End of Art

In The End of Art, Donald Kuspit argues that art is over because it has lost its aesthetic import.

Library Journal

Renowned art critic Kuspit's proclamation in the title of his latest book seems to come a bit after the fact. Haven't we already heard the wailing sirens from art manifestos and writers alike, including Suzi Gablik's Has Modernism Failed? (1985), Arthur Danto's After the End of Art (1998), or Hans Belting's The End of the History of Art? (1987)? This diatribe by Kuspit (The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20th Century) might not be particularly original, but it is brave and unwavering in its opinion that art is over and "postart" (performance artist Allan Kaprow's term) is its unfortunate replacement. Many influential European thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin, and Baudelaire haunt Kuspit's cranky objections to postart, which he generalizes as commercial, running on empty, playing to the crowd, banal, unsatisfying, soulless, secular, and corrupt. Kuspit boldly blames newly resurrected 20th-century masters like Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol for the state of things today but finds glimmers of hope in the "New Old Masters" (Paula Rego, Michael David, etc.), who retain a little faith-and tradition. Recommended for larger libraries as a solid (if biased) introduction to modern and postmodern art and all its conflicted meanings.-Prudence Peiffer, Cambridge, MA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Donald Kuspit is one of America's most distinguished art critics. Winner of the prestigious Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism, given by the College Art Association, he is a Contributing Editor to Artforum, Sculpture, New Art Examiner, and Tema Celeste magazines, as well as Editor of Art Criticism. Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, he also holds honorary degrees from Davidson College, the San Francisco Institute of Arts, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he has been the A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. Dr Kuspit has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the author and editor of hundreds of articles and books, most recently The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20th Century and Psychostrategies of Avant-Garde Art.