AN APORIA OF POSSIBILITY: ON TECHNOLOGY AND THE LOSS OF MATERIALITY OF ART

Abstract

Numerous art historians and art critics have announced the death of art. From Arthur C. Danto´s Hegelian analysis to Hans Belting´s Kantian reading, art's fate seems sealed and its potentials exhausted. These approaches either claim that art has become pure idea and is thus no longer art but philosophy, or that art has so lost itself in the myriad of it's possibilities that the artistic schools, periods and traditions which once provided it's stability has vanished . In the following article, the crisis of contemporary art is analyzed from a third and strictly material perspective. Drawing on the thinking of André Leroi-Gourhan, the article proposes to look at art´s current crisis as a direct result of the changed relations between the human and matter or between the hand and materiality, that modern technologies and processes of automation have produced. Where the human hand becomes increasingly superfluous, the ties to the material world that used to steer and guide artists is equally lost.