The problem of the death of the art crosses practically all modern artistic history. The Hegel’s lectures Aesthetics, delivered not much later of the Kantian validation of an autonomous judgment of taste, already present the idea of the dissolution of the art- that would have, in the words of the philosopher, become thing of the past. This work intends to investigate the narrow and intriguing connection between an art that finally reached autonomy at the modern times and the constant shade of its proper death. Either in the aesthetic discourses that, since the beginning of modernity, indicate an obsolescence of the art, either in the critical-revolutionary impulse of the avant-gardes, that had fomented a selfdestruction of the artistic sphere, either in our present time, where any concrete distinctions between the work of art and other things, that is, between aesthetic value and exchange value, seems to disappear, the question of the death of the art, in one way or another, confirms its presence. To inquire the meaning of this long validity, as well as verifying its persistence in the contemporary time, is, in short, the proposal of this work.