Contemporary art exhausted stylistic innovation and collapsed into speculation and irony

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. “It claims to be null—‘I am null! I am null!’—and it truly is null.” — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 725

Categorization

• XREF: Danto’s end-of-art claim connects to Marx’s broader point that avant-garde exhaustion is a precondition for omnivore monoculture. — connects to: avant-garde shock loses its subversive force once it becomes expected and institutionalized — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 564; Contemporary art has escaped the frame of art history — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 249; Authentic art simultaneously mirrors and rejects its historical moment. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 882 (+5 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: Marx’s timeline of artistic exhaustion (Danto 1980s, Baudrillard 1990s) is the evidence base for his portrait of a culture with ‘no direction’ — is that too dependent on high-art theory?