  Julieta Aranda | Gregg Horowitz
Paul Mattick | Yates Mckee
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65 W 11th St.
Wollman Hall (5th fl)
New School
February 23, 2013
6-9pm
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The “death of art†has been a recurring theme within aesthetic and philosophical discourse for over two centuries. At times, this “death†has been proclaimed as an accomplished fact; at others, artists themselves have taken the “death of art†as a goal to be accomplished. So while this widely perceived “death†is lamented by many as a loss, it is celebrated by others as a moment of life renewed. For them, art is all the better for having disburdened itself of the baggage of outmoded modernist ideologies. Insofar as the “death†of longstanding cultural traditions has in the past typically been understood to signal a deeper crisis in society at large, however, the meaning of death necessarily takes on a different aspect today — especially when the tradition in question is modernism, the so-called the “tradition of the new†(Rosenberg). Because the very ideas of “death†and “crisis†appear to belong to the edifice of modernity that has been rejected, these too are are to be jettisoned as part of its conventional yoke. Modernity itself having become passé, even the notion of art’s “death†seems to have died along with modernism.
We thus ask our panelists not merely whether art is at present “dead,†but also if traditions are even permitted the right to perish in conservative times. If some once held that the persistence of philosophy indicated the persistence of obsolete social conditions, does the persistence of art signal ongoing social conditions that ought to have long ago withered away? If so, what forms of political and artistic practice would be sufficient to realize art, and in what ways would realizing art signal something beyond art? Marx felt that the increasing worldliness of philosophy in his time (heralded by the culmination of philosophy in Hegel) demanded not only the end of philosophy, but also that the world itself become philosophical. If avant-garde movements once declared uncompromising war on art in order to tear down the barrier between art and life, would the end or overcoming of art not similarly require that the world itself become artistic?
The Many Deaths of Art event poster