Sztuka – temat zamknięty?

Art, developing for a long time according to the logic of emancipation towards a deepening intellectual anarchy and axiological chaos which destroys its identity, is, in my opinion, a closed subject. However, J. Baudrillard and D. Kuspit return to it, joining a long list of authors who announce the death of art; the death which manifests itself in art’s entropy, repetitiveness, recycling of the same thing again and again, image transparency, nothingness, nihilism or commercialisation. In this respect, both diagnoses confirm only observations made earlier. The issues which deserve more careful examination include: aestheticisation of economy, art as a laboratory of social anomie, the return to traditional painting. The aestheticisation of economy depicts the extension of art to its new, alternative forms of existence, towards such fields as marketing, image creation, consumption, the cult of the body (narcissism) and ‘disneylandisation’ of life. The aestheticisation of economy (also: of everyday life) appears to be conquering the area of art while pushing away to the margin the two other trends (continuation of the avant-garde experiments and reactivation of visual arts in their earlier form).