Friday evening, October 2, 2026 – 6:30 p.m. – the spacious David Zwirner Gallery – NYC – Critics Page guest editor Natalia Gierowska eloquently and gracefully introduced the twelve essay-contributors to her provocative section of THE BROOKLYN RAIL on The (End) of Art History?, before a multitude of friends standing among Nate Lowman‘s compelling key-shaped canvases, Hanging Out.
Under the watchful, documentary gaze of the magazine’s ever-present Publisher and Artistic Director, Phong H. Bui, I experienced a surge of pride, not only because I am gradually becoming welcomed into the RAIL’s embracing, resolutely communal family.
Upon reflection, my “pride” was layered by inspiration, about the persistence of the art of making, (as RAIL Managing Editor, Charles M. Schultz, reminded us in his opening remarks); and the synaptic excitation disrupting my brain when I am in such affinity-driven company.
Gierowska’s interrogatory prompt for her colleagues’ published texts was spurred by Francis Fukuyama‘s 1989 essay, “The End of History,” subsequently elaborated in his book, The End of History and the Last Man. She back-tracks Fukuyama through informed, synthesized analyses of Hans Belting, Alexander Kojeve, Arthur Danto, Edgar Wind, and many others, spotlighting the end-concept metaphorically as a kind of permeable bracket, a liminal gateway, rather than a blunt terminus; thus setting the stage for we “cultural sphere” RAIL readers of the twenty eclectic pages to follow.
“Are the ‘ends’ diagnosed by [the thinkers enumerated above] truly endings?” Gierowska wonders, “Are they transitions between historical stages?” and/or, she continues, “Are we living through an ending, a reset, or the emergence of a new historical order?”
…emerging, myself, into the dark, post-drizzle quietude of the farthest-West Chelsea industrial streetscape, and headed toward the distant subway station, Natalia’s last concept, “order,” lingered.
I imagined my habituated, linear construct of [art] history-as-successive-events [and makers/persons] disintegrating — then re-forming — into an as-yet-untrodden way forward.