Sic Transit Gloria Artis: “The End of Art” for Theodor Adorno and Guy Debord

It is now difficult to resist the impression that “the end of art”—so often and so noisily announced, and just as vociferously rejected, during the 1960s—has finally come about, albeit surreptitiously, and “not with a bang but a whimper.” For more than a century the development of art was synonymous with an uninterrupted succession of formal innovations and “avant-gardes” continually extending the boundaries of creative activity. The last period of seeming glory ended, however, at the beginning of the seventies, since which time no new avant-garde tendency has come to the fore. All we have seen is a recycling of isolated and degraded fragments of the arts of the past. The suspicion that modern art is exhausted has now begun to affect even those who have been the most resolute opponents of any such notion. The very least that may be said is that for decades now we have witnessed nothing even remotely comparable to the formal revolutions of the years between 1910 and 1930. Opinions differ, naturally, as to whether or not work of value is still being produced. But it is unlikely that there is anyone for whom the art of recent years still represents “the sensible manifestation of the Idea,” or even an expression of the present period as focused and conscious as were the literature, visual arts or music of the first decades of this century.