The essay is devoted to a generation of prophets and slanderers of prophets that will be sixty come 2007. A characterisation of this generation, which here is called the Generation of Eighty-three furnishes the pretext for historicising prophecy in the age of its topicality. The lead figures in this enlightenment play so amply blessed with coincidences were all born in 1947 and all are active today at Karlsruhe (Peter Sloterdijk, Beat Wyss and Boris
Groys), Berlin (Horst Bredekamp), in Virtual Reality (Howard Rheingold) or in New York (Salman R. Rushdie).
The focal point of the characterisation is the programmatic text published in the biopolitical year of birth of the Eighty-three-ers, Peter Sloterdijk¿fs "Kritik der zynischen Vernunft" (1983; in English as Critique of Cynical Reason [Minnesota, 1988]), flanked by the postdoctoral thesis Beat Wyss completed in 1983, Trauer der Vollendung (Hegel¿fs Art History and the Critique of Modernity, Res Monographs in Anthropology and Aesthetics series, Cambridge [UK] and New York, 1999) and, again dating from 1983, Hans Belting¿s inaugural lecture in Munich on the end of art history.
The (then-) current image-theory debate is interpreted as one of the by-products of the '83 ideology . an outlook formed out of the criticism that raged against the generation of ¿f68 and which is proving increasingly to be a rock of offence
on the onerous path toward a fitting scholarly treatment of more recent
developments in art and the media.