Contemporary art has escaped the frame of art history

Evidence

Once, art was understood as an image of reality, of which art history furnished the frame. In the contemporary epoch, however, art had escaped its frame. Traditional definitions could no longer enclose it, as new forms and practices proliferated, not merely taking mass media as their materials, but often delivered by the electronic media themselves or even by fashion, as stylistic rivals of what remained of the beaux arts. — Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, 249

Categorization

• DEFINE: Belting’s image-of-reality framing gives a crisp definitional account of why traditional art history can no longer enclose contemporary practice.
• XREF: Echoes the media-and-culture erosion of aesthetic boundaries central to Jameson’s account of the postmodern. — connects to: Contemporary art exhausted stylistic innovation and collapsed into speculation and irony — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 725; Contemporary aesthetics is slackening representation and dissolving medium; Post-1960s art rejected the institutional hierarchy of materials and objects — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2912 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Contemporary art exhausted stylistic innovation and collapsed into speculation and irony #expands (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 725
• Post-1960s art rejected the institutional hierarchy of materials and objects #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2912
• Contemporary aesthetics is slackening representation and dissolving medium #expands (0.72)
• Postmodern art operates within media systems rather than unifying them into transcendent wholes #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 381
• Early performance work deliberately blurred the boundary between art and real life #exemplifies (0.72) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 69
• Art is not graspable by pure contemplation apart from its tradition #complicates (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 246