Avant-garde art exhausted its possibilities leaving only commerce

Evidence

Once a hotbed for cultural invention, the avant-garde art world had long since descended into a marketplace of raw speculation. Andy Warhol kicked this off in pushing what he called “Business Art,” which merged avant-garde experimentation with celebrity culture and financial capital. Perhaps this was the only trajectory left. Critic Arthur Danto proclaimed the “end of art” in the 1980s, as the great explosion of avant-garde ideas in the early twentieth century exhausted future opportunities for stylistic progress. Contemporary art, he argued, “has no brief against the art of the past, no sense that the past is something from which liberation must be won.” By the mid-1990s, theorist Jean Baudrillard complained that contemporary art had become “mediocrity squared,” masking its lack of ambition with irony. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 725

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s overall thesis project of tracing four periods of cultural production and that blankness is an artifact.