Instytut Historii Sztuki <Posen> [Hrsg.]: Artium Quaestiones (11.2000)

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MARIUSZ BRYL

let, just as Wamke, did not agree to the irreversiblity of the developments which resulted
in the present state of affairs, yet she proposed a different solution to the problem: a re-
turn to the romantic-modernist theory of art in order to enable the audience - using proper
categories and criteria - to experience and evaluate works of art through direct visual per-
ception. Millet defended the autonomy of art in reference to other domains of human activ-
ity, for it is only autonomous art that can have a critical function with respect to reality.
Criticism as a modę of existence of academic art history was also an ideał of a Marxist,
Otto Karl Werckmeister, except that for him it is not the aesthetic autonomy of works of
art, but their political aspect which guarantees a critical function of art. Due to its length,
seriousness, and highly emphatic tonę, Werckmerister’s polemic is rather a generał refuta-
tion. According to Werckmeister, Belting’s thesis about the end of art history pertains only
to the “problem of modemization.” “And in a capitalist economy, as well as the domain of
culture which belongs to it, problems related to modernization are sooner or later to be
solved. This, however, happens not because of intellectual considerations, as in Belting’s
book, but by changes in the conditions and relations of labor. German art history is now
undergoing such changes. It is being limited as an academic institution of historical re-
search and extended as a public institution which deals with exhibiting culture.” Werck-
meister himself, rejecting the “rhetorical figurę” of the “end of art history in which he saw
the surrender of art history to a culture of experts, imagined its futurę as a discipline -
contrary to Belting — in its ability to keep a critical distance to contemporary art. He
treated art historians “as representatives of the enlightened public which, living in a con-
sumer society, must be able to pass aesthetic judgments and to justify them in a rational
way.”
Except for a few discussions in which he took part, Belting did not join the debate
which he had provoked with his controversial statement about the "end of art history." His
silence will, however, tum out only apparent, if we consider it in the perspective of his pre-
sent publications which indicate, as it were, how he is now practicing art history after its
"end." On the one hand, following his scholarly talent which has always combined in-
dividualism with a tendency to construct great historical overviews (e.g. Bild und Kult),
Belting has recently published another magisterial study, Das unsichtbare Meisterwerk,
reconstructing the history of the idea of work of art in the modern times. This book may be
classified as a "new model" surmy: it is not a classic history of, in this case, modern art,
but a history of a certain problem or aspect which, however, was chosen in such a way that
it might, first, touch the essence of the historico-artistic process, and second, enable the
author to approach it in his own, individualized way. The resulting study combines the
features of a traditional synthesis (wide rangę, exhaustiveness, macro-narration) with the
uniąuenes of an originał analysis (a new modę of connecting facts, their new ordering, a
shift of emphasis from certain specific elements of the work’s structure to others, etc.).
Still, there is also the other Belting, author of a series of rełatively short texts in which he
proposes a new perspective of art history as an anthropologically oriented study of images.
In these texts, he follows the direction signalized in Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte, prepar-
ing a theoretical foundation of a new discipline, integrating all images, regardless of the
variety and changeability of the media being their vehicles. "The present task of the an-
thropology of visual media is a new correlation of the technical and symbolic procedures of
presenting images in reference to their cultural or religious use. ... [I]nteraction between
the spectator and the image, between the body of the image and the natural body is a per-
ennial law in the history of visual media. ... Anthropology is able to analyze a dialogue be-
tween the image and visual media in its myriad variants. ... [A]sking ąuestions about im-
ages implies asking ąuestions about ourselves. That is why today it is much morę urgent
than ąuestioning about art. We may live better in the world of the new media if we stop