Category: Institutions

Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (2)

I left off in the last post on Danto’s book wondering just what to make of his identifying the essence of art as the material embodiment of a meaning to be communicated from artist to audience.  Just what that meaning is (how an audience is supposed to grasp it) is radically context-dependent in Danto, which explains the historicism that exists side by side with his essentialism. (See my previous post, where I quote the passage on page 95 where Danto explains how he is both an essentialist and a historicist.)

Starting with the essentialist part, Danto is (as I read him) substituting an emphasis on “meaning” for any attempt to describe the material features that reveal a thing as a work of art.  “Modernism,” he tells us “came to an end . . . when it became imperative to quit a materialist aesthetics in favor of an aesthetics of meaning” (77).  The difference “between works of art and mere real objects could no longer be articulated in visual terms” (77). 

Quoting a long passage here will provide Danto’s understanding of 1) how his essentialism and historicism co-exist and 2) how he believes art works are to be recognized as instances of art.  (He doesn’t use the word “recognize,” but I think its Hegelian echo appropriate for understanding his position.)

Here’s Danto:

     The difference, philosophically, between . . . Dickie and myself is not that I was an essentialist and he was not, but that I felt that the decisions of the art world in constituting something a work of art required a class of reasons to keep the decisions form being merely fiats of arbitrary will.  And in truth I felt that according the status of art to Brillo Box and to Fountain was less a matter of declaration than of discovery.  The experts really were experts in the same way in which astronomers are experts on whether something is a star.  They saw that these works had meanings which their indiscernible counterparts lacked, and they saw as well the way these works embodied those meanings.  These were works simply made for the end of art inasmuch as there was very little to them in terms of sensuous presentation, and a sufficient degree of what Hegel terms ‘judgment’ to license the admittedly somewhat reckless claim I sometimes made that art had nearly turned into philosophy.

     There is a further consideration bearing on the institutional account, and which has played a considerable role in my thinking about art, namely, that an object precisely (or precisely enough) like one accorded the status of artwork in 1965 could not have been accorded that status in 1865 or 1765.  The concept of art, as essentialist, is timeless.  But the extension of the term is historically indexed—it really is as if the essence reveals itself through history, which is part of what Wofflin may be taken to have implied in saying, ‘Not everything is possible at all times, and certain thoughts can only be thought at certain stages of the development.’ History belongs to the extension rather than the intension of the concept of art, and again with the notable exception of Hegel, virtually no philosophers have taken seriously the historical dimension of art. . . . [B]oth content and means of presentation are themselves historical concepts, though the faculty of the mind to which they answer is not perception but, once again, ‘judgment.’ (195-96, my italics).

As I complained in my last post, the “essence” seems vapid, an empty container into which the historical contents (the actual meaning and the means of its presentation) are poured.  Especially since humans have multiple ways of conferring and communicating meanings, many of which ways we don’t call art and all of which arguably require “judgment” in order to be interpreted and understood. But this passage clarifies why Danto wants to be an essentialist. He wants to avoid “arbitrary” judgments and seems to think only essentialism offers such a guarantee. The historical conditions prevailing at any given moment are not enough since, obviously, such conditions can and do change. But whether such changes are “arbitrary” (surely Hegel wouldn’t find them so) and whether the fact of their existence means chaos reigns is debatable, to say the least.

But I want to focus here on the conditions that would trigger or underwrite the “judgment” that something is a work of art.  The search is for what Wittgenstein would term the “criteria.”  Danto it seems to me offers three candidates for those conditions.

The first is context.  Here Danto goes very far in Wittgenstein’s direction, even as he tells us that his essentialism means he stands “resolutely against the Wittgensteinian tides of the time” (194).  However, he embraces Wittgenstein’s notion of a “form of life” when he comes to fleshing out what he means by context. 

Here’s Danto:

  The expression ‘form of life’ of course comes from Wittgenstein: he said, ‘To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.’ But the same thing must be said about art: to imagine a work of art is to imagine a form of life in which it plays a role. . . . I want heavily to stress a philosophical point about forms of life: a form of life is something lived and not merely known about.  For art to play a role in a form of life, there has to be a fairly complex system of meanings in which it does so, and belonging to another form of life means that one can grasp the meaning of works of art from an earlier form only by reconstituting as much of the relevant system of meanings as we are able.  One can without question imitate the work and the style of the work of an earlier period.  What one cannot do is live the system of meanings upon which the work drew in its original form of life.  Our relationship to it is altogether external, unless and until we can find a way of fitting it into our form of life. (pp. 202-203).

Not only is this position radically historicist, but we get here context on steroids.  The ‘judgment’ that allows us to grasp a work’s meaning is utterly dependent on a “complex” set of background assumptions and understandings.  And this complex set is not something known, but something “lived.”  Meaning emanates like mist from a swamp—a swamp that is the murky (never fully cognized) water we live in.

For me, this kind of historicist rendering of “form of life” (with its hint that one form of life is incommensurable with all others) pushes me toward nominalism rather than essentialism, especially when it comes to cultural (as distinct from biological) phenomenon.  If a work is to be understood as “art” in relation to the “role” it plays in a form of life, then it seems to follow that different forms of life will call something “art” in relation to different criteria.  (Danto would not dispute this point; he just doesn’t think it undermines essentialism.)  So, for example, (following Walter Benjamin here), things are produced for and embedded in ritual practices in certain cultures, but then cross over into being thought “art” when abstracted from their original context of production and use to be placed in a Western museum.  In such cases, the effort seems less to reconstitute the system of meanings in which the object once had a role than to identify some features of “beauty” that can float free of context altogether.  It is a sign of our times that such abstraction from context is now frowned upon and museums displaying such objects nowadays at least gesture toward indicating the original context.

Additionally, accepting this understanding of the holistic determinism wielded by “form of life” commits one (I think) to Wittgenstein’s insistence on “meaning as use”.  Danto’s reference to the “role” a work plays points in that direction.  A work’s meaning is revealed by the “use” to which it is put within a form of life.  So an object being used in a ritual has a different meaning than an object placed on a museum wall.  That, again, seems to me to point in a nominalist direction.  The same painting displayed in a museum or displayed on the wall of the billionaire’s mansion communicates different meanings.  The “essential” fact that it communicates a meaning, that it is put to some use, seems incapable of constraining its radical shape-shifting.

Although he touches on it only lightly in After the End of Art, Danto’s second criteria for art has been “the transfiguration of the commonplace.”  Think here of James Joyce—and transubstantiation.  What the artist does is take the ordinary (a Brillo box; life in dull, dreary Dublin) and transform it (like the priest turns wine and bread into the godhead) by some magical derring-do.  Art transforms the mundane into the sacred.  It reveals the divine that lurks within even the most neglected, even despised, items of everyday life.  Danto (to my knowledge; I haven’t read all his work by a long shot) does not indulge himself in such transports.  And what gives Joyce his dizzying edge is how we are left uncertain as to whether he celebrates such priestly powers in his art or mocks the pretension of artists to possess such power. Is Joyce stealing for the artist religion’s power, or telling us the artist has no such power–and religion never really had that power either? It’s delusion–and disillusion–all the way down.

But to return to nominalism.  (Again, perhaps Danto goes in this direction in his book on the transfiguration of the commonplace.) It seems to me the transfiguration effect is very dependent on the conditions of display.  In other words, the aesthetic is a bounded sphere.  Its actual boundaries at any given moment are a matter of social convention.  But an object is transformed into an art work when it is moved into that sphere.  Once in that sphere, the object’s possible uses (to go back to meaning as use) are also changed.  You don’t put steel wool pads into Warhol’s Brillo Box even if you can.  And that box is in a gallery or a museum not a grocery store.  Different social conventions apply in these different spaces. Danto’s historicist point is not just that different social spheres co-exist at one time, but the same physical spaces mean very different things at different historical moments.  Going to visit Santa Croce in Florence in 2025 to view the Giotto frescoes is vastly different from being in the same church in 1515.

That the boundaries and significances of various social spheres are thus susceptible to change explains much of the point of Brillo Box—and of many of the avant-garde practices from 1890 to the present.  The aim is to reconfigure the space that is “art.”  In some cases, as in much of avant-garde practice, the goal is to eliminate the distinction between art and other spheres (often just designated generally and vaguely as “life”) altogether.  Collapsing the distinction will lead, in the most utopian visions, to a glorious transformation (for the better) of life itself.  The end of art will liberate art and its users from the constraints of art’s being limited to a bounded sphere.  Everything that leads us to cherish art can be brought into every moment of our lives.

A more limited ambition is to expand what gains admission to the sphere of art.  That seems to me a better way of understanding Warhol.  His is a protest against the exclusions that define “high art.”  He is thumbing his nose at such snobbery—in a sly, ironic, and close to cynical way no doubt.  It’s all a species of joke, aimed at deflating the Arnoldian “high seriousness” of the gatekeepers of culture.  That a philosopher like Danto then writes volumes of philosophy spurred on by the Brillo Box can look like one of the high serious ones taking the bait.  His inability to see the joke becomes a new addition to the joke.

In any case, the notion of display, and of a bounded sphere in which the art works resides and is thus recognized as an art work), points to an institutional or conventional understanding of “art.”  Danto in Chapter Ten of After the End of Art has shrewd things to say about museums—and certainly understands the crisis they face under attacks about their elitism, their gate-keeping role, and their extraction of works (often stolen outright) from their original contexts.  It is striking, however, how long this crisis has lasted (well nigh upon fifty years now) with no resolution.  Well meaning (and sometimes well executed) efforts at “public art” aside, the effort to displace the museum as the primary site of display have not gained much traction, partly because no feasible alternative has been found, and partly because our billionaire art collectors are in love with the museum as the suitable site to display their Verblenian grandeur.

Danto’s third criteria is narrative.  He seems to understand the necessity of narrative in two different ways, one fairly parochial, the other very wide-ranging.  The parochial sense is easily stated.  It is, Danto insists, impossible to judge the significance of Warhol’s Brillo Box unless you know how it is in conversation with abstract expressionism.  In other words, to state Danto’s point in Bahktin’s idiom, every utterance is a response to a prior utterance.  Words—and works of art—are not created ex nihilo, and they do not stand on their own.  Danto here fully agrees with various theoretical attacks on the notion of autonomy, on the false belief that anything can stand on its own two feet, disconnected from others, from context, from institutions, from (in short) history.  Hence truly understanding something means locating it within the narrative of which it is part.  Most museum visitors, in Danto’s view, have no idea of what they are looking at because they lack the relevant knowledge.  They don’t know the narrative.

This more specialist knowledge, however, yields to a more global claim about knowledge.  Here’s the version of that large claim in relation to museum visitors.  This “is knowledge of a different order altogether than art appreciation of the sort transmitted by docents, or by art historians, or by the art education curriculum.  And it has little to do with learning to paint or sculpt.  The experiences belong to philosophy and to religion, to the vehicles through which the meaning of life is transmitted to people in their dimension as human beings.  And as this point I return to Adam Verver’s [a character in the Henry James novel The Golden Bowl] conception of the thirsting millions.  What they thirst for, in my view, what we all thirst for, is meaning: the kind of meaning that religion was capable of providing, or philosophy, or finally art—these being, in the tremendous vision of Hegel, the three (there are only three) moments of what he terms Absolute Spirit.  I think it was the perception of artworks as fulcrums of meaning that inspired the templelike architecture of the great museums of [Henry] James’s time, and it was their affinity with religion and philosophy that was sensed as conveying knowledge.  That is, art was construed as a fount rather than merely an object of knowledge” (pp. 187-88).

Although this passage mentions neither “narrative” nor “form of life,” I understand it in relation to those two concepts.  Meaning for Danto, as we have already seen, only arises within the context of a form of life.  And I take it that a “form of life” (given Danto’s historicist leanings) is neither static, nor of a single moment.  It is dynamic and constituted (at least partially) by its history, by the unfolding of multiple relations over time.  In the exalted passage just quoted, art becomes a concentrated focal point, a resonant embodiment, of a form of life’s possible meanings.  The art work becomes a “fount” when it grants us insight, provides an opportunity to grasp meanings previously hidden.  Art is a means for a Hegelian coming to consciousness, even to self consciousness.

I will end by saying I am deeply attracted to such an exalted view of art.  Certainly, I am very inclined to see art works as instances of communication.  And often what the artist wants to communicate is a fairly (or even unfairly) grandiose vision of how a form of life hangs together (or fails to hang together)—as well as a vision of how a life can be lived ethically and meaningfully within a form of life.  Explaining the hold that art has over us who are addicted to it as related to the insights it affords makes sense to me.

Except.  There is also another feature of the experience of art works that seems separate from, albeit not necessarily antagonistic to, a focus on the communication of meaning.  That feature is the more mystical sense of participation in some fundamental, hard to describe (hence mystical) communion with forces (energies) greater than the self.  Rather than providing access to meanings, there is what Nietzsche saw as the Dionysian collapse of meanings and of the self offered in ecstatic states that art provokes.  Danto’s neglect of that side of art goes hand in hand with his rejection of the material, of the sensuous.  His is a very intellectual understanding of art, one that drains it of some elemental powers that cannot be easily captured by or reduced to philosophy.

Perhaps it is possible to mute the mysticism of the prior paragraph by returning to Danto’s insistence that a form of life is something lived not merely know about p. 203, quoted above). If that is the case, and if art works provide a focal point for experiencing a form of life, then an emphasis on what knowledge the art work conveys somehow misses the point. Such an emphasis sustains too great a distance between art work and audience. What we want to capture is the immersion in the work that is the experience of encountering it, not some nugget of insight we extract from it. New Criticism’s “heresy of paraphrase” is not just about trying to convey the art work’s meaning in terms different from those of the work itself, but also about standing apart from a work instead of leaping into it, which may be a way of saying one has prioritized “judgment” over experience.

LINKS

Blogging has been pretty much non-existent for me over the past year.  I won’t make any promises about the future.  If my silence goes on much longer, I will very likely just close down this site altogether.

But I have written a few things over the past months, and here at the links for anyone who might be interested.

First, a review of John Guillory’s recent short book on “close reading.”

https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/37/3/919/8259478

Second, a review of Alexandre LeFebevre’s book, Liberalism as a Way of Life.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/liberalism-as-a-way-of-life-by-alexandre-lefebvre-princeton-nj-princeton-university-press-2024-285p/8A0FBBBFBD5842764650B966930B9EEF

Third, an essay on Hannah Arendt’s theory of judgment that considers its deficiencies as a solution to the failure to construct a “common world” within a political and/or social community.

https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.58.1.0040

This last link is only to an abstract of the essay.  Contact me at mcgowanjohn74@gmail.com if you would like me to send you a copy of the whole essay.  I also have a pdf of the entire special issue of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric in which the essay appears.  Happy to send that along to anyone who is interested.

Great Books 2: Institutions, Curators, and Partisans

I find that I have a bit more to say on the topic of “great books.” 

The scare quotes are not ironic—or even really scare quotes.  Instead, they are the proper punctuation when referring to a word as a word or a phrase as a phrase.  As in, the word “Pope” refers to the head of the Catholic Church.  The phrase “great books” enters into common parlance with University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins’s establishment of a great books centered curriculum there in the 1930s.  From the Wikipedia page on Hutchins: “His most far-reaching academic reforms involved the undergraduate College of the University of Chicago, which was retooled into a novel pedagogical system built on Great Books, Socratic dialogue, comprehensive examinations and early entrance to college.”  The University of Chicago dropped that curriculum shortly after Hutchins stepped down in the early 1950s, with St John’s College now the only undergraduate institution in the country with a full-bore great books curriculum.  Stanford and Columbia had a very great books slanted general education set of requirements for first and second year undergraduates well into the 1990s, but have greatly modified that curriculum in the 21st century.

These curricular issues are central to what I want to write about today.  “Literature,” Roland Barthes once said, “is what gets taught.”  It is very hard to even have a concept of “great books” apart from educational institutions, from what students are required to read, from what a “well-educated” person is expected to be familiar with.  As I wrote a few posts back (https://jzmcgowan.com/2023/07/31/americans-are-down-on-college/), we in the United States seem now to have lost any notion of what a “well-educated” person is or should be.  The grace notes of a passing familiarity with Shakespeare or Robert Frost are now meaningless.  The “social capital” accruing to being “cultured” (as outlined in Pierre Bourdieu’s work) has absolutely no value in contemporary America (apart, perhaps, from some very rarified circles in New York). 

I am not here to mourn that loss.  As I said in my last post, aesthetic artefacts are only “alive” if they are important to some people in a culture.  Only if some people find that consuming (apologies for the philistine word) an artistic work is fulfilling, even essential to their well-being, will that work avoid falling into oblivion, totally forgotten as most work of human hands (artistic or otherwise) is. 

Today, instead, I want to consider how it is that some works do survive.  I think, despite the desire from Hume until the present, that the intrinsic greatness of the works that survive is not a satisfactory explanation.  More striking to me is that the same small group of works (easily read within a four year education) gets called “great”—and how hard it is for newcomers to break into the list.  For all the talk of “opening up the canon,” what gets taught in America’s schools (from grade school all the way up through college) has remained remarkably stable.  People teach what they were taught.

Yes, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez have become “classics”—and are widely taught.  But how many pre-1970 works have been added to the list of “greats” since 1970?  Ralph Ellison and Frederick Douglass certainly.  James Baldwin is an interesting case because he has become an increasingly important figure while none of his works of fiction has become a “classic.”  On the English side of the Atlantic, Trollope has become more important while Shelley has been drastically demoted and Tennyson’s star is dimming fast.  But no other novelist has challenged the hegemony of Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, and Eliot among the Victorians, or Conrad, Joyce, Hardy, and Woolf among the modernists.  The kinds of wide-scale revaluations of writers that happened in the early years of the 20th century (the elevations on Melville and Donne, for example) have not happened again in the 100 years since.  There really hasn’t been any significant addition to the list (apart from Douglass and barring the handful of new works that get anointed) since 1930.

I don’t deny that literary scholars for the most part read more widely and write about a larger range of texts than such scholars did in the 1950s and 1960s.  (Even that assumption should be cautious.  Victorian studies is the field I know best and the older scholars in that field certainly read more of the “minor” poets of the era than anyone who got a PhD in the 1980s or later ever does.)  But the wider canon of scholars has not trickled down very much into the undergraduate curriculum.  Survey courses in both British and American literature prior to 1945 are still pretty much the same as they were fifty years ago, with perhaps one or two token non-canonical works.  More specialized upper class courses and grad courses are sometimes more wide-ranging.  Most significantly, the widening academic canon has not moved into general literate culture (if that mythical beast even exists) at all.

The one place where all bets are off is in courses on post 1945 literature.  No canon (aside from Ellison, Morrison, Rushdie, Baldwin) has been established there, so you will find Nabokov read here and Roth read there, while the growth of “genre courses” means Shirley Jackson and Philip K. Dick are probably now taught more frequently than Mailer or Updike or Bellow.  Things are not as unstable on the British side, although the slide has been toward works written in English by non-English authors (Heaney, Coetzee, various Indian novelists alongside Rushdie, Ondaatje, Ishiguro).

Much of the stability of the pre-1945 canon is institutional.  Institutions curate the art of the past—and curators are mostly conservative.  A good example is the way that the changing standards brought in by Henry James and T. S. Eliot were not allowed (finally) to lead to a wide-scale revision of the “list.”  Unity and a tight control over narrative point of view formed the basis of James’s complaints against the Victorians.  The rather comical result was that academic critics for a good thirty years (roughly 1945 to 1975) went through somersaults to show how the novels of Dickens and Melville were unified—a perverse, if delightful to witness, flying in the face of the facts.  Such critics knew that Dickens and Melville were “great,” and if unity was one feature of greatness, then, ipso facto, their novels must be unified.  Of course, the need to prove those novels were unified showed there was some sub rosa recognition that they were not.  Only F. R. Leavis had the courage of his convictions—and the consistency of thought—to try to drum Dickens out of the list of the greats.  And even Leavis eventually repented.

The curators keep chosen works in public view.  They fuss over those works, attend to their needs, keep bringing them before the public (or, at least, students).  Curators are dutiful servants—and only rarely dare to try to be taste-makers in their own right. 

I don’t think curators are enough.  The dutiful, mostly bored and certainly non-passionate, teacher is a stock figure in every Hollywood high school movie.  Such people cannot bring the works of the past alive.  For that you need partisans.  Some curators, of course, are passionate partisans.  What partisanship needs, among lots of other things, is a sense of opposition.  The partisan’s passion is engendered by the sense of others who do not care—or, even more thrilling, others who would deny the value of the work that the partisan finds essential and transcendentally good.  Yes, there are figures like Shakespeare who are beyond the need of partisans.  There is a complacent consensus about their greatness—and that’s enough.  But more marginal figures (marginal, let me emphasize, in terms of their institutional standing—how much institutional attention and time is devoted to them—not in terms of some kind of intrinsic greatness) like Laurence Sterne or Tennyson need their champions.

In short, works of art are kept alive by some people publicly, enthusiastically, and loudly displaying how their lives are enlivened by their interaction with those works.  So it is a public sphere, a communal, thing—and depends heavily on admiration for the effects displayed by the partisan.  I want to have what she is having—a joyous, enlivening aesthetic experience.  Hume, then, was not totally wrong; works are deemed great because of the pleasures (multiple and many-faceted) they yield—and those pleasures are manifested by aesthetic consumers.  But there is no reason to appeal to “experts” or “connoisseurs.” Anyone can play the role of making us think a work is worth a look, anyone whose visible pleasure has been generated by an encounter with that work.

The final point, I guess, is that aesthetic pleasure very often generates this desire to be shared.  I want others to experience my reaction to a work (to appreciate my appreciation of it.)  And aesthetic pleasure can be enhanced by sharing.  That’s why seeing a movie in the theater is different from streaming it at home.  That’s why a book group or classroom discussion can deepen my appreciation of a book, my sense of its relative strengths and weakness, my apprehension of its various dimensions. 

So long as those communal encounters with a work are happening, the work “lives.”  When there is no longer an audience for the work, it dies.  Getting labeled “great” dramatically increases the chances of a work staying alive, in large part because then the institutional artillery is rolled into place to maintain it.  But if the work no longer engages an audience in ways close to their vital concerns, no institutional effort can keep it from oblivion.

Great Books?

I am currently facilitating a reading group that began with the goal of revisiting the literary works the group members read in a “great books” course forty years ago.  The original (year long) syllabus will be familiar to anyone who knows the traditional canon of the Western literary tradition: Homer, the Bible, Sophocles, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Dostoyevsky, Joyce.  Forty years ago, there was not even a token attempt to include a non-white, non-male author—and the absence of such authors went entirely unmarked, was not on the radar screen as it were, and thus was not even considered something worth noticing or contemplating.

In the course of revisiting the class all these years later, it is not surprising that the group has felt the need to supplement the original list with works by Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Jesmyn Ward, Sandra Cisneros, and Salman Rushdie.

In reading those works, some members of the group have declared (in certain, not all, instances) that the books don’t meet the standard of a “great book”; some of the books have been deemed interesting, informative, worth reading perhaps, but not “great.”

Which raises the vexed question of the standard for greatness—and that’s the topic of this post.

My first—and biggest—point is that I find the whole enterprise of deciding whether something is great or not unproductive.  It rest on the notion of a one size fits all, absolute standard that is more detrimental to appreciation of an aesthetic (or any other kind of) experience than helpful.

Is Italian cuisine “better” than Chinese cuisine?  I trust you see the absurdity of the question.  You certainly can’t appreciate the Italian meal you are eating if you are comparing it to a Chinese meal.  And, in the abstract, the general question of which cuisine is “better” is nonsense.  There is no proper answer to the question because it lacks all specificity.

Judgments of better or worse are always in relation to some standard, some criteria, of judgment.  In his book A Defense of Judgment (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Michael Clune keeps scoring cheap points by telling us that Moby Dick is better than The Apprentice.  The examples hide the absurdity of the claim.  If he insisted instead that Moby Dick is better than The Sopranos, he would almost certainly generate the kind of objection that could lead to forcing him to justify his claim.  According to what criteria is Moby Dick superior, and in relation to what purposes.  Are there no contexts at all where I would prefer to watch The Sopranos to reading Moby Dick? Are there specific things The Sopranos does better than Moby Dick? Am I always choosing the lesser (thus revealing my debased tastes) when I watch the show?  Would the world be a richer and “better” (that word again!) place if it only had Moby Dick in it and not The Sopranos? 

I hope that makes it clear that the rank ordering of various aesthetic works is not just unhelpful, but needlessly restrictive, tending toward the puritanical.  Furthermore, it is a category error.  To respond to diversity (that there are multiple cuisines, that there are many aesthetic objects, and that they come in different genres and employ different media) by ranking all the instances it offers on one scale is to miss the pluralistic plenitude of the world.

So, the standard bearer always cries at this point, does that mean anything goes?  Are we doomed to drown in the sea of relativism? The bugbear of relativism, the contortions writers who long to be considered “serious” go through to avoid being accused of relativism, never fails to astound me.  I hope to address these fears—akin to a “moral panic” in their intensity—in a future post.  Suffice for now to say that relativism is trivially true.  You cannot aspire to be the world’s greatest baseball player if you grow up in first century CE Rome or in contemporary Malawi.  Your aspirations are relative to context.

What does that say about aesthetic standards?  First (again, trivially true) is that such standards shift over time.  Until 1920, general opinion was that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a better book than Moby Dick.  From 1920 to 1980, you would have been considered a complete philistine to prefer Stowe’s novel to Melville’s.  Currently, a more pluralistic ethos prevails.  If you are considering a novel that successfully moves an audience to tears and outrage about a social injustice, then Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the ticket.  For more abstract musings on the meaning of life, Moby Dick is a better bet.  If you want a “tight,” well structured, gem of a more minimalist nature, not one of the “loose baggy monsters” that Henry James disparaged, than neither Stowe nor Melville is going to fit the bill.

Judgment, then, of a work’s quality will be relative to the standard you are applying to the work.  And also relative to the purpose for which the work was written and the purpose for which the consumer is coming to the work.  When making up a syllabus of 19th century American literature, excluding Stowe (and, for that matter, Frederick Douglass), as was standard practice for well over fifty years, is to offer a very truncated vision of the American scene from 1840 to 1870.  Allowing some vague, unspecified, notion of “better” justify the inclusion of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville, along with the exclusion of Stowe and Douglass, is not only to miss important cultural works, but also to renege on the intellectual responsibility to be self-conscious about the standards that govern one’s judgments (and the choices that follow from those judgments, along with the consequences of those choices).

OK.  Let me try to get concrete.  The whole “great books” thing, with its (most likely inevitably futile) attempt to impose “standards” on the benighted tastes of one’s contemporaries, always arises in moments of what we nowadays call “culture wars.”  One famous instance is the quarrel between “the ancients and the moderns” of the late 17th and early 18th century.  More relevant to us today is the modernist revolt against the Romantics and the Victorians.  T. S. Eliot was a central figure here, promulgating a “classicist” aesthetic standard that valued austere, non-sentimental, tightly formed, stringently intellectual (and hence non-emotional and non-personal) works over what he deemed the sloppy, sentimental, and overly rhetorical (i.e. trying to persuade the audience of some moral or political or otherwise sententious “truth’) of the art of the 19th century.  That the works Eliot championed were “difficult” was a feature not a bug.  The world was awash in easy, popular art—and “high art” had to be protected from danger of being dragged into that swamp. 

What Eliot was trying to produce was nothing less than a sea change in sensibility.  He wanted to change what audiences liked, how they responded to aesthetic objects.  Henry James (as we have already seen) was engaged in the same enterprise.  The modernist painters offer a particularly clear case of this enterprise.  Works that in 1870 were deemed “barbarous” were declared masterpieces by 1910.  (Van Gogh, who sold only one painting in his lifetime, unhappily did not live to bask in this radical revaluation, this shift in criteria of judgment, in the world of visual art.  Cezanne, to a somewhat lesser extent, also died a few years too early.)

The shift in sensibility was wonderfully summed up (in his usual pithy manner) by Oscar Wilde when he said “it would take a heart of stone to not laugh at the death of Little Nell.” (Translation: the death of little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop –which gets dragged out over numerous pages—famously moved readers to tears on both sides of the Atlantic.)

So, in short, we do have a set of aesthetic standards promulgated by the modernists that lead to the elevation of Melville over Stowe (among many over revaluations) and which can be specified (especially when considered as negations of some of the prevailing features of “popular art”—works which, like loose women, are castigated for being “too easy.”)

A list of great books, then, can be a destroyer of diversity.  (“Eleanor Rigby” along criteria of profundity and musical complexity is a “greater” song than “When I’m 64,” but don’t we want a world in which both exist and in which we listen to both?)  And such a list relies on a fairly one-dimensional set of criteria that belies the imaginative plenitude that the arts provide.  When this narrowing work is combined with the notion that all judges of any taste know instinctively what a great work looks and tastes like, without any need to spell out the grounds for their judgment, we have a specific sensibility parading as universal.  (Which, not surprisingly, mirrors the objection of women and people of color about their experiences in “unmarked,” male-shaped spaces.  There are unwritten, even unconscious, norms of behavior in such spaces that are not seen as one alternative manner among others, as not universal.)

Does this mean all judgments of “better” or “worse” are off the table? No.  It simply means that an aesthetic work (or a meal in a Chinese restaurant for that matter) should be judged according to the criteria that guided its making.  I will admit that I find much politically motivated visual art deeply flawed.  But that is not because I have some aestheticist notion that art is always ruined by being political (another of the modernist shibboleths).  I reject any such absolute, universalist standard that says art can only do this and not that.  Rather, I think it is particularly difficult for the visual arts to make statements; they don’t have the same resources for statement-making available to novelists, poets, and film-makers (to name only three). 

Does this mean that visual artists should all eschew making works that aim at some political point? No.  Successfully doing something that is very difficult is often the hallmark of an important artist, one worth paying attention to.  The role of the audience is, in this view, to grasp what the artist is trying to accomplish—and to judge how successfully the artist accomplished that goal. Given similar goals, some artists do better work than other artists–relative to that goal.

Two last points and I am done.

The first relates to acquired taste.  An aesthetic education is always a process of learning how to appreciate, in the best case scenario to enjoy, aesthetic objects that, at first encounter, are too different, difficult, foreign, unfamiliar to grasp.  This process of education is mid-wived by others (friends, lovers, teachers) who deeply appreciate some works of art and long to convey that appreciation to another.  The means to that sharing is a heightened apprehension of the particular features of the particular work.  The mentor guides the neophyte toward “seeing” what is there.  The one who appreciates illuminates the work, shows what it contains that is to be valued, to the newcomer.  People who are especially good at this work of illumination are the truly gifted teachers and critics. 

In my ideal English department (for example), the staff would include a medievalist to whom the works of that period are endlessly fascinating and enjoyable—and that professor would be a success if she communicated that enthusiasm, that appreciation, to students who entered college with no idea that there was a vastly rich repository of medieval literature to encounter and learn to love. There would be no need to disparage some works as inferior in order to champion some as deeply pleasurable and worth reading along any number of criterial dimensions. 

And that brings me to my second—and last—point.  There is absolutely no doubt that various works have been aided in the perpetual effort to escape oblivion by institutional support and inertia.  Wordsworth becomes part of the curriculum—and I teach and research about Wordsworth because of the institutional stamp of value.  Literary institutions, like all assemblages of power, work to sustain themselves.  It takes a long time for values to shift in the academy—a shorter time in the market (as witnessed by the shift in taste in painting between 1870 and 1914).  The larger point is that judgments of value do not occur in a vacuum.  There are institutional hierarchies that protect prevailing judgments and only slowly adopt re-valuations.  

Still, institutions are not omnipotent—and they tend to ossification if not drawing revitalizing energies from some other source.  All of which is to say that “great books” only remain alive to the extent that some people somewhere still find them of interest, importance, worth devoting some time to.  Here’s the last reappearance of relativism in this discussion.  A book can be as “great” as you want to claim it is, but none of its intrinsic features will ensure its survival, its still being read, its not falling into the oblivion that engulfs 99% of the artistic works ever produced.  It will only still command attention while some audience finds it worthy of attention.  And that worthiness rests, in part, on the work having institutional prestige and enthusiastic champions, but also (crucially) on an encounter with it being experienced by at least some people as part of living a full and satisfying life.  The work’s survival is relative to an audience that keeps it alive.