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.