Between Histories

A forum for philosophers of different orientations, this book explores the contemporary historical situation of art—as an answer to claims about “the death of art” and exhaustion of the idea of progress.

The authors gathered in this volume peer into art’s past and present in order to cast a querying glance into the future. Their perspectives, diagnoses, and recipes vary: from analytic to Hegelian to poststructuralist, from counter-arguments against postmodern readings of art’s history to their celebration, from ruminations about the abysses opening in the depth of artistic creation to re-envisioning modernism in order to push history forward once more.

The conversation remains open-ended and art’s future uncertain, but perhaps our thinking about it can receive a fresh impulse to move beyond the stalemate registered under so many “deaths” and “ends” of art, the author, and history.