Art has no unitary essence or unfolding logic

Evidence

These two discourses, he argued, had always been disjoined, since art historians — with the rarest of exceptions — had never had much to say about the art of their time, while the avant-gardes tended to reject the art of the past en bloc anyway. But both were historical mystifications. There was neither a unitary essence nor an unfolding logic in art, which not only assumed widely diverse forms, but fulfilled radically different functions, in the various societies and epochs of human history. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 247

Categorization

• XREF: Belting’s anti-essentialism anticipates and parallels the broader postmodern skepticism toward master narratives that this reader’s wider debate covers. — connects to: The Institut rejected individual-expression views of art as historically transcendental — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 544; No coherent universal history of art remains possible — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 248

Broader Connections

• No coherent universal history of art remains possible #corroborates (0.90) — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 248