Perhaps the last decades of the twentieth century will go down in history as the age of ‘endism’. There was hardly an institution or idea of which the end was not sooner or later proclaimed. Daniel Bell announced the end of ideology in 1960, as Michel Foucault did the end of man as well as politics in 1966. Roland Barthes wrote his essay on the death of the author in 1967, while Jean-Francois Lyotard proclaimed the end of ‘grand narratives’ in 1979, the same year in which Richard Rorty argued that philosophy had ended. Some years later, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama published an essay entitled ‘The End of History’. Art, of course, could not lag behind. In the early eighties, the end of art seemed to be somehow ‘in the air’, as three authors published about it independently of each other: the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo in ‘The Death and Decline of Art’ (1980), the German art historian Hans Belting in The End of Art History (1983), and the American philosopher and art critic Arthur C. Danto in ‘The End of Art’ (1984).

To be sure, the idea of an end of art was by no means a novelty at the end of the twentieth century, and neither was the end of philosophy or history for that matter. Each of the authors writing about the end of art refers back to Hegel, who is often argued to have already predicted the end of art in the Lectures on Aesthetics he gave between 1817 and 1829. However, although the literature often speaks of Hegel's ‘end of art thesis’, the exact phrase is nowhere to be found in his work. The end of art is therefore, as Eva Geulen calls it, a ‘rumour’, which nevertheless turned out to have a significant impact, that has left its traces in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin and Adorno, and in the writings of philosophers and critics up until this day.

How should we understand the renaissance of the rumour of the end of art in the last decades of the twentieth century?