Rather surprising …

… The University Bookman: The Final Artistic Taboo. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… Lying at the end of [Danto's] account of art history is an eternal foreclosure on all forms of artistic production preceding the post-modern era. All models from the past, all previously successful styles, are “historically circumscribed,” off-limits to working artists as viable technical avenues. So now everything can be a work of art, except the kinds of artifacts human beings regarded as artworks for millennia. Everything is permitted to the artist, except an application of the technical resources most conducive to artistic excellence. Those things, he contemptuously claims, have been put aside by modernism in the way “adults … ‘put aside childish things.’” Danto’s declaration of complete artistic liberty leads, in the end, to the single most rigid set of restrictions ever prescribed to working artists, a dynamic resembling, with uncanny precision, the way modern declarations of total political and moral liberty have always ended up generating oppressive ideologies.