I have recently finished reading Arthur Danto’s After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton University Press, 1997).
What follows are some fairly non-systematic reactions. There will be a second post on Danto that follows up on this one.
For starters, the title is odd since Danto strongly distinguishes art from aesthetics, and his thesis (it seems to me) is that art after modernism is still art but has jettisoned the aesthetics. That is, we haven’t seen the end of art, but the end of aesthetics. Or perhaps more accurately, the severance of art from aesthetics. Thus he writes: “art before and after the ‘era of art’ shows that the connection between art and aesthetics is a matter of historical contingency and not part of the essence of art” (25).
This all suggest a very de-materialized notion of art’s essence. He is very clear that art after modernism can no longer be distinguished by its visual “look” or by any other sensuous quality. Modernism “came to an end when philosophy was separated from style because the true form of question ‘What is Art?’ emerged . That took place roughly around 1964. Once it was determined that a philosophical definition of art entails no stylistic imperative whatever, so that anything can be a work of art, we enter what I am terming the post-historical period” (46-47, my italics). “Greenberg believed that art alone and unaided presents itself to the eye as art, when one of the great lessons of art in recent times is that this cannot be so, that artworks and real things cannot be told apart from visual inspection alone” (71).
Strange that he wants to talk of a “post-historical” period since he is very Hegelian in the belief that certain ideas can only arise and certain questions can only be asked at specific historical moments. Unless he is saying (super-Hegelian if he is) that reaching the historical moment when the question of what is art can be asked in its “true form” means history has come to a close. There will be no further progress, no future paradigm shift (Danto invokes Kuhn several times). Art will now only and always be pondering the question of “what is art?” Really?
Danto does seem to accept that one can practice aesthetics and thus sidestep being an artist who concentrates on the philosophical question. [See p 33 and its discussion of impressionist painting as “aesthetically pleasing,” a source of “immediate enjoyment” that is separate from (innocent of) any “philosophical theory.”] At this point, Danto seems to favor asceticism over aestheticism, coming across as a stern philosophy master who has no truck with mere “enjoyment.” But he does, begrudgingly, admit that one can apprehend art, even “post-historical art,” apart from any engagement with the philosophical questions that animate his relation to art works. “It is always possible to learn to respond sensitively and with discrimination to works nothing in one’s experience especially prepared one for. For someone whose interaction with art is of this order, a theory about the end of art makes no sense at all: one continues adjusting and responding to whatever comes along without benefit of theory” (56). The tone of this passage is very difficult to describe—and priceless as well as comic.
In any case, to move away from art’s sensuous qualities facilitates a move toward something non-material. We need, Danto says, “a general theory of quality” (95). And then immediately thereafter, we get his most explicit statement of what he wants a philosophy of art to achieve: “As an essentialist in philosophy, I am committed to the view that art is eternally the same—that there are conditions necessary and sufficient for something to be an art work, regardless of time and place. I do not see how one can do philosophy of art—or philosophy period—without to this extent being an essentialist. But as an historicist I am also committed to the view that what is a work of art at one time cannot be one at another, and in particular that there is a history, enacted through the history of art, in which the essence of art—the necessary and sufficient conditions—are painfully brought to consciousness” (95)
So much to unpack here. But to be schematic. 1) Note the word “painfully.” What kind of pain are we talking about here?
2) If something can be an art work in 1965 that could not have been an art work in 1765, then what kind of “essence” are we talking about? A version of historical or cultural relativism seems much more likely. In fact, Danto will go on to invoke the Wittgenstein’s notion of a “form of life” (see 202-203).
3) So why the fervent attachment to essentialism? Why is “philosophy period” undercut if one does not believe there are entities (concepts? practices? truths?) that are “eternally the same”? Wittgnestein, for one, was trying to cure philosophy of this (to him fruitless) search for eternal verities.
4) Finally, there is the commitment to a kind of Hegelian progress. History has a direction and leads to a clarification of some idea, follows a path toward bringing that idea to consciousness. A pretty dubious assumption—and one that requires a rigorous pruning of the canon, so that one can tell a story about how Giotto leads to Massachio and so on down to Van Gogh yielding Pollock. Works that don’t easily fit into this narrative are sidelined, they are not part of the “mainstream.” Since, as we will see in my second post, Danto is strongly committed to pluralism of practice in “post-historical art” and also adamant that “narrative” plays a crucial (dare I say “essential”) role in our understanding of art works, why not entertain the idea of multiple different narratives co-existing at any historical moment. Why think there is only the one grand Hegelian narrative leading “painfully” to be sure but apparently inexorably to a destined end?
It seems that the “essence” Danto finally offers us is one centered on “meaning.” Here Danto once again leans heavily on Hegel. “[A]s Hegel puts it in speaking of the work of art, ‘It is essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind and spirit.’”(97-98). To which Danto immediately adds: “And that is true of Morris as of Warhol, of Pollock as of Mondrian, of Hals as of Vermeer” (98).
Danto elucidates: “Hegel speaks of intellectual judgment of ‘(i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation.’ Criticism needs nothing further. It needs to identify both meaning and mode of presentation, or what I term “embodiment” on the thesis that artworks are embodied meanings” (98, my italics).
It really does seem that that’s it. The essence of art is that it is embodied meaning. There are several consequences of this “thesis.” For starters, it brings the material back in. Meaning may not be visual, but it is also not fully spiritual. It has a physical presence in the world, at least in works of art. We might very well wonder, however, if it is possible to speak of meaning, especially of a meaning that is communicated, apart from some kind of physical embodiment. And that raises the question of what is distinctive about art all over again. Because if embodied meaning is the focus, language itself qualifies. Words spoken and/or written are embodied meanings.
From my perspective, Danto’s discussion of meaning and of art’s communicative aim is way too passive. He is not interested in what works do, what motivates a person’s desire to communicate, and what means they use toward that end. That’s partly unfair since Danto is in fact a truly gifted commentator on individual works of art. But my comment is meant to illustrate how general—and to that extent, in my view, vapid—his identified “essence” is. Knowing the “essence” does very little to contribute to the work of understanding. And surely understanding is the goal of communicative acts. The speaker wants to be understood; the auditor wants to understand.
To be told that an act of communication is taking place and that it uses material means to gets its message across does very little, it seems to me, to advance the work of understanding. It does, as Danto tells us, lead us to focus on just what material means the person chose to employ. So we would want to know why this means, rather than that. Why painting instead of words? Why abstract painting rather than mimetic? Beyond that interest in means, the work of interpretation still needs to unfold. Yes, it may help to know that here we are dealing with a work of art rather than a medical report, but concentrating on what makes it a work of art is separate from considering what the artist is using art to convey. And if the artist is using art to consider what makes something art or not, well and good. That’s one thing to be thinking and communicating about. But surely it would get tiresome rather quickly if all art were devoted to navel gazing about what art is, what’s its true or essential nature is. That seems like contemplating the essence of love as opposed to the practice of living out love, with all its joys and difficulties, in a relationship with another person. Which is to say that Danto, even as he considers art as a communicative act, rarely talks as if the practice of art is a two-way street, one in which an audience is a crucial as a producer.
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