Does contemporary art history really exist?

Marcello Faletra questions the very existence of contemporary art history as a coherent discipline. He argues that the field has been destabilized by image studies, which relativized art history since Hans Belting's 1983 'The End of Art History'. Belting declared the end of art history as a Hegelian paradigm subordinated to historical process. Contemporary art history dissolves into a proliferation of images lacking common temporality. Faletra notes that various contemporary art histories disagree on dates, each having its own. He asks whether contemporary art history ever existed or is disguised in what Didi-Huberman calls 'anachronism'. Drawing on Marx, Faletra observes that universal history never existed except in representations, and there is no necessary coincidence between social process and artistic phenomena. He suggests a 'probable history' of contemporary art, oscillating between local and global, between formal art partisans and flâneurs crossing anthropology, semiology, philosophy. The discipline is torn between historical discipline and involuntary indiscipline of queer thought—the former tending toward identity rhetoric, the latter toward rhizomatic montage of fragments. Contemporary works vanish soon after appearance, becoming private fetishes rather than collective symbols, suggesting programmed obsolescence. Faletra proposes replacing Magritte's 'This is not a pipe' with 'This is not a history of contemporary art'.