Connecting the emergence of Modern art to developments in Capitalism is hardly novel in the field of art history. Here is a very mainstream art history book that develops this thesis in detail [1]. Here is MoMA explicitly linking the developments in Modernism to changing
economic and technological conditions [2]. And that's before you talk to anyone working from the tradition of Marxism [3].
It's an undergrad art history 101 observation.
Also, he's off on his origin story. German Romanticism was an elaboration on Kant's theory of the sublime, developed in 1790 in The Critique of Judgement. So the theoretical groundwork happened at least a generation earlier.
But my bigger question for him: Is global capitalism fundamentally changing such that something that appears to look like artistic practices from 400 years ago will return? Is capitalism over? Or are we entering some new atavistic phase? and if so, why?
Also, he's off on his origin story. German Romanticism was an elaboration on Kant's theory of the sublime, developed in 1790 in The Critique of Judgement. So the theoretical groundwork happened at least a generation earlier.
But my bigger question for him: Is global capitalism fundamentally changing such that something that appears to look like artistic practices from 400 years ago will return? Is capitalism over? Or are we entering some new atavistic phase? and if so, why?
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Art-1851-1929-Capitalism-Repre... [2] https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/what-is-mode... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism,_or,_the_Cultura...