Hegel's Art History and the Critique of Modernity & Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger. . - book review

It is here, in the passages of his Aesthetics devoted to art after its end, that we find many of Hegel's deepest commentaries on the arts. He speaks of this post-Classical art as "set free," no longer suffering from the burden of being the principal organizing mode of self-consciousness. (5) This disavowal of any remaining imperative for art finds a natural expression in today's discourse of artistic pluralism. Indeed, current questions of the status of art as an institution, the nature and rhetoric of artistic autonomy, and the role of art in the public sphere are all anticipated in Hegel's attempts to find a place for art in his philosophical system. That he would ask these questions before the emergence of the historical avantgarde--with its two paths of political engagement and hermetic isolation--suggests such concerns need to be answered by reflecting on more than just that component of modernism. It is worth asking as well whether the Hegelian model of art as in its essence a vehicle of truth might not have found discomfiting survival, not only in critical theorists such as Theodor Adorno (who similarly articulates a theodicy in relation to art) but also in avant- (and neo-avant-) garde attempts to conjoin the exercise of autonomy and the capacity to serve in voicing a progressive political critique.

Hegel has been called the father of history for the historicizing model he offered the field of art history. Yet he can also be understood as part of the process of the historicization of art that occurred in the early 19th century, rather than its prime philosophical exponent. One of the virtues of Wyss's approach from the inside, as it were, is that the correlations and connections between Hegel's thought and contemporaneous institutions, such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel's new museum built near Hegel's own lodgings, are brought into relief in a way that avoids portraying one as merely the expression of the other.

Wyss ends his text with suggestive discussions of the Hegelian impulse in four very different thinkers: Max Nordau, Oswa Spengler, Hans Sedlmayr, and Gyorgy Lukacs (whom he refers to, respectively, as a "technocrat, a conservative nihilist, a Catholic, and a Marxist-Leninist," p. 173). Wyss treats this "unholy alliance" of thinkers as successors Hegel, but it is unclear whether their thought follows from his as much as they--and he--emerge out of currents of thought (theological, Enlightenment, historical) that preceded them all. In any case, what these thinkers share, along with Hegel, is a vision of art (and culture more generally) as having reached a terminus in its development, which it comes to stand in the wrong relation to human life and thus suffers a forced abrogation of some putatively essential role. If Hegel found this moment of artistic superanuation in the immediate post-Classical, Christian period he idiosyncratically called romantic art, these critics found the object of their scorn in what th ey felt to be one of the actual Romantic movement's later incarnations: the modernist avant-garde. So Nordau argues that art has degenerated from (in Wyss's words) a "healthy realism" to a "sickly idealism" (p. 182), or from an objective to a pathologically subjective mode. The end of art would be not just the end of the avantgarde Nordau despises, but the triumph of science over all the arts, which, when tamed, would serve merely as entertainments. Hegel and Nordau each thought of art as having been put in service as a vehicle of truth. In Hegel's case, this was a legitimate duty for art to discharge; in Nordau's view, it was a demand on art that art could only pretend to fulfill. Both thinkers, however, see that role played by art, legitimately or not, as taken over by a greater, more adequate form of knowledge.