JOSÉ GUILHERME PEREIRA LEITE

n 1989, just before the New Millennium, Francis Fukuyama provoked the philosophical community by talking about the End of History and the End of Art. Art, according to him, would lose its negativity, dissolving into the homogeneous modes of an unprecedented universality created by the triumph of liberal capitalism. What actually happened since then? The anti-societal character of artistic production was intensified, following multiple world crisis worsenings. The end-of-worldism and the Kulturpessimismus that plague us nowadays are typical counterfaces to technical hyperthelia, symptons of a capitalism that reigns in economy with no cultural legitimacy.
Analysing some works of Art, we seek to identify the elementary structures of this end-of-worldism, searching for their recurrences and symbolic matrices. Thus, a constellation come into play: writings by J. M. Coetzee, films by Stanley Kubrick and Alfonso Cuarón, examples of recent cinecatastrophe, trash films and animations, songs by Gilberto Gil, works by Giuseppe Penone and Pierre Huyghe, the curatorial ideas of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev for dOCUMENTA(13) – with several of its participants –, the opera Amazonas by Peter Weibel and architectural projects carried out by Anne Lacaton, Jean-Philippe Vassal and Frédéric Druot.
This analysis seeks parallels between the works and a conceptual climate founded on the denunciation of a “creontic capitalism” – a term that is coined by us – exploring this hyperthelia and the serious disjunctions between politics and emancipation. Authors such as Herbert Marcuse, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Christopher Lasch, Milton Santos, Hermínio Martins and Beatriz Sarlo are summoned here, in a kind of sounding board, together with references to G. W. F. Hegel, who was implicated by Fukuyama in his teleological and absolutizing propositions. Hegel also appears cause his aesthetic ideas on the reflective character of Art seem increasingly valid, and not the other way around.