Spectacle, Communication, and the End of Art

Writing about the recurrent “rumour” of the “end of art” in modern art and philosophy since Hegel, Eva Geulen emphasized its perpetual untime­liness: “As long as one speaks of an end . . . speech is either precipitous or belated . . . . For either the end has already occurred or it is still to come. In the meantime, which the end displaces either forward or backward, the notorious talk of the end circulates.”1 1  - Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor After Hegel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1. This duality is crucial to understanding the place of art within the critique of spectacle developed by Guy Debord: for the Situationists, art was already a thing of the past and in need of its punctual and authentic end.

In its “spectacular” end, the corpse of art is preserved as an autonomous institution but with its highest vocation voided: once promising the development of new forms of communication, new ways of picturing and engaging with the world, art under the reign of spectacle is either enshrined as a moribund object of veneration in the museum as mausoleum, or propped up as novelty or speculative investment in the art world, that most rarefied branch of the entertainment industry. Conversely, the Situationists positioned themselves as the historical realization of the avant-garde’s stalled destruction of art: the Dadaists and early Surrealists, for Debord, had critiqued the forms and norms of bourgeois culture to the point of contesting the existence of art as a sector separate from the rest of social life. But, Debord asserted, the avant-gardes had not gone far enough, had not passed from an aesthetic opposition to bourgeois society’s modes of representation to a political opposition to that society’s economic foundation. The Situationists would take the dreams of the avant-garde and the Marxist critique of alienation as two halves of the same project, seeking to accomplish the “supersession and realization of art” — its abolition as a separate specialization and the realization of its liberatory promise directly in life. No longer producing poetry at the service of revolution, Debord sought “revolution at the service of poetry.”² 2 - SI, “All the King’s Men,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 155.