and Arthur C. Danto. It will be especially the latter with his anarchic reinterpretation of the end of art as “cut” that will be explored here in conclusion. While considering himself a born-again Hegelian, Danto develops a conception of the end (of history) of art without dissolution that takes him far from his supposed master Hegel, suggesting that the discussion is still open and always will be.