ABSTRACTIn this paper, I consider Adorno's claim that art is at, or is coming to, an ‘end’. I consider Adorno's account in relation to the work of Arthur Danto and G. W. F. Hegel. I employ Danto's account, together with two distinct interpretive glosses of Hegel's account, as heuristic devices in order to clarify both Adorno's own arguments, and the context within which they are being advanced. I argue that while Danto and Hegel see art as coming to an end (...) autonomously, owing to art's successful realization of its governing principle, Adorno by contrast sees art as coming to an end heteronomously. Art's narrative is forcibly broken off, rather than completed. Adorno's account, indebted to Hegel, of art's commitment both to autonomy and the realization of ‘spiritual needs’ is explored in order to clarify how, on Adorno's view, this has happened to art; and why, precisely, he believes art is coming to an end. (shrink)

My topic is authenticity in or perhaps as painting, not the authenticity of paintings; I know next to nothing about the problem of verifying claims of authorship. I am interested in another kind of genuineness and fraudulence, the kind at issue when we say of a person that he or she is false, not genuine, inauthentic, lacks integrity, and, especially when we say he or she is playing to the crowd, playing for effect, or is a poseur. These are not (...) quite moral distinctions (no one has a duty to be authentic), but they are robustly normative appraisals, applicable even when such falseness is not a case of straight hypocrisy but of lack of self-knowledge or of self-deceit. (A person can be quite sincere and not realize the extent of her submission to the other’s expectations and demands.) This sort of appraisal also has a long history in post-Rousseauist reflections on the dangers of uniquely modern forms of social dependence, and they are prominent worries in the modern novel. (shrink)

By comparison with other parts of his philosophy, Hegel'sAestheticshas been slighted by Anglo-American philosophers. All the more welcome then are two recent essays by Robert Pippin, which promise to go well beyond received notions. WithHegel's Idealism, Pippin published what is by any measure one of the most original of recent treatments. Shortly thereafter came a penetrating study of the idea of the modern, which allotted a central role to artistic modernism, and since then he has published various essays actively engaging (...) our post-Kantian legacy. Readers will therefore have heightened expectations of Pippin's turn to Hegel's aesthetics, or rather, as he himself signals, the philosophy of art — unlike some he clearly approves of the shift from Kantian questions of aesthetic taste to Romantic speculations on art, indeed on Art as cultural absolute.They will hardly be disappointed. Yet in the event they will find themselves negotiating texts that are at once dense and elliptical, much of the argument being conducted via footnotes, its implications—what it commits the author to in theory and in practice — not evident straightaway. If Hegel's position is complex, Pippin's turns out to be no less so. While I can hardly do justice to its intricacies, I do consider it both important and controversial, whether as interpretation of Hegel or as an approach to modernist abstraction. (shrink)

The problem with how we mythologise reality is arguably at the core of humanity’s ecological/existential crisis. While others have pointed to this, F. W. Schelling produced a philosophy of art which both confirms it and lays the foundations for how it can be addressed. This involves reversing the polarities of the ‘modern mythology’, related directly to Art-and-Humanity’s joint meaning crisis which Schelling claimed originates in our alienation from Nature and the rise of ‘revealed religion’. Despite his resurgence (inspiring Complexity Science), (...) the relevance of Schelling’s aesthetics to resolving humanity’s long-standing ethical problems has been neglected. In this paper, I begin by framing Schelling’s view on religion, contextualising his ontological, cosmological approach to art. I then argue why his ‘dialectical aesthetics’, grounded in ‘process metaphysics’, presents a radical advance on Kant’s and Hegel’s ‘reflective’ standpoint featured in our dominant theoretical aesthetic paradigm (causing art’s sharpest decline via the evolving ‘modern’ suppression of metaphoric thinking by ‘symbolic idealism’, at the heart of our ‘worlding’ problems). Then, showing how Schelling’s Principle of Art leads us archetypally back to the normative sciences, I argue redirecting the self-destructive modern mythology means reorienting ‘final cause’ in our narratology. And why this firstly requires distinguishing proper metaphor from the symbolic constructions common in ‘conceptual art’. (In a subsequent paper, Schelling’s Art ‘in the Particular’ will be revealed to offer the practical application of his Principle to any artforms/works ‘for all time’ in praxis, advancing my argument here for why his system offers a suitable framework for collectively re-worlding the world). (shrink)

1 More than two centuries later, the aesthetic reflection of Idealism does not seem to have lost interest in philosophical debate at all. It is a multifaceted interest, which has partly historical-conceptual reasons, since it was post-Kantian philosophy that first posed the problem of defining art in systematic and cognitive terms, and partly more genuinely theoretical ones, for instance the contemporary declinations of a typically Idealistic theme such as the socio-historical determination o...

This article attempts two things. First, it aims to reassess the literary criticism that Georg Lukács produced in the 1930s while he was living in the Soviet Union in light of his earlier, and much-esteemed, The theory of the novel. Second, in order to carry out this reassessment, it examines the place of Hegelian aesthetics in Lukács’s theorization of realism in the 1930s criticism, in relation both to contemporary Soviet writings on the subject and to his own earlier, ostensibly Hegelian (...) work. I argue that, at least in terms of the place of art in the historical dialectic, the later work is more consistent with Hegelian philosophy than The theory of the novel. (shrink)