Writing about the recurrent \u201crumour\u201d of the \u201cend of art\u201d in modern art and philosophy since Hegel, Eva Geulen emphasized its perpetual untime\u00adliness: \u201cAs long as one speaks of an end\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. speech is either precipitous or belated\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. 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.\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Eva Geulen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor After Hegel<\/em> (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 1.<\/span> 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 <\/em>in need of its punctual and authentic end.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
In its \u201cspectacular\u201d 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\u2019s 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 <\/em>opposition to bourgeois society\u2019s modes of representation to a political<\/em> opposition to that society\u2019s 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 \u201csupersession and realization of art\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aits 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 \u201crevolution at the service of poetry.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - SI, \u201cAll the King\u2019s Men,\u201d in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents<\/em>, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 155. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
This utopian strain in bourgeois Western aesthetics, it is true, has a long pre-history, going back to Hegel\u2019s Lectures on Aesthetics<\/em> where the philosopher proclaimed that art was \u201cno longer the highest mode in which truth fashions an existence for itself.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Quoted in Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn<\/em> (London: Verso Press, 1998), 82.<\/span> To put it schematically, for Hegel, art had reached its point of ultimate unity in Classical Greek sculpture and was destined to be displaced by philosophy as the means of accessing or embodying the Absolute. As Fredric Jameson has written, art for Hegel was propelled toward \u201cthe abolition of the aesthetic by itself and under its own internal momentum, the self-transcendence of the aesthetic towards\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. the splendour and transparency of Hegel\u2019s utopian notion of philosophy itself, the historical self-consciousness of an absolute present.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ibid., 77. <\/span> For Jameson, however, Hegel\u2019s \u201cseemingly misguided\u201d concept, when read retrospectively through Marx, holds a richer vision of the end: \u201cThe dissolution of art into philosophy implies a different kind of \u2018end\u2019 of philosophy\u200a\u2014\u200aits diffusion and expansion into all the realms of social life in such a way that it is no longer a separate discipline but the very air we breathe and the very substance of the public sphere itself and of the collectivity. It ends, in other words, not by becoming nothing, but by becoming everything.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Ibid., 81\u200a\u2013\u200a2.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Jameson\u2019s reading of Hegel, the coterminous ends of art and of philosophy imply an infinite expansion onto the terrain of everyday life, a movement abolishing specialization in the discovery of authentic modes of being together, the very substance of collectivity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Debord, Hegel\u2019s pronouncement that art \u201cconsidered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past\u201d had been vindicated by the history of modern art.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> -  Quoted in Geulen, End of Art<\/em>, 10.<\/span> But whereas philosophy had been the telos<\/em> of Hegel\u2019s historical schema, Debord argued for the necessity of taking \u201ceffective possession of the community of dialogue, and the playful relationship to time, which the works of the poets and artists have heretofore merely represented.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle<\/em> (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 133.<\/span> Debord\u2019s end of art therefore substitutes for Hegel\u2019s metaphysical Idea or Absolute a strictly materialist ideal of community and social dialogue; it is in the shift from representation to praxis<\/em>, read as a call for revolutionary action, that art can realize its historical mission and dissolve itself in the process. Irreducible to the sort of simplistic subordination of art to politics\u200a\u2014\u200aor vice versa\u200a\u2014\u200awith which Debord is often charged, this vision implies a dialectical relationship between the two, each containing the truth of the other. One particularly beautiful Situationist tractfrom 1963 imagined that \u201cbetween revolutionary periods when the masses accede to poetry through action\u2009.\u2009.\u2009. circles of poetic adventure remain the only places where the totality of revolution lives on, as an unfulfilled but immanent potentiality, as the shadow of an absent individual.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - SI, \u201cAll the King\u2019s Men,\u201d 155.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n