But I am afraid it is the same.
Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 12. Badiou’s identification of art, science, politics, and love as the four fields of human activity that yield truth is a central claim of his philosophical project.
There are many reasons for the German Idealists’ depreciation of the artistic achievements of their own time, but one reason “why Schelling and Hegel, among others, underrated German art” is particularly noteworthy in the current context: it concerned “their belief that in times of intense artistic creativity . . . there is little reflection on art. Thought about art, and philosophy of art, arise only when art is in decline. . . And Hegel’s age was above all an age of criticism and of reflective thought about art.” Michael Inwood, introduction to Hegel’s Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin Books, 1993), xi. Perhaps this remark could help to solve the riddle asked by Frieze Magazine on the cover of their September 2009 issue, “Whatever happened to theory?”
Andrzej Warminski, “Introduction: Allegories of Reference,” in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3–4. The Kant quotation is taken from his Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987). The concluding quotation by de Man is taken from notes compiled under the title “Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Hegel,” delivered in the fall of 1982 at de Man’s alma mater, Yale.
A classic example of the persistence of this via negativa in our time is presented by Giorgio Agamben in his essay “Les jugements sur la poésie…”: “Caught up in laboriously constructing this nothingness”—i.e., the “negative theology” (this is the term Agamben actually uses) of criticism—“we do not notice that in the meantime art has become a planet of which we only see the dark side, and that aesthetic judgment is then nothing other than the logos, the reunion of art and its shadow. If we wanted to express this characteristic with a formula, we could write that critical judgment, everywhere and consistently, envelops art in its shadow and thinks art as non-art. It is this "art," that is, a pure shadow, that reigns as a supreme value over the horizon of terra aesthetica, and it is likely that we will not be able to get beyond this horizon until we have inquired about the foundation of aesthetic judgment.” See The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 43–44. A more elegant proposal, no less negatively worded, however, is formulated by Thierry De Duve in the justly celebrated opening pages of his landmark tome Kant After Duchamp, where he invites the reader to imagine herself an anthropologist hailing from outer space trying to figure out what humans mean when they name something, anything “art”: “You conclude that the name ‘art,’ whose immanent meaning still escapes you—indeterminate because overdetermined—perhaps has no other generality than to signify that meaning is possible.” See Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 5–6.
I am of course perfectly aware of the apparent arbitrariness with which different notions of culture are bandied around and played out against each other here; as is the case with “art,” the impossibility of really defining “culture” is partly determined by the culture to which such questions of definition necessarily belong. The question of contemporary culture as that which presently engulfs art and from which, I believe, “art” should be saved, is a central concern of Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (both Eagleton and his mentor Raymond Williams are, of course, key authors in the art-and-culture debate): “pleasure, desire, art, language, the media, body, gender, ethnicity: a single word to sum all these up would be culture.” After Theory (London: Basic Books, 2004), 39.
The reference here is to the following celebrated, oft-quoted (and just as often misread) passage: “In all these respects art is, and remains for us, on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past.” Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, 13. This statement has often been misread as a proclamation of the end of art; Hegel himself provides the qualifying commentary, stating that “this claim excludes the possibility of great and/or intellectually authoritative art in the present and the foreseeable future, but not in the distant future. But such an art of the future would not be ‘for us.’” Ibid., 105. (It would be “for us,” though). The amount of commentary this seemingly casual remark has spawned continues to baffle and astound; Arthur C. Danto and Donald Kuspit are some of this exegetic tradition’s most prominent representatives.
There is no more powerful symbol of this state of diffusion, which Agamben (see note 5) would describe as “art now,” than the series of books published under the best-selling title “Art Now” by Taschen Verlag.
The author would like to thank Will Holder and FR David for allowing some of these thoughts, first formulated for the latter, to appear online. I would also like to acknowledge Jørgen Lund from the University of Bergen for sharing some of his beautifully formulated ideas on art (paraphrased in chapter III) with me at a conference organized at the Bergen Kunsthall in August 2009.