Belting and Danto independently declared art’s end in the 1980s

Evidence

In 1983, the German art historian Hans Belting published Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?; a year later, the American philosopher Arthur Danto his essay ‘The Death of Art’. The close convergence of their themes has found further expression in Belting’s enlarged second edition of his work, Eine Revision nach zehn Jahren (1995), which drops the question-mark in the first edition, and Danto’s After the End of Art (1997). — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 246

Categorization

• XREF: The Belting–Danto convergence is a key reference point in the wider postmodernism periodization debate this reader is entering.
• SEED: The detail that Belting dropped the question-mark from his 1983 title by 1995 is a telling microlessay on how intellectual conviction hardens over a decade.