By his end of art thesis Hegel meant that 'For us art no longer counts as the highest mode in which truth fashions an existence for itself' For Hegel art is superseded by philosophy which becomes the highest mode in which truth manages to come into being.
Frederic Jameson in his essay "'End of Art' or 'End of History'"? in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 says that:
the art whose 'end' Hegel foresaw is, in the light of Kant, to be identified as Beauty. It is the Beautiful that comes to an end in this significant event, but what takes its place is finally not philosophy, as Hegel thought, but rather the Sublime itself, or in other words the aesthetic of the modern or the transaesth etic if you prefer. And of course, very much in the spirit of Peter Burger' suggestion, this supersession is accompanied by a low level persistence and reproduction of any number of secondary forms of the Beautiful in all the traditional senses; the Beautiful now as decoration, without any claim to truth or to a special relationship with the Absolute.
It should be clear, then, that whatever this particular historical event is, it will scarcely present much similarity to that older and earlier 'end of art' in which philosophy failed to live up to its historic vocation, and in which it was left to the Sublime to supplant the merely Beautiful. The end of the modern, the gradual setting in place of postmodernity over several decades, has been an epochal event in its own right whose changing and shifting evaluations merit some study in themselves.
Jameson says that:
the function of the Sublime, the modern, of the one half of art, is taken over by Theory; but this also leaves room for the survival of art's other half, namely the Beautiful, which now invests the cultural realm at the moment in which the production of the modern has gradually dried up. This is the other face of postmodernity, the return of Beauty and the decorative, in the place of the older modern Sublime, the abandonment by art of the quest for the Absolute or of truth claims and its redefinition as a source of sheer pleasure and gratification (rather than, as in the modern, of jouissance). Both Theory and the Beautiful are constituent elements of that 'end of art' which was the postmodern: but they tend to block each other out in such a way that the seventies appeared to be the age of Theory, where the eighties revealed itself as the moment of garish cultural self indulgence and consumption (which began indeed to include signed and commodified Theory itself in its lavish feasts).
There has been an emphatic turn towards neoliberalism in political-economic practices and thinking since the 1970s; a turn characterized by deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state from many areas of social provision. The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a deep assumption of a neoliberal mode of governance.
Since neo-liberalism stands in opposition to social democracy and corporatism---it is deeply opposed to socialism, state planning and Keynesian state interventionism--- it can be interpreted as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites with assaults on the powers of organized labour. Planning and control are attacked as a denial of freedom.
In his A Brief History of Neoliberalism David Harvey says that:
Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices . ... It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit.
In her review of Denis G. Arnold (ed.), Ethics and the Business of Biomedicine Lisa Newton highlights the core issue: the recent move of the professions of health care from a service orientation to market orientation. This is crucial transformation and it is what sits behind the politics of health care reform with its emphasis on the healthcare institution-patient population" dyad.
Arnold's brief to the authors was:
to evaluate the practices of profit-seeking healthcare organizations, and business-friendly public policies regarding health care, and to offer normative guidance regarding the ethical delivery of healthcare products and services by profit-seeking organizations operating in a global marketplace. (p. 1)
If health care seeks profit, it will surely find it -- there's nothing we want so much as freedom from pain and a long active life, and to the extent that we have money, we'll pay the earth to get them. People without money will not be able to get them, of course, but then they can't get expensive sports cars, either, and we don't mourn over that. Is health care radically different from sports cars, or even music lessons? If not, whence the controversy? And if it is different, then maybe pursuit of profit is totally alien to the profession.
The other aspect is the use of market instruments to help manage the rising costs of health care in public institutions and the ideology of "market" mechanisms, premised on the freedom of every consumer to make "his own" choices and take full responsibility for them. Though some hold that for-profit enterprises can be "disciplined" into adopting goals aligned with traditional medical practice, I doubt this.
Corporate medicine is a very different beast to the traditional medicine of the old family doctor and the "doctor-patient" dyad. An insurance company contemplating the effects of our policies and practices, doesn't care about the pain they produce, or countenance, and as long as they have investors scanning the quarterly returns.
In the opening paragraphs in their Introduction to Australian Cultural Studies: a Reader John Frow and Meaghan Morris’ say:
During the past few years the word ‘culture’ has come to be used by Australians in a sense that seems far removed from anything to do with artistic and literary texts. When Australian Labor Party Senator Stephen Loosley declares that ‘resetting industrial policy is really a matter of reshaping cultural attitudes’, he is not defining culture as a domain of aesthetic pleasure, as a set of masterpieces, or even as an expression of national identity. Nor is he speaking in economic terms of culture as a major industry which (the Sydney Daily Telegraph Mirror assure us) ‘fills Aussie tills’. He is referring to a complex of social customs, values and expectations which affect our ways of working. So, too, was Rupert Murdoch in an interview screened on ABC-TV in 1990. Just as the worst company crash in Australian history ended an era of financial mismanagement and entrepreneurial crime, the Melbourne host of the ABC current affairs program 7.30 Report asked Mr Murdoch what ‘we’ should do to save our economy. Mr Murdoch replied perfunctorily, ‘Oh, you know: change the culture’.
Unlike Senator Loosley, Murdoch expected us to ‘know’ that he was quoting a formula of the neo-liberal rhetoric now broadly shared in Australia (as elsewhere) by bureaucrats, politicians, economists, journalists and financiers as well as union and corporate leaders, namely: economic problems have cultural solutions. Culture in this sense is not just a topic for specialized debate by an esoteric caste of interpreters (‘critics’). On the contrary: ’changing the culture’ is a shorthand but expansive way of challenging the conduct of others people’s everyday working lives – whether within the framework of a single company (’changing the culture is not a quick process in something as old and as large as ARC’, says a chief executive of Australia’s main producer of concrete reinforcing steel); of an industry (a marketing expert offers a paper on ‘changing culture for service: how to effect a change to the service culture ion shopping centres’); or an entire national economy (‘Professor Hughes said Australians had relied on the “lucky country” attitude for too long [. . .] ”We have got to cultivate an export culture”’). (pp. vii-viii)
In the Introduction to Modernity and the hegemony of vision (edited by David Michael Levin) Levin says:
For those of us who can see, vision is, of all the modes of perception, the one which is primary and predominant, at least in the conduct of our everyday lives. This does not seem open to much debate. More problematic, however, is the narrative that argues for the domination, the hegemony, of a visual paradigm in our cultural history. Can it be demonstrated that, beginning with the ancient Greeks, our Western culture has been dominated by an ocularcentric paradigm, a vision-generated, vision-centered interpretation of knowledge, truth, and reality? If so, many more questions follow. Can it be argued that, in the period we call "modernity" (the period beginning, say, with the "discovery" of perspectivism and the rationalization of sight in the Italian Renascimento of the fifteenth century), this ocularcentrism has assumed a distinctively modern historical form? How is the ocularcentrism of modernity different from that which prevailed in earlier ages? Has
the character of the dominant vision changed in correlation with the evolution of modernity, its hegemony manifesting itself differently in each of the centuries since the Renascimento? What is left, today, of the rational vision of the Enlightenment? Has its institutionalization in the course of modernity given it historically distinctive forms of incorporation, power, and normativity? How has the paradigm of vision ruled, and with what effects?
He says that In "The Age of the World Picture," Heidegger not only considers the hegemony of vision to have had its beginningin the culture and philosophies of ancient Greece but thinks it has continued into our own time. In fact, he thinks, the historical form that this hegemony has assumed in the latest phase of the modern period is particularly ominous, reducing everything to the ocularcentric ontology of subject-relative images or representations. Moreover, this historical development of our ontology as he sees it is so distinctive, so decisively different from the ontology of earlier historical periods that he argues for the recognition of a "new epoch," defined precisely in terms of this reduction of being to being-represented