Abstract

According to philosophers and art critics like Arthur Danto, modern art has reached a point of culmination. Being obliged to redefine itself otherwise than through the concept of representation, modern art has turned to a kind of self-interrogation and undertaken a program of revelation of its real essence. Modernist art became a kind of philosophical questioning, the answer to which brought it to fulfillment by the late 1960’s with Warhol’s duplicates. Since then, there could be nothing new in the history of art; post-modern art in this sense seems to have come to an end and, liberated from the burden of its history, to have entered into an era of omnipossibility. From this point on it is absolutely free to follow as many directions as it likes at once. But is post-modern art really post-historical? Has art come to an end in this postmodern era? And how this concept of omnipossibility is to be understood? These questions rise as an agon between modernism and post-modernism, between objectivity and relativity, or between a claim of universal validity and cultural contingency.