Art-as-Art
Ad Reinhardt



The one evolution of art forms unfolds in one straight logical line of negative actions and reactions, in one predestined, eternally recurrent stylistic cycle, in the same all-over pattern, in all times and places, taking different times in different places, always beginning with an "early" archaic schematization, achieving a climax with a "classic" formulation, and decaying with the "late" endless variety of illusionisms and expressionisms. When late stages wash away all lines of demarcation, framework, and fabric, with "anything can be art", "anybody can be an artist", "that's life", "why fight it", "anything goes", and "it makes no difference whether art is abstract or representational", the artists' world is a mannerist and primitivist art trade and suicide-vaudeville, venal, genial, contemptible, trifling.






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The End of Painting
Douglas Crimp

The symptoms were everywhere: in the work of painters themselves, all of whom seemed to be reiterating Ad Reinhardt's claim that he was "just making the last paintings anyone could make" or allowing their paintings to be contaminated with such alien elements as photographic images; in minimal sculpture, which provided a definite rupture with painting's unavoidable ties to a centuries-old idealism; in all other mediums to which artists turned, as one after another, they abandoned painting. The dimension that had always resisted even painting's most dazzling feats of illusionism - time - now became the dimension in which artists staged their activities as they embraced film, video, and performance. And, after waiting out the entire era of modernism, photography reappeared, finally to claim its inheritance.