I think Hans Belting, who teaches at ZKM in Germany really gets it about the end of art history as we know

it, so I decided to read part of Art History After Modernism, University of Chicago Press, 2003 to think about his ideas a little more. He was at the first conference at CAFA on Chinese Art History and Criticism in 2009. The span of modernism in the US and Europe meant different things, and in the US it was shorter in length. In the 60's artists made time based work and used conceptual ideas. Allen Kaprow used installations to make a context of art. In 1964 Harold Rosenberg, in "The Anxious Object" described the aesthetics of impermanence of art's temporality in transient materials. He noticed visual art and quasi metaphorical performance art were merging (Note, sort of like music and visual art merging in coding today) "By circulating an event in art history, painting sheds its material body; it takes on an astral body ubiquitous in art books, in catalogs, TV and films as well as in the text of art writers...and which exists in accordance with the frequency of its public mention, that is its dependence on time." (p. 177). Wow that's amazing, because he didn't know about the internet, where now all art can shed its material body and take on an astral body with the frequency of its mention with hits and keywords. So Belting ask "what can art history be when paintings are no longer the focus, but art survives in texts as a reified symbol of its momentum in history. " Well that's deep. The critic now writes the score of how art is to be presented. Technological art recedes into what Paul Virillio calls "the aesthetics of vanishing". "What happens in the art world only makes sense after it is written about with the professional urge to provide a personal vision rather than information." (P. 178) Arthur Danto, the Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art Columbia University Press, 1986, chapter "The End of Art". He felt the boundaries between all the arts was becoming "unstable" i.e. poetry, painting, dance, performance, sculpture. Reality was inferred in painting. This is through cues or signs. Art may fool the sense but it does not fool the viewer. It took a long time for artists to learn to draw perspective, even though everyone saw in perspective. The same is not true for making sentences. So artists had to learn their trade, and the learning of the trade had a history, which became art history. "The task of art to produce equivalences to perceptual experiences passed, in the later 19th and early 20th centuries from the activities of painting and sculpture to those of cinematography - in the fact that painters and sculptures began conspicuously to abandon this goal just about the same time that all the basic strategies for narrative cinema were in place." p. 99