The artist has not invented anything, but he has engaged everything. The work is made up of endlessly proliferating meanings which have no stable point of origin, nor of closure. Obviously, as Donald Judd observed, with the acknowledgment of these oblique shifts in frames and formats, linear history unravels and art history ceases to be developmental. If historicity is predicated upon a concreteness, then such epistemological frames must be abandoned. For its day is long past.
Criticism is a matter of correct distancing.
It was at home in a world where perspective and prospects counted and where it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on human society. As the artist without hands remains truest to the phenomenological Idea, because he doesn't pollute it with the burden of objectivity, perhaps the true critic is one who never writes but senses his world without imposing texts upon it. Nobody argues for the idea that people do not or should not paint etc. anymore. Rather, what Hegel and others aimed and aim at is a recognition of the fact that art as ar t has run its course, that what was peculiar to the nature of art was finally and explicitly realized after a long historical struggle and development.