Angels on the Head of a Pin (Open Thread)

With trepidation that this might put off (bore) the very sort of incipient collectors we were brainstorming on resources for yesterday, I found the discussion the thread prompted fascinating (in the way that scholars once found it fascinating to debate how many angels might fit on the head of a pin, perhaps, but...). Still, because the conversation that sprung up is important to me, but I'd like to keep that thread for resources suggestions (or debates about whether learning art history is important for new collectors), I'm gonna graft that part of the discussion there into this new post (which means, please feel free to make your same points again here).

To get the ball rolling, I'll start with the comment by Bill Gusky, who noted:

In our current post-art-historical era, are developments still really taking place -- developments in the sense of a continuity of progress of some sort?

It appears more to me that trends emerge and recede but no true movements in the art historical sense seem to be rising into prominence. It's quite exciting -- makes you wonder how this will be viewed in fifty years.

This follows from an excellent discussion on Bill's own excellent blog that you should read as well.

To throw fuel on the fire, I'll note that I recall vividly the first conversation I had with an artist after reading Danto's collection, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. It was with a young artist and the idea that Art had ended nearly drove her to distraction. "How can you know, from this vantage point?" was her refrain in disputing the notion. I had to agree that it was impossible to be certain.

In yesterday's thread, Marc Snyder argued though:

It was really only the modernist true believers that emphasized the idea of progress in art, which could lead you to believe that a close inspection of what was going on around you could somehow allow you to deduce what the next big thing would be.

Now I'll confess to being (or having been) a modernist true believer, so it's hard for me to dispute that objectively.

However, last night in another conversation with an abstract painter, I discussed the issue of whether or not developments were indeed still taking place. This painter, whose approach to abstraction is so circular it begins to make one dizzy to discuss it (which is a very nice feeling in that context, I have to say), suggested that perhaps Pluralism is indeed a significant development in art history in and of itself. I can't reconstruct his exact argument without getting knee-deep into his process, which I don't have time for, but it was a rather convincing suggestion.

Indeed, the opening up of art history, whereby artists are not excluded from this or that exploration because of geography, gender, or even time, would seem a logical next stage after the boundary-bursting efforts of Post-Modernism, no? But then that demands to be answered in the context of intent. Analytical Cubism was a very intentional development in Modernism, for example. Which leads me to wonder whether developments happen by accident? If not, then perhaps our post-PoMo era indeed is "Development" free.