ABSTRACT
This chapter uses a critique of Arthur Danto's theory as a means of answering the question of postmodernism in the visual arts. It offers a more plausible alternative reading of modernity and post modernity. The key artist in understanding the transition from modern to postmodern is Malcolm Morley. The premise of Danto's argument concerning the end of art is that the advent of cinematography precipitated a traumatic crisis in the art world. According to Danto, Neo-Expressionism raised, as art, no philosophical question at all, and indeed it could raise none that would not be some variant on the one rose in its perfected form by Andy Warhol. One of the major areas of difficulty raised by Danto's approach concerns his very reading of twentieth-century modernism as a kind of quasi-philosophical endeavour. In the Neo-Geo abstractions of Phillip Taffe, for example, the parodies and subversions of modernist colour-field painting and pop art are found.
