Author: Ian Shipton

Ian originally trained as a jeweller and silversmith, he has since worked in many creative fields including interior design, product design, and more recently garden design, contributing to several RHS show gardens at the Hampton Court Flower Show. Ian currently teaches on the "Contemporary Art and Professional Studies" program run in conjunction with Bath Spa University at Weston College. He is involved in his love of painting and sculpture and studying for his MA in Fine Art at Bath spa University.

The End of Art

The basic meaning of the term “art” has changed several times over the centuries, and has continued to evolve during the 20th century as well. Danto describes the history of Art in his own contemporary version of Hegel’s dialectical history of art. “Danto is not claiming that no-one is making art anymore; nor is he claiming that no good art is being made any more. But he thinks that a certain history of western art has come to an end, in about the way that Hegel suggested it would.”[1] The “end of art” refers to the beginning of our modern era of art in which art no longer adheres to the constraints of imitation theory but serves a new purpose. Art began with an “era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes… In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylistic or philosophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story.”[2]

1. Cloweny, David W. (December 21, 2009). “Arthur Danto”. Rowan university. Retrieved 2009-12-21.
2. Danto, Arthur Coleman (1998). After the end of art: contemporary art and the pale of history. Princeton University Press. p. 47. ISBN 0-691-00299-1. As quoted by Professor David W. Cloweny on his website