The End of Art Theory : Criticism and PostmodernityTools Burgin, Victor. The End of Art Theory : Criticism and Postmodernity. Atlantic Island, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986.
Abstract (English)"The 'postmodern' has become a major issue for both the visual arts and cultural theory. However, the art world has mainly tended to understand postmodernism in purely domestic terms as, literally, any form of art to emerge after the crisis of confidence in modernist aesthetics. Even the recent vogue for 'neo-expressionist' alike. First assembled in the Enlightenment, this apparatus still provides the terms in which art is largely conceived to this day: 'genius', 'expression', the 'purely visual', the 'work' (and it apotheosis, the 'masterpiece'), and so on. Refusing such terms, Victor Burgin's essays in this book are the result of his continuing attempt to root visual art in contemporary cultural theory, rather than in traditional art history and aesthetics. He refuses to think 'art' in isolation from the political, or to conceive the 'political' in purely socio-economic terms, without a theory of the unconscious. He refuses to consider the 'visual' outside of language, or to venerate such hierarchies as 'fine art', 'vernacular art' and 'mass media'. He similarly disregards the supposedly inviolable 'specificities' of the various media; his essays cut across a diversity of fields - photography, film, painting, advertising - in the contemporary landscape of representational practices." -- p. [4] of cover.
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