Undoing the Visual Arts Since 1960

This timely study critically assesses each of the various presuppositions that led to how we got to where we are today.

Contemporary art has replaced the notion of artistic medium with a semiotic model of communication, treating art as text open in its ‘reading’. The dumping of the notion of artistic medium cancels aesthetic depth and undermines even relative expressive determinacy. Marcel Duchamp privileged the play of mind over the ‘simply visual’. Minimalism and Pop Art set their faces against the place of personalised life-experience and expressive formation in art-making. Andy Warhol’s work threw up the so-called ‘institutional theory of art’: whatever the artworld calls art is art.

Art’s academisation brought in entirely inappropriate models of knowledge-creation, and then art became issue-based. Art was curatorially patronised to fit a woke ideological agenda. The incredible accord between institutional power, artworld theorising, the media, and the art-economy made contemporary art immune from criticism: the undoing of visual art was complete.