The End of Art, the End of Time.

The Postmodern Museum, the Commodification of the Past and the Myth of Decadence in a Neo-Aestheticist Fantasy

Abstract

Long after the speculations regarding «the end of art» and «the end of history» reached their peak, the discursive and conceptual framework that shaped them in the American debate has become evident as a structural part of its own object. Its main concern is the relation between the present and the historical past and the historicity of such a relation. Michael Moorcock’s novelistic trilogy The Dancers at the End of Time (1972–1974–1976) simultaneously states, dramatizes and embodies this concern. The author —one of the leading figures of fantasy and science fiction in the second half of the twentieth century— imagines a far-future scenario that hyperbolically feeds off both fin-de-siècle and «postmodern» cultural references. The sudden appearance of a woman coming from 1896 in the neo-aestheticist society of the End of Time acts as a catalyst for the dramatic conflict. In order to understand the series’ qualities and its historical relevance, this papers builds a comparative framework joining the implicit theorizing in this product of genre fiction and the «theoretical fictions» of authors such as Jameson, Danto, Huyssen, Fukuyama, Sontag and Baudrillard. Above all, it examines the political and ideological impact of acknowledging the fabricated nature of «epochs» (past and present) as well as the possibility of redeeming history, between the myths of progress and decadence.