Art For Art's Sake

I was really pleased yesterday to finally be together as a class again - our meetings have seemed sporatic - and to clear up some course groundwork and move on to an engaging talk on art history and art today. I appreciated the wide ranging comments and questions, and I look forward (despite the weather) to visiting the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum later today.

In a sense, the history of art came to a close sometime in the 20th Century, I mean at least that history that included narrative flow and progressive development. Anybody looking at the chapel Giotto painted in Padua in 1400 and the one Michel Angelo painted in Rome a hundred years later would know which came first. But there does not seem to be any intrinsic qualities to the urinal Marcel Duchamp placed in a gallery in 1917 that clearly delineate it from the over-sized balloon poodle sculptures Jeff Koons put in the Versailles Palace last year. Yet these two artworks are considered, art historically, as prominent as those two churches. Would any Renaissance artist be able to tell which came first? One wonders.