Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art: Essays 9004468358, 9789004468351

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
2. Danto, Art, and History
3. Danto, Style, and Intention
4. Essence, Expression, and History: Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art
1 Essence and Expression: Danto’s Philosophy of Art
2 The End of Art: Danto’s Philosophy of Art History
3 A Critical Examination of Danto’s Philosophy of Art
4 Concluding Remarks
5. Danto’s New Definition of Art and the Problem of Art Theories
6. The End of Art?
7. Danto, the End of Art, and the Orientational Narrative
1 Introduction
2 Misunderstandings: The Endlessness of Art
3 The End of Art
4 Criticisms of the End-of-Art Thesis
5 Re-Reading Danto
8. Arthur Danto and the Problem of Beauty
1 On Why Beauty in the Narrow Sense Appears to be a Problem for Danto
2 On Why Beauty Has No Place in Danto’s Concept of Art
3 Explaining (or Explaining Away) the Relevance of Beauty to Art Properly So-Called
4 Arthur Danto’s Concept of Art and Beauty in a Broader Sense
9. Arthur Danto, His Philosophy of Art and Critical Practice
1 Essentialism without Critical Value Judgments
2 Danto’s Definition of Art and His Critical Practice
3 Danto’s Philosophy of Art History and His Critical Practice
4 Art Criticism without Evaluation?
5 Summary
10. Arthur Danto and the Political Re-Enfranchisement of Art
1 Introduction
2 Disenfranchising Art
3 Danto and the Possibility of Political Art
4 Summary
11. Danto, Pluralism, and Politics
1 Between Modernist Autonomy and Post-Modernist Engagement
2 Danto, Modernism, and Pluralism
3 Post-Modernist Political Advocacy and Post-Historical Pluralism
4 Summary
12. The Philosophy of Art History, Dance, and the 1960s
13. Arthur Danto Goes to the Movies
1 Introduction
2 Danto’s Ontology of Cinema
3 Danto and the History of the Moving Image
4 Danto and Moving Image Criticism
14. Warhol’s Empire
15. Danto’s Philosophy of History
1 Historical Retrospecton
2 The Substantive Philosophy of History
3 The Eye-Witness View of History
4 The End of Art
16. Danto’s Comic Vision: Philosophical Method and Literary Style
1 Introduction
2 Danto’s Philosophical Method
3 Comedy Tonight
4 A Happy Ending
17. The Age of Danto
Appendix: Two Brief Notes on What Art Is
1 On “Wakeful Dreams”
2 “Kant and the Work of Art”
Index

Citation preview

Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art: Essays

Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

Philosophy of History and Culture Edited by Michael Krausz (Bryn Mawr College) Advisory Board Annette Baier† (University of Pittsburgh) Purushottama Bilimoria (Deakin University, Australia) Cora Diamond (University of Virginia) William Dray† (University of Ottawa) Nancy Fraser (New School for Social Research) Clifford Geertz† (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) Peter Hacker (St. John’s College, Oxford) Rom Harré (Linacre College, Oxford) Bernard Harrison (University of Sussex) Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago) Leon Pompa (University of Birmingham) Joseph Raz (Balliol College, Oxford) Amélie Rorty (Harvard University)

volume 39

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/phc

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Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art: Essays By

Noël Carroll

leiden | boston

Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Carroll, Noël, 1947- author. Title: Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art : essays / by Noël Carroll. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Philosophy of history and culture, 0922-6001 ; volume 39 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “For over thirty years, Arthur Danto was the most important art critic and philosopher of art and aesthetics in the English-speaking world. Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art: Essays provides a comprehensive and systematic view of his philosophy and criticism by Noël Carroll, Distinguished Professor of the Philosophy of Art, CUNY and himself a former journalist specializing in arts criticism. Danto’s writings attracted and still attracts diverse audiences, including aestheticians, artists, art critics, historians, and art lovers. In this book they will find his major themes not only analyzed in depth but also discussions of his political significance, views on history, cinema and more”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021022005 (print) | LCCN 2021022006 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004468351 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004468368 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Danto, Arthur C., 1924-2013–Aesthetics. | Art–Philosophy. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC B945.D364 C37 2021 (print) | LCC B945.D364 (ebook) | DDC 700.1–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022005 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022006

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0922-6001 isbn 978-90-04-46835-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-46836-8 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Noël Carroll. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Sense, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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To the Members of the Philadelphia Aesthetics Reading Group Past, Present, and Future Susan Feagin, Proprietor

∵

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Contents

Acknowledgements ix

1

Introduction 1

2

Danto, Art, and History 8

3

Danto, Style, and Intention 25

4

Essence, Expression, and History: Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art 36 1 Essence and Expression: Danto’s Philosophy of Art 37 2 The End of Art: Danto’s Philosophy of Art History 49 3 A Critical Examination of Danto’s Philosophy of Art 63 4 Concluding Remarks 69

5

Danto’s New Definition of Art and the Problem of Art Theories 71

6

The End of Art? 79

7

Danto, the End of Art, and the Orientational Narrative 93 1 Introduction 93 2 Misunderstandings: The Endlessness of Art 94 3 The End of Art 95 4 Criticisms of the End-of-Art Thesis 103 5 Re-Reading Danto 108

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Arthur Danto and the Problem of Beauty 114 1 On Why Beauty in the Narrow Sense Appears to be a Problem for Danto 114 2 On Why Beauty Has No Place in Danto’s Concept of Art 118 3 Explaining (or Explaining Away) the Relevance of Beauty to Art Properly So-Called 121 4 Arthur Danto’s Concept of Art and Beauty in a Broader Sense 126

9

Arthur Danto, His Philosophy of Art and Critical Practice 129 1 Essentialism without Critical Value Judgments 129 2 Danto’s Definition of Art and His Critical Practice 131 3 Danto’s Philosophy of Art History and His Critical Practice 134 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Contents

4 5

Art Criticism without Evaluation? 137 Summary 142

10

Arthur Danto and the Political Re-Enfranchisement of Art 143 1 Introduction 143 2 Disenfranchising Art 143 3 Danto and the Possibility of Political Art 147 4 Summary 152

11

Danto, Pluralism, and Politics 153 1 Between Modernist Autonomy and Post-Modernist Engagement 153 2 Danto, Modernism, and Pluralism 156 3 Post-Modernist Political Advocacy and Post-Historical Pluralism 161 4 Summary 166

12

The Philosophy of Art History, Dance, and the 1960s 167

13

Arthur Danto Goes to the Movies 182 1 Introduction 182 2 Danto’s Ontology of Cinema 182 3 Danto and the History of the Moving Image 188 4 Danto and Moving Image Criticism 193

14

Warhol’s Empire 196

15

Danto’s Philosophy of History 199 1 Historical Retrospecton 199 2 The Substantive Philosophy of History 200 3 The Eye-Witness View of History 202 4 The End of Art 204

16

Danto’s Comic Vision: Philosophical Method and Literary Style 210 1 Introduction 210 2 Danto’s Philosophical Method 211 3 Comedy Tonight 213 4 A Happy Ending 216

17

The Age of Danto 219

Appendix: Two Brief Notes on What Art Is 223 Index 228 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

Acknowledgements Chapter 2 “Danto, Art, and History” from History and Theory vol. XXIX, No. 1 (1990), pp. 111–124. Originally printed as review of Danto. Chapter 3 “Danto, Style, and Intention” from Journal of Art and Aesthetics vol. 53, No. 3 (Summer, 1995), pp. 251–257. Chapter 4 “Essence, Expression, History: Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art” from Danto and his Critics edited by Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell’s Publishers, 1993), pp. 79–106. Chapter 5 “Danto’s New Definition of Art and the Problem of Art Theories” from British Journal of Aesthetics vol. 37, No. 4 (October, 1997), pp. 382–386. Chapter 6 “The End of Art?” in Theme Issue 37 from History and Theory (1998), pp. 17–29. Chapter 7 “Danto, the End of Art, and the Orientational Narrative” from The Library of Living Philosophers: The Philosophy of Arthur Danto edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago, Illinois: Open Court, 2013), pp. 433–453. Chapter 8 “Arthur Danto and the Problem of Beauty” in Il mondo dell’arte il tempo dell’arte: Prospecttive sull’estetica di Arthur C. Danto, edited Michele Di Monte (Rome: Meltemi Editore), 2008. Reprinted in Beauty Unlimited, edited by Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 29–44. Chapter 9 “Filosofia dell’arte e attivita critica” in Arthur C. Danto e l’ontologica dell’arte, edited by T. Adina and A. Lanciere in Rivista di estetica, No. 35 (2) (2007), pp. 67–80. Reprinted in International Yearbook of Aesthetics: Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Vol. 16 (2012), pp. 48–63. Chapter 12 “The Philosophy of Art History, Dance, and the 1960s” in Reinventing Dance in the 1960s: Everything was Possible edited by Sally Banes (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), pp. 81–97. Chapter 13 “Arthur Danto goes to the Movies,” in Philosophy and the Moving Image by Noël Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming July 2021). Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Acknowledgements

Chapter 14 “Warhol’s Empire,” in Unwatchable edited by Nicholas Baer et al (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), pp. 189–193. Chapter 15 “Danto’s Philosophy of History” in Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Arthur Danto edited by Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr (Malden, MA: Willey Blackwell, forthcoming 2021). Chapter 16 “Danto’s Comic Vision: Philosophical Method and Literary Style” in Philosophy and Literature, vol. 39, No. 2 (October, 2015), pp. 554–563. Chapter 17 “The Age of Danto” in ASA Newsletter vol 33, No. 3 (Winter, 2013), p. 2.

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Chapter 1

Introduction In nineteen hundred and eighty-one I returned to graduate school in philosophy with the desire to specialize in the philosophy of art. That was also the year of the publication of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace by Arthur Danto.1 It was the book to study – the gold standard of the philosophy of art among my fellow graduate students and me. Although Danto had written seminal essays in the field of the philosophy of art prior to the publication of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, until nineteen eighty one, Danto was only a part time aesthetician; he was also a metaphysician, an epistemologist, a philosopher of history and a historian of philosophy, among other things. But the Transfiguration of the Commonplace marked his transition into becoming a full-time philosopher of art, producing, by now, the larger half of his books in the field of aesthetics. That productivity, moreover, coincided with my own professional career as a philosopher, a career that has been stimulated throughout by Arthur Danto. A number of my core ideas are variations on Danto’s – some of whose deviations from his versions I suspect he does not approve. Nevertheless, studying Danto closely was essential to my evolution as a philosopher over nearly forty years, as it has been for others, including my own students. As a result of this close engagement with Danto’s work, I have often had occasion to write about it. Sometimes, these articles have been the result of panel discussions which I had the good luck to share with Danto at various professional meetings. Frequently, the publication of a new book by Danto led me to reconsider his oeuvre from a novel perspective. In time, I accumulated quite a collection of articles on Danto, enough in fact to make a book. And that is what you are now reading – a collection of my articles on Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art, including a brief appendix addressing two essays in his last book What Art Is. This collection is intended to provide an overview of Danto’s contributions to the philosophy of art, while also attempting to take into consideration the relations of his art criticism to his philosophy and vice-versa. As major new developments in Danto’s philosophy of art emerged, I attempted to take note of them. In this respect, this book could be seen as the journal of an 1 Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1981). © Noël Carroll, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004468368_002 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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avid Danto-watcher. However, the book is not a desultory chronicle, since I am ­constantly concerned with charting the relationships between the major developments in Danto’s philosophy of art. I have also included essays on Danto’s approach to criticism, on the consequences of his approach for politics, his views on cinema, on history, on the ramifications of his philosophy of art history for dance, and a view of his style of writing. Danto’s work in the philosophy of art heralded a decisive break with reigning philosophical fashions. Before Danto’s earliest endeavors in the philosophy of art, a moratorium on the attempt to define art had been declared by a number of philosophers influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Even Monroe Beardsley, the dean of American philosophers of art of the period, in his landmark treatise Aesthetics, refrained from proffering a definition of art, despite the fact that he clearly had one within his reach. However, in nineteen hundred and sixty four at a presentation during the Eastern Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association Danto gave a paper entitled “The Artworld” (also published in 1964 in The Journal of Philosophy), which began to turn the tide against Neo-Wittgensteinian aesthetics.2 Although not proposing a complete analysis of the criteria for art status, “The Artworld” did argue powerfully for an atmosphere of art theory and history as a necessary condition for art status. Not only was “The Artworld” important for rejuvenating the project of defining art. Danto’s strategy for carrying it off was also influential. In what was to become for Danto a life-long meditation on Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, it came to Danto that whatever decided whether or not a candidate was art, it would not be something that could be detected by the naked eye. That is, since Warhol’s Brillo Box is an art work whereas everyday, identically looking Brillo cartons are not, that which won Brill Box art status was not something that could be eyeballed. That is, it could not be a manifest property of the art work. This insight was important in a number of respects. Previous attempts to define art, such as the representational theory, the expression theory, formalism, and the aesthetic theory of art all relied upon searching for the essence of art in terms of something that could be manifested perceptually in ­experience – like significant form. Danto’s argument that what made art art was indiscernible, thus pinpointing the mistake upon which millennia of art theorizing had been predicated, while also turning philosophers onto a more promising direction of inquiry. 2 Arthur Danto, “The Art World,” Journal of Philosophy 61 (Oct. 15, 1964). Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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At the very least, this encouraged many thinkers to wonder about what in the context of the practices of art enfranchised some objects as art works. George Dickie developed this in terms of what he initially called the institution of the art world. Richard Wollheim talked about the art world as a form of life. However, even where philosophers of art characterized the decisive art world context for the enfranchisement of art in ways differently than Danto did, they owed the expansion of art theory to a wider field of considerations to Danto. And, as well, the method of deploying thought experiments involving an array of perceptually indiscernible counterparts that nevertheless strike us as belonging to contrasting categories – such as art works and real things – while a signature technique of Danto’s, also became important element in the workaday tool-kit of every practicing aesthetician. Danto has not only been a pioneer in the philosophy of art through his re-invigoration of the question of the essence of art. He has also re-inspired interest in the philosophy of art history. In a daring conjecture, reminiscent of Hegel, Danto has argued that art history has come to an end, a thesis that requires careful parsing, as you will see in the pages to come. This claim, it will be argued, has a crucial role to play in the defense of Danto’s philosophy of art while also providing a foundation for the kind of art critic Danto became. That is, on the one hand, the end of art thesis is an attempt to indemnify Danto’s essentialist theory of art from the greatest nemesis of such theories – the future from whence counterexamples never dreamt of by essentialist philosophers hurtle from with devastating effect. But, if Danto is right, and art history has come to an end, then his essentialist theorizing has nothing to fear from what will be. There will be nothing new under the sun; theoretically, it is dusk, and Minerva may take wing. On the other hand, the end of art thesis played further roles in Danto’s approach to art. It served as an argument that vindicated his particular practice of art criticism. According to the end of art thesis, with respect to art, we live in post-historical times. There is no overarching agenda that is first and foremost in the minds of ambitious artists as the program of the self-definition of art was said to be during the period of Modernism, as understood by people like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Instead, each artist is free to pursue her own projects. Ours is an era of pluralism. Moreover, pluralism in art making calls for pluralism in art criticism – that is, for art critics who are open to many different kinds of artistic aspirations and who are committed to identifying what each art work is about on its own terms on the way to assisting audiences in appreciating the ways in which the artist in question embodies that which the art work is about. And, of course, that is exactly the kind of criticism Arthur Danto practices. In short, he is precisely the type of critic the art world needs, if the end of art thesis is true. Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Because Danto is a pluralist, he has a certain flexibility in responding to political art not shared by many of the most ambitious art critics who were and are his peers – the Modernist art critics and the Politicized Post Modernists art critics. Since Danto accepts that art works can be about something other than the reflexive critique or the self-definition of art, he can countenance explicitly political art – and even implicitly political art – as perfectly legitimate. Alternatively, unlike Politicized Post Modernists, he does not have to measure the worth of each artwork in terms of the contribution it makes or fails to make to the struggle against capitalism and the consciousness debauching semiotics of consumerism. Danto’s pluralism allows that art can be political or not, and that there are political projects beyond only the putatively titanic conflict between progressives and capitalism. My first chapter – “Danto, Art, and History” – derives from my comments on the occasion of Danto’s delivery of the Trilling Lecture at Columbia University. This essay sets out a hypothesis about the relationship between Danto’s philosophy of art and his philosophy of art history. The idea is not only that Danto’s philosophy of art indemnifies his philosophy of art in the way suggested earlier. The philosophy of art history also sets the stage for Danto’s arrival on the scene as the successor to Andy Warhol. Warhol shows that the essence of art needs to be stated in terms of something indiscernible to the naked eye. Danto is ready and able to say what that something is. This chapter also addresses a tension within Danto’s philosophy. It points out that the kind of philosophy of art history involved in announcing the end of art is, strictly speaking, at odds with the analytical philosophy of history that Danto developed in a book with that title. For, in his Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto argued that the historian cannot know that some historical process is over, unless she is at a sufficient temporal remove from it.3 Yet, Danto is in the thick of the course of events he deigns to declare done. The next essay – “Danto, Style, and Intention” – discusses the essay that is, perhaps, Danto’s single best known, “The Artworld.” In this piece, I examine the notion of the style-matrix that Danto introduced in “The Artworld” and question whether it is consistent with what Danto contends about artistic intentions in other works such as The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. “Essence, Expression, and History: Danto’s Philosophy of Art” overlaps with the first chapter to some extent; however, it has a decidedly different emphasis, 3 Arthur Danto, The Analytical Philosophy of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. An expanded version of this volume has most recently been re-issued with an introduction by Lydia Goehr under the title Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

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since it spends much more time critically laying out and questioning the t­ heory of art presented in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. With Danto’s publication of his book, After the End of Art, he modifies his theory of art. In “Danto’s New Definition of Art and the Problem of Art Theories,” I explore the changes in his philosophy of art and argue that his new theory is not up to doing the work he assigns it – namely, to cut the difference between art works and real things. In “The End of Art?” my aim is to work out Danto’s end of art thesis as exactly as possible and to locate the points at which I think the argument falters. The end of art thesis is also examined in my next essay – “Danto, the End of Art, and the Orientational Narrative.” In this essay, I return to the criticism that Danto’s philosophy of art history contradicts his philosophy of history. But then I go on to suggest that Danto’s own philosophy of history may be too narrow in its construal of the function of historical narratives. For, there are not only what might be called scientific narratives; there are also ones I call orientational or practical narratives. Moreover, Danto’s end of history thesis, while unacceptable as an example of a scientific narrative, may be charitably reconstrued as an orientational narrative that possesses the sort of legitimacy that belongs to the genre of practical narratives. “Danto and the Problem of Beauty” takes up the issue of Danto’s last through-written treatise in aesthetics, The Abuse of Beauty. In this article I attempt to show why Danto needs to confront the issue of beauty, given his theory of art, and then I go on to assess the degree to which his account of artistic beauty succeeds in what it needs to accomplish. “Danto, the End of Art and the Orientational Narrative” concludes with the idea that Danto’s story about the end of art can be read as propaedeutic to his pluralistic brand of art criticism. The end of art thesis, in other words, paves the way for his pluralism. In “Danto, his Philosophy of Art and Critical Practice” I attempt to show the relations of Danto’s criticism not only to his philosophy of art history but also to his definition of art. In a manner of speaking, his art criticism, I claim, “falls out” of his definition of art. Nevertheless, I also argue that certain of the assertions that Danto makes about his criticism, including his evasion of evaluation, are unsustainable. The discussion of Danto’s critical practice naturally leads to a discussion of the political dimension of his approach to art, given the large amount of political art and criticism that emerges in the period that Danto becomes one of the leading art critics. In “Danto and the Political Re-Enfranchisement of Art” I point out that Danto’s theory of art, in contrast to Modernism and the aesthetic theory of art, neatly accommodates the possibility of taking political art seriously rather than supposing that politics and art combine as incongruously

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as oil and water. And then in “Danto, Pluralism, and Politics” I specify Danto’s stance toward the political in art. I maintain that in opposition to Modernists, Danto can appreciate the political dimension of art works, while, at the same time, not forcing every artwork into the one-size-fits-all ideological rack that the Politicized Post Modernists endorse. Danto’s philosophy and criticism has excited interest far beyond the seminar rooms of philosophy departments and even the groves of academe. Artists, art writers, and art lovers find Danto’s work on art compelling, since Danto’s insights at one level of generality or about one art form can often shed light elsewhere. In “Judson Dance Theater, and the Philosophy of Dance History after Danto” I suggest a way in which Danto’s philosophy of art history – which is stated primarily in terms of painting – can be extrapolated in ways that partially reinforce Danto’s theory while simultaneously enriching our understanding of dance history. In “Arthur Danto Goes to the Movies” and “Warhol’s Empire” I look at ­Danto’s philosophy of art in relation to cinema. In “Danto’s Philosophy of History,” I examine Danto’s conception of narrative, a view that is so essential to both his aesthetics and his criticism. The penultimate chapter – “Danto’s Comic Vision: Philosophical Method, Literary Style” – attempts to take the measure of Danto as a thinker and a man by examining his style of writing. This essay focuses on Danto as an author with a distinctive philosophical and literary style. That style, I maintain, is essentially comic. As is well known, Danto’s preferred literary device is the proliferation of indiscernibles. Danto adores inventing indiscernible counterparts and then exploring their ramifications at length. But this recalls the recurring comic strategy of creating structurally ambiguous situations – as when two sets of identical twins are strolling around Ephesus unbeknownst to themselves and others. The comic possibility of a comedy of errors, in other words, is of a piece at the level of literary style with Danto’s commitment to the philosophical method of indiscernibles. Thus, Danto’s writing style at once expresses the clarity and joyfulness that make Danto Danto. I conclude with “The Age of Danto,” a brief attempt at characterizing the coherence of his overall aesthetical project, emphasizing the unity of his philosophy of art and his criticism while also remarking upon its suitability as theory and practice for our times. This is not a through-written book. The essays collected here are stand-alone articles. The book is organized with an eye to the reader who may be interested in this or that aspect and/or stage in the development of Danto’s project. One can dip into this collection anywhere; each article will contain the background information necessary to make this possible. Thus, there is unavoidably some

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repetition from article to article as is required to make Danto’s recurring premises clear as new topics are broached.4 This, of course, is a function of the fact that most of these articles were published as responses as Danto’s thinking about art headed toward new vistas. The advantage of this feature of the book is that it allows the reader to sample topics without having to read everything that precedes the subject that concerns her. Interest in Danto ranges across disciplines and practices. Readers with many different interests can use this book. One can, for example, gain a comprehensive account of Danto’s view of beauty or of criticism by reading the relevant articles rather than the whole book, because they are stand-alone articles. This makes the book especially useful to libraries where students, professors, art practitioners, and art lovers from diverse fields can focus on their own concerns by simply turning to an article that addresses their interests. At the same time, this collection presents a systematic overview of Danto’s philosophy of art, showing how the parts fit together, while also tracking recurring problems. Danto himself attracted admirers from diverse communities including not only philosophers of art and philosophers of history, but artists, art critics, and art historians as well as art enthusiasts in general and fans of Danto’s criticism in particular. I hope that this volume meets those various interests by addressing the variety of interests in stand-alone articles that speak to readers from a gamut of varied backgrounds. 4 In this, the essays mimic Danto’s own practice, since he would iterate his modus operandi with each new turn in his thinking, showing how it applied to his current position.

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Chapter 2

Danto, Art, and History Arthur Danto, a distinguished philosopher in the analytic tradition and currently the art critic for The Nation, has made contributions to virtually every area within his discipline. Many readers are undoubtedly familiar with his seminal Analytical Philosophy of History.1 Throughout his career, Danto has been especially concerned with the philosophy of art. Three books, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, and The State of the Art, display the great range of his concerns with respect to aesthetic theory.2 They cover a tapestry of topics too rich to be given full justice in one article. Thus, I will concentrate on issues in which history and theory intersect in Danto’s writings. One thing that is immediately distinctive about Danto’s philosophy of art is that, despite his analytic orientation, he is nevertheless sensitive to the importance of history for the philosophy of art. For, though history plays an important role in the theorizing about art by philosophers in the Hegelian tradition – like Lukács and Benjamin – it has not received much attention in the analytic tradition of the philosophy of art. In fact, at times the role of history in art theorizing is regarded with outright hostility within the analytic tradition. Clive Bell, a seminal figure for the analytic philosophy of art, states: I am not a historian of art or of anything else. I care very little when things were made, or why they were made; I care about their emotional significance to us. To the historian everything is a means to some other means; to me everything that matters is a direct means to emotion. I am writing about art, not about art history.3 For Bell, and for analytic philosophers who subscribe to what are called aesthetic theories of art,4 the artwork – for example, a painting – is a system of formal relations that will trigger an emotion, specifically an aesthetic feeling, in the percipient. That is, an artwork structured formally (in terms of lines, masses, colors, and so on) in the right way will elicit an aesthetic emotion no 1 2 3 4

Danto (1968). Danto (1981), (1986), and (1987). Bell (1958, 73). The late Monroe Beardsley is perhaps the most famous representative of this line of thought.

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matter when the object was made or when it is viewed. The relation between the formal structure and the emotion holds for all times; beauty, for instance, it might be said, touches what is common to all. There is no need to learn about the history of the production of the object nor the place of the object in history, for that is irrelevant to the aesthetic interaction between the artwork and its audience. To think otherwise is to commit what was called the genetic fallacy, of which the notorious intentional fallacy is the best known instance. The bias here is what might be broadly thought of as empiricist: sensory properties of the art object, apart from the intentions and historical contexts that give rise to them, causally provoke a sensation of the aesthetic which is most often described as valuable for its own sake and which is believed to be divorced from the general flow of life. To divert one’s attention away from the play of form to the history of the object is to invite distraction; in the case of visual art, it is to risk losing perceptual pleasure for the sake of knowledge (in other words, the aesthetic is conceived of in contrast to the cognitive). Furthermore, artworks, on this view, are defined essentially in terms of evoking some sort of aesthetic experience. Of course, that influential strands in the analytic tradition view art as essentially definable also predisposes that approach to an aversion to history. For, if art is essentially definable, then it has some kind of timeless essence. Studying the history of art in this light runs the danger of missing the forest for the trees. And though not all of the voices in the analytic tradition subscribe to the aesthetic view of art, there is a strong inclination in favor of essentialism among analytic philosophers of art, which, in turn, is marked by a willingness to theorize ahistorically.5 It is within this context that the work of Arthur Danto is particularly interesting. He has attempted to stress the importance of history for the philosophy of art in several ways, thus breaking with much of the past of analytic art theory. In the matter of identifying an object as an artwork, Danto believes that art history provides an indispensable ingredient. Art history is unavoidable, as well, in his account of aesthetic appreciation. And, in addition, Danto has provided us with a philosophy of art history of the Hegelian sort. However, though Danto has developed the importance of history to art theorizing more than any other major analytic philosopher of art, he still remains 5 Some qualifications are called for here. There is also an important anti-essentialist movement in analytic aesthetics that derives its inspiration from the writings of Wittgenstein. Morris Weitz, to be discussed briefly in what follows, was a notable representative of this tendency.

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committed to the fundamentals of that approach insofar as he wishes to propound an essential, that is to say, timelessly valid definition of the nature of art. The purpose of this review article is to examine Danto’s innovative effort to put history on the agenda of the analytic philosophy of art, and to explore the conceptual problems that this engenders within Danto’s theory. Danto offers us both a philosophy of art and a philosophy of art history. His philosophy of art has been most fully developed in Danto (1981), while his philosophy of art history has been subsequently articulated in essays.6 Danto’s philosophy of art is essentialist, unabashedly a characterization of the timeless essence of art; at the same time, a philosophy of art history suggests mutation within its subject matter. Here, then, there is at least potential for conflict between the viewpoints of a philosophy of art versus a philosophy of art history. In exploring the relationships between these two perspectives in Danto’s work, I shall offer an interpretation of the way in which the philosophy of art and the philosophy of art history are supposed to function in concert in Danto’s theorizing, and I shall conclude by sketching some possible problems for Danto’s approach. Stated baldly, there seem to be two central relationships between Danto’s philosophy of art and his philosophy of art history. Initially, it is his philosophy of art that seems to suggest a philosophy of art history, and, it turns out, his philosophy of art history is a partial defense of his philosophy of art. This essay is concerned mostly with Danto’s philosophy of art history. However, since the suggestion of a philosophy of art history lies immanent, so to speak, in Danto’s philosophy of art, I will begin with some observations about Danto (1981). In that text, through a series of transcendental arguments, each prompted by the consideration of sets of indiscernible objects which are nevertheless different, Danto isolates, it seems to me, five conditions for art. X is a work of art if and only if 1) x has a subject 2) about which it projects some attitude or point of view 3) by means of rhetorical ellipses that 4) employ some enthymematic material from the historico-theoretical artworld context, and which 5) engage audience participation in filling out the enthymematic gaps rhetorically posed by x.7 6 Notably “The End of Art,” “Art, Evolution and the Consciousness of History” (which appear in Danto 1986), and “Approaching the End of Art” (in Danto 1987). 7 I have phrased much of the above conditions in my own language: so some elucidation of the relation of my construction to Danto’s idiom is in order. The first condition – x has a subject – derives from Danto’s notion that an artwork must be about something; in other words it must have a semantical component. The second condition – that the artwork project some attitude or point of view – is connected to Danto’s idea that the artwork must be marked by the artist’s style, where “style” is thought of as a way of seeing; one might write this condition as “x must have style,” but here it must he stressed that “style” has the implication of the way

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Each of the preceding clauses is arrived at by hypothesizing the best explanation to account for the differences between ostensibly indiscernible objects. For example, we begin with the intuitive conviction that there is a difference between two identical red canvases – one a color field painting and the other a red canvas that got that way by being the only thing between an accidentally dislodged can of red paint and the floor. In order to explain our conviction that the former is an artwork and the latter not, Danto hypothesizes that the color field painting has the property of being about something, in other words it has a subject – perhaps the nature of art – while the accident is mute. Similar arguments, deploying different sets of indiscernibles, put Danto’s conditions in place. Of these five conditions, the fourth is most intimately related to the prospect of a philosophy of art history. Danto maintains that historical placement is essential, or “analytical”, to the identity of an artwork. A readymade sword from Toledo, say – could not be an artwork at the time of Dürer, while an identical object proffered by Dali in the post-Duchamp artworld could be. The reason for this, on Danto’s account, is that the world of Dürer had not yet, as a matter of historical fact, developed art theories capable of supporting the claim of the sword to be art, while, by the time Dali came onto the scene, the right sort of theoretical understanding was available. For Danto, the artworld includes theories, theories that group the objects we call art into various constellations (Danto 1981, 135). For an object to count as art it must have an historically relevant theory supporting it. As I understand Danto, what he has done is to stand an observation propounded by Morris Weitz, in “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics”, on its head.8 Weitz said that the theories of art of the past did not succeed in defining art in in which the artist’s viewpoint colors the subject matter. The third condition – conceming rhetorical ellipses – is stated more broadly than Danto might wish because in his view the relevant form of ellipsis in art is metaphor (which is connected, I think, to his notion of the “is of artistic identification”); I have not specified the form of ellipsis narrowly as metaphor, in order to allow that other forms of ellipsis may be relevant. Condition four is meant to capture Danto’s view that the historical context within which the artwork is created is essential to the artistic identity of the work of art; I have written this condition in terms of the “historico-theoretical artworld context” because it is the conceptual background of the artwork at the time of its making that fixes the identity of the work as the artwork it is. Finally, the fifth condition is my version of Danto’s notion that the spectator’s response to art is cognitive, specifically, that it is interpretative. If I understand Danto correctly, said interpretation involves filling in the rhetorical ellipses of the artwork. This is connected to both the third and the fourth conditions. One stage of interpretation involves situating the work in its proper art-historical context, which then enables the spectator to identify the metaphor or metaphors pertinent to the work. 8 Weitz (1956).

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general but were overt art criticism, revealing or theorizing the value of certain art movements or tendencies (namely, those favored by the theorists in question). What Danto seems to be saying is that in order to be art, an object has to be connected to such a theory. So a painting by Olitski counts as art just in case it is logically supportable by a theory such as that of Greenbergian modernism. Danto has incorporated the successive failures of scope of past philosophies of art as a condition of his own philosophy of art; to be a work of art, an object must be connected to the kind of theory Weitz criticized.9 What has this to do with a philosophy of art history? Well, as those of us who teach aesthetics presume, the theories of art subtending successive art movements or styles begin to take the form of a dialogue or a conversation. Just as the exposition of early modern philosophy – Descartes to Kant – takes the form of a developing narrative, so we plot the course of modern aesthetics as a continuing debate: imitation theories, followed by expression theories, followed by aesthetic theories, followed by institutional theories, and so on. Thus, if art mirrors the evolution of art theory – insofar as art requires said theories 9 Objections can be raised concerning Danto’s claim that in order to be art an object requires a subtending theory. It might be argued that much of the accepted corpus of art does not seem to have been generated by theories nor is much of it correlatable to theories. Fred Astaire had no theory of tap dancing, nor, to my knowledge, has anyone ever produced such a theory for Astaire and comparable artists. Similarly, did Frederick Remington have a theory of art? One might be tempted to say he did have one, namely, the imitation theory of art. But his hardly seems to be a theory. Instead it is a hodgepodge of principles, preferences, and rules of thumb. One, of course, might today develop a rigorous imitation theory of art, but that could scarcely be advanced as the theory under whose aegis most of the work thought of as mimetic was produced over the centuries. Moreover, my first point about the imitation theory might also be extended to much of what passes for art theory in the reflexive period of art. It is not theory in most cases. Rather it is, more often than not, primarily polemic laced with, at best, fragments of theoretical principles, prognostications, slogans, implicit or explicit moral commitments (that do not add up to coherent ethical positions), unexamined and often incompatible assumptions, and typically limited views of art history. One might attempt to deal with the paucity of full-blooded theories in the artworld by trying, on the basis of the objects produced by an art movement, to construct rigorous theories; however, the data will unquestionably under-determine our choice of such theories, and, in any case, such theories would not seem to be of the sort that Danto has in mind since they are not part of the atmosphere of the artworld; they await invention. It might be felt that Danto can sidestep these problems by abandoning the idea that artworks are subtended by theories, rigorously construed, and by holding merely that artworks must be subtended by some artworld concepts, which, in turn, may not add up to theories. However, if this move is made, it might become difficult for Danto to generate a philosophy of art history since that seems to require rival theories in dialectical opposition. That is, it is unclear that prognostications, rules of thumb, and preferences will yield the kind of intelligible “conversation” Danto envisions for art history.

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– and if the unfolding of art theory has a developmental or linear structure, so too will art history. Danto doesn’t make the point in exactly this way. He says, “Art history must have an internal structure and even a kind of necessity” (Danto 1986, xiv). However, the quality of “a continuing conversation” (Danto 1986, xiii) that Danto discerns in the succession of historical art movements, and upon which he rests his sense of “a kind of necessity” in art history, is clearly a function of the evolving dialogue between the rival art theories that underpin respective art movements.10 A central purpose of Danto’s philosophy of art history is to reveal the “internal structure” of art history11 by means of an overarching narrative of the Hegelian sort. However, before sketching the broad outline of this account, some clarificatory comments are useful. First, a philosophy of art history in Danto’s sense will be linear or developmental. When Danto asks whether art has a history, he means does art have a developmental history, a progressive history. As well, the possibility of such a linear history implies that it might come to an end, where “end” is used in the sense that no further development – for one reason or another – is possible. Of course, as is well known, Danto does believe that art has come to an end in this respect. However, that doesn’t mean that people will stop making art, only that art history will cease to be developmental. We have reached a period which Danto calls that of “post-historical art,” where the need for the constant, self-conscious revolutions that distinguished modern art are now past. People will continue to paint, sculpt, and write from now on, but those activities will not be pursued under the auspices of a project or program with a linear, developmental structure. For, if the history of art has proceeded in the way Danto’s philosophizing would have it, there are no more projects or programs available to artists that have the requisite linear structure.

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When Danto develops his philosophical history of art, there is an ambiguity about whether it is meant to track the order in the history of art or the order in the history of art theory. Perhaps Danto thinks that this distinction is irrelevant because the artistic production of the artworld at a given moment, on his view, is essentially connected to prevailing theories. But some anomalies result from proceeding in this way. For example, with what will later be called the iconological development, there are no corresponding artworks – that is artworks made explicitly with the Panofskian theory supporting them. On several occasions in Danto (1986) and (1987), Danto indicates a related impetus for undertaking a philosophy of art history, namely, to explain how the artworld of the ­present is in what he assesses to be such a dismal state. The currency of Neo-expressionism is, for Danto, one index of the plight of the contemporary artworld – of its loss of vitality. Danto’s philosophy of art history proposes an account of why this predicament is upon us.

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Briefly, the major epochs in Danto’s philosophy of art history involve an initial stage where the dominant view of art, in theory and in practice, is that art is imitation. This conception of art is linear; art progressively strives to capture the appearance of things – replacing “inference to perceptual reality wherever possible with something equivalent to what perceptual reality itself would present” (Danto 1986, 88). This conception, however, cannot be sustained either at the level of theory or practice. From the practical or historical point of view, the advent of cinema renders art, or fine art, obsolete; and, from the perspective of theory, the conception of art as imitation was never comprehensive enough for it to accommodate literature.12 Moreover, the failure of comprehensiveness of this viewpoint became progressively more apparent in the type of non-mimetic art that artists began producing after they realized cinema had put them out of business. The failure of the conception of art as imitation called forth alternative accounts of art: expression theories, like that of Croce,13 on the one hand, and iconological theories, such as that introduced by Panofsky, on the other. Both theories invested art with a project other than imitation, and, indeed, accommodated art that defied the ideal of imitating reality. The expression theory of art identified art as the clarification of the artist’s intuitions or feelings. It could explain the departures from perfect verisimilitude as indices of the artist’s emotions and could explain the eschewal of representation altogether in terms of objectless emotions. Alternatively, the iconological view regards art as a way in which a culture represents its inner life to its members (Danto 1986, 203). The Gothic cathedral and the Gothic manuscript, for example, exemplify, in symbolic form, the same spirit and serve the purpose of disclosing the ethos of their time and place. As successors to the imitation view of art, the expression view and that of iconology share at least one important feature. If art accords with either, then art history will not have a developmental structure. Different artists will express different emotions and different cultures will reveal different spirits; however, since Danto presumes that there is no linear, developmental structure to the emotions, on the one hand, and to spirits of different epochs, on the other, art history, as a whole, will come to an end – in other words it will no longer be evolutionary in the sense of being aimed at some goal. 12 13

For Danto’s intriguing argument to this conclusion see Danto (1986, 98–99). It seems to me that one might wish to criticize Danto’s periodization of the history of art. Theories as well as artworks much in the spirit of expressionism are in evidence before the advent of cinema and the decline of imitation in the tine arts. Longinus and the Romantics come to mind.

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But the expression theory and, presumably, iconology cannot be sustained because they are not comprehensive enough. In the wake of cinema, artists explored alternative avenues of development, of which the view that art is reflexive became the most important.14 That is, confronted with the overthrow of the mimetic project by cinema, artists began to wonder about the nature of their art and began to take this question – the self-conscious question of the essence of art – to be the primary problematic of their practice. They produced theories, and objects coordinated with said theories, as the means of coming to terms with this problematic. However, this “theoretical” activity could not be adequately comprehended by the expression theory – artworld “theories” are not accurately described by the language of the emotions15 – and, I assume, Danto also believes that similar problems of scope beset iconology.16

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In “An. Evolution and the Consciousness of History,” Danto observes that a competing option also flourished in the period of early modernist art, which view maintained that “it was the task of art to represent a higher reality than the optical” (Danto 1986, 207– 208). Danto, correctly, notes that this was not the road modernism would take. However, it might be useful to speculate what the consequences would be if this approach were revived today. Couldn’t art of this sort generate the kind of developmental structure that the end of art thesis denies? If there is some plausible candidate for “higher reality,” art under this dispensation could attempt progressively to approximate it. See especially “The End of Art” in Danto (1986, 108 and 109). I stress that this is an assumption on my part. Danto doesn’t say that iconology lacks comprehensiveness. I make this extrapolation because Danto’s tendency is to treat expression theories and iconology as if they were variations on roughly the same historical moment in his philosophy of art history. However, we must also consider that if Danto does maintain this position on iconology as a theory of art, it may be false. It seems to me that the iconological approach can indeed accommodate the kind of reflexive movement in art history that concerns Danto. The reflexive obsession with ascertaining the quiddity of art in which the artist poses as a scientist or a philosopher attempting to penetrate to the nature of things seems to me an ample icon for our age of analysis, for an age preoccupied with (often reductionist) ideals of knowledge. If this interpretation is persuasive, iconology remains a viable theory of art, one not yet superseded by alternative theories; it does not yield a progressive history of art and it would entail an end of art in Danto’s sense. However, an end of art where iconology remains a viable theory of art in general is at variance with the sort of end of art Danto heralds, and this variance has important theoretical implications. Danto’s characterization of the end of art functions as an argumentative wedge for the philosophy of art he wishes to advance. But if the end of art is reached at the iconological moment where iconology is a viable comprehensive theory of art, then there is still at least one competing universal theory of art that remains in opposition to the kind of theory Danto wants to advance in our post-historical epoch. (It might also be the case that Danto could outflank this type of objection by incorporating iconology as a condition for being a work of art.)

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The era of reflexive art, then, comes to supersede that of expression and iconology.17 Art movement after art movement generates theories of the nature of art – for example, art is significant form, paintings are by nature flat – and creates artworks that emblematize those theories. Moreover, the era of reflexive art reinvests art with a progressive model of development. Presupposing that art does have some nature to be discovered, successive art movements progressively approximate it, much in the way that on certain views science gets closer and closer to revealing the structure of reality. Cubism makes some advances on the nature of art by acknowledging the picture plane, and Pollock refines that insight by showing that painting is essentially line and color. Pop art – particularly the work of Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein, and Rauschenberg, as presaged by Duchamp – marks a special moment in this evolution. By producing indiscernibles – paintings of flags and comic book panels, effigies of soup cans, and actual urinals that are perceptually indiscernible from their real counterparts – these artists have finally gotten the question of the nature of art into proper philosophical form. That is, Danto believes that philosophical inquiry becomes possible just when we are perplexed because we are confronted by perceptually indiscernible phenomena that we nevertheless believe to be distinguishable: for example, moral action that is outwardly indiscernible from prudential action; causal chains of events indiscernible from regularly recurring, constant conjunctions; coherent dreams indiscernible from waking experience, and so on. What pop artists effectively forced 17

As I understand Danto, the reflexive art period succeeds that of expressionism (and possibly that of iconology) because it is more comprehensive. But I wonder whether the case here is unambiguous. The theories of art proposed by each successive reflexive art movement claim to be comprehensive. But are they truly comprehensive where that would appear to have to involve the attribution of self-conscious theorizing about the nature of art to works of past historical periods? Is it plausible to suppose that medieval altarpieces take up the question of the essence of art? Danto thinks that expression theories fail in comprehensiveness if they treat the theoretical dimensions of modern art in the language of the emotions. But don’t reflexive theories fail in an analogous way if they impute self-consciousness to a great deal of our artistic heritage? It is true however, that even if reflexive theories and expression theories are equally badly off vis-a-vis comprehensiveness, it is still the case that reflexive theories have a developmental potential that expression theories don’t. The reflexive theory, then, would supersede the expression theory because it provides an evolutionary problematic. However, if this is where the “internal necessity” of the transition from expressionism to reflexivity resides, it would have to be the case that artists have some predisposition toward progressive models of art history. But I at least can see no “internal necessity” for this kind of predisposition or preference. In short, I am not sure that the transition from expression to reflexivity that Danto charts – though historically accurate – reveals an inner structure to art history as a whole.

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was the question “What is art?” in its proper philosophical form by raising the prospect that there could be artworks – one thinks of some of Morris’ metal constructions – that would be indiscernible from their ordinary, industrial counterparts. However, once artists got this far in their theoretical activity, they could get no further. They could pose the question “What is art?” in its proper philosophical form, but they could not answer it. Why? Because art is not the sort of arena in which the question once posed can be answered – because art is not a proper theoretical vehicle. Thus, on the developmental model of reflexive art, art comes to an end when pop artists get the issue of the nature of art into a theoretically amenable form; they cannot, however, answer the ­question themselves because that would involve the sort of abstract theorizing and argumentation for which the idiom of art lacks the adequate means.18 Danto writes, “In turning into philosophy, art has come to an end. From now on ­progress could only be enacted on a level of abstract self-consciousness of the kind which ­philosophy alone must consist in. If artists wished to participate in this progress, they would have to undertake a study very different from what the art schools could prepare them for. They would have to become philosophers.”19 Now, if art in the developmental sense has come to an end – that is, if art history is over, closed to future innovation – that has interesting repercussions for the philosophy of art in general and Danto’s philosophy of art in particular. According to Weitz’s well known account of the role of art theory, essentialist theories of art cannot be convincingly framed because they will be vulnerable to the innovations of future artistic activity – which innovations are mandated by the concept of art. But Danto’s philosophy of art history, in proposing that art has ended, has initiated the possibility that the philosophy of art can be 18

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Danto seems to think that there are at least three different ways in which art can come to an end. 1) Art can complete its developmental project (for example, by capturing perceptual appearances) and end in the sense that there are no more technical breakthroughs to be anticipated in the future. 2) Art can shift into a non-developmental phase, such as expressionism. 3) Art can go as far as it can with a given project without becoming something else – like philosophy – along its developmental trajectory. With respect to the end of reflexive art, two of these senses of an ending come into play – art goes as far in defining itself as it can, and art after reflexivity will probably return to non-developmental activities, such as expression. At the end of “Approaching the End of Art,” Danto remarks that post-historical art will involve “returning to the serving of largely human needs” (Danto 1987, 217), which activity, I take it, he conceives of as lacking a developmental structure. Whether or not this is conclusive is a matter to be taken up later. “Approaching the End of Art,” in Danto (1987, 216). Also see “The End of Art,” in Danto (1986, 111).

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made invulnerable to counter-examples. The bottom line of Danto’s philosophy of art history is that we have now encountered all the kinds of art that there will be; we need not fear future innovations of the categorical sort that endanger essentialist theories of art like his own. There will be no new artworld theorizing under the sun; so there will be no new kinds of art. All the data about the kinds of art there can be is in; there won’t be any theoretical breakthroughs of the sort that became commonplace during the revolutionary period of modern art, because that sort of theoretical art has reached a limit beyond which it cannot advance. Thus, we are finally in a position to propose a universal theory of art, like the one in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, without worrying about future counter-instances. If Danto’s philosophy of art suggests the type of philosophy of art history he develops, it is also the case that his philosophy of art history is designed to logically support his (and other) attempts at essentialist art theory by ingeniously disposing of the prospect of future counter-examples. Danto writes, “Having reached this point, where art can be anything at all, art has exhausted its conceptual mission. It has brought us to a stage of thought essentially outside history, where at last we can contemplate the possibility of a universal definition of art and vindicate therewith the philosophical aspiration of the ages, a definition which will not be threatened by historical overthrow.”20 So, in effect, the philosophy of art history is a defense of the philosophy of art, inuring essentialist theorizing from the prospect of future counterexamples. This is a neat trick, if one can pull it off. For the remainder of this article. I would like to examine some of the misgivings I have about this maneuver.21

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Danto’s argument hinges on the notion that art ends once it gets the question “What is art?” in its proper philosophical form; it does this by creating artworks – like Duchamp’s Fountain – that are indiscernible from their everyday counterparts. At that point, it becomes the task of philosophy to step in and start theorizing. But it seems reasonable to ask whether this is the right form for the question “What is art?” to take. 20

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“Art, Evolution, and the Consciousness of History,” in Danto (1986, 209). A similar sentiment is voiced in the “Prologue” to Danto (1987, 4): “Philosophy of art could not begin to achieve the universality of a true dimension of its nature, which did not happen until fairly recently.” Of course, we will not show that Danto’s philosophy of art is flawed even if we show that his defense of it from the vantage point of the philosophy of art history is problematic. At best, we will only show that it may be open to certain types of counter-example; it remains to produce the relevant counter-examples. Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Danto is convinced of its appropriateness because he holds the metaphilosophical view that it is definitive of philosophical problems that they treat issues of indiscernibility. The philosophy of art, for example, only begins when the problem of indiscernibles becomes live. So, insofar as the theoretical aspirations of reflexive art are philosophical, a momentous juncture is reached when artists discover the indiscernibility problem. But agreement here presupposes Danto’s metaphilosophical claim about the identifying marks of philosophical problems in general and of the philosophy of art in particular. Do issues of indiscernibility identify all philosophical activity? The age-old philosophical problems of the existence of universals, the existence of God, the nature of the just society, and so on do not appear to be straightforwardly generated by issues of indiscernibility, while the question of how two identical slips of the tongue – one a psychoanalytic parapraxis and the other a cognitive malfunction – differ would seem to be a medical problem, not a philosophical one. My point here is simply that Danto’s philosophy of art history relies upon his conception of philosophy in general and upon its subdivisions in particular, both of which are open to contest. To put some content in this remark, we need only recall that many neo-Marxist, semiological, and post-structuralist critics would not agree that the question “What is art?” has been gotten into proper form when the problem of indiscernibles is broached. They believe that the proper theory of art can only be developed once we have gotten past the narrow confines of philosophy/theory that Danto advances and the socio-ideological nature of art is foregrounded. Art, then, is not at an end for them – there is some breathing space left as artists and theorists, and artist/theorists, try to force this socioideological issue. I am not endorsing their view. I am only making the logical point that Danto’s philosophy of history depends on his view of philosophy at large, which – especially within the artworld Danto is discussing – is in dispute. One might read the activity of postmodern artists as part of a continuing and disputatious conversation with the pop artists and Minimalists of Danto’s philosophy of art history; these artists and theorists might be taken to be arguing that the problem with earlier endeavors of reflexive art is that they failed to secure the proper theoretical framework. Indeed, I think that this is an accurate characterization of much contemporary artworld rhetoric. It may not be correct; nevertheless, I think that Danto must explicitly come to grips with it in order to defend his presuppositions. There may also be more vexing problems in this area. Danto offers us a developmental history of art – one where art has an end. Central to this claim is the notion that the proper philosophical form of the question “What is art?” is the issue of indiscernibles, which can be taken up in articulate detail only by Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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philosophical exposition. But doesn’t this mean that Danto’s view of the nature of the philosophy of art is material to generating his philosophy of art history? And, in that case, is a question being begged here since this philosophy of art history is, in turn, material to establishing the possibility of the philosophy of art? Let me spell this worry out in more detail. Danto’s argument seems to be: 1. Once the question “What is art?” can be framed in terms of indiscernibles, then no further theoretical breakthroughs can issue from the artworld. 2. If no theoretical breakthroughs can issue from the artworld, then an essentialist theory of art is possible. 3. The question “What is art?” has been framed in terms of indiscernibles. 4. Therefore, an essentialist theory of art is (now) possible. Premises 1 and 3 yield the end-of-art thesis. Premise 3 is factual. Premise 1 seems to rest on at least two presumptions: a) that art can’t work out the theory of art without becoming philosophy – it is not a vehicle suited for theorizing; and b) that once the question is framed in terms of indiscernibles, it has its proper theoretical form – one which supersedes any other theoretical formulation. Though many artists are likely to disagree that artworks cannot make greater contributions to theory than raising questions (rather than delivering answers), I tend to agree with this view.22 But the claim that the issue of indiscernibles marks the proper formulation of theoretical questions remains unsettled. Moreover, the assumption that it does may be just the assumption that essentialist theorizing is possible. For the method of indiscernibles is primarily an exquisitely economical way of trying to focus attention upon making essential distinctions. It is, so to say, a tool inextricably linked with essentialist theorizing. To suppose that the advent of the indiscernible issue is the decisive moment in the reflexive conversation in the artworld about “What is art?” is to prejudge the debate in favor of essentialist theory – in other words, to suppose that essentialist theory is viable, which of course is intended to be the conclusion of the argument. Likewise, to maintain that once the method of indiscernibles has arrived, no further theoretical breakthroughs can arise, seems to beg 22

Though I believe that I have correctly interpreted Danto’s view when I argue that artworks cannot make theories, there are places in the text that suggest that they might be theoretical vehicles. For example, in “Art, Evolution, and the Consciousness of History,” Danto refers to every work and every movement in early modernism as “a kind of theory in action” (Danto 1986, 207). However, if artworks at one point in time could be theoretical vehicles, then Danto would have to explain why today they can no longer serve that function. But, perhaps when Danto speaks of “theory in action,” he is only reporting the self-conception of artists, which, it turns out, he does not endorse.

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the question in the debate between essentialist and anti-essentialist theorists, where anti-essentialist theorists might argue that art indeed still has a history, namely, overcoming essentialism both in theory as well as practice. The point here is not that Danto’s philosophy of art will be unable to withstand counter-­ examples, but rather that his philosophy of art history may not be able to protect it from counterexamples without begging the question. Danto sees artworks and movements connected to theories. When the question of the nature of art is broached, the developmental history of art ends. The question of the nature of art, it seems, somehow trumps any other kind of theorizing about art that, in turn, might generate a developmental project for art history. But I’m not sure why this should be. At one point, Danto says that what he calls post-historical art may return to serving human needs. But certainly one can imagine this giving rise to art-world theorizing of all sorts – about what human needs are best served by art, and about the styles best suited to satisfying those needs. And this could yield a developmental structure to art history, not unlike the one empowered by the imitation theory. One could even imagine this project – which answers the question “What is art?” in terms of satisfying human needs, or in terms of human emancipation or liberation – as arising dialectically, as part of the inner structure of art history, in response to the “reflexive error” of the post-World War II artworld. Danto may feel that the satisfaction of human needs by art, like the expression of emotions, cannot support an historically evolutionary structure. But I’m not sure we know enough about needs to preclude this – needs themselves may even have an historico-developmental structure. However, even more importantly. I don’t see how we can be reassured that art pursuing the dialectically evolved project of satisfying a relevant set of human needs, under whatever theories it concocts,23 won’t produce compelling counterexamples to contemporary theories. My speculations here may sound a bit wide-eyed, but to summarize their general thrust I mean to say that we have no reason to think that the artworld will stop making theories (ones involved in some sort of continuing conversation with reflexive art), that those theories may generate a developmental 23

Danto may object that such theories just won’t be art theories. But as Paul Guyer has pointed out. Danto hasn’t really told us how to identify art theories. See Guyer, “When Is Black Paint More Than Black Paint’? – The New York Times, Book Review section (Feb. 1, 1987). p. 23. Furthermore, Danto cannot identify art theories as those which deal with indiscernibles, for two reasons: first, his own view requires that there have been art theories (such as expression theories) prior to the advent of reflexivity, second, to suppose that art theories are identified in terms of the issue of indiscernibility would again beg the question.

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program, and that that program may generate counter-examples to bedevil contemporary essentialist theorizing. Since we can’t predict those theories now, we can anticipate neither that the developmental history of art is at an end nor that the kind of work that might be generated is subsumable by contemporary essentialist theories. In the first chapter of Narration and Knowledge, Danto makes a pretty conclusive argument against what he calls the substantive philosophy of history. He writes: [We] might think of philosophers of history as trying to see events as having meaning in the context of an historical whole which resembles an artistic whole, but in this case, the whole in question is the whole of history, compassing past, present and future. Unlike those of us who have the whole novel before us, and are able to say with some authority what is the significance of this event or that, the philosopher of history does not have before him the whole of history. He has at best a fragment – the whole past. But he thinks in terms of the whole of history.24 Danto contrasts this with the pursuit of ordinary history, wherein the researcher establishes the significance of an event in the past by connecting it to another event, perhaps a consequence of said past event, which is known to the historian writing in the present but which was not yet known at the time of the event being explained. That is, an historian connects a past event to its fruition in future events, where the “future” events in question are known to the historian because they are in his past. The substantive philosopher of history is, in effect, a misguided historian. He attempts to construe the significance of past and present events in light of the whole of history, much of which lies in the future and of which he cannot claim knowledge. The substantive philosopher of history is an historian manqué on this account, one who misunderstands the structure of historical knowledge. Now after offering this devastating diagnosis of philosophers of history, Arthur Danto has joined their ranks. He admits his conversion somewhat astonished him,25 but he hasn’t yet explained how he intends to reconcile this contradiction in his work. To ascertain the historical significance of an event, one must be able to see that event in the light of its consequences. If Danto is correct and the period of reflexive art is over, we have yet to learn its consequences. Perhaps, as suggested above, it will result in dialectically evolved, 24 25

Danto (985. 8–9). “Preface,” Danto (1986, xiv).

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developmental theories that generate new, progressive aesthetic programs. In any case, by Danto’s own analysis of history, we cannot pronounce the recent decline of reflexive art to be the end of developmental art history until we have a better sense of its consequences.26 And that is something that the substantive philosopher of history of art cannot yet know. Specifically, we cannot know whether the artworld will respond to the passing of reflexive art by means of some theory that will take hold and generate a new project for art. Though Danto’s views on art history, construed as a substantive philosophy of art history, violate his own criterion for historical explanation, one need not dismiss his efforts as those of an historian manqué. For even if Danto is not temporally situated in a position that would allow him to pronounce on the end of art, we might reconceive that claim as pertaining to the end of a certain movement in art, one which is often referred to as “modernism” and which concerns the question of essences. Just as one may now say that we have reached the end of the American Century (though not that the Century of the Pacific has begun), one may say we have reached the end of modernism. In this light Danto’s philosophy of art history may be reread as ordinary art history – as a history that relates such developments as the rise of cinema, expressionism, iconological theory, and the turn to essentialist reflexivity to the exhaustion of the modernist model of artmaking. As ordinary history, Danto’s speculations do not constitute a defense of the philosophy of art, but they do cast the significance of the past in bold relief.27 References Bell, C. 1958. Art. New York: Putnam, Capricorn. Danto, A. C. 1968. Analytical Philosophy of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Danto, A. C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Danto, A. C. 1985. Narration and Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Danto has suggested to me that the limitations noted above apply only to the history of action, not to the history of representation. However, since action will involve representational elements, broadly conceived, it is difficult to see the way in which these two types of history can be sharply distinguished. This article is based on my review essay of Danto’s recent books on the philosophy and history of art, in History and Theory 29 (1990).

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Danto, A. C. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press. Danto, A. C. 1987. The State of the Art. New York: Prentice Hall. Weitz. M. 1956. The Role of Theory in Aesthetics. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15. 27–35.

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Danto, Style, and Intention Arthur Danto’s work in the philosophy of art has been consistently influential in the last half of the twentieth century. His contributions encompass many of the central topics in aesthetics, addressing not only the question of the nature of art, but also the questions of the nature of pictorial representation, of the nature of aesthetic appreciation, and of the structure of art history. Moreover, his answers to these questions aspire to systematicity. Perhaps no other aesthetician of his generation has evolved as complete a philosophy of art as has Arthur Danto. However, developing a conception so large and so complex, of course, runs the eminent danger that inconsistencies or, at least, tensions are apt to erupt between the various parts of one’s philosophy. The purpose of this paper is to explore certain tensions with respect to the notion of artistic intention that appears to beset Danto’s philosophy of art. Specifically, this tension seems to arise because in Danto’s scheme intention is relevant to fixing the artistic status and identity of artworks, but it is denied a role by Danto in making certain stylistic attributions to artworks. The issue is whether Danto can consistently endorse a role for intention in the first instance while denying it in the case of certain stylistic attributions. Where possible, I will try to show how Danto’s differential treatments of artistic intention can be reconciled. Nevertheless, I shall also argue that in some cases Danto’s treatment of artistic intention is self-contradictory. The canonical statement of Danto’s theory of art – i.e., his answer to the question “What is art?” – is contained in his The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.1 That theory is very elaborate, however, I think that a fair reading of it shows that among the numerous determinants that Danto sets forth as conditions for the art status of a work as well as for its identity, artistic intention plays an ineliminable role.2 Among Danto’s seminal insights is that it is not possible that everything we are disposed to call an artwork can be an artwork at any point in history. A vial, purportedly containing a sample of Parisian air, proffered by the likes of 1 Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, 1981). 2 For a comprehensive account of Danto’s theory, see Noël Carroll, “Essence, Expression and History: Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art,” in Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). See also Noël Carroll, review of Danto, in History and Theory 1 (1990). © Noël Carroll, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004468368_004 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Marcel Duchamp as an artwork, may be a collector’s item today, but were an indiscernible counterpart of that vial to be displayed at the time of Giorgio Vasari, it would have been incomprehensible. It may be possible for something to be an artwork today which would have been impossible to have been an artwork yesterday. What makes it possible for a vial of Parisian air to be an artwork in the twentieth century while its indiscernible counterpart could not be an artwork in the Renaissance? Danto’s famous answer is an artworld – an atmosphere of ideas and theories and a backdrop of historical development that provide the conceptual resources that enable not only an audience to recognize something as art, but which provide the artist with the mutual understandings that permit her to presume that there will be an audience out there prepared to recognize what she intends to communicate. Whether something is art depends upon its historical context. Audiences require ideas and theories or a background of art history in order to recognize that a candidate is an artwork. These ideas, theories, and histories, however, are also indispensable to artistic creativity. They provide the framework in which the artist makes her choices; they delimit the moves that are possible in her game. The artist makes the artwork against the backdrop of these shared ideas, theories, and histories, and the audience’s recognition of the artist’s point depends upon a mutually possessed conceptual framework. The artist cannot create, nor could an audience decipher, an artwork without an artworld framework. The historical circumstances of a work are in this way constitutive of its art status. So one requirement for art status, according to Danto, is that the work in question be related to an artworld – a constellation of ideas and theories with a certain history. But Danto also contends that another necessary condition for art status is that artworks be about something, and therefore, that they have interpretations – interpretations whose content is whatever the artwork is about. Perhaps Duchamp’s vial of air is about the way in which art historians fetishize things Parisian. Of course, such an interpretation would not have been available to connoisseurs at just any time in history. It requires situating the object in an art historical context in which it is understood that one very important role of art is to comment on the artworld itself. Such an interpretation of what the artwork is about only makes sense where there are ideas or art theories abroad and alive that take it to be the role of art that art comment on art. For Danto, the identity of a work of art is fixed by an interpretation relative to an historically situated artworld. Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Pierre Menard’s, though lexically indiscernible, are different artworks because of the way in which their different historical situations endow them with different

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properties which, in turn, call for different interpretations. The identity of the work and its interpretation are logically interrelated, and both are a function of the art historical location of the artwork in question. As a result, not every interpretation of a given artwork is admissible. Though Duchamp’s work can be interpreted in light of regnant artworld theories – possessed by Duchamp and his audience – about the role of art to comment on art, a similar interpretation of a Neolithic artifact is not so interpretable. For our Neolithic carver lacked the conceptual wherewithal to hatch such an art-commentative intention, and the audience who shared his conceptual framework lacked the conceptual resources to secure up-take on anything like such an intention. Art status, the identity of the work of art, and its logically correlative interpretation are all historically constrained. They depend upon connecting the candidates in question with their relevant artworlds – i.e., with the art theories, ideas, and histories that are the conditions of possibility of the artworks at hand. If one asks why this should be so, a likely answer is that historically situated art theories, ideas, and conceptions of art history form the likeliest source of the stock of beliefs which account for the formation of the artist’s intentions and for their subsequent recognition and up-take by audiences. An artworld atmosphere – i.e., historically specific art theories, ideas, and historical understandings – are crucial for Danto because of their relevance to the formation and communication of artistic intentions and their interpretations. A candidate work is an artwork in part because an artist intends it to be so in virtue of her understanding of artworld theories, ideas, and histories. Whether a candidate is identified as an artwork of a certain sort – a Neolithic carving or a postmodernist comment on the artworld – depends in part on what the maker could have intended it to be in the relevant historical circumstances. Thus, Danto writes: “His [the artist’s] ignorance sets some limit to the range and variety of identifications we are justified in making.”3 And, furthermore, the interpretations that are relevant to the status and identity of the work are assessed in light of hypotheses about artistic intention. Danto says “it is difficult to know what could govern the concept of a correct or incorrect interpretation if not reference to what could and could not have been intended”4 (where, of course, what could or could not be intended can be approached in terms of the reigning theories of art and the current ideas about art and its history that are alive and abroad in the specific artworld context). That is, for Danto a correct interpretation is a hypothesis about what the artist 3 Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. 130. 4 Ibid.

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could have intended; what it is reasonable to think that the artist could have intended serves as a constraint on art-identifying interpretations. If my account of Danto’s theory is accurate, then, for Danto artistic intention plays an ineliminable role in establishing whether something is an artwork as well as in identifying which artwork it is. We consult the specific artworld ­context of a work in order to ascertain what the artist could and could not have intended in making the work. Our art-identifying interpretations of a work will be generally guided by what it is historically likely the artist intended and will be, in all cases, constrained by what it was historically possible for the artist to intend. Artworks like our Neolithic carving will neither be i­ ndividuated nor accorded art status in terms of an interpretation that presupposes a reflexive theory of art because such a theory is an historically implausible element of a Neolithic knowledge stock, and therefore, it is monumentally unlikely that any Neolithic carver could have intended an art-reflexive comment by means of her artifact. However, though Danto seems committed to the ineliminability of intention in identifying a candidate as an artwork, he nevertheless seems equally committed to the view that artistic intentions are irrelevant in certain discussions about the stylistic properties of artworks. But insofar as the stylistic properties of an artwork, or at least some of them, should be relevant to identifying a candidate as an artwork, this mixed view of artistic intention seems to court inconsistency. In what follows I will look at two of Danto’s discussions of style: one from his essay “Narrative and Style,”5 which I think can be adjusted to avoid inconsistency, and the other from his essay “The Artworld,”6 which I think that Danto should abjure under the threat of self-contradiction. In “Narrative and Style” Danto maintains that when we explain an artwork in terms of the individual style of an artist, intentions do not have explanatory power.7 That is, there are stylistic features of artworks that are not explained by the artist’s intentions. These are features of artworks which become apparent as the oeuvre of an artist develops. Such features crystallize into a stylistic donnée at a certain point and then throw the retrospective light of understanding upon the artist’s earlier work. The earlier work is not made with and, therefore, is not explained by the artist’s intention to implement the stylistic 5 Arthur Danto, “Narrative and Style,” in his Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-­ Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992). 6 Arthur Danto, “The Artistic Enfranchisement of Real Objects: The Artworld,” in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, eds. George Dickie, Richard Sclafani, and Ronald Roblin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). This article was originally published as “The Artworld,” in The Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964). Page references herewith follow Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology. 7 Arthur Danto, “Narrative and Style,” p. 246.

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donnée in question, because the stylistic donnée is not yet known to the artist. And this not only appears to contradict the notion from The Transfiguration of the Commonplace that correct interpretations of artworks must be constrained in virtue of what the artist could and could not intend; Danto also explicitly takes it to refute intentionalism, especially as that view is espoused by Richard Wollheim.8 What Danto seems to have in mind in “Narrative and Style” is something like this: in one of his very early films, called Kid Auto Races at Venice, Charlie Chaplin wore a costume – comprising a derby hat, a tight Edwardian jacket, baggy pants, and a bamboo walking stick – that would later become the signature attire of the tramp. Supposedly, this outfit was thrown together from the wardrobe of his co-actors. Chaplin had no thought at the time of inventing the tramp character. That character would only be invented in the course of many films over several years. The figure in Kid Auto Races is not yet the tramp; he has none of the characteristic pathos we find in later films like The Gold Rush. Nevertheless, a film historian might say of Kid Auto Races that in it we see the glimmerings of Chaplin’s future film persona. Such an historian might isolate Chaplin’s costume here and explain its significance in terms of anticipating or putting in place a number of the key stylistic ingredients of the figure of the tramp. One might remark on the importance of Kid Auto Races by saying that “In Kid Auto Races Chaplin discovers the costume of the tramp.” In this case, the significance of Kid Auto Races is explained in terms of Chaplin’s style or, more accurately, in terms of the style that Chaplin will come to develop. Intentions do not have a role in this explanation, for it is not the case that in assembling this costume Chaplin intended to initiate the character of the tramp. Chaplin “didn’t know from” the tramp at this point in his career and, consequently, could form no intentions about that character yet. The statement “In Kid Auto Races Chaplin discovered the costume of the tramp” is what Danto has analyzed in his work on philosophy of history as a narrative sentence, i.e., one which we may utter about a past event in light of consequences of that event that are known to us, but which are unknown to contemporaries of that event. We know about the tramp and can explain the significance of Kid Auto Races in light of him; neither Chaplin nor any of his contemporaries yet knew of the tramp nor could they explain Kid Auto Races in light of the imminent appearance of the tramp on the horizon of history. Moreover, since Chaplin had yet no knowledge of the tramp, Kid Auto Races cannot be explained by reference to Chaplin’s intentions regarding the tramp. And finally, since we often explain stylistic features of artworks in the way that 8 Ibid.

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I have explained the significance of Chaplin’s costume in Kid Auto Races – i.e., by way of narrative sentences – artistic intentions may lack explanatory power in accounting for stylistic features. Or, insofar as stylistic features only emerge gradually in the course of an oeuvre, as the tramp only emerges gradually in Chaplin’s work in the teens, intention does not explain style, rather style often helps isolate the consolidation of artistic intention.9 Undoubtedly, we do often use narrative sentences like “In Kid Auto Races Chaplin begins to discover the tramp.” We use such sentences to highlight the place of the artwork in the artist’s development or in terms of its influence on other artists. Furthermore, these explanations, which connect stylistic features to generally unintended consequences of the work, do not advert to the artist’s intention. But this admission does not entail that the artist’s intentions are without explanatory power. In explaining Kid Auto Races, one surely would explain his choice of costume with reference to his comic intentions. It is in light of his intention to amuse that his choice of consistently ill-fitting garments becomes intelligible. That is, nothing explains Chaplin’s attire in Kid Auto Races so well as postulating his intention to amuse, especially considering prevailing film-world ideas that clothes that are too large or too small are funny. That explaining why a work is a significant member in an evolving series of works or in a career may not rely upon intention does not show that intentions are not relevant to the interpretation of the work. It only shows that often we are interested in stylistic features for purposes other than interpretation. For example, doing art history – tracing influence and development across a temporally continuing series of works – may involve considering the work in light of consequences unimaginable at the inception of a particular work, just as any other sort of history involves tracking the unintended consequences of actions. This does not preclude the fact that intentions are still relevant to explaining the genesis of actions and artworks. Moreover, it is the genesis of a work that is important for ascertaining its art status and identity. And artistic 9 The example that Danto uses to make this point is Jennifer Bartlett. However, for several reasons, I do not think that Danto’s choice is a good one. First: by showing that Anderson’s, Ratcliff’s, and Crimp’s hypotheses about Bartlett’s intentions are dubious, Danto only demonstrates that the critics attributed the wrong intentions to Bartlett, not that intention-talk is not explanatory. Second: it seems to me that Danto refutes the hypotheses of Anderson, ­Ratcliff, and Crimp by adducing (on p. 245) what he takes to be an indication of Bartlett’s real intentions. For example, Danto uses discussions with Bartlett that illuminate her intentions in order to advance his brief. Thus the way Danto works through the argument in the Bartlett case does not unequivocally get him the anti-intentionalist conclusion that he seeks. See Danto, “Narrative and Style,” pp. 244–248.

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intentions have an explanatory role to play in arriving at the interpretations that constitute the work of art. That we go on to make other sorts of interpretations that go beyond the artist’s intentions – e.g., art historical interpretations about the relations of the artwork to an evolving series of other works – does not entail that references to artistic intentions are altogether without explanatory power. Insofar as Danto suggests that his discovery of art historical narratives renders his view anti-intentionalist, he overstates the case. Certain art historical interpretations may go beyond tracking artistic intention for certain purposes, while, at the same time, for the purposes of establishing the art status and identity of a work artistic intention still has explanatory relevance. Artistic intention, that is, is relevant to fixing the meaning and stylistic properties of the work for purposes of settling its artistic status and identity, even though other remarks, beyond the ken of the artist, can be made about the style of the work. Once one concedes that we have interests in different kinds of accounts of the stylistic features of a work and that these different, though compatible, accounts stand in different relations to artistic intentions, the intentionalist leanings of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace need not be taken to contradict Danto’s characterization of stylistic narratives, even if Danto himself seems to take the latter as grounds for anti-intentionalism. Danto is mistaken in his suspicion that stylistic narratives are incompatible with intentionalism, especially intentionalism narrowly focused on interpretation. Nevertheless, there is another element of Danto’s writings on artistic style that is irreconcilably at odds with the intentionalism of his constraints on art-identifying interpretations. This is his idea of a style matrix which he introduced at the end of his article “The Artworld” and which he has never recanted.10 In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” T. S. Eliot wrote: No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to 10

Arthur Danto, “The Artistic Enfranchisement of Real Objects: The Artworld,” pp. 181–182. Moreover, in conversation, Danto has reassured me that he is still very much committed to the idea of the style matrix.

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all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole readjusted.11 One way to understand Danto’s notion of the style matrix of art history is to conceive of it as an attempt to give logical structure to Eliot’s view of new works of art in relation to the tradition. For Danto, pairs of style predicates are what he calls opposites. Opposites are pairs of predicates that behave as contradictories, if the object to which they are to be applied is of a certain required sort. For example, if x is a soldier, then x is either an officer or not an officer. Style predicates – like “realistic” and “not realistic” – are opposites where the pertinent objects ‘under consideration are, say, paintings. At any given moment in art history, the existing artworks can be described in terms of a list of style predicates, like “representational,” or “expressionistic,” or “formalism,” and so on. For any painting, every style predicate in the style matrix will apply to it, or its opposite will. Suppose at time T3 the relevant style predicates in the matrix are “representational,” “formalist,” and “expressionist”; then it is likely that there may be some work that is representational, formalist, and not expressionist, another work that is not representational, not formalist, and expressionist, and so on. What happens when, as Eliot puts it, a really new work of art appears is that a new set of predicates is added to the style matrix. Danto says: “An artistic breakthrough consists, I suppose, in adding the possibility of a column to the matrix.”12 Thus, when postmodern dancers composed works out of literally everyday movements to the style matrix – call it “ordinariness.” This, according to Eliot, forced a readjustment in terms of every work in the tradition. In ­Danto’s idiom, every work in the tradition in addition to being representational or not representational, formalist or not formalist, expressionist or not expressionist was also either ordinary or not ordinary. The introduction of the new style introduces a new set of style predicates with which to map the entire field of existing dance. Romantic ballet in the 11 12

T S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology, eds. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller (SUNY Press, 1987), p. 146. Danto, “The Artistic Enfranchisement of Real Objects: The Artworld,” p. 182.

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wake of postmodern dance should be relabled representational, expressionist, and not ordinary. Perhaps certain forms of Native American dance, involving little more than walking, turn out to acquire a heretofore unremarked property, viz., ordinariness. After the advent of German expressionism, Grunewald’s painting may be relabled “expressionist.” Certainly art historians sometimes talk like this. I clearly remember art appreciation classes where I was encouraged to see artworks of the past through the optic of the twentieth-century modernism. Recall Clive Bell. And there are film historians like Noel Burch who describe certain works of early cinema – i.e., cinema before 1913 – in terms of the disjunctive narrative strategies of the contemporary avant-garde. In some cases, this talk may be taken to be merely heuristic and metaphorical. But in other cases, like those of Bell and Burch, it is not. And where such stylistic attributions are advanced literally, Danto’s style matrix models this way of talking quite nicely. However, it should be evident that this conception of style attribution is incompatible with the intentionalist constraints that Danto defends in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. The story about how postmodern dance enfranchises ordinary movement in such a way that what looks exactly like everyday walking is transfigured into an evening of avant-garde dance is a veritable case study in Danto’s philosophy of art. Inhabiting an artworld where the theories and ideas of people like John Cage were alive and abroad, artists and audiences shared a background of beliefs that enabled choreographers to intend to make comments on the nature of dance by means of ordinary movement in a context where spectators were prepared to recognize that intention as well as prepared to recognize the artist’s intention that they recognize that intention. Postmodern dance was possible because the right kind of art theories and ideas were in the air, available to dancers and audiences alike. In that context, the ordinariness of the movement was a salient, intelligible, constitutive property of the dances in question. However, once we move outside that artworld to remote historical locales where there is nothing like postmodern theorizing in the offing, Danto, it seems to me, should want to resist stylistic attributions of ordinariness. Some Native American dance may look like some postmodern dance, but Danto is the self-professed nemesis of perceptual similarity. Even if some Native American dance looks like ordinary walking and, in that respect, resembles postmodern choreography, the reader, as well as the writer, of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace should reject their assimilation. The Native American dance cannot possess the property of postmodern ordinariness because its composers lack the requisite postmodern ideas and theories. Their work

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cannot be interpreted in terms of the notion of ordinariness for the relevant concept of dance-as-ordinary movement, formed in reaction to the perceived history of Western theatrical dancing, is beyond their stock of knowledge and belief. They could not intend that their works have such properties, nor are they the kind of communicable properties that it makes sense to attribute to their works independently of their ideas, theories, and intentions. And yet that attribution is the sort that Danto’s style matrix invites.13 For Danto, objects are identified as the artworks they are by interpretations that are constrained by what the artist could have believed. The style matrix, on the other hand, can impute properties to artworks that are completely anachronistic and beyond the ken of the artist. For the style matrix warrants stylistic attributions that have no basis in the historical past. The style matrix allows imputations of properties to works of the past on the basis of conceptions of art available only in the recent present. Moreover, insofar as these imputed properties figure in the identification of artworks, the style matrix runs afoul of Danto’s own doctrine that interpretations not outstrip the knowledge stock of the relevant artist. Danto’s idea of a style matrix, like Eliot’s view of perpetually readjusting artistic traditions, is dubious insofar as it suggests the possibility of backward causation. Both views have artworks acquiring essential properties after they have been loosed upon the world and after their makers are long dead. This commitment is problematic in and of itself in ways that I will not dwell upon here.14 But in Danto’s case, these putative problems are compounded by the fact that the style matrix is not compatible with other deeply held tenets of 13

14

In conversation, Danto has defended the style matrix to me on the grounds that it models a very productive mode of critical discourse. But, in contrast, I think that we can acknowledge what is productive about the relevant sort of critical discourse without embracing the metaphysical commitments of the style matrix. The value of the critical discourse that Danto has in mind is heuristic rather than probative. If one speaks of the romantic strains in some pre-romantic music, one speaks almost metaphorically. The effect of such talk can be salutary for, in the best instances, it leads us to pay close attention to actual musical structures in the work at hand. But once this focusing work is done, we can abandon the heuristic. That is, an anachronistic style attribution may make a certain artistic structure stand out, but once the structure has been isolated for our attention by such analogies, we may dispense with the analogue. Style-matrix-type talk helps heuristically to prompt spectators to look and listen closely; it is critically valuable because it is rhetorically effective. But there is no reason to think that since this manner of speaking is psychologically valuable, in the way just conceded, that this manner of speaking literally characterizes the real properties of artworks. For further discussion of this issue, see Jerrold Levinson, “Artworks and the Future,” in his Music, Art, & Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 1990).

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his theory, viz., that interpretations – which involve stylistic attributions – of artworks be constrained by what the artist can know and intend, and that the properties of works be a function of art history. Stylistic attributions, when processed through the style matrix, are ahistorical. They are divorced from the artist’s intentions and from her concretely situated cognitive stock of ideas, art theories, and historical self-understandings. Given the incompatibility of the style matrix with the rest of his theory, along with the problems of backward causation which we have not discussed, one wants to urge Danto to disavow the style matrix as a reliable instrument of stylistic attribution in favor of the intentionalist, historicist leanings of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.15 15

An earlier version of this paper was given as a talk at the symposium on the philosophy of Arthur Danto for the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco in the spring of 1993. I would like to thank my fellow symposiasts – George Dickie, Myles Brand, Keith Lehrer, and, of course, Arthur Danto – for their suggestions and provocations. And, I would also like to thank Peter Kivy for his comments and criticisms.

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Chapter 4

Essence, Expression, and History: Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art is one of the most imaginative and richest creations of Anglo-American aesthetics. Whereas analytic philosophies of art are often derided as sterile and unduly abstract when it comes to the purposes of artmaking and criticism, Danto’s theories are in close touch with the practice of art, savoring its history in ways that are provocative, suggestive, and inspiring to artists and critics alike. Yet, at the same time, Danto’s philosophizing remains rigorously metaphysical. Whatever our final assessment of the adequacy of Danto’s philosophy of art, its influence on the course of analytic aesthetics is already awesome. His refinement of the “method of indiscernibles” has augmented the repertory of philosophical techniques of analysis, and his discovery, so to speak, of the “artworld” has awakened aestheticians to the unavoidable relevance of art history and context to art theory. Danto’s theory of art is quite complex. It involves not only a philosophy of art proper – that is, an analysis of the essential nature of art – but a philosophy of art history as well: a bold Hegelian conjecture that art history is over. Moreover, these components of his theory are related in several quite unexpected ways. And, in addition, Danto’s philosophy of art itself is somewhat elaborate; indeed, it is far more intricate than the debate in the recent philosophical literature indicates. Thus, the often unacknowledged complexity of Danto’s view demands that before we attempt to evaluate it critically, some care be taken in attempting to appreciate the subtlety of Danto’s theoretical apparatus in its entirety. To this end, the next part of this essay is devoted to an exposition of Danto’s philosophy of art. Here, I hope to show that Danto’s philosophy of art is fundamentally a variant of expressionism. Since this is a feature of Danto’s philosophy which has not been noted in current philosophical discussions, I hope the novelty of this finding will relieve the summary character of my explication. After a discussion of Danto’s philosophy of art, I will to elucidate Danto’s philosophy of art history as well as its relation to Danto’s characterization of the essential nature of art. Then, once we have the full theory before us, we can begin to engage the system critically.

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Essence and Expression: Danto’s Philosophy of Art

In his The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,1 Danto sets forth a fully articulated philosophy of art. Some of the components of that theory appeared in earlier articles.2 However, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (henceforth simply called Transfiguration) is not merely an assemblage of previous insights. It expands upon the earlier work – especially in terms of the contributions introduced in the often overlooked or misunderstood seventh chapter of Transfiguration – while also weaving Danto’s hypotheses, new and old, into a systematic fabric. Stated formulaically, the theory of art that Danto propounds in Transfiguration maintains that something X is a work of art if and only if (a) X has a subject (i.e., X is about something) (b) about which X projects some attitude or point-of-view (this may also be described as a matter of X having a style) (c) by means of rhetorical ellipsis (generally metaphorical ellipsis), (d) which ellipsis, in turn, engages audience participation in filling-in what is missing (an operation which can also be called interpretation) (e) where the works in question and the interpretations thereof require an art-historical context (which context is generally specified as a background of historically situated theory). This theory of art is an attempt to capture the essential nature of art. Because he believes that the distinguishing characteristics of art are not something that can be detected perceptually, Danto is unworried by the well-known claims, motivated by Wittgenstein’s discussion of games, to the effect that the essence of art is not definable.3 For such skepticism about defining art is based on the supposition that art cannot be essentially characterized in virtue of manifest or perceptual properties. However, since Danto’s theory of art focuses on non-manifest properties of artworks – distinguishing features that the eye alone cannot descry – his view is inured to neo-Wittgensteinian anxieties. Danto establishes each of the necessary conditions for art status in his theory by means of transcendental arguments of a recurring structure. In each case, he imagines at least a pair of indiscernible items – for example, an artwork and a mere real thing; or two indiscernible artworks; or a mere ­representation and an indiscernible representation that is an artwork – where 1 Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass., 1981). 2 Such as: Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy, 61, 1964; “Artworks and Real Things,” Theoria, 39, 1973; “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33, 1974. 3 This is a position popularized by Morris Weitz in his “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15, 1956, pp. 27–35.

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we are prone to agree that, despite the perceptual indiscernibility of the pairs in question, there nevertheless remains an ontological distinction to be drawn between them. How is this possible? What would have to be the case in order for this to be possible? The task of theory then becomes that of illuminating the distinction in question by means of producing or hypothesizing the best explanation of why, for example, one of a pair of indiscernible objects is an artwork, while the other is only a mere real thing. That is, art theory must explain how the relevant distinction is possible. For Danto, this method of indiscernibles is not simply a technique of philosophical aesthetics. It is Danto’s metaphilosophical conviction that philosophy in general is generated by problems of perceptual indiscernibility. That is why, Danto maintains, philosophical problems are not tractable by empirical observation. For example, the problem of reality emerges when we are able to imagine two phenomenally indistinguishable states: a perfectly coherent dream and the so-called external world (Descartes). The problem of the nature of causality arises when we conceive of two perceptually indiscernible courses of events: one comprised of constantly conjoined states of affairs versus one where antecedent states necessitate subsequent ones (Hume). A central problem in moral theory concerns demarcating acts of prudence from acts of morality where the observable actions in question – say, making the correct change – look exactly alike (Kant). And, perhaps needless to say, for Danto, the philosophy of art begins when we can imagine two objects – say Duchamp’s Fountain and a urinal – which, though to all appearances identical, are nevertheless such that one is an artwork and the other is not. If for Danto philosophy only arrives on the scene when some problem of indiscernibility of the preceding variety erupts, once on the scene, the task of philosophy is, first and foremost, to produce theories which will sort the perceptual indiscernibles – that we nevertheless maintain to be distinct – into their appropriate categories. That is, epistemological theory will mark the principled difference between coherent dreams and reality; metaphysical theory will the differentia between constant conjunctions, and causes and effects; ethical theory draws the boundary between prudence and morality; and philosophical aesthetics, among other things, discovers the ontological dividing line between artworks and mere real things. Moreover, since such philosophical exercises begin by confronting phenomena which, though they be categorically distinct are none the less perceptually indiscernible, said exercises are immune to neo-Wittgensteinian admonitions that philosophers can never isolate the putative conceptual boundaries on the basis of manifest or perceptual properties. For manifest properties have virtually no conclusive theoretical work to do in philosophy as it is conceived by Danto.

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Danto’s philosophy of art is put in place step by step through a series of arguments. Different arguments motivate the postulation of each of the various necessary conditions for art status enumerated above. In all cases, the form of argumentation is transcendental, and each mobilizes the indiscernibility method. That is, each argument produces an explanation to show how it is possible that the indiscernible counterparts in question are nevertheless different. However, the arguments on behalf of each of the conditions in the theory often rely upon working with different sets of indiscernibles. The first condition in the theory – that artworks are about something – derives from contrasts between artworks and indiscernible real things. The second and third conditions in the theory – that artworks are elliptical and that they project points-ofview – are motivated by contemplating items that are merely representations (and, therefore, about something) from indiscernible representations that are also artworks. Like the first condition, the fourth condition – that artworks have or require interpretations – appears to derive from the contrast between mere real things (which, lacking a semantical component, neither have nor require interpretation) and indiscernible artworks (that have or mandate interpretation). And, finally, the fifth condition in the theory – that a­ rtworks and their interpretations depend upon a background or context of art history – is proposed in order to explain the difference between distinct artworks – the Don Quixote of Cervantes and the Don Quixote of Menard – which appear identical in all manifest or observable respects. Given this general map of the argument in Transfiguration, it is instructive to note, in some detail, the way in which each of the derivations flagged above is implemented. As a first approximation of the nature of art, Danto conjectures that artworks have a subject: artworks are about something. Sometimes this has been expressed by saying that artworks have the property of aboutness or that they have a semantical component. Danto supports this piece of his theory by meditating upon the nature of the difference between certain artworks and what to all intents and purposes we might regard to be ordinary objects that happen to look exactly like the artworks in question. Historically, this contrast is precedented in the relationship between readymades, such as Duchamp’s In Advance of a Broken Arm, and the everyday snow-shovels that are its counterparts. Or – to cite the example that seems to have provoked Danto from his dogmatic slumbers – Warhol’s Brillo Box is in Danto’s description4 indiscernible from the boxes of soap-pads piled in the storerooms of the neighborhood grocery. Furthermore, if such actual examples 4 Transfiguration, p. 44.

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do not suffice, one can readily imagine a painter of the 1960s – from those days when objecthood was everything – who covers a canvas with red paint and declares the result Untitled, thereby intending to exemplify the regnant theory that artworks just are real things (like radiators, as a Jasper Johns would have put it). And yet, there does seem to be a difference between a work such as this by an artist and an indiscernible red canvas – an exact counterpart of the artist’s production – that got that way simply because some children accidentally toppled some cans of red paint on it. What is the difference between ready-mades and their indiscernible counterparts, between Warhol’s Brillo Box and Proctor and Gamble’s, and between red-canvases made under the aegis of artworld theories and red canvases produced by carelessness? Danto hypothesizes that with these pairs of indiscernibles, the difference is that the artwork in each of these contrasts is about something, whereas the real object counterpart is what it is and nothing else. It is not about anything at all. A red canvas by the artist envisioned above is about art. It says something – namely, that artworks really are real objects. In a sense, such an object is actually a refutation of the very theory that it is meant to exemplify. For though it serves as a vehicle for publicizing the theory that artworks are nothing but mere real things, it is not a mere real thing. It has a semantic component. It sends a message: that artworks really are real things. But the messenger is not a mere real thing in so far as it is an instrument of intentional communication. The red canvas made red by the reckless children, on the other hand, is a mere real thing; it says nothing. In order to defend the hypothesis that the boundary between artworks and real things rests on the fact that artworks have subjects whereas mere real things do not, Danto engages in a thought-experiment – which, at the same time, is a playfully wicked, philosophical satire of certain artistic tendencies of the sixties – about the impossibility of attempts to create artworks that really just are mere real things. Imagine an artist, a great demotic leveller, who, appalled by the elitism of a hierarchical artworld that would valorize or privilege certain items like Titian’s The Annuciation over toaster ovens, decides to put all art on the same level, the level of the ordinary, just as John Cage sought to erase the boundary between music and ambient sound in his 4’33”. This populist stocks his gallery with every kind of appliance, auto-part, building material, and cut-rate piece of clothing that he can find on Canal Street in order to compose his Exhibition of Real Things. And yet his collection does not comprise a collection of mere real things; for his collection is charged with meaning. It is a polemic. Given its context

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in a continuing debate, it signifies like a gesture. It carries and communicates the artist’s disdain for the artworld as he conceives it. It is impossible for the artist in question to implement his rejection of artworld elitism without transfiguring the real objects he enlists into something other than mere real things – without, that is, transfiguring them into signifiers. For, if for no other reason, the context in which the artist proffers his found objects is already historically so symbolically freighted that any intervention the artist makes within it is bound to have implications. The ontological futility, then, of the artist bent upon producing and presenting a mere real thing in his capacity as an artist marks an ineliminable feature of art. In so far as the artist, while playing that role within the presentational conventions of the artworld, cannot produce a mere real thing (because he cannot eradicate the aboutness of his creations), aboutness must be granted to be a core feature or necessary feature of art. Danto’s argument that an artist, such as we’ve imagined, cannot produce a mere real thing – as opposed to something that has the semantical component of aboutness – scotches fashionable artworld harangues of the sixties that sounded the utopian call to dissolve the gap between art and reality. In revealing the impossibility of that quest, Danto isolates aboutness as a necessary condition for arthood. However, in locating aboutness as a necessary condition for arthood by means of the indiscernibility method, Danto also rejects two very influential strands of philosophical aesthetics, specifically: aesthetic theories of art as championed by Clive Bell and his formalist followers, and the family-resemblance approach to identifying art as endorsed by neo-Wittgensteinians. For both the formalists and the neo-Wittgensteinians, in different ways, emphasize the discernible or manifest properties of putative artworks, whereas, by definition, the indiscernibility method utterly discounts or factors out the relevance of manifest properties for the project of identifying art; and, predictably enough, the method zeroes-in on a feature of art like aboutness – a feature that the naked eye cannot descry – which neither formalism nor the family-resemblance approach can accommodate. The aboutness condition of Danto’s philosophy of art – that artworks have a subject, that they are about something, that they have a semantical component – is generated by considering the contrast between an artwork and its indiscernible, merely real counterpart, and by asking for the principled grounds that make that contrast possible. Similarly, the fourth condition of the theory – that artworks have interpretations – is also motivated by the contrast between items we are convinced are artworks and their mere real-thing counterparts.

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For example, take a work about which there is no plausible disagreement that it is an artwork; take a masterpiece; take Poussin’s The Ashes of Phocion. Then imagine that an art supply store somewhere in Soho explodes for want of a furnace repairperson. Paint is hurled in every direction, but a great deal of it converges on a canvas awning across the street, and, as it splashes down, it configures itself in the shape of what could pass as a point-for-point facsimile of Poussin’s The Ashes of Phocion. The event is a statistical fluke, rather like those snow drifts on Chinese mountains in which some have seen the face of Christ. Though Poussin’s The Ashes of Phocion and the results of our Soho explosion areindiscernible to the naked eye, intuitively the two items seem radicallydifferent. Wherein lies the difference? How is it possible? One very powerful answer to this question is that the painting by Poussin invites and supports an interpretation, perhaps a very deep interpretation, whereas the fall-out from the blasted paint store deserves no more of an interpretation than the debris scattered in the wake of Hurricane Andrew – which is to say, none at all. Perhaps the fact that the first and fourth conditions of Danto’s philosophy of art are generated by the same sorts of contrasting indiscernibles – artworks versus mere real things – makes their somewhat complementary relationship unsurprising. For the fourth condition of the theory complements the first condition in the sense that in so far as artworks have subjects, are about something or signify something, then it seems natural to suppose that a proper appreciation of them will involve apprehending the subject of the artwork, grasping what it is about, comprehending what it signifies, unpacking its semantical component – or, in short, interpreting it. Indeed, one might even attempt to argue from the necessity of the first condition to the fourth condition. For if we do not restrict the notion of interpretation to the illumination of what is not obvious, and allow, as Danto seems to allow, that an interpretation is simply a statement of what something is about, then if something x is about y, this implies that x has an interpretation, viz., a statement of whatever x is about. The aboutness of the item stands to the interpretability of the self-same as recto does to verso. Danto’s emphasis on an irreducible dimension of interpretation in artworks has important ramifications for his philosophy of art. For given the essential interpretive address of artworks to spectators, Danto construes the aesthetic appreciation of art to be – in large measure – cognitive, that is, a matter of responding appropriately to art by making interpretations (a cognitive process, if there ever was one). This, of course, is at odds with many of the most abiding and deeply entrenched conceptions of aesthetic appreciation in the dominant tradition, which tradition most frequently characterizes aesthetic appreciation in noncognitive terms, such as disinterested pleasure or feelings of release.

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In this respect, Danto’s theory of art again diverges significantly from aesthetic theories of art which conceive of artworks as objects designed with the function of eliciting certain noncognitive states in spectators. Like Nelson Goodman and unlike Monroe Beardsley, Danto identifies aesthetic appreciation as cognitive, though, whereas Goodman sees the artwork engaging the spectator cognitively in the manner of a theory that directs us to the world, the cognitions that Danto identifies as constitutive of aesthetic appreciation need only dwell on the purport of the art object. That artworks have subjects and engage interpretations, though necessary features of artworks on Danto’s view, hardly serve to differentiate them from many other things. For instance, all representations have subjects and, therefore, interpretations in the broad sense Danto permits, but not all representations are artworks. The stick-figures that differentiate the men’s restrooms from the women’s restrooms in airports have subjects and minimal interpretations, but they are not artworks. So, more than the first and the fourth conditions above are required to track art proper with precision. In order to elaborate his theory in such a way that artworks proper can be distinguished from the mere representations with which artworks share certain necessary conditions (aboutness and interpretability), Danto introduces another set of indiscernibles for consideration: artworks that are representations versus mere representations that are indiscernible from the artworks in question.5 For example, think about one of Erle Loran’s diagrammatic analyses of a painting by Cézanne and Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriation of it: Portrait of Madame Cézanne. The Loran diagram is a mere representation, an attempt to instruct us in the principles of Cézanne’s art. Lichtenstein’s painting is something else again, an elliptical statement about Cézanne’s project, one that maintains that for Cézanne, painting is essentially diagrammatic. The subjects of Loran’s diagram and Lichtenstein’s painting differ; Loran’s painting is about a certain work by Cézanne, whereas Lichtenstein’s painting is about Cézanne’s vision. The method of address of the Loran diagram is straightforward; the address of Lichtenstein’s Portrait of Madame Cézanne is rhetorical, which, for Danto, means that it has to be filled-in by the spectator in the manner of a rhetorical question.6 Or, in other words, it requires an interpretation by the spectator. Moreover, the rhetorical structure that Danto believes is generally in operation with artworks is metaphor.7 A metaphor is a rhetorical trope that invites 5 Ibid., ch. 6. 6 Ibid., ch. 7. 7 Ibid.

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audiences to interpret it by exploring a target term in light of a source term (“the moon” in light of “ghostly galleon”); the number of correspondences that an audience may find between the target term and the source term is indefinite; the audience proceeds by, often playfully, testing correlations between the source domain and the target domain of the trope. Similarly, artworks invite interpretations, their embedded metaphors engaging spectator’s cognitive play. The metaphor projected by Warhol’s Brillo Box is that artworks are real things, while, with regard to much great literature, according to Danto, the reader – himself or herself – is the target domain while the characters provide source domains.8 That is, for example, when reading Antigone, I may embrace the metaphorical structure that Noël Carroll is Creon, and explore it in a way that leads to self-discovery. To understand an artwork is to grasp the metaphor that is always there. The semantical component of an artwork is an underlying metaphor or set of metaphors. The metaphorical dimension of artworks is its transfigurative dimension – the target term of the metaphor is seen in the light of the source term, and the target term is thereby transfigured. In the greatest works of narrative art, the audience is transfigured when we see ourselves in light of characters like Ahab or Oedipus or Nora. Art is rhetorical; metaphor is a rhetorical trope. In fact, metaphor is the key rhetorical trope with respect to art since art involves our seeing one content in a certain light, seeing art itself as a real thing à la Warhol, for example. The hypothesis that art is a matter of rhetorical ellipsis, notably metaphorical ellipses, moreover, reinforces the notion that art involves interpretation by further specifying the nature of the relevant interpretation – to wit: filling-in rhetorical ellipses by identifying and exploring the metaphors in the work. The contrast between Loran’s diagrams – mere representations – and Lichtenstein’s Portrait of Madame Cézanne – an artwork which involves represensaticm – is supposed to establish the third condition in Danto’s theory: that Artworks are elliptical, indeed, that they area form of rhetorical ellipsis, standardly enlisting the rhetorical trope of metaphor. But the contrast between mere representations and artworks that involve representation is also intended to motivate the postulation of the second condition in Danto’s theory: that artworks have points-of-view.9 Artworks are not only about something, they project a certain point-of-view about whatever they are about. Whereas mere representations aspire to transparency, artworks express ideas and attitudes toward whatever they represent. 8 Ibid., p. 172. 9 Ibid., ch. 7.

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They are referentially opaque, cocooned, so to speak, in the propositional attitudes of artists. Loran’s diagram attempts to illustrate the actual abstract structure of Cézanne’s paintings. Lichtenstein’s painting promotes a conception of Cézanne’s project – that he, Cézanne, saw even his wife as a matrix of geometrical forms. In the case of Lichtenstein’s Portrait of Madame Cézanne, the object of Lichtenstein’s concern is Cézanne about whose work Lichenstein expresses a point-of-view. Lichtenstein, the rhetor, strives to lead the audience to see Cézanne in the same way that he does. The artist/rhetor transforms the audience into one who sees in a certain light, viz., the light of the rhetor/artist. Art transforms or transfigures audiences into seers of a certain kind. Reviewing the works of Robert Mapplethorpe, Danto generalizes from Mark Stevens (Mr 10 ½) and says “We see him [Mark Stevens] from within a homosexual perception, and it is that perception, that vision, that is the true subject of these [Mapplethorpe’s] works.”10 Art is a matter of rhetorical ellipsis. Artworks deploy elliptical metaphors rhetorically which function to enable the audience to see one thing in the light of something else. This metaphorical vision, in turn, can be said to embody a point-of-view or a way of seeing. For Danto, the metaphors with which an artist chooses to address a given subject matter are deeply connected to the way in which the artist sees the world. In this respect, art properly so-called always possesses a style in the sense that underwrites Buffon’s proverb that style is the man (or woman) himself (herself).11 Style is the embodiment of a pointof-view, or, alternatively, the person, himself or herself, is a representation (a representational system) from a point-of-view, that is, a representation in a certain style, according to a certain way of seeing or of organizing the world. Whereas mere representations strive toward an ideal of transparency, artworks are opaque. Whatever they are about is embedded within the context of an artistic vision – a style (in a somewhat existential sense) – or point-of-view. Generally, the vehicle or structure of this point-of-view is, broadly construed, metaphorical; metaphor can serve as the vehicle for points-of-view because of the way in which it focuses attention only on certain aspects of its target. Metaphorical ellipsis, then, encourages the audience to explore the content of the artwork from a certain standpoint – indeed, it encourages the audience to take on that standpoint, which, of course, is the standpoint of the artist/rhetor to whatever the artwork is about. Art, at least momentarily, transforms the 10 11

Arthur Danto, Encounters and Reflections : Art in the Historical Present (New York, 1990), p. 211. Transfiguration, pp. 197–198.

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spectator into one who sees the subject of the artwork from the point-of-view of the artist or under the auspices of the same metaphor that the artist does. The metaphors that embody the points-of-view expressed by the artwork articulate the artist’s style of being in the world. This is perhaps not so completely obscure as it might seem to be, since for Danto, ways of being in the world are to be thought of as matters of representation. The artist herself is unaware in any explicit sense of her way of being in the world just because it is her way of being in the world. Through artworks – through the choice ultimately of metaphorical structures – the artist makes her way of seeing the world or some subject therein available not only to herself but to audiences. Audiences in embracing the artist’s metaphorical structures – the embodiment of her point-of-view – entertain and explore alternative ways of seeing the world. The second condition of Danto’s theory – that artworks have points-of-view or styles (in the special sense Danto uses that term) – along with the structural specification, in the third condition of the theory, of the rhetorical and metaphorical devices that project the said points-of-view are the nub of Danto’s theory of art. These differentia are introduced through contrasts between mere representations (which aspire to transparency) versus artworks that involve representation (and which are opaque), but one supposes that Danto’s conclusions are not only meant to apply to artworks that involve representations, but to abstract art as well. What is, of course, remarkable about the second condition in Danto’s theory is that it shows that his theory of art is at root an expression theory. The most salient differentia between art and non-art is not simply that art is about something and, therefore, interpretable – for art shares these features with non-artistic representations – but that art expresses points-of-view about its subjects. Moreover, these points-of-view are something that flow from the very being of the artist. And, finally, the audience’s reception of the artwork involves taking on the artist’s point-of-view in interpretive acts in which one explores the subject of the artwork in virtue of the artist’s fundamental (existential, so to speak) metaphors. In a rough way, this recalls the expressionism of someone like Tolstoy, however startling that may sound. For the artwork derives from the very being of the artist, incarnating her point-of-view and attitude in metaphorical structures whose engagement by spectators enables them to share her point-of-view and attitude. Danto’s hypothesis that artworks necessarily have style, i.e. embodiments of points-of-view, suggests what Danto may believe to be one of the key ways in which art is important. Points-of-view or ways of seeing the world are usually transparent to us because we inhabit them. By embodying them in artworks,

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what is transparent and unnoticed becomes opaque and salient. Art, then, serves the purpose of making consciousness aware of itself.12 Thus, in a way that parallels many expression theorists, Danto locates the point of art in the externalization of subjectivity in such a way that the artist and the rest of us are able to examine it.13 The notions that artworks are metaphors and that they embody ways of seeing the world fit neatly with the claims that artworks possess aboutness, and have or elicit interpretations. Responding to artworks involves interpreting their underlying metaphor or metaphors. In so far as artworks are ways of seeing, they are about a certain way of taking whatever they are about. Such points-of-view, then, invite interpretation while compounding the way in which artworks are about things – for the way they are about whatever they are about is part and parcel of what they are about. Along with studied contrasts between indiscernible artworks and mere real things, and between indiscernible mere representations and counterpart representations that are artworks, Danto also investigates the contrast between sets of indiscernible artworks. His most famous example of this sort is the contrast between Cervantes’ Don Quixote and its counterpart by Pierre Menard, as imagined in Borges’ Pierre Menard, Symbolist Poet.14 The two novels are wordfor-word identical but, as Danto, following Borges, notes, they have very different properties. For example, Menard’s diction, in that it is archaic, is somewhat affected, whereas Cervantes’ is natural. And so on. A major motive behind Danto’s presentation of this contrast is to introduce a discussion of how artworks are individuated. Specifically, it is his point that individuating artworks must take into account the place of the work in art history. Artworks cannot be individuated exclusively in terms of what some might their intrisinic structural properties (such as significant form). The historical context of the artwork is indispensable in establishing its identity, a view theoretically at odds with aesthetic theories of art like Bell’s. However, the consideration of indiscernible but different artworks also yields a further necessary condition for art status. An artwork requires a background of art history in order to be the artwork that it is. This background is most readily conceptualized as one of art theory, i.e. of historically situated art theories. These art theories need not be true in the way that Danto’s philosophy

12 13 14

See Ibid., p. 207; and Arthur Danto, “Moving Pictures,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Winter, 1979, pp. 20–1. See, for example, Francis Sparshott, The Theory of the Arts (Princeton, NJ, 1982), pp. 85–8. Transfiguration, p. 33.

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of art aspires to truth. These theories need only be available and pertinent to the artists in question. For example, in order to be works of art, as well as in order to be the works of art they were, Conceptual Artworks depended upon the existence of artworld theories – however philosophically controversial – that encouraged the idea that artworks themselves were basically theoretical statements about art. Conceptual Art could not have existed under the Ming Dynasty nor in the court of Louis XIV because those venues lacked the appropriate kind of theories. Conceptual Art depended upon the fact that supporting artworld theories had emerged by the late 1960s, which theories made Conceptual Art possible. At earlier historical junctures, Conceptual Art would have been neither intelligible nor possible (for it would not even have been intelligible to its producers who themselves would have lacked the requisite conceptual framework for producing it). That artworks require a historical context – specifically a background of historically situated theory – meshes in significant ways with the rest of Danto’s philosophy of art. Inasmuch as artworks possess aboutness, they “say” something, but what they say depends in crucial respects on context. If artworks have a semantic component, they also have a pragmatic component. That is, what they say depends on the historical circumstances in which they are articulated. What the artist can be saying depends, to an important degree, on the background of art theories and art history available to her and her audience. The necessary, historical situatedness of the artworks also sets certain constraints on interpreting artworks. For Danto, artworks call forth or propose interpretations as an integral part of what it is to be an artwork. However, these interpretations, given the historical situatedness of the artwork, must be limited to what the artist knows or could have believed. It is not clear that Danto would go so far as to say that interpretations of artworks are constrained to track what the artist actually intended. However, he does prelude interpretations that rest on supposing conceptual frameworks and facts about which the artist was ignorant.15 For instance, it would be a mistake to attribute postmodern pastiche to prehistoric cave painting. Moreover, the way in which to locate the plausible compass of an artist’s beliefs about what she is doing is to look to the reigning theories of art and conceptions of art history about and abroad in the historical artworld that she inhabits.16 If the historico-theoretical context of an artwork necessarily shapes what it is about, then it shapes the metaphors the artwork projects as well as the 15 16

Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 135.

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point-of-view expressed by those metaphors. Furthermore, our interpretations of the metaphors and the associated ways of seeing the world that are incarnated in artworks must be constrained by our most plausible hypotheses about the works in question in view of what we know about the historically extant art theories and conceptions of art history available in the artworld in which the artist flourished. Thus, it is possible to summarize Danto’s analytical philosophy of art as a tidy package of interrelated commitments: artworks are about subjects about which they express a point-of-view through metaphors which they not only have but about which, given rhetorical ellipsis, they invite interpretations, which interpretations, in turn, must be constrained historically. That Danto’s theory places such emphasis on the historicity of art is a wellknown feature of his theory. That his theory is essentialist is also acknowledged, but less frequently emphasized, while the fact that the form that that essentialism takes is expressionism appears not to have been discussed previously. What is perplexing about the overall structure of Danto’s theory is that it seems to be unstable in its mixture of elements. Its historicism, for example, sits uneasily with its essentialism, especially since the form of essentialism it espouses – expressionism – is arguably a variety that has been historically superseded. The perplexity here derives from the way in which historicism and essentialism are generally understood. For these approaches are thought to be incompatible; historicism is thought to preclude essentialism. In fact, sensitivity to the history of art is thought to show the error of essentialism in general. Furthermore, philosophers of art at the time of Danto’s first interventions in the field17 maintained that essentialist theories of art were a dead letter. So, a question arises about how Danto thinks that an essentialist theory of art – indeed, one so narrow as an expression theory – is plausible, especially if art history and the lessons therein are to be acknowledged? But in order to comprehend Danto’s defense of his essentialist project with respect to these questions, we need to turn to his philosophy of art history. 2

The End of Art: Danto’s Philosophy of Art History

Danto’s philosophy of art is essentialist. He advances a real definition of art in terms of necessary conditions that are jointly sufficient. When Danto initially began to advance his theory in the early 1960s, there was an influential 17

Here I have in mind Danto’s article “The Artworld,” which was published in 1964.

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consensus that essentialist theories of art were impossible. On the one hand, it was believed that the history of art is too diversified and various to permit generalization. But, on the other hand, it was also thought that the track record of past art theorizing suggested that real definitions were unlikely. For the history of past art theory – Plato, Aristotle, Tolstoy, Bell, Collingwood, Langer, and so on – was said to be littered with putative essential definitions of art that were subsequently refuted by the appearance of types of art not imagined or countenanced by the theories in question. Imitation theories of art were problematized by post-impressionist painting, while philosophies of art that claimed that art was the expression of emotions were followed and effectively refuted by an art movement like modernism that was committed to the notion that art stated cognitive theories – theories about the nature of art – with no trace of emotion. The history of art teaches us, then, that philosophies of art of the essentialist variety are always vulnerable to counterexample from innovative developments in the history of art subsequent to the postulation of the essentialist theory in question. Morris Weitz worked this intuition into an argument.18 He insisted that in so far as the practice of art shows that art is an arena which supports the permanent possibility of innovation, novelty, radical originality and even revolution, art is an open concept. We apply the concept of art always alert to the possibility that art may at any moment take off in new directions; this is part of what we value about art. Because art is innovative in this way, we can never define art; it is always possible that art will develop in unpredictable trajectories. Art may always acquire vital, new features. To treat art as a closed concept – susceptible to analysis in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions – is incompatible with its innovative dimension. Any essential definition of art which attempts to fix its central features is at conceptual odds with the possibility that art of the future may possess unheralded features and modes of valuation. Any essentialist theory of art at t1, is liable to counter-examples at t2 or thereafter. Past attempts at essential definitions, in Weitz’s accounting, did not succeed in producing general theories of art; they were at best works of covert art criticism that revealed or theorized the value of certain art movements or tendencies (viz. those favored by the theorist in question). Indeed, a Weitzian confronted by Danto’s characterization of art would undoubtedly reinterpret Danto’s philosophy of art as a failed essentialist definition that really amounts to a specimen of art criticism – art criticism that points to a crucial feature of 18

Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics.”

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much art in the aftermath of the Second World War. That feature is, of course, the connection of art to art theory. Danto, in other words, might be read as a critic who has pinpointed, not the eternal nature of art, but the salient feature of art in what might be called its Age of Theory. Danto, a connoisseur of Pop Art, mistakes a vital feature of that art for the essence of art. And, in this sense, Danto’s philosophy would appear to be locked in history rather than transcending history. Of course, Danto’s philosophy of art ingeniously accommodates our opening comments about the variability of art history. For the diversity of art history is, in a manner of speaking, built into his essential definition of art in so far as he maintains that every work of art requires a specific art-historical context and its subtending theories. Art has essential features, but among them is historical variability. Thus, historical variability presents no prima facie impediment to essentialist theorizing. After the manner of Hegel, Danto has taken this ostensibly daunting insight about art history into his own philosophy of art (aufgehoben). Moreover, in response to Weitz’s contention that the role of all theory is really covert art criticism, Danto maintains that the role of the theories that Weitz had in mind was actually to enfranchise art – to make art possible – in so far as art requires a background of such theories in order to exist. But what of the worry that any essential theory of art, propounded at time t1, provides no guarantee that future counter-examples will not confute it? Or, to approach the problem differently: why is Danto assured that by acknowledging the necessary historicity of art, the prospect has been eliminated that some development in the future might not emerge which is incompatible with all or some of the rest of his characterization of art? Here Danto mobilizes his philosophy of art history.19 Again recalling Hegel’s theory, Danto’s philosophy of art history claims that art history has come to an end. This is a difficult idea that has many ramifications. But one logical consequence of it – if it is true – is that the possibility of future counter-examples, of the sort that a Weitz warned of, to Danto’s own philosophy of art is foreclosed. Put simply: if art history is over, then there will be no more counter-examples issuing from the future. All the evidence is now in; essentialist theorizing can proceed with no anxieties about future counter-examples. If art history has 19

Danto’s philosophy of art history is developed in “The End of Art,” and “Art, Evolution and the Consciousness of History,” in Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, 1986); “Approaching the End of Art,” in Arthur Danto, The State of the Art (New York, 1987); “Bad Aesthetic Times,” and “Narratives of the End of Art,” in Arthur Danto, Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (New York, 1990); and “Learning to Live with Pluralism,” in Arthur Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box:The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York, 1992).

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ended, then we are in a position to determine that no art-historical development contradicts the rest of the theory of art. We know everything of the sort we need to know in order to produce conclusive generalizations. Or, as Danto says of the end of art: Having reached this point... art ... has brought us to a stage outside history, where at last we can contemplate the possibility of a universal definition of art and vindicate therewith the philosophical aspiration of the ages, a definition which will not be threatened by historical overthrow.20 Thus, Danto’s philosophy of art history provides him with an argument for entertaining the possibility of an essentialist philosophy of art, such as the one he advances. For the conclusion of that philosophy of art history – that art history is over – should unhorse any arguments about future counter-examples. Danto’s philosophy of art history insulates it from “historical overthrow.” For, in effect, if Danto’s philosophy of art history is correct and art has reached the end of the line, then the time for the production of counter-examples has run out. The kinds of developments in art history that might concoct such counter-examples are past. In short, Danto’s philosophy of art history is designed to undermine any challenge to the possibility of essentialist theorizing that rests on the supposition that the future of art is, in a certain sense, open. But what could Danto have in mind by the end of art history? If art history indeed ended with Warhol in 1964, how does that square with the production of all sorts of art since then? Here some clarification of what Danto has in mind by art history and the philosophy thereof is necessary. The central purpose of Danto’s philosophy of art history is to reveal its “internal structure” by means of an overarching narrative of the Hegelian sort. The history of art, as it figures in such an account, will linear or developmental. When Danto asks whether art has a history, he is thinking in terms of a progressive history. Does art have a telos or a target toward which it gravitates or at which it is aimed? When artists in the West were committed to the production of perfect imitations of reality, art had a history in the developmental sense as successive generations of artists strove toward capturing the appearances of things with progressive success. Of course, such a developmental history of art will reach an end when artists succeed in hitting their target – in the case of imitation: by replacing “inference to perceptual reality wherever possible

20

Danto, “Art, Evolution and the Consciousness of History,” in Philosophical Disenfranchisement, p. 209.

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with something equivalent to what perceptual reality itself would present.”21 Moreover, Danto believes that this episode in the developmental history of art did end – with the advent of cinema, if not some time earlier. The end of art history, given Danto’s construal of the relevant sense of history as developmental history,22 does not entail the end of artmaking, no more than Hegel’s pronouncement of the end of history implied the end of political activity. Rather, what marks the end of a developmental history is that a problem – like that of capturing appearances – is essentially solved, or, at least, brought as near to a solution as is possible. Once artists solved the problem of verisimilitude, the developmental history of art stopped, even though artists continued – in what might be called the eye of the historical storm – to make pictures. The internal history of art reached a resting point. But the end of art history does not imply an end to artistic activity. The solution of the problem of pictorial representation, though it brought the development of one epoch of artmaking to a close, did not stop artists from painting. Given that the project of verisimilitude was solved, the question arises as to still whether art has a history – which Danto understands as the question of whether there remains any project or problem for artists to pursue that possesses the sort of telos or target that would yield a developmental history of art? The developmental history of verisimilitude is over. Has any other project emerged to function, so to say, as the engine of a progressive history of art? Here Danto focuses on the development of modernism which, after the interlude of expressionist art, reorients the internal, developmental history of art. Though Danto does not say this outright, I take it that he presumes that modernism is the source of all the troublesome counter-examples that have wrecked so many attempts at essentialist art theorizing. Thus, if he can show that modernism has reached a point beyond which no further internal development is possible, then the essentialist theory of art is home free. That is, if modernism has run its course, then the internal, developmental history of art is over, and an essentialist philosophy of art is possible. Modern art, or modernism, is distinctive, on Danto’s account (along with the accounts of many others), in terms of its project of self-definition. Modernism is committed to the discovery of the nature of art in the way that ­Renaissance painting was committed to capturing visual appearances. In both cases, these projects were aimed at the discovery of something accessible in terms of some epistemic criteria; they both aimed at a target such that we could know 21 22

Philosophical Disenfranchisement, p. 88. For a fuller account of Danto’s philosophy of art history, see Noël Carroll, review essay of Danto’s recent books on art, in History and Theory, 29 (1), 1990, pp. 111–24.

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whether they hit the target. Both projects resemble science in the sense that they allow for progressively closer approximations of that after which they seek. Thus, in principle, they presuppose that it is possible to reach the light at the end of the tunnel. Danto thinks that the Renaissance project eventually achieved its goal. Then art had to find something else to do. Gradually, that something else became the reflexive interrogation of the nature of art which interrogation we call modernism. Modernism supports the possibility of a developmental history of art because artists can come closer and closer to identifying the nature or the essential conditions of art. The nature of art is something that, ex hypothesi, we could discover. Cubism introduces the insight that paintings are flat; abstract expressionism refines this by analyzing painting into its basic constituents: line and color. Moveover, on Danto’s account, modernism comes to an end, though not exactly in the way that the Renaissance project came to an end. For modernism does not fully realize its quest. It gets to the gates of the Holy City, but cannot pass through them, or, to change religions, like Moses, it cannot enter the Promised Land. The modernists do not discover the nature of art. Rather, what they achieve is getting the question – “What is the nature of art” – into its proper philosophical form. Modernism accomplishes this much by raising the problem of indiscernibility by means of ready-mades and Warhol’s Brillo Box from within the precincts of the artworld itself. This is a momentous achievement. However, once art has raised the problem of the nature of art in its proper philosophical form, art cannot bring the problem any closer to its solution. The problem has to be turned over to philosophers. That is, once modernism discovers the problem of indiscernibility, it has taken the problem as far as it can go. It remains to philosophy to finish the job. Nevertheless, in so far as the problem has been pushed as far as art can push it, the internal, developmental history of art terminates when modernism reaches the limits of its capacity to disclose the nature of art. Artists, of course, will continue to make art after modernism, but it will be post-historical art. Such art may be dedicated to expressing emotions, emblematizing the spirit of the times, criticizing society, and fulfilling human needs. But it will not be guided and unified by a developmental historical project. Those days of grand history end when modernism takes the problem of the nature of art as far as it can. But why can artists only raise the problem of the nature of art? Why can’t they solve it, once they discover that the crux of the problem revolves around indiscernibility? Though Danto does not state his reasons explicitly, I suspect that the answer is that art – perhaps most especially avant-garde art – does not have the logical apparatus required to generalize or to mount coherent

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arguments. Art, especially avant-garde art, would seem to be too elliptical and disjunctive to serve the purpose of constructing and defending a coherent theory of art. Thus, it can at best only frame the issue of the nature of art in its most appropriate form. Once art discovers the issue of indiscernibles, the developmental history of art is at an end. Moreover, if modernism has carried its project of self-definition as far as it can go, then the well of wild counter-examples has run dry. For, it is the project of reflexivity or self-definition – the testing of the limits of what art is from the inside – that led to the proliferation of artworks to the point where it seemed that any object, or any object indiscernible from any ordinary object, could be art. Once art has got the project of self-definition out of its system – which it does when it reaches the issue of indiscernibility – it will produce no more nettlesome counterexamples. Why believe this? There appears to be a narrative of the history of the philosophy of art that underpins Danto’s developmental narrative of art history. As mentioned, Danto’s own theorizing about art occurred against the backdrop of the neo-Wittgensteinian denial that art could be defined. A large part of the motive for this view was the conviction, undoubtedly reinforced for the revolutionary character of modernism, that it is part of the logic of the concept of art that the criterial purposes of art encompass innovation, originality, and novelty. Thus, since the substance of the innovations of the future are not available to essentialist theorists in the present, their theories are bound to fail, especially if the very practices of art encourage artists to break with the canons of the past. In this context, the question that arose naturally was: if there is not an essential definition of art, then how are we to tell the art art from the non-art? The neo-Wittgensteinians answered: by means of family resemblances. That is, we say of some newly encountered object that it is art if it resembles past works of art – preferably past paradigmatic works of art. But, since it is logical truth that everything resembles everything else in some respect, then sooner or later – indeed, sooner rather than later if we choose sufficiently broad dimensions of resemblance – everything can be counted as a work of art. That is, the neo-Wittgensteinians had no way to establish that certain dimensions of resemblance are significant and that others are not. So, the family-resemblance method was impracticable. Furthermore, the neo-Wittgensteinian opposition to the possibility of essential definitions of art conceived of those definitions as specifying manifest, non-relational properties of art – like significant form – just as the family-resemblance method itself pertained to the manifest, instrinsic properties of artworks. But if one restricts one’s attention to manifest properties, one

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quickly confronts the problem of differentiating ordinary urinals from Fountain. Thus, it gradually became a commonplace in aesthetic theorizing that one should not look to manifest discernible properties as the basis upon which to tell art from the non-art. Dickie’s emphasis on institutions and Danto’s own emphasis on art history appear roughly at the point in the dialectic of the philosophy of art where the neo-Wittgensteinian reliance on manifest properties of art provoke the problem of indiscernibility within art theory and where the recommended counter-measure is to lay emphasis in identifying art on the importance of nonmanifest, relational properties that pertain to the genesis of the artworks in question. Now if I am correct in my speculation, Danto thinks that a story very much like this narrative of the recent history of the philosophy of art underwrites the evolution of modernism. Indeed, the story of modernism is almost the same story as that of philosophical aesthetics, perhaps because philosophical art theories have been reflecting, if not generating, each stage of the history of modernism. Warhol’s discovery of indiscernibles comes around the time that philosophers are abandoning the idea that the manifest properties of art are serviceable for discriminating art from non-art. Rejecting the family-resemblance approach results from being forced into admitting that anything can look like something else that is art. Thus, Warhol’s artmaking succeeded in providing exactly the kind a problematic case that when exploited logically demonstrated the infeasibility of the family-resemblance approach. The Warhol examples along with the logic of resemblance, showed that all of the evidence was in vis-à-vis manifest properties since everything is like everything else. Anything, that is, could look like something that was art. What remains for theorists to ascertain was whether there was some nonmanifest property a properties to supply the differentia between art and non-art. Artists could not pursue this investigation any farther. For they work in the medium of manifest properties wherein, once it is admitted that anything can look like art, we can expect to learn nothing further of any theoretical import.23

23

Note that the argument as stated above is more limited in scope than Danto presumes. First of all, it only seems relevant to visual art such as painting. It would not show that literature has reached the same impasse as visual art, though putatively Danto’s philosophy of art is meant to track literature. But, furthermore, it is not clear that the argument even applies generally to the fine arts. There are artists and art movements that do not traffic solely in the medium of manifest properties. Joseph Kossuth and Arakawa are examples of the former. Conceptual Art and Language Art are examples of the latter.

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The reflexive modernist project of self-definition reaches its limits of development for much the same reason that the neo-Wittgensteinian notion of family resemblance founders. In the latter case, this opens the possibility for renewed essentialist theorizing in terms of nonmanifest properties, while in the former case, there are no objects left in terms of manifest properties that the theorist does not already have before him (since art can look like anything). The artist can return to producing objects for the purpose of satisfying human aesthetic and emotional needs, leveling social criticism and so on. But the project of self-definition is over; art history in the developmental sense is over; and with it, the threat of innovative counter-examples disappears. Developmental art history, like the subtending dialectical conversation in the philosophy of art, has exhausted the full gamut of manifest properties that might have imperiled an essentialist theory of art like Danto’s. Thus, if Danto’s philosophy of art history is correct and art history is over in the way he claims, then an essentialist theory of art is possible.24 However, even if this reconstruction of Danto’s argument is persuasive, it is not clear that it will inure essentialist theorizing in the way he hopes. For there may be a loophole in the argument. Modernist artists, let us suppose, cannot produce objects that in virtue of their manifest properties provide new evidence for or against essential definitions of art. But might they not create objects whose non-manifest properties provide counter-examples? Perhaps artists produce artworks that have the non-manifest property of being generated by theories that are opposed to essential definitions of art. That is, artists produce artworks whose best interpretation or whose only plausible interpretation implies a commitment to the conviction that the conception of characterizing art by means of essential definitions is misguided. Moreover, this is not merely an abstract possibility. It reflects the stance of a great deal of the neo-Marxist, postmodernist, poststructuralist, deconstructivist and/or multicultural art that has been produced in the past decade. Furthermore, this art is part of the internal history of modernism and the fact that this debate between essentialists and anti-essentialists persists might be thought to indicate that that history is not yet at an end, since its dialectic has not yet been played out fully. I say this not in order to endorse any of these anti-essentialist theories of art and their associated practices, but only to make the observation that the 24

One possible line of criticism of Danto’s philosophy of art history that I do not explore in this essay concerns the question of the historical adequacy of Danto’s narrative of art history. I do not deny that there may be deep problems here, but I leave it to the art historians to find them.

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modernist conversation has apparently proceeded beyond the point of the issue of indiscernibles, and it has done this often in concert with a rejection of the advisability of essentialist theorizing. This phenomenon, even if it does not defeat Danto’s view, requires some explicit comment on his part – specifically comment on the question of why artworks in the continuing modernist debate about the nature of art cannot in principle produce counter-examples to essentialist theories of art in virtue of non-manifest properties and anti-­ essentialist commitments. Undoubtedly Danto may think that he is ready for this sort of question. For in his Transfiguration, he argues that it is a necessary condition that any work of art be generated by a theory. His own theory, that is, can, logically speaking, swallow up any artworld theory and the objects associated with it, so that future, art theoretical counter-examples are in the same neutralized boat as any imagined counter-example in terms of manifest properties. That is, there maybe future artworld theories that generate all sorts of objects but their appearance will only confirm Danto’s philosophy which mandates that artworks must be connected to such theories, whether they be essentialist or anti-essentialist in nature. Danto does not make these considerations explicit, though it might appear to supply him with further reason to believe that at least the sort of theory advanced in Transfiguration is indemnified against art-theoretical counter-examples. But if this is Danto’s view, it surely has the air of paradox about it, especially with respect to the kind of politicized modernism (or postmodernism) one finds everywhere nowadays. For this brand of artmaking, in effect, is categorized as art according to Danto exactly in virtue of its rejection of the view that any object is essentially art. This may not be a deep paradox, but shallow or deep, it calls for resolution. Perhaps Danto will argue that the appearance of logical tension here can be softened since his philosophy of art can in some way be said to incorporate the anti-aesthetic artworld theories that are connected to such things as Sherry Levine’s appropriations. I must admit that I’ve never got the hang of this sort of Hegelian argumentation; I’ve never understood why if one theory can accommodate another that that should redound to the favor of the putatively broader theory. But, in any case, anti-essentialists, who believe that art theories should acknowledge the place of art in broader social, economic, and semiotic contexts, can also diagnose essentialist theories like Danto’s to their own advantage. Danto’s philosophy of art history supposedly guarantees that there will be no counter-examples to his philosophy of art issuing from future art practice. In point of fact, I think that his philosophy of art history at best would show

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that there can be no counter-examples in terms of the manifest properties of artworks. However, this does not preclude the possibility of counter-examples with respect to non-manifest properties. Danto, for example, maintains that artworks necessarily project points-of-view. Artists of the future could, it seems to me, resolve to produce artworks of which we might be loathe to say that they project points-of-view. We are already familiar with a range of aleatoric methods that have been employed in twentieth-century art in order to distance the artwork from authorial intention. Admittedly, these examples – from Tzara through Cage and Cunningham – are essayed in the name of an ­anti-Romantic theory of art. But imagine that the aleatoric method becomes the norm of artmaking in an artworld where it no longer has polemical implications. Might we not then have plausible candidates for art status which in virtue of their non-manifest relation to certain aleatoric, generative procedures serve as counter-examples to Danto’s philosophy of art? I cannot see how Danto’s philosophy of art history can preclude such possibilities in principle. Danto’s philosophy of art history is supposed to serve as a defense for his philosophy of art proper. Specifically, it is meant to defend the possibility of an essentialist philosophy of art against future theoretical developments in the artworld. Putatively, Danto’s philosophy of art history affords us with independent grounds for believing that a theory like the one propounded in Transfiguration is immune to historical overthrow. However, it is not evident that this argument does not ultimately beg some very crucial questions in so far as it is not clear that Danto’s philosophy of art history is really independent of his philosophy of art. Danto’s argument about the end of art depends on the notion that art ends once it gets the question “What is the nature of art?” in its proper philosophical form. It does this by creating artworks like Fountain which are indiscernible from its mere real-object counterparts. At that point, the developmental history of art is over and philosophers like Danto step in and start theorizing. However, if this philosophy of art history is to be compelling, it must be reasonable at the very least to suppose that the question “What is the nature of art?” has been appropriately posed exactly when we confront the indiscernibles that pressure us to differentiate them theoretically. Danto, of course, is convinced of the appropriateness of this way of framing the question because he holds the metaphilosophical view that it is definitive of philosophical problems that they treat issues of indiscernibility. The philosophy of art only begins when the indiscernibility problem becomes live. Thus, in so far as the theoretical aspirations of reflexive art – whose history is that of art’s coming to consciousness of itself – are philosophical, a climactic juncture is reached when artists discover the indiscernibility problem.

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But agreement about this philosophical history of art presupposes ­Danto’s metaphilosophical claim about the distinguishing marks of philosophical problems in general and of the philosophy of art in particular. Yet do issues of indiscernibility truly epitomize philosophical activity in general? Such a view seems too exclusive: the problem of the existence of universals, the existence of God and the nature of justice do not appear to be straightforwardly generated by issues of indiscernibility. And yet the view is also too inclusive: whether a slip of the tongue and its indiscernible counterpart is a psychoanalytic parapraxis or a cognitive malfunction is a medical question, not a philosophical one. That is, in principle, we have no reason to believe that philosophy correlates with indiscernibility in the way that either Danto’s philosophy of philosophy or his related philosophy of art history requires. For example, with respect to both the philosophy of art and the philosophy of art history, as noted earlier, there are currently many neo-Marxists, semiologists and poststructuralist artists, art critics, and art theorists who would not agree that the question “What is the nature of art?” has been put into its proper form when the problem of indiscernibles is broached. For they believe that the proper theory of art can only be developed once we have gone past the narrow confines of philosophy/theory that Danto inhabits, and the socio-ideological nature of art is foregrounded. Art, for such theorists, is not at an end yet – there is some breathing space left as artists, theorists, and artist/theorists attempt to compel the philosophical acknowledgment of the socio-ideological nature of art. I am not endorsing such a view. I raise it only to make the logical point that Danto’s philosophy of art history depends on his views of both philosophy in general and the philosophy of art in particular where such views are hotly contested, especially the artworld environs that Danto is discussing. Moreover, this disagreement about the nature of the philosophy of art should alert us to a certain circularity in Danto’s defense of his philosophy of art by means of his philosophy of art history. Danto presents us with a developmental history of art – one where art has an end. This story unavoidably relies on the notion that the proper philosophical form of the question “What is the nature of art?” can only be framed in a philosophically appropriate way in terms of indiscernibles. And once framed that way, art history ends and its discovery is explored by the essentialist. But doesn’t this mean that Danto’s view of the nature of the philosophy of art is material to generating his philosophy of art history? Yet other views of the philosophy of art – anti-essentialist views such as the ones alluded to previously – are also possible. On those views, the philosophy of art history that Danto advances would be suspect. So the question that presents itself is whether Danto can tell the story of the end of art without simply

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presuming his own controversial conception of the philosophy of art in the teeth of legitimate or, at least, living alternatives. And, of course, if Danto’s philosophy of art is material to establishing his philosophy of art history, then it is difficult to see how his philosophy of art history can serve as a defense of his philosophy of art without begging the question. Danto’s argument appears to be this: 1. Once the question “What is the nature of art?” is framed in terms of indiscernibles, then no further theoretical breakthroughs can issue from the artworld. 2. If no theoretical breakthroughs can issue from the artworld, then an essentialist theory of art is possible. 3. The question “What is the nature of art?” has been framed in terms of indiscernibles. 4. Therefore, an essentialist theory of art is (now) possible. Premises 1 and 3 yield the end of art thesis. This conclusion, along with premise 2, show that essentialist theorizing is possible. Premise 3 is factual. Premise 1 rests on at least two presumptions: (a) that art can’t work out the theory of art without becoming philosophy – art is not a vehicle suited for theorizing; and (b) once the question is framed in terms of indiscernibles, it has its proper philosophical form – one which is superior to any other theoretical formulation. Though many artists are likely to disagree that artworks cannot make greater contributions to theory than raising questions (rather than delivering answers), I tend to agree with this view.25 But the claim that the issue of indiscernibles marks the proper formulation of theoretical questions remains unsettling, especially in the context of this argument. For the method of indiscernibles is nothing but an exquisitely economical way for focusing attention upon making essential distinctions. It is, so to speak, a tool inextricably linked with essentialist theorizing. It has been designed expressly for that purpose. But then to suppose that the advent of the indiscernible issue is the decisive moment in the reflexive artworld conversation about “What is the nature of art?” is to prejudge any debate in favor of essentialist theory. Moreover, to invoke indiscernibility in a characterization of a philosophy of art history that is meant to defend the possibility of essentialist theory is circular; for it supposes the viability of essentialist theory – by dint of its assumptions about indiscernibility – in the course of an argument whose very conclusion is ostensibly that essentialist theory is viable. 25

For my defense of this position, see Noël Carroll, “Contemporary Avant-garde Art and the Problem of Theory,” in Pellegrino D’Acierno and Barbara Lekatsas (eds), The Adventures of the Avant-garde: from Dandyism to Postmodernism (Westport, Conn., forthcoming).

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Thus, for all its elaborateness, Danto’s philosophy of art history cannot deliver the goods. It cannot serve as an independent defense of the viability of essentialist art theorizing because it already presumes the viability of essentialist art theorizing. Thus, whether Danto’s philosophy of art is adequate must be evaluated separately from his philosophy of art history. Likewise, to maintain that, once the method of indiscernibles has arrived, no further theoretical breakthroughs are possible in the artworld seems to beg the question in the debate between essentialist and anti-essentialist theorists, where anti-essentialist theorists might argue that art indeed still has a developmental history, namely the overcoming of the error of essentialism both in theory as well as practice, which, in turn, may produce counter-examples in virtue of non-manifest properties that Danto’s theory cannot countenance. The point here is not that Danto’s philosophy of art proper will not be able to withstand counterexamples, but rather that his philosophy of art history may not be able to protect it from counter-examples without begging the question.26 Danto has recently replied to this sort of criticism27 by asserting that his philosophy of art has no historical implications in the way that past philosophies of art, which were nothing but covert advocacy criticism, did. Danto’s own theory, he contends, is abstract and historically neutral with respect to preference for any specific style or set of styles. I am not sure that I understand how this answers the charge of circularity in his defense of his philosophy of 26

Another objection to Danto’s philosophy of art history is that it contradicts his own analytical philosophy of history. According to Danto, genuine historical enquiry involves characterizing the significance of events and states of affairs from the past in the light of events that lay in the future of the said events which are nevertheless in the past of the historian. That is, a historian today discloses the significance of the Treaty of Versailles by connecting it to the rise of Nazism, an event in the future of Treaty of Versailles, but in the past of today’s historian. This is the basic structure of historical narration and knowledge. But grand philosophies of history of the Hegelian or substantive or speculative variety fail to respect this structure. For they aspire to tell the whole story of history, including that of the future events about which the speculative philosopher has no genuine knowledge. They, for example, attempt to chart the significance of the past in the light of the end of history. But such philosophers really have no knowledge of endtimes that could only be identified from a vantage point in the distant future. Such philosophers presume knowledge they have not got of the future in order to narrate events about the past and the present. Their philosophies of history are, therefore, spurious historical narratives and ersatz historical knowledge. But if this is Danto’s view of the substantive philosophy of history, how can his own substantive philosophy of art history be salvaged? It contradicts his own strictures on what constitutes a genuine historical narrative. See Arthur Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York, 1985), pp. 8–9 and pp. 342–63. 27 Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, pp. 229–30.

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art by means of a philosophy of art history. For the charge of circularity does not rest on any stylistic preferences Danto might have, but on his conception of the significance of the indiscernibility method. But, in any case, as already indicated, Danto himself can easily be re-­ interpreted in the light of the kind of debunking strategy that he employs against past theories. For the Weitzian can say with some force that Danto is really the critic par excellence of art in the age of theory. That is, by focusing on theory, Danto has battened on a salient feature of contemporary art and projected it backwards on all history. In this, he differs in no way from Clive Bell who honed in on significant form as the relevant property of neo-impressionist art and then reconfigured the history of art in the light of it. It will do no good for Danto to say that his approach differs from Bell’s in so far as his theory privileges no specific historical style whereas Bell’s does. For Bell accepts as wide a body of historical achievement as does Danto, ranging from neo-impressionist painting, to Byzantine icons, to tribal masks and so on. Thus, Danto’s ad hominem dismissal of past theories can be met by a hearty tu quoque. Whether Danto’s philosophy of art is adequate cannot be adjudicated by an exchange of debunking arguments. Rather Danto’s philosophy of art needs to be assessed on the basis of its own strengths and weaknesses apart from the philosophy of art history and related histories of the philosophy of art. In summary, then, Danto’s philosophy of art history, though intriguing, especially in its account of modernism, fails as a defense of his philosophy of art proper. Whether his philosophy of art is acceptable depends on a review of it apart from historical considerations. 3

A Critical Examination of Danto’s Philosophy of Art

Stated compactly, Danto’s philosophy of art maintains that X is an artwork if and only if (a) X has a subject (X is about something) (b) about which it projects a point-of-view (c) by means of rhetorical/metaphorical ellipses (d) which have or require interpretations (e) where X and interpretations thereof depend on historically situated theories. Let us examine this theory piece by piece. Aboutness is said to be a necessary feature of all works of art. But surely this is too exclusive. There may be art that is not about anything, for example: art that is simply a matter of design or decoration or patterning. Kant alludes to this sort of art when he speaks of musical fantasias.28 Or consider the ­patterning 28

Immanuel Kant, The Critique o f Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1982), p. 72.

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on archaic vases.29 Some ballets by Balanchine – perhaps Concerto Barocco – have the character of exercises in abstract form.30 Such art may be intended or designed for the purpose of stimulating old-fashioned experiences of beauty. Pretheoretically, I see no reason to deny these examples art status. One might, following Goodman, attempt to argue that such works involve exemplification and, as such, at least refer to or are about themselves.31 But it seems to me that exemplification requires more than the mere possession of a certain property or pattern.32 Exemplification also requires some indication – conventional or otherwise – that the candidate in question is functioning as a sample of something, if only as a sample of itself. Whether or not something is a sample cannot simply be a matter of the possession of a property. It must also be presented as a symbol by means of some framing device or indexical structure. Otherwise everything is a symbol, which is absurd. Moreover, there is no reason to think that with the examples in the preceding paragraph, we can find any grounds for attributing symbolic, self-reference to them. Moreover, Danto’s argument that artworks possess aboutness fails to block the kinds of artworks I have introduced. For what Danto’s argument shows is that it is not possible for a contemporary modernist (or postmodernist) artist to make an artwork that says nothing. Given the lay of the recent artworld, any attempt that the artist Danto calls J33 makes will have theoretical implications about J’s conception of art and, therefore, will count as a statement about art. But at best this argument pertains to contemporary art. It does not foreclose the possibility of precontemporary art that has no semantic component but that is simply in the service of producing noncognitive, aesthetic experiences. Perhaps most art is not like this; but it seems draconian to assert that no art is.

29

For an example, one might turn to the Sphipibo Indian “beer barrel” from the upper reaches of the Amazon River which is illustrated in William Justema, Pattern: A Historical Panorama (Boston, 1976), p. 128. 30 Of Concerto Barocco, Balanchine writes: “The only preparation possible for this ballet is a knowledge of its music, for Concerto Barocco has no “subject matter” beyond the score to which it is danced and the particular dancers who execute it. Set to Bach’s Concerto in D minor for Two Violins, the ballet tries to interest the audience only by its dancing, its treatment of the music, just as Baroque art and architecture interested people not because of their subjects but because of the decorative treatment that embellished those subjects.” This quotation is from Balanchine’s New Complete Stories of the Great Ballets by George Balanchine, ed. Francis Mason (New York, 1968), p. 93. 31 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis, 1968), pp. 52–61. 32 For criticisms of Goodman’s theory of exemplification, see Monroe Beardsley, “Semiotic Aesthetics and Aesthetic Education,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 9 (3), 1975. 33 Transfiguration, p. 3.

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Here Danto might attempt to mobilize another piece of his philosophy of art. He maintains that all art is connected to theories. Perhaps artworks dedicated to prompting old-fashioned aesthetic experiences are really connected to theories – theories like Bell’s notion of significant form. In that case, might we not say that artworks produced under the aegis of such theories also signify whatever theory supports them? Now it is not certain that all the kinds of artworks I have invoked are connected to such theories. But even if they are, there is no reason to suppose that in implementing a theory, the artwork is about that theory or a sign of the theory. Nor is it plausible to say that such an artwork exemplifies a theory, unless there are internal or external, semantical, or contextual or conventional grounds for thinking that the artwork refers to the theory that generates it. Artworks made in the spirit of Bell’s theory of significant form need not be taken to refer to that theory. Moreover, these problems with the aboutness condition of Danto’s philosophy of art have significant implications for his interpretation condition. It may be true that most artworks have or require interpretations. However, if it is possible that there is some art that is not about anything – art that is designed simply in order to elicit a sensuous experience – then why suppose that all art requires interpretation? Some art might be beneath interpretation. Simple, abstract musical airs and dance figures may be produced solely to be enjoyed sensuously. Such works may require no interpretation, in any rigorous sense of the word, but may be art nevertheless. Therefore, Danto’s interpretation condition, like his aboutness condition, appears overly exclusive. Similarly, Danto’s claim that artworks always involve a form of rhetorical ellipsis, notably metaphorical ellipsis, is too restrictive. For there are what we call might call “plain-speaking” artworks. These are artworks that are about something, but which state what they are about directly. Here I have in mind something like the last engraving in Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress. This has a subject and may even warrant a bit of interpretation, but not in virtue of having left anything out. Nor is its didactic address metaphorical. The moral of the picture is quite literally presented. In Danto’s writings on aesthetics, he has at times invoked the notion of the is of artistic identification. Parallel to many accounts of the is of metaphor, the is of artistic identification may function acceptably in contexts where it would be literally false if it were taken to be the is of predication or the is of identity. An example of the is of artistic identification occurs when I look at the Hogarth engraving and say “There’s a dead harlot.” This is literally false, but it is also an acceptable way of speaking, given our pictorial conventions. Now if one were to assimilate the is of artistic identification to the is of metaphor, one

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might claim that the Hogarth engraving is a metaphor. But I see no grounds for such an assimilation. The use of is that is warranted by our pictorial conventions is not an instance of the is of metaphor. Nor is the existence of the relevant pictorial convention evidence of ellipticality of any sort in the engraving, rhetorical or otherwise. To take the is of pictorial representation as evidence for either ellipticality or metaphor would be an equivocation. Danto contends that artworks necessarily possess points-of-view. Artworks necessarily have a style in the sense of a style of seeing or being-in the world. Perhaps we can capture this by saying that, for Danto, artworks have existential points-of-view. This commitment fundamentally amounts to a variant of expressionism, and I cannot see how it manages to avoid most of the standard objections to expression theories of art. Whether all artworks express points-of-view is at least debatable. They may lack points-of-view either because they are not the sorts of things that points-of-view are intelligible for them to possess – again, examples of certain abstract designs are relevant here – or because the artist has no point-of-view or is too inept to project it. That is, artworks may lack points-of-view in so far as they lack aboutness, which implies that they have no subject about which a point-of-view might be expressed. Or, artworks may be without points-of-view because the artist in question is incapable of formulating one in his medium. But even in cases of artworks that have points-of-view, the points-of-view in question need not be existential points-of-view. There is no reason to suppose that an artist cannot be commissioned to make a work of art that expresses a point-of-view or way of seeing the world that is not her own. The artist can be adept at manipulating the forms of a certain genre, a genre whose very forms portray a way of being-in the world, but which forms do not reflect the author’s own way of being-in the world. A skillful film director can make a classic suspense thriller of the paranoid persuasion bereft of anxieties herself. For the forms of a genre may be expressive of certain ways of being-in or seeing the world – for example, may be paranoid expressions – while, at the same time, this does not entail that the relevant forms are expressions of the paranoid texture of the director’s consciousness.34 One might be tempted to argue that “beneath” the commissioned pointsof-view in such films, the artist’s genuine point-of-view is always detectable. I doubt that this could be shown empirically on a case-by-case basis. Nor does it follow from any deeper philosophical premise – such as: everyone has a unique point-of-view – for even if that is true in some nontrivial sense, it would not 34

The distinction between paranoid expressions and expressions of paranoia derives from Alan Tormey, The Concept of Expression (Princeton, NJ, 1971), p. 107.

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entail that that view is always expressed. It might not be expressed because the artist simply deploys the routine expressive devices of her genre, which diverge from her own way of seeing things. Or an artist might try to efface her own point-of-view. For example, she might embrace the sorts of aleatoric procedures alluded to earlier in order to encourage her audience to explore its own way of seeing. And, of course, the artist may just lack the talent to articulate his point-of-view. The claim that there is always a point-of-view detectable in artworks seems either overly romantic or overly programmatic. It should also be noted that the case on which Danto builds his hypothesis about the incarnation of points-of-view in artworks is not well suited to his purpose. For by his own account of Lichtenstein’s Portrait of Madame Cézanne, it is not Lichtenstein’s way of seeing that is portrayed, but Cézanne’s. Lichtenstein is commenting on Cézanne’s diagrammatical way of seeing; Lichtenstein is not articulating his own way of seeing. Thus the case, given Danto’s own exposition, does not support the hypothesis that artworks always project the point-of-view of their producers. There is no reason to think that Lichtenstein’s comments on Cézanne’s vision applies to Lichtenstein, nor is it clear in any determinate way what making such a comment about Cézanne indicates about Lichtenstein’s way of seeing or being-in the world. The last condition in Danto’s theory is that artworks and interpretations thereof require a background of historically situated theory. I suppose that the relevant theories may be as broad as the Imitation Theory for artworks prior to modernism and perhaps the “theory” of didacticism for artworks in the Catholic Middle Ages. Construed widely enough, one can readily agree that most of the artworks of the canonical tradition of the West and of the great imperial cultures of the East are underwritten by actual, historical theories. Nevertheless, it does seem too exclusive to maintain that all art is connected, enfranchised, or generated by theories. The sublime tap-dancing of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and John Bubbles is, on any unprejudiced view, art, but it strains credulity to think that anything like a theory, even under a generous construal of that term, could be thought of as a condition for the existence of this dancing. There were no theories of tap-dancing then – indeed, there probably aren’t really any now. But even if there is a theory of tap-dancing now, it was not something that Robinson and Bubbles had access to and, therefore, it could not be attributed to them given Danto’s own constraints on interpretation. Of course, there were existing theories of dance, but we have no reason to think that Robinson or Bubbles subscribed to them; indeed, we may have some reason to think that they would not have subscribed to them, if they knew about them. And the same might be said about their relation to existing ­theories of art.

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At this point, Danto may wish to relax his emphasis on theory. He may claim that all that is required by his philosophy of art is that the artworks in question be constituted against a background of knowledge of the history of art. This certainly applies to the tap-dancing of Robinson and Bubbles who undoubtedly knew who their predecessors and teachers were, and who had a sense of the history of their medium. Understanding the historicity requirement in Danto’s philosophy of art in this way allows it to cover a great deal more territory than does the emphasis on theory and, in this broadened sense, the historicity requirement may indeed be a plausible necessary condition for art. However, stated in Danto’s preferred idiom – that is, in terms of historically situated theories – the historicity requirement is inadmissible. So far we have explored the ways in which Danto’s theory is too exclusive. Are all the conditions, considered in tandem, too inclusive? One counter-example that comes to mind is a racist tirade. It has a subject – some ethnic group – about which a point-of-view is projected, which is revelatory of the speaker’s rather sordid way of seeing and being-in the world. Its very crudity shows the thuggish style of the man. It is conceivable that his rant is elliptical; that it contains metaphors and even a central organizing metaphor; that it invites listeners to fill-in its rhetorical questions for themselves; indeed, that it leaves its main point to be discovered through the low-level interpretive activity of the audience. Moreover, the polemic is made possible by racialist theories of a certain historical vintage. One way of short-circuiting this kind of counter-example would be to say that, though the tirade is made possible by historically situated theories, they are not the right kind of theories. They are not art theories. This seems the correct move to make as well as one that corresponds to Danto’s intentions. However, it does point to another area of potential circularity in Danto philosophy of art. Namely, how are we to identify art theories? Danto cannot say that they are the theories that enable us to enfranchise artworks. For to mobilize that conception would require a way of identifying artworks which is independent of any reliance on the notion of art theory. But unfortunately, Danto has given us no other way to identify art theories. Moreover, similar potential problems of circularity would arise were an attempt made to block the audience’s interpretation of the point of the racist tirade on the grounds that they are not making art interpretations. For how are art interpretations to be defined without essential reference to artworks? However, even if we suppose that Danto will be able to negotiate these potential problems of circularity, the threat of over-inclusiveness still threatens his theory. For imagine that our counter-example is not a racist tirade, but an artistic manifesto by an artist on behalf of a movement which manifesto

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bespeaks the theory of art that is espoused by the artworks the movement produces. Such manifestos may range from outrageous cases like Tzara’s ­“Unpretentious Proclamation”35 to Joseph Kossuth’s more soberly reasoned “Art After Philosophy, I and II.”36 Like the racist tirade, these manifestos seem to meet all of Danto’s conditions. And, unlike the racist tirade, they also may be said to depend upon a background of art theories and a knowledge of the history of art. But some artistic manifestos are not art. Even if one is willing to bite the bullet in the case of Tzara, the Kossuth example seems less palatable. But why? Danto’s theory seems to provide no way in which to differentiate artworks proper from rhetorically elliptical, metaphorical, personal art manifestos that enunciate a theory of art which theory is also precisely the same one that concerns the artworks the manifesto advocates, i.e. the manifestos promote exactly the same view of art, that the pertinent artworks have. Such manifestos may require interpretation, perhaps even art interpretations. Nevertheless, it seems fair to presuppose that, for example, Kossuth’s “Art after Philosophy” is not art. The question is whether Danto’s theory of art has the conceptual resources to deny it the status of an artwork?37 4

Concluding Remarks

It is the nature of essays in this genre that one pays honor to one’s subject by criticizing him. In this essay, I have raised what I think are deep problems with Danto’s attempt to defend his philosophy art by means of his philosophy of art history. I have also suggested problems with each of the major components of Danto’s philosophy of art as well as with the package as a whole. Whether these problems are minor or insurmountable remains to be seen. However, amidst all this criticism, I should remind the reader that I have agreed that Danto’s emphasis on the dependence of the work of art on a historical background or context is an authentic insight. Though I am wont to carp about a narrow 35 36 37

Tristan Tzara, “Unpretentious Proclamation,” in Seven Dada Manifestos (London, 1977), pp. 15–18. Joseph Kossuth, “Art after Philosophy, I and II,” in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Idea Art (New York, 1973), pp. 70–101. That Danto’s philosophy of art may not have the conceptual resources to differentiate manifestos from artworks is perhaps suggested by Danto’s own essay “The Last Work of Art: Artworks and Real Things”, reprinted in G. Dickie and R. Sclafani (eds), Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology (London, 1989), p. 561. For in that essay, Danto seems tempted to consider his own essay to be an artwork.

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construal of this background in terms of art theory, the broader interpretation, which encompasses a requisite knowledge of art history, is compelling. Admittedly, identifying artworks with respect to an artist’s background knowledge of the history of art raises the specter of circularity, but I am not sure that this is an insuperable difficulty.38 Arthur Danto’s emphasis on the necessity of an appreciation of art history for the philosophy of art is one of the major achievements of philosophical aesthetics in the second half of the twentieth century. It has reoriented the philosophy of art in exciting new directions. It has already profoundly influenced three generations of aestheticians. I count myself fortunate to have been among them. 38

I try to propose one way of avoiding this problem in Noël Carroll, “Identifying Art,” in Robert Yanal (ed.), Institutions of Art: Reconsiderations of Themes of George Dickie (University Park, forthcoming); and Noël Carroll, “Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (forthcoming).

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Chapter 5

Danto’s New Definition of Art and the Problem of Art Theories Arthur Danto’s interesting new book After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History continues his exciting explorations of the relation of the concept of art to the evolution of art history and art theory.1 In this brief essay, I would like to focus on some of the problems that appear to arise for Danto’s proposals concerning both the concept of art and the nature of art theories, especially in relation to his philosophical history of art. One thing that is particularly striking about After the End of Art is that in it Danto explicitly propounds a definition of art. Although there has always seemed to be an implicit definition of art behind Danto’s speculations, never before, to my knowledge, has he stated it outright. But in After the End of Art, such a definition has finally found its way into print. Danto’s new definition of art is cautious; it advances two necessary conditions for art status and makes no claim for joint sufficiency. Danto says that in order to be a work of art x must (i) be about something and (ii) x must embody its meaning.2 To ‘embody its meaning’ in turn, amounts to something like ‘to discover a mode of presentation that is intended to be appropriate to its meaning’ – i.e. is intended to be appropriate to whatever subject it is about. I have inserted the notion of an intention here, of course, because otherwise the definition would turn out to be covertly evaluative – it would count nothing as a work of art that failed in finding an appropriate mode of presentation. I must say that I was very surprised when I read this definition. Perhaps what surprised me most was what it did not contain. Specifically, it left out what I had always thought was one of Danto’s greatest hypotheses, namely that art required an atmosphere of art theory. Such theories and the narratives they generate are a major topic in After the End of Art. In this book and in Danto’s earlier writings, such theories and narratives were said to enfranchise artworks – which I understood to mean that it is a necessary condition of art that a putative artwork be an instance of an art theory or an intelligible episode in the sort of narrative that such theories generate. However, even though Danto 1 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton U.P. 1997). 2 Ibid., p. 195 © Noël Carroll, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004468368_006 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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has much to say about such artworld theories and narratives in his new book, he does not include the relation to such theories and narratives in his new, explicit definition of art . This exclusion comes with certain benefits, but it also has costs. First the costs. Danto knows that his conditions are not jointly sufficient. But I wonder if he appreciates how far they fall short of addressing some of his most important themes. The distinction between artworks and real things is perhaps his leading theme. It is for him the question of the philosophy of art. But his new, explicit definition of art fails to answer it. Danto requires of an artwork that it possess aboutness and embodiment. But these are only necessary conditions. Many non-artworks will meet these conditions. A real sword replete with expressive qualities effectively designed to project fearsomeness has, by dint of its expressive qualities, aboutness, and, ex hypothesi, it effectively embodies its meaning. Similarly, real sports cars are designed with lines that not only facilitate high speed, but connote it as well.3 So, again, we have a case where the definition does not locate the difference between artworks and real things. Perhaps the most embarrassing example of this sort will be real Brillo Boxes, as opposed to Warhol’s. Real Brillo Boxes have a subject – Brillo – about which their carefully chosen iconography communicates something: that Brillo is clean, bright, modern, and that it is associated with freshness, dynamism, and liveliness. Perhaps its red, white and blue colour scheme associates it with ‘American cleanliness’ (which, of course, is next to godliness). Similar points can be made about myriad industrial products whose packaging is designed to send a message – subliminally, as Vance Packard would have said – about its product. But maybe the Brillo Box is the cruelest example of all, since Danto’s new definition of art fails to supply the philosophical wherewithal to differentiate a lowly Brillo Box from one of Warhol’s, thereby failing to answer what Danto himself believes is the central question of the philosophy of art. Of course, if artworks have to be connected to time-indexed artworld theories and their implied narratives, then it would be possible to cut the difference between Proctor and Gamble’s Brillo Boxes and Warhol’s. The former are not artworks because there was no artworld theory that enfranchised them at the time of their first appearance, nor do they fit into any known artworld narrative. 3 Given different theories of aboutness, some readers may worry that the preceding counterexamples are not relevant. But Danto’s own view of aboutness only requires that the works in questions have a subject, and my examples meet this criterion. The sword, ex hypothesi, attributes fearsomeness to itself just as the cars claim speediness for themselves. The examples in the next paragraph are even less controversial, since industrial packaging is standardly about its product, attributing all manner of desirable properties to it.

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That is, what many thought, or at least I thought, was Danto’s theory of art once had just the very filter at its disposal to deal with cases like this.4 But without the requirement of artworld theories and narratives, his position becomes overly inclusive. Indeed, it fails what Danto has identified as the central task of a philosophy of art – differentiating real things from artworks that are perceptually indiscernible from them. Where a relation to an art theory or narrative is a necessary condition of art, Danto has in his service a non-manifest, historical relation that he can use to cashier real Brillo Boxes and similar industrial packaging from the order of art. Without it, the artworld may be even too pluralistic for Danto’s aesthetic conscience. After all, being sanguine about the works of Damien Hirst, Janine Antony and Matthew Barney is one thing; ordinary packages of condoms are quite another. Indeed, culturally significant artefacts of all sorts will in general present systematic problems for Danto’s new theory of art. Since it appears that Danto once had the resources in his theory to block examples like these, one wonders why he has abandoned them. Several reasons come to mind. First, he no longer has to tell us how to determine the difference between art theories and narratives, and other sorts of theories and narratives. Many thought that this problem might burden him with charges of circularity. But without requiring essential reference to art theories and narratives, that worry goes by the board. Another reason for dropping essential reference to theories is more germane to After the End of Art. For there we learn that art theories and their related narratives are what create, so to speak, a nether region outside the pale or mainstream of history. Greenberg’s theory consigned Surrealism to limbo in this way. Art theories and narratives are exclusionary. One might think that this is just a liability of the traditional art theories. But it would be a potential danger for meta-theories like Danto’s too. For if Danto requires of putative artworks that they be related to art theories and narratives, then many things that we count as art will be excluded, including films before film theory, and tap dancing, not to mention warehouse loads of tribal art. Danto’s earlier art theorizing, I think, probably reflected the Greenbergian assumptions of recent artworld theoretico-critical practice where connecting an artwork to a theory and a related narrative is still de rigueur, even if the theory and the narrative is not Greenberg’s. In earlier writings, Danto appeared to take this assumption into his theory, making the relation to an artworld theory and narrative a necessary condition for art status. 4 I attempt to offer interpretations of Danto’s theory in Noël Carroll, ‘Essence, Expression and History: Arthur Danto’s Philosophy of Art’, in M. Rollins (ed.), Danto and hit Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993); and Noël Carroll, review of Danto, in History and Theory, Vol. 1 (1990).

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Perhaps he now fears that this is unrealistically to turn the mode of thinking popular in the New York artworld into a condition for art status. Or maybe he now realizes that it results in a philosophy of art that is too exclusionary. Possibly that is why he has jettisoned reference to art theories and narratives from his new, explicit definition of art. But this, it seems to me, puts his position between a rock and a hard place. For if he drops reference to art theories in his definition, his theory is far too inclusionary, even for an avowed pluralist. After all, he still wants the distinction between different sorts of Brillo Boxes. Yet if he returns to his emphasis on art theory, his philosophy of art becomes exclusionary. Thus Danto’s theorizing appears trapped between the horns of a dilemma. Danto has often stressed that anything can be art, but not at every point in history. A readymade could be art in 1920, but not in 1520. What determines whether a particular object at a particular time can be art is, according to Danto’s earlier view, its connection to co-existing artworld theories. Now that Danto has dropped the theory requirement from his concept of art, it seems to me that he may lack the means to forestall a flood of Renaissance readymades. Perhaps Danto does not regard this as a problem because he believes that now (and, at least, since 1964) anything could be in the extension of art. But this would miss the point that even now it is not the case that everything is in the extension of art and that in order to account for that the definition of art must include some criteria for excluding a Renaissance pair of breeches, even if sewn by Giotto, from the extension of art. The connection to existing art theories performed this function in Danto’s earlier writings. Without this requirement, Danto would appear to be forced to concede that anything can be art at any time – not only in the present and for the future, but with respect to past artefacts as well. Another problem that besets Danto’s new definition of art is the relation Danto wants to draw between the possibility of its discovery and the history of art. In Danto’s view, the philosophy of art had to await that point in art history when the problem of indiscernibles raised its hydra head. That moment arrived when artists like Warhol presented artworks like Brillo Box that were indiscernible from their ordinary counterparts. At that point, the question of the nature of art was allegedly put in its proper philosophical form, ready to be answered by theorists like Danto, and art history, as the progressive interrogation of the nature of art, came to an end. But when we look at Danto’s new definition of art, the preceding story becomes puzzling. Danto cites Hegel’s view of art on at least three occasions.5 5 Danto, After the End of Art, PP. 30–31, 97–98, 194–195.

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And, as Danto himself openly acknowledges, Hegel’s theory is virtually the same as Danto’s theory of the concept of art. But what shall we make of this? Does this mean that it is not the case that one must confront the problem of indiscernibles in order to develop a philosophical theory of art? After all, Hegel came up with pretty much the same theory as Danto without confronting the problem of indiscernibles.6 And, if one does not require the problem of indiscernibles in order to produce a philosophical theory of art, does not the significance of works like Warhol’s Brillo Box for the philosophical history of art just disappear? Of course, one might claim that Hegel was aware of the problem of indiscernibles, since the earliest type of art in the Hegelian system was Symbolic Art and what Symbolic Art stands for is arbitrary – anything can symbolize anything else. But if Danto opts for this interpretation of Hegel, his philosophical history of art will be a shambles. Art history will not end in A.D. 1964 with Warhol, but in 1964 B.C. with Egyptian Art – Hegel’s premier example of Symbolic Art. And if the progressive history of art ended in 1964 B.C. (or even earlier), then how will Danto explain why it started up again with the Greeks? Or, to speak paradoxically, if Symbolic Art embodies the question of the nature of art in its proper philosophical form, then the philosophical history of art will end as soon as it begins. Needless to say, Danto might attempt to deal with these problems by saying that Hegel’s theory of art is not really a philosophical theory, since it is not generated by the problem of indiscernibles. But, since it looks to be the same theory as Danto’s new definition of art, one would suspect that if Hegel’s theory is not philosophy, then neither is Danto’s. Or, perhaps what the correspondence shows is that philosophical theories do not really require indiscernibles, thereby refuting one of Danto’s long-standing meta-philosophical claims. Moreover, if indiscernibles are not required to answer the question of the nature of art, then the philosophical history of art that Danto propounds would appear to evaporate. Either way Danto turns, the alternatives seem unhappy ones. As already noted, if Danto’s new definition of art shows us that indiscernibility is not necessary for answering the question of the nature of art, then that has dire consequences for Danto’s philosophical history of art. It robs Danto’s history of a climax since, like Hegel, anyone might have come up with the proper definition of art without, like Danto, confronting Warhol’s or 6 Of course, it should be added that if in response to our observations about the equivalence of Hegel’s theory to Danto’s, Danto drops the question of the indiscernibility as a mark of theory, then he cannot use reference to indiscernibility in order to preclude theories such as the one I am calling “ultimate reality abstractionism”.

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Duchamp’s indiscernibles. That is, if the new definition of art is true, then the necessity of the climax Danto situates in the work of Warhol drops away. Furthermore, in a related vein, if Danto drops essential reference to art theories from his account, one wonders how he hopes to generate a philosophical history of art. In Danto’s earlier writings, it seems to me that whatever necessity attached to Danto’s history of art was there because of the dialectical relationships that obtained between the historically existing theories of art that motivated successive stages in art history. But once one subtracts the requirement that art be connected with existing theories, then the source of the necessity in Danto’s story of art falls away, since the necessity in question was connected to the theories that enfranchised art movements as dialectical responses to their predecessors. It is difficult, then, to see how Danto hopes to generate a philosophical history of art if he eschews reference to art theories as a requirement for art status. Without essential reference to art theories, artworks will just follow artworks in time. That is, there will be no philosophical necessity underlying Danto’s story. Danto’s most recent account of the relation of art history and art theory also revives some of the problems evident in his earlier versions. On Danto’s present account, certain art theories have been the engine behind progressive art historical development. Moreover, according to Danto, theories of that sort are no longer possible. Why not? I must confess that I have never understood why this should be so. One reason Danto gives is that we cannot imagine what such theories would be like. But this does not seem persuasive. We cannot imagine what scientific theories one thousand years from now will be like. If we could imagine them now in any detail, they would be contemporary scientific theories, not future ones. But we do not argue on the basis of our inability to imagine future scientific theories that there will not be any. So I am not sure that our imaginations should be the test for the availability of future art theories. Furthermore, we may not be able to imagine future art theories now or to know whether or not they will be developmental just because they are theories and as such are in the same boat as scientific theories. Moreover, I can at least suggest candidates for such future theories, with continuing developmental potential, since some already exist in the past. Malevich and Mondrian championed abstract painting as a means of representing Ultimate reality. Suppose the idea took hold among painters in the way in which Greenberg’s theory captured their imagination. If painters thought that ultimate reality was knowable and if they thought that there were better and worse, as well as better and even better ways of presenting it, the engine of art historical progress could be revved up once again.

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Furthermore, if Danto’s diagnosis of the relation of art theories and narratives is correct, these ultimate reality abstractionists might retell the history of art as the story of progressive approximations of ultimate reality. It could go like this: representational art identified the right aim for art, but had the wrong, or at least too narrow a conception of reality. Modernism rectified that error somewhat and, anyway, supplied painters with the right means for the job – abstraction – but finally they were not ambitious enough; Modernists were only concerned with the ultimate reality of painting. That was a start; their intentions were of the right sort, only limited. Similarly, the Duchamp-Warhol tradition can be commended, by our ultimate reality abstractionists, for understanding that art is about reality, they just did not dig deep enough. Representational art, Modernist art, and the art of Duchamp, Warhol and their progeny count as genuine for these ultimate reality abstractionists because they all thought that art was committed to ­discovering the truth. Their efforts were honourable and belong to the developmental story of art. They just thought of truth on the wrong scale. Why is an art movement like this – comprised of theory, practice, narrative and a progressive agenda – unimaginable? It is not sufficient to say that it does not exist now, if one intends to pronounce the end of art with any philosophical finality. Is not it logically possible that this kind of theory could exist? Nor will it do to say that a theory like the one I have concocted is a nonstarter because it is riven with falsehoods. For neither the Representational Theory nor the Modernist Theory were true, even for their own times, and yet, according to Danto, they drove the engine of art history, if only by making salutary errors. And in any case, we cannot rule out of court on a priori grounds that there is not something to which our ultimate reality abstractionists maybe getting closer. Here, of course, my point is not to convince you of ultimate reality abstractionism, but only to make the logical point that nothing in Danto’s argument shows that this kind of theory is strictly impossible. What is to stop a theory like this from entering the artworld and starting up the progressive narrative of art history all over again? Will Danto respond that (i) such a theory fails to answer the indiscernibility question and (ii) that, in any case, that question has already been decisively answered by Danto? Both these answers raise problems. First, it is not clear that answering the indiscernibility question would be beyond the reach of such a theory. It is just a bigger theory of art than those that focus solely on the indiscernibility question, and there is no reason to think that it cannot incorporate earlier insights into this problem into its more comprehensive theoretical and narrative frameworks. Moreover, although questions about indiscernibility are important ones with respect to the nature

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of art, we have no argument to show that they are the only or even the most comprehensive ones. Remember that Danto has only provided us with necessary, but not jointly sufficient conditions for art status. This leaves open the logical possibility that additional conditions may suggest a developmental project. At this point, Danto may put his foot down and say that the indiscernibility questions have been solved decisively by his theory and that when one dialectically pits his theory against a theory like the one I am imagining, there is just no contest. But this brings us back to the first dilemma that I sketched earlier. Danto’s project has not been successfully resolved yet on its own terms. His new definition of art does not differentiate between artworks and mere real things, such as commercial packages.7 This problem, in turn, may dispose Danto to revert to the requirement that artworks be connected to art theories. Thus, at present, Danto’s position seems caught between the sea of overinclusiveness and the shoals of overexclusiveness. Thus, Danto is not now in a position to claim the authority of his theory against prospective contenders. 7 In his article “Wakeful Dreams,” Danto adds another necessary condition to his answer to the question “What is Art?”. In addition to aboutness and appropriate embodiment, he proposes that artworks are “wakeful dreams.” By this, he means that artworks are in some sense distant from reality. I conjecture that this may be an attempt on Danto’s part to distinguish artworks from advertisements and commercial packaging. However, it does not appear to me that artworks are necessarily distant from reality. Hans Haacke’s MOMA POLL 1970, it seems to me, is a real political gesture as are many of his other works. Indeed, many cases of political art appear to operate within social reality consequentially rather than being distanced from it. See Arthur Danto, “Wakeful Dreams,” in his book What Art Is (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), esp. pp. 48–52.

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Chapter 6

The End of Art? In 1986, at a time when things looked bad – with Neo-Expressionism ascendant everywhere and appropriation flourishing as the art world equivalent to the leveraged buyout – Arthur Danto had a scandalous idea.1 He said that art history had come to an end. Nor was this a passing journalistic jeremiad – a grumpy, cyclic doldrum of pessimism meant to be forgotten and consigned to the kitty litter with the onset of better days. Danto’s verdict came armored in philosophical argumentation and apparent deductive finality. This really was the end of art. Perhaps at first Danto greeted the conclusion of his own argument with despair. The end of art appeared to be a fall from grace. But as time went on, Danto learned to live with his findings. He no longer thinks that the end of art is such a bad thing. The end of art, by his account, has ushered in an age of pluralism where thousands of different flowers may bloom. For just at the moment when art history was divested of its goals and direction, art acquired a plenitude of new freedoms. This is the story that Arthur Danto wishes to tell in After the End of Art.2 He intends to explain how art history came to an end, what it means to say that art history is over, and why this is a good thing. But all of this, of course, presupposes that art history has come to an end. And yet it seems to me that not only are the alleged reasons for this almost never interrogated in the literature, but also that Danto’s own arguments on behalf of this conclusion are so hurried and elliptical that they are easy to miss. This is at least surprising, since so much would appear to hang upon them. Thus, in this essay, I would like to concentrate on the questions of why Danto believes that art history is over and whether his reasons are compelling. Here it is important to begin by clarifying what Danto does not mean by the end of art. Frequently, when people hear Danto’s conjecture, their first response is to say that it is obviously wrong – for, as anyone can see, there are still lots of artists making artworks. In fact, there are probably more artists working today than in any other period in history. There are certainly more art schools, art fairs, galleries, museums, shows, artists, and artworks than ever 1 Arthur Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, 1986), 81–115. 2 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, 1997). © Noël Carroll, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004468368_007 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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before. How could art history be over when art is being produced at such a dizzying rate? But this objection rests on a misunderstanding. For when Danto speaks of the end of art, that is an abbreviation for the end of the developmental history of art. Historical accounts may be divided into two sorts: narratives and chronicles. A chronicle of events is a list of time-ordered happenings. First x happens, then y happens, then z, and so on. But in a narrative, the events are connected by more than temporal succession: there is a beginning that gives rise to complications that converge on closure. Events compose a story; they head toward a climax. When Danto says that the history of art is over, he means a certain development – a certain narrative development – is finished. He does not mean that the chronicle of art history is done. Artworks will still be created ad seriatim. What is over is a particular process of evolution. Events follow each other helter-skelter in time. However, on occasion, events coalesce in large-scale developments or movements. In human affairs, this often occurs when people embark upon a project that has a determinate goal or end. Human flight, for example. The history of flight can be told as a narrative. Successive attempts, theories, and inventions can be configured as an evolutionary process culminating in Kitty Hawk. Similarly, large swaths of art history can be told as a linear, developmental narrative. Beginning with the Greeks, artists embraced a project: verisimilitude. That is, they aspired to render the appearance of things with such surpassing accuracy that any normal viewer could recognize what pictures were pictures of simply by looking. Artists aspired to pictorial realism – to making images that bore greater and greater likenesses to whatever they were images of. This project underwrote the production of artworks for centuries. It enabled writers from Vasari to Gombrich to write narratives of art history – developmental stories tracing impressive and more impressive feats of realism (closer and closer approximations to the look of things). Narratives like this have a definite structure. They posit a goal; events are included in the story inasmuch as they contribute to the realization of the goal. Moreover, insofar as the goal is well-defined, it is conceivable that it could be achieved. And if and when such a goal is achieved, the story – as a progressive, developmental narrative – is over. Furthermore, Danto contends, this happened to art history when, in the nineteenth century, photography and cinema perfected the mechanical means to render appearances – including the appearance of movement – accurately. At that point, a certain narrative was finished, though, of course, pictures continue to be made. The chronicle of picture-making is still being told, but the story – the evolutionary saga of the conquest of visual appearances – is, for all intents and purposes, over.

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But if film and photography closed one chapter of art history, they did not shut the book. For eventually artists found other projects to pursue, and at least one of these was developmental. Verisimilitude as the object of high artistic ambition appeared otiose in a world of mechanical reproduction. But artists came to reconstrue their aspiration in terms of another target. Art – or at least serious art – was no longer dedicated to capturing the appearances of things, but to characterizing something even more elusive – the nature of art itself. Art, that is, became engaged in the project of self-definition. Recounted magisterially by critics like Clement Greenberg, modern – or, more aptly, modernist – art conceived of itself as a Kantian critique of its own conditions of possibility, such as the literal shape of the support and the flatness of its surface. Step by step, the picture plane contracted, putatively to disclose its essential nature as a flat thing. Insofar as art has a determinate nature, the project of self-definition, like the project of verisimilitude, had a developmental structure. And presumably the project could be brought to completion. However, at this point, Danto introduces a complication to the story of modernism as it is traditionally told. In 1964, as part of the continuing project of art’s self-definition, Andy Warhol, presaged by Duchamp and his readymades, presented his Brillo Box at the Stable Gallery in New York. For Danto, this work has enormous theoretical repercussions. On his account, Brillo Box demonstrates that something can be a work of art at the same time that its perceptually indiscernible, real-world counterparts are not. This raises the question of why Warhol’s Brillo Box is art whereas identical-looking Brillo boxes by Proctor and Gamble are not. According to Danto, this is to pose the question “What is art?” – the question of art’s definition – in its proper philosophical form.3 But, Danto continues, once artists like Warhol posed the question “What is art?” in its proper philosophical form (that is, as an indiscernibility problem), they could make no further theoretical contribution. Answering that question is a job for philosophers, not artists. Danto writes: “The artists have made the way open for philosophy and the moment has arrived at which the task must be transferred to philosophy.”4 That is, once embarked upon the project of the definition of art, there was only so far that artists qua artists could take it. They could visually focus the question “What is art?” in its proper philosophical form – as the problem of indiscernibles – but they could pursue it no further as artists doing the things that artists do. Any further progress on the definition of art would require the 3 It is a long-standing metaphilosophical conviction of Danto’s that paradoxes of perceptual indiscernibility are the natural topics of philosophical research. 4 Danto, “The End of Art,” 111.

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kind of work typical of philosophers.5 If artists were to undertake this chore, they would have to give up being artists – and working in the manner typical of artists – and become something else, namely, philosophers. Thus the second developmental narrative of art history comes to an end, as artists turn over the project of defining the nature of art to philosophers. Unlike the end of the project of verisimilitude, the project of defining the nature of art does not end in completing the job, but in assigning it elsewhere. Nevertheless, with Warhol, art advances the plot as far as it can, and art history as a progressive linear narrative comes to an end, or, at least, a stopping point. That is why Danto calls the present epoch of artmaking “post-historical art” – it is art after art history, constructed as the progressive, developmental narrative of art’s self-definition. Artworks will continue to be made after the end of this story, but they will no longer fall within the trajectory of a linear evolution converging on the discovery of the nature of art. Nor, Danto consoles readers, is this so horrible, since artists, now freed from the burden of self-definition, can experiment in every which way, liberated, as well, by Warhol’s revelation that art can look like anything. The chronicle of future art production will be multifarious. But the narrative of art history as an evolutionary (teleologically driven) process is over. This is a nice story. Not only does it have a happy ending – indeed, one quite uplifting for a period like ours that consistently flatters itself for its pluralism – but it also appears to do a serviceable job of explaining the stunning diversity of art practices on offer today. But the account pretends to do more than simply illuminate what has happened. It also predicts the future. Art history will never be developmental again for reasons of philosophical necessity. But I am not really certain that we should believe this. The crux of Danto’s argument is that artists can only take the question of the definition of art so far. As anyone familiar with artists knows, this is like waving a red flag at a bull. Modern artists specialize in exceeding the limitations philosophers of art attempt to foist upon them. So why is Danto so sure that he has located a barrier that contemporary artists cannot breach? Danto is not always very forthcoming about this. However, his suggestion seems to be that in order to take the project of defining art further than posing the indiscernibility question, artists would have to give up being artists and become something essentially different, namely philosophers – where the underlying assumption is that one cannot be an artist and a philosopher at the same time. But why not? 5 Presumably: framing theories in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and arguing for them.

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Danto must be presuming that not only is what artists and philosophers do essentially different, but that the one activity precludes the other. What artists do is put paint on canvases and design visual appearances. And this is just the wrong medium for framing definitions. Making definitions is not what artists qua artists are trained to do, and paintbrushes and canvases are not the right tools for the job in any case. But if this is what Danto has in mind, there is a problem with the argument at the outset. For this version of the argument equates art with painting, and that is surely an equivocation. Art, including visual art, today (and for many yesterdays), is no longer a matter of painting in the narrow sense of that concept. Visual artists engage in all sorts of inventions, including installations that frequently mix word and image in rebus-like structures where text, context, and visuals operate like cinematic montage, juxtaposing fragments in order to elicit inferences from spectators. Why can’t verbal/visual arrays like these be contrived such that viewers are brought to an awareness of the nature of art maieutically, after the fashion of Socratic puzzles? Perhaps some may be persuaded that painters doing what painters traditionally do cannot advance insight into the definition of art. But visual artists are not just painters – they are rebus-makers, performance artists, conceptual artists, language artists, collagists, and so on. Danto knows this; indeed, he commends Warhol for making this proliferation of genres historically possible. But why then suppose that these genres necessarily cannot contribute to the definition of art? Danto does not say. But without closing off these possibilities, there is no reason to think that art history as the story of the self-definition of art is necessarily over. The place where to my knowledge Danto most explicitly and elaborately propounds the reasoning behind his end-of-art thesis is in the essay “Approaching the End of Art.” Because this argument is so important to his overall project, I will quote it at length. Danto writes: My sense is that with the trauma to its own theory of itself, painting had to discover, or try to discover, what its true identity was. With the trauma, it entered into a new level of self-awareness. My view, again, is that painting had to become the avant-garde art just because no art sustained the trauma it did with the advent of cinema. But its quest for self-identity was limited by the fact that it was painting that was the avant-garde art, for painting remains nonverbal activity, even if more and more verbality began to be incorporated into works of art – “painted words” in Tom Wolfe’s apt but shallow phrase. Without theory, who could see a blank canvas, a square lead plate, a tilted beam, some dropped rope, as works of

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art? Perhaps the same question was being raised all across the face of the artworld but for me it became conspicuous at last in a show of Andy Warhol at the Stable Gallery in 1964 when the Brillo Box asked in effect, why it was art when something just like it was not. And with this, it seemed to me, the history of art attained that point where it had to turn into its own philosophy. It has gone as art as far as it could go. In turning into philosophy, art had come to an end. From now on progress could only be enacted on a level of abstract self-consciousness of the kind which philosophy alone must consist in. If artists wished to participate in this progress, they would have to undertake a study very different from what art schools could prepare them for. They would have to become philosophers.6 Here it is quite clear that Danto is collapsing the prospects of painting with art in general – including all sorts of visual art – despite his reference to lead plates, tilted beams and dropped ropes. Apparently he does this on the grounds that painting is the avant-garde art, and, therefore, a reliable indicator of the possibilities and limitations of art in general (That is just what it means to be the avant-garde art: to be in advance of all the others in pertinent respects). But, since painting is nonverbal (presumably by definition), trading essentially in appearances, and since answering the question “What is art?’ requires a capacity for verbal articulateness, Danto surmises that painting – and, by extension, art in general – can at best show forth (demonstrate) the problem of indiscernibility, but can make, so to speak, no further “comment.” That is, indiscernible appears cannot be solved within the realm of appearances (the realm of the senses). In this regard, Danto’s view seems loosely analogous to Hegel’s suggestion that Romantic art must cede pride of place to philosophy because in its aspiration to render an imperceivable rational idea perceivable, Romantic art aimed to do something that art was ill-suited to do, especially when compared to philosophy (and religion). Danto’s argument, then, is roughly: 1. If x is the avant-garde art, then the condition of x reveals the condition of all the arts. (premise) 2. Painting is the avant-garde art. (premise) 3. If painting is to advance the project of the self-definition of art, then it must be verbal. (premise) 4. Painting is essentially not verbal. (premise) 6 Arthur Danto, “Approaching the End of Art,” in The State of the Art (New York, 1987), 216.

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5.

Therefore, painting cannot advance the project of the self-definition of art. (from 3 and 4) 6. If painting cannot advance the project of the self-definition of art, then we have reached the end of the art of painting. (premise) 7. Therefore, we have reached the end of the art of painting – such is the condition of painting. (from 5 and 6) 8. Therefore, we have reached the end of art – all the arts have ended. (from 1, 2 and 7) This argument is proffered not merely as an explanation of why it is the case that artists today have in fact left off the modernist project of self-definition. It is an argument designed to prove that art – that is, the developmental history thereof – is over. But though the argument is logically sound, most of its premises are deeply controversial. The first premise seems to me essentially definitional. It stipulates that if anything is the avant-garde art, then it reveals the condition of all the other arts. It does not claim that there is such an art, but only states the criterion such an art form would have to meet, if there were one. Since this is a matter of stipulation, I think we should grant Danto this premise for the purposes of argument. However, further premises in this argument are less acceptable. Danto maintains that painting is the avant-garde art. His reason is that cinema brought about a epochal identity crisis for painting in a way that was more traumatic than the identity crisis suffered by any other art. This is a historical hypothesis, one difficult to evaluate. Was the identity of painting really more shaken by cinema than that of theater? But, in any case, there are also philosophical problems with Danto’s claim. One would suppose that if anything were the avant-garde art in Danto’s sense – an indicator of the possibilities and limitations of all the other arts – the so-called avant-garde art would be so in virtue of some property or set of properties that it shared with all the other arts. That is, the avant-garde art will share certain necessary conditions with the other arts, and variations along this dimension of correspondence will predict variations along the same or similar dimensions in the other arts. But by Danto’s own account, there are strong disanalogies between painting and at least some of the other arts. He claims, for example, that painting is necessarily not verbal. But many other arts – like literature and theater – are verbal. On the one hand, this leads us to ask why the prospects for verbal arts should be predicted on the basis of a putatively nonverbal art. But on the other hand, with respect to the second premise of Danto’s argument, it also prompts one to suggest that perhaps Danto should not regard painting as the avant-garde art. For on his account, it is marked by

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a peculiarity – its allegedly nonverbal nature – that it does not share with a number of other art forms. Thus, it will not be a reliable indicator, along certain pertinent dimensions (namely, the capacity to articulate), of the condition of various other arts (including other visual arts, like installations), and, therefore, it should not be taken to be the avant-garde art – that is, a predictor of the destiny of art in general. In other words, the second premise of Danto’s argument may be false in a way that indicates that one cannot infer from the prospects of painting to the prospects of art in general. In this respect, the second premise may be the origin of Danto’s tendency to equivocate between painting and art in general. But if painting is nonverbal in the way that Danto alleges, then it cannot be the avant-garde art in his sense, since other arts may possess the verbal means to articulate the problematic of self-definition in the way he requires. Other arts, like literature, are articulate in the requisite sense. Indeed, in his “The Last Work of Art: Artworks and Real Things,” Danto hints playfully that his article is an artwork;7 but if his article is an artwork – perhaps an exercise in belles lettres – then surely artists are capable of doing philosophical aesthetics. Admittedly this a paradoxical example. Maybe Danto is just speaking ironically here. But there are other examples of art – indeed, of visual art – that Danto should accept and that are articulate in a way that Danto thinks painting is not. These include installation art, conceptual art, language art, performance art, collages, and rebuses of configurations not yet imagined. Possibly just because these genres have the capacity or the potential to take the problematic of the definition of art further than does painting, as Danto conceives it, they should be considered the avant-garde arts.8 But then painting is not the avant-garde art, and its putatively nonverbal status has no implications about whether the history of art, including visual art, is necessarily foreclosed. The third premise of Danto’s argument claims that if painting is to advance the project of the self-definition of art, then it must be verbal. This presupposes that if any art is to advance the project of self-definition, it must be verbal. This seems to be pretty commonsensical; language appears to be the natural medium for framing definitions and for mounting the kinds of arguments necessary to 7 Arthur Danto, “The Last Work of Art: Artworks and Real Things,” in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. George Dickie and Richard J. Sclafani (New York, 1977), 551–562. 8 Here it is important to emphasize that I am not claiming that these art forms have in fact advanced research into the definition of art, but only that Danto has not supplied any reason to suppose that, in principle, they cannot do so. Since they are not as remote from verbal expression as Danto alleges painting to be, he at least owes us an explanation for thinking that they cannot – as a matter of logic – continue to contribute to the developmental history of art (construed as a process of self-definition).

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support such definitions. Nevertheless, as art history richly ­illustrates, there may be an aspect of the dialectic of the self-definition of art which is not necessarily verbal – not necessarily a matter of stating or defending a definition – to which artists may contribute without literally trafficking in words. What I have in mind is the use of the artwork as a counterexample. Throughout the twentieth century – from Duchamp’s readymades to Warhol’s Brillo Box – artists have created problem cases designed to challenge prevailing art theories and to provoke the formulation of new, more accommodating theories. A work like Fountain, on the one hand, problematized aesthetic theories of art, while, on the other hand, it also alerted philosophers to the importance that context, including institutional frameworks and art history, might bear on art status. That is, Fountain functioned both as a putative refutation of certain views about particular necessary conditions for art status, while also contextually suggesting (conversationally implicating?) the need to consider other possible necessary conditions. In its role as a counterexample or provocation, Fountain made a contribution to the evolution of the project of the self-­ definition of art and it did so in a way that did not necessarily rely on words. Posing a deft example – even a nonverbal one – then can advance the project of self-definition. Therefore, it is not the case that art must be verbal for art history to continue to move forward philosophically. Of course, it is true that the preceding examples are just the ones that Danto invokes to commend artists for raising the indiscernibility problem. And he adds that artists can go no further than this. But why? In the past, artists used telling inventions to address theoretical issues not reducible to indiscernibility issues. Painters refuted the representational theory of art by means of abstractions. On what grounds can Danto argue that future “theoretical” examples, hailing from the precincts of art, won’t provoke further theoretical insight and refinement? Perhaps even nonverbal artworks can sometimes “test” theories, both in the sense of contesting settled views and suggesting new lines of research.9 9 Danto may think that after Warhol’s indiscernibles there can be no further counterexamples – that Warhol makes the last counterexample – not only because it is essentially visual but because it has either said it all or because any other indiscernible would say the same thing. The latter is not true, as Danto himself has shown; different sets of indiscernibles – such as Danto’s own nine red canvases and the Menard case – make different points. So, future indiscernibilia may have something new to say that is pertinent to the project of self-definition. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that art world counterexamples can only take the form of indiscernibles. Aleatoric music, poetry, and pictures (The Exquisite Corpse) need not take the form of indiscernibles and yet they effectively challenge expression theories of art. Thus artists may advance the project of self-definition – even in exclusively visual terms – without resorting to indiscernibles. Warhol’s indiscernibles have not said it all nor must all that remains to be said be “phrased” in the idiom of indiscernibles.

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In After the End of Art, Danto presents a theory of art, but one that he admits only proposes two necessary conditions for art status which, he concedes, are not jointly sufficient.10 This leaves room for the addition of further necessary conditions; even philosophy – or at least Danto’s – hasn’t completed the project of the definition of art. But why does Danto presume that it is beyond the ingenuity of nonverbal artists to contrive hard cases of the sort that might reveal maieutically further essential criteria of art status?11 I do agree that there are profound limitations on the type of contribution that avant-garde artworks can make to producing art theory and that many of the ways in which art critics describe such works as “theoretical” are exorbitant.12 Insofar as avant-garde artworks are by definition disjunctive and elliptical, they are not, for example, functional vehicles for presenting detailed philosophical arguments.13 But this concession does not preclude the possibility that avant-garde works, even nonverbal ones, can make some contribution to art theory, including the definition of art. For carefully chosen and/ or crafted hard cases can not only undermine existing art theories; they can pointedly indicate new theoretical directions. If philosophers can imagine and/or describe counterexamples that dialectically advance theoretical breakthroughs – such as the addition of a necessary condition to an essential definition – then artists, even nonverbal ones (even painters), can make them. Counterexamples can, so to say, be proposed either abstractly or concretely. Thus, it is too draconian to maintain that only if art is verbal can it advance the project of defining art. Consequently, even if painting were essentially nonverbal, it would not, in principle, be debarred from continuing to contribute to the definition of art, and, thereby, to keeping art history in the evolutionary sense a going concern. Logically, that is, whether or 10 Danto, After the End of Art, 195.1 have discussed this theory in Noël Carroll, “Danto’s New Definition of Art and the Problem of Art Theories,” British Journal of Aesthetics 37 (­October, 1997), 386–392. 11 One might suspect that Danto believes that the project of defining art is over because he thinks he’s come up with the definition, thereby leaving artists nothing else to do in this line than – at best – to illustrate it. But since Danto allows that he’s only supplied two necessary conditions for art status so far, there is still work to do, and, if the arguments above are right, there is nothing to stop artists from pitching in. 12 For further argument, see Noël Carroll, “Contemporary Avant-garde Art and the Problem of Theory,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 29 (Fall, 1995), 1–13. 13 Of course, this observation does not entail that there cannot be artworks of a non-avantgarde, verbal nature that can pose philosophical definitions and arguments in a coherent, classical manner. Perhaps Danto’s “The Last Work of Art” is one of them. But if this is so, then we have good reason to believe that art faces no logical impediment to advancing the project of self-definition from “the inside.”

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not painting or any other art is nonverbal provides no grounds for presupposing that the project of the definition of art “from inside” art history has necessarily reached its ultimate limits of possibility. The fourth premise of Danto’s argument is that painting is essentially not verbal. This is not strictly true, since paintings can literally incorporate words, and there can even be paintings of words. Nor is the former merely a modern possibility. It is a recurring feature of several established genres, including religious, didactic, and historical painting. Perhaps it is true that premodern painting never incorporated words for the purpose of making art theory outright. But inasmuch as the tradition of painting provides a legitimate space for the use of words, it cannot be that painting is essentially nonverbal, nor can it be said that, because it is nonverbal, it provides no possibility to contribute to the definition of art. Moreover, if what is really at stake in this premise is the issue of whether or not visual art (or art in general) is verbal, then, as we have already shown, many forms of visual art, including collage and installation art, literally possess verbal resources and, therefore, cannot, without further argument, be alleged to be disqualified from the definition game. And, of course, as Danto himself concedes, much modern painting (and visual art) is “verbal” in the extended sense that it occurs in an atmosphere of art theory. As a result, many visual choices (such as emphasis on the shape of the support) can be “read” in charade-like fashion as implicating theoretical points. This is the “painted word” phenomenon to which Danto alludes in the preceding quotation. But doesn’t this afford painting enough of what Danto calls “verbality” (or verboseness) to make it theoretically possible for painters (and other visual artists) to continue to engage (in some sense) in the project of the self-definition of art? Here it might be argued that insofar as painters are verbose, they are not really painters as such; they are not engaged in pure painting. But isn’t this just a modernist conceit? It begs the question about the nature of painting, and, anyway, it is irrelevant when it comes to visual artists in the extended sense of the term. Perhaps it can be said that such a presupposition concerning painterly purism supplies reasons internal to the modernist project of why it could not carry its conception of self-definition further after the arrival of Brillo Box. Danto says as much in After the End of Art.14 But the limitations of modernist painting on its own terms cannot be mistaken for the limitations of either visual art or art in general. Modernism as conceived by Greenberg may be historically closed in 14 Danto, After the End of Art, 14–16.

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Danto’s sense, but the possibilities for the developmental history of art may still be open. That is, the Greenbergian project for pure painting may be finished, but it is misleading to herald that as “the end of art history” – at least as that phrase has been standardly taken since Danto reintroduced it in 1984.15 In After the End of Art, Danto writes: My own sense of an ending suggests that it was the remarkable disjunctiveness of artistic activity across the entire sector, not the rather reduced formulas of monochrome painting, that provided evidence that the Greenbergian narrative was over, and that art had entered what one might call a post-narrative period. The disjunctiveness became internalized in works of art which also might have included painting. Whereas Crimp sees evidence of the “death of painting” in painters allowing their work to be “contaminated with photography,” I see the end of the exclusivity of pure painting as the vehicle of art history.16 But if this is Danto’s current interpretation of the end-of-art thesis, then it is not so dramatic a claim as it has seemed for nearly a decade and a half. For it only amounts to the assertion that pure painting is no longer the best candidate for the vehicle of art history. And that leaves open the logical possibility that there may be other vehicles to do the job – other vehicles to carry the developmental history of art forward. Moreover, since talk of a task that only philosophy can acquit has dropped out of the story, there is no reason in principle to suspect that there are no other available vehicles conceivable. The only limit here is the ingenuity of artists, and that is a contingent matter. Danto also presupposes that if painting cannot advance the project of the self-definition of art, then art history – or the history of painting – in the developmental sense is over. This, in turn, presumes that self-definition is the only available engine for art history in the evolutionary sense. That is, if either painting, visual art, or art in general can no longer play in the definition game, then art history as a progressive, linear narrative is done for. But why is the project of self-definition taken to be the only available engine for art history? 15

I think that the phrase has generally been regarded as describing a condition that putatively ranges across the arts. For example, Warhol’s achievement in visual art was paralleled by Cage’s in music and that of the Judson Dance Theater with respect to choreography. One naturally supposed that, as with the case of Warhol, these artists also brought the history of their forms to an endpoint. It would come as a bit of a philosophical letdown, then, to learn that the end-of-art thesis was only meant as a comment on an episode, albeit an important one, in American painting. 16 Danto, After the End of Art, 171.

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In earlier times, by Danto’s own account, verisimilitude was sufficient to drive art history forward. So even if Danto has prescinded self-definition as a possibility for art history, why does he think that no other project can propel art history onwards? In a perhaps Hegelian mood, Danto appears to “privilege” self-definition as the highest goal that art history could have – the artistic variant of consciousness becoming aware of itself through an unfolding process of self-disclosure. But his argument is about the prospects for the continuation of a linear, developmental history of art, and such a narrative logically requires only that art have a goal, not that the goal be the allegedly highest one. Possibly artists convinced by Danto’s arguments about the project of self-definition will enlist in another project – albeit not such a lofty one – and that project will yield a developmental narrative. They might rededicate themselves to discovering the most effective means for delivering visual pleasure. And, with the promise of evolutionary psychology, who is to say that there may not be some fairly determinate strategies to this end that artists can approximate successively as they did the rendering of visual appearances? There is no a priori argument to show that there are no projects like this one to be embraced and, therefore, no reason to suppose that there can be no more developmental histories of the sort that the projects of representation and self-definition entailed. It is interesting to note that Hegel himself – though agreeing with Danto that art history is over – did not think that the engine of art history was the project of self-definition. For Hegel, art was not about the self-disclosure of the nature of art, but about the revelation of the nature of consciousness to itself, an enterprise he thought philosophy was better qualified to discharge. I do not wish to endorse Hegel’s viewpoint on this matter. However, the fact that he and Danto locate the developmental prospects for art in different projects illustrates the point that there are more grounds for an evolutionary history of art than self-definition. And if there are more grounds for an evolutionary history of art than self-definition, they may remain in principle to be discovered and implemented by artists. Thus, even if Danto has shown that the project of self-definition is necessarily foreclosed to artists – a conclusion that I resist – it still would not follow that art history is necessarily over. Danto’s argument that art history is finished is an ambitious philosophical conjecture. It is philosophical because it pronounces finality of necessity. But if premises 2), 3), 4) and 6) of the argument, and their underlying presuppositions, are imperiled, then the case seems an unlikely one. Art, in an evolutionary sense, is not over. It remains, at least in principle, open. On the other hand, Danto’s philosophy of art history might be “demythologized” in a way that reveals something important about the contemporary

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state of the visual arts. The prospects for the continuation of the developmental history of art and the project of self-definition may not be necessarily foreclosed, as I hope that I have shown. And yet, as a matter of contingent fact, it does seem that for at least a decade or more, many serious artists are no longer concerned – no longer obsessed – with the project of self-definition. Someone like Robert Gober is more preoccupied with the theme of trauma than he is with the essence of art, and many of his peers care more about what they think of as politics than ontology. There has been a palpable shift in mainstream artworld concerns since the early 1970s and the heyday of modernism, and maybe Danto’s end-of-art thesis can be reconstrued as a partial explanation of this. For Danto has, in effect, skillfully elucidated the way in which the purist modernist project of the self-definition of the medium of painting faced limitations, limitations that cannot be surpassed by modernist painting for reasons internal to the Greenbergian dispensation. This, in turn, forced ambitious artists to look elsewhere for their inspiration and many of the interests that they have taken up in the wake of modernism’s demise are not congenial to the prospects for a developmental history of art. And this accounts, in part, for why we find ourselves in a moment where art history conceived of as the pursuit of the project of self-definition seems stalled. But, as I have argued, there is no reason in principle to suppose that this is anything more than a hiatus, a resting point. Logically, it is possible that the project of the self-definition of art could be revived, or that another suitably developmental end might be anointed. And yet Danto is right that something has happened; something has changed. The modernist project has collapsed internally for the reasons he brilliantly, if left-handedly, dissects, yielding the outbreak of pluralism he so astutely describes in After the End of Art. Thus, though the end-of-art thesis fails as an argument in the speculative philosophy of art history, as art criticism, it is exemplary and important. What Danto calls “post-historical art” is not a philosophical category. Rather, it is a telling description of a significant, though contingent, stylistic interlude.17 17

I would like to thank Arthur Danto, David Bordwell, and Sally Banes for their help in the preparation of this paper, though the flaws herein are my own doing.

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Danto, the End of Art, and the Orientational Narrative 1 Introduction Outside the precincts of philosophy, Arthur Danto is, in all likelihood, best known as the critic who has proclaimed that art has come to an end. Although often misunderstood, the thesis has been broadcast widely enough that Danto’s moniker, cued by the phrase “the end of art,” could probably qualify as an entry in a New York Times or New Yorker crossword puzzle. Indeed, with that clue, Danto would undoubtedly elicit faster name-recognition than Hegel, his most notable precursor in the end-of-art business. A conjecture so bold, of course, has invited a great deal of criticism. Perhaps the most embarrassing charge of all is that Danto’s philosophy of art history is inconsistent with – in fact, flatly contradicted by – Danto’s own analytical philosophy of history (as expounded in the book of the same name). Specifically, the kind of historical narrative that Danto wants to tell about art – which narrative concludes with the end-of-art thesis – is not, by Danto’s own account of the nature of history, a proper historical narrative at all. It is exactly the kind of history that Danto, the philosopher of history, proscribes. To tell the story of the end anything still in play in the here and now, by Danto’s analytical lights, is not to produce genuine history, but history-manqué. Thus, if Danto the philosopher of history is right on this score, then he may be the most decisive critic of Danto the philosopher of art history. Exploring the tension between Danto’s end-of-art thesis and his conception of the nature of historical narration is the central topic of this paper. In the course of the discussion, I will attempt to establish a way in which the endof-art thesis, suitably modified, may be considered to count as an acceptable historical narrative, though I hasten to add that the reconciliation I propose between Danto’s philosophy of history and his philosophy of art history may not be to Danto’s liking. However, before attempting to help to extricate Danto from the logical corner into which he has argued himself, we must first look at the end-of-art thesis carefully. I shall begin by sketching some misunderstandings concerning it, and then try to set it forth in its canonical form. Next I turn to the problems the thesis confronts on its own terms, including its inconsistency with Danto’s © Noël Carroll, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004468368_008 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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philosophy of history. Finally, I will propose a re-interpretation of the thesis that will render it more palatable cognitively, although undoubtedly at the cost of making it philosophically less adventurous. 2

Misunderstandings: The Endlessness of Art

When, in 1986,1 Danto first announced the end of art, the proposal was greeted by artworld types with derision. Philosophers are notorious for privileging the abstract results of their theorizing over the facts that are there in plain sight for anyone to see. Leibniz had his synchronized monads. The-end-of-art was Danto’s fancy, a Hegelian redux maybe all the more farcical for being a replay. For, surely, as anyone could observe in 1986, the artworld was teaming with ambition. – Neo-Expressionism was still a going enterprise, painting was back, as evidenced by the skyrocketing price-tags on the canvasses of David Salle and Julian Schnabel, and the Post-modern Class of 1976 was steaming ahead at full throttle. How could so much expansive movement herald the end of art? In 1986, there were, in all probability, more artists at work than ever before in world history. That had to be true, if only for the simple demographic fact that, ceteris paribus, there are always more people, including particularly more people ready to enlist as artists in highly technologically advanced, information societies like our own. Museums were being erected at a rate of more than one a week. Many of them were museums of contemporary art, waiting to be filled with product. Only some benighted philosopher with a big idea could stare all this activity in the face and declaim the end of art. Indeed, one might have been tempted to chastise Danto for advancing the end-of-art thesis even more sternly than one would have been disposed to upbraid any other philosopher of art who ventured a comparable assessment. For Danto’s own philosophy of art would appear to imply the endlessness of art. Like Hegel, according to Danto, x is an artwork only if 1) x is about something – i.e., x possesses a meaning – 2) which is embodied or presented in a mode/manner/form appropriate to whatever it is about.2 For example, vari1 Arthur Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, 1986), pp. 81–115. 2 This definition, and its relation to Hegel, is repeated several times in Arthur Danto, After the End of History (Princeton, 1997). I criticize this theory in my “Danto’s New Definition of Art and the Problem of Art Theories,” in The British Journal of Aesthetics, 37 (Oct, 1997), pp. 386–392.

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ous religious paintings by El Greco are about aspiring spirituality, a theme expressed or appropriately embodied in vertically elongated figures. Moreover, this conception of art, when combined with certain mundane facts about human life, entails that the future of art is, in principle, endless. For, the course of human affairs is always changing. The old is always giving rise to the new: new social types, new customs, new anxieties, new hopes, possibilities, problems, syndromes, and so forth. Consequently, there is perennially something novel for art to be about – something, furthermore, that will require the invention of new forms of embodiment or presentation which forms are appropriate to or which suit the new content. Human history, in other words, guarantees that there will be no end of the phenomena for art to be about, while the pressure to discover or imagine new artistic forms and structures that correspond aptly to the novel subject matter will be equally relentless. For a theory of art like Danto’s, the temporality of human existence would seem to assure that the career of art will be never-ending. In stark contrast to his end-of-art thesis, Danto’s conception of art strongly suggests that human life can always resort to art to express its evolving concerns. That is, an unforced reading of Danto’s philosophy of art seems at odds with his philosophy of art history. 3

The End of Art

The preceding objections to the end-of-art thesis allege 1) that as a matter of fact, art has not ended – it is being produced in greater numbers than ever before, and 2) that, in principle, art, construed as someone like Danto does, will continue to be made so long as there are people living in changing times. I suspect that Danto will be happy to concur with both these claims. But he will be quick to add that neither objection makes contact with what he intends by the phrase “the end of art.” Often Danto’s thesis is “refuted,” Johnsonian fashion, by pointing out that massive amounts of art is still being made. Were there to be a complete cessation of artmaking, Danto would call that turn of events “the death of art” rather than “the end of art.” And though Danto’s hypothesis has sometimes been misconstrued as the assertion that art is dead – that the practice of artmaking has shut down altogether – Danto has something else in mind by “the end of art.” When the fairy tale ends and we are told that the deserving family lived happily ever after, we presume that we are being told that they may have gone on to have a great many other rewarding adventures, but that those other

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adventures are not part of the story we are now hearing. For we have reached the end of that particular tale. Similarly, when Aristotle maintains that the ending of a tragedy is that from which nothing else follows, he is not committing a metaphysical howler. Rather, he is making a point about a certain kind of narrative, namely a narrative with closure. Likewise, the sense of an ending that Danto invokes when he speaks of the end of art is a literary artifact, specifically that of narrative closure. Two bright, attractive, young people meet. They seem drawn to each other. Their families, however, object. Obstacles are thrown in their pathway. Will the youngsters overcome these obstacles and become a couple? One by one every problem is solved until nothing stands between them and the altar. The story is over; “The End” flashes on the screen; the curtains close. For, there is nothing left to the story. All the questions that the narrative has pressed upon us about its storyworld have been answered. We are not intended to assume that there is no life in the storyworld after the curtains close – that, in the fiction, that universe just evaporates. It is simply that those happenings are not part of this story; “the end,” in the relevant sense, is a product of narration. It is the point at which a particular story is over. When Danto speaks about the end of art, he is talking about the end of a certain kind of narrative, namely a certain kind of art historical narrative. He is contending that the pertinent art historical narratives have reached a terminus – they have attained closure, or, at least, they have gotten as near to closure of as they can possibly get. Of what kind of art historical narrative is Danto thinking? A developmental narrative. But what is that? To get a handle on the notion of a developmental narrative, let us start with one that is not art historical in content. Recall Woody Allen’s altogether comical account of the history of the sandwich. The Earl of Sandwich is brooding over an assortment of ingredients: slices of bread, various viands and cheeses, relishes, and so forth. He wants to combine them in a convenient way for eating. He experiments, but his initial attempts are failures. First, he puts a piece of bread between two pieces of salami and sloshes mustard on top of the meat. But when he grabs the assemblage, it slips out of his hand and sails across the room. Then he puts the condiments between the meat and the bread. That’s better, but it is still pretty slippery. Next he piles the meat and the condiments on top of a single piece of bread. If he balances it just right, he can get it into his mouth without getting his hands greasy. But the construction is unstable; things can slip off of it.

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Finally, it dawns on him: put the meat and the condiments between two pieces of bread. Now that’s the ticket. He waves the results triumphantly. The sandwich has been invented. This is a developmental or progressive narrative. It is animated by a ­problem – the discovery of a way of eating that keeps the mustard on the meat and not on your hands. Each episode in the story charts a step in the solution of the problem. Every episode is part of the story because of its relation to the problematic. When the problem is solved and the first sandwich is made, the story of the sandwich – or the story of how the sandwich became the sandwich – is over. Closure obtains at just that point in the narrative, because the questions that have focused our attention – when and how will the sandwich be born? – have been answered. That is, to speak more precisely, the story of progressive attempts to get the design of the sandwich just right has come to a close. The problem has met with a solution; the evolution of the sandwich, in terms of purposes that sent the Earl of Sandwich into the kitchen, is complete. Closure is secured as the answer to the Earl’s inquiry is delivered. The End. Admittedly, people are still making sandwiches today. And every once and awhile, modifications are made on the basic design: the club sandwich, the hoagie, the Dagwood, the hero, and so on. But, in a certain sense, the developmental story of the sandwich is done, once the basic design of the sandwich has been perfected. Everything that comes after that, including all the sandwiches that you and I make, is (to change foodstuffs) icing on the cake. Our sandwiches, though undeniably sandwiches, are post-historical sandwiches – that is, sandwiches confected after the heady days when the scullery was aflutter with the Earl of Sandwich’s daring experiments. So, a developmental narrative is a narrative propelled by a project or a problem whose episodes involve successive, progressive, intended approximations toward the solution that drives the endeavor the story describes or depicts. To the extent that such narratives have a goal to be attained, they will eventuate in closure when the question of whether that goal is realized is answered. That is, such a narrative ends when the solution is achieved (or not) or when the enterprise gets as close as it can to a resolution. When Danto speaks of the end of art, he is invoking the notion of discursive closure with respect to certain developmental narratives. He is not talking about the end of the literal activities of artmaking. Instead, he is claiming that a certain developmental, art-historical narrative has come to an end – or has reached closure or something like it. But which art historical narrative is Danto talking about?

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Actually, for Danto, two developmental, art-historical narratives dominate the history of Western art. They are interconnected and, according to Danto, they are both over (though “over” in different ways). The first, which Ernst Gombrich labeled “the gradual conquest of natural appearances,” began in ancient Greece, was rejoined in the Renaissance, came to be called “realism” in the nineteenth century, and culminated with the inventions of photography and finally motion pictures. This historical narrative was underwritten by a project – to perfect the Platonic mirror that Hamlet bade artists to hold up to nature. Episodes in this story include the rediscovery and refinement of perspective. Then, when the very appearance of movement is captured on screen, the story finally comes to an end, since in terms of how things look, there is fundamentally nothing left to accomplish. People, of course, are still making realistic pictures – indeed, millions of them. But the story of the “conquest of natural appearances” is a closed book. Nevertheless, the conclusion of the aforesaid story of the conquest of appearances provoked new problems. If the story of Western art’s greatest adventure to date was over, what was left for the ambitious artist to do with himself? If the once noble aspiration of conquering visual appearances could now be discharged more efficiently, accurately, and comprehensively by a machine no more complicated than a camera, what was the self-respecting artist to do? Several avenues of development presented themselves. But the one which came to command the most influential following is what Clement Greenberg anointed as “Modernism;” and with modernism came the second great, developmental, art-historical narrative. Modernism, on Greenberg’s view, assigned to advanced painting a project.3 Roughly, the idea was that the aim of genuine painting is to discover its own nature. True painting is reflexive – it functions as a critique of its own conditions of possibility (to put it in the Kantian epistemological idiom that appealed to Greenbergians). That is, the role of serious painting is to reveal its own essence through the medium of painting. Nor is this merely a preoccupation of recent vintage. Critic/historians like Michael Fried and Leo Steinberg traced it to way-back-when. The aim of art during the epoch of the conquest of visual appearances was to capture the look of reality. That accomplished, artists still remained obsessed with reality. But increasingly the reality that concerned them was not the reality putatively mirrored and depicted by the painting; rather what preoccupied them was the nature of the painting itself construed as a real object. A picture 3 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected essays and Criticism, ed. John O’brien, vol 4: Modernism with a Vengeance 1957–1969, pp. 85–93.

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of a tree is no less an object in the world than the tree it pictures. A picture has at least as much reality as chair. So, what kind of thing is it? The inquiring artist wants to know and to embody the answer in a form appropriate to the answer. The question – “what is art?” – is what supposedly drove artistic research onward from the advent of impressionism to, according to Danto, 1964 when Andy Warhol exhibited his Brillo Box at the Stable Gallery in New York City. According to Greenberg and his followers, the largest portion of this reflexive race toward identifying the essence of art operated under the assumption that fundamentally paintings qua paintings are flat surfaces. Successive modern art movements refined with greater and greater clarity this alleged insight, along with its corollaries, concerning, for example, the edge or boundedness of the painting. The Impressionists dissolved the object into washes of color; Manet defied the laws of perspective, the ensuing optical distortion disavowing the conceit that a painting is a transparent window onto the world. Cézanne emphasized the pictured object as a painted artifact on the brink of abstraction, while the Fauves highlighted the two-dimensional property of color. In Matisse’s paintings with fabric, two-dimensional patterns often seized optical control of the canvas. The Cubists contracted the picture plane only to be exceeded by Pollock’s drip paintings which reduced it to nothing more than a site for the interplay of line and color. Perhaps the finest hour in this artistic quest to acknowledge the allegedly two-dimensional nature of painting came at the moment when Morris Lewis, in his series entitled Unfurleds, soaked his canvasses in paint to the point that they became so saturated that the surface of the support and the painted picture plane merged. As should be evident already from the preceding paragraph, the conception of art embarked upon a reflexive interrogation of its own identity lent itself quite readily to be represented by a developmental, art-historical narrative. The art historian or art critic could plot each movement, each artist, and, in some cases, each painting along a narrative arc, much as Vasari had charted the march toward perspective. Some work contributed to getting ever clearer about the essence of art. That work propelled the story forward. But there was also backsliding and regression – for example, Dali with all that vulgar, deep pictorial space. Indeed, critics and art historians could use this developmental narrative as an evaluative grid. Art that advanced the narrative was good – “on the side of history,” as they used to say. Art that shirked or impeded the narrative program was suspect and probably retrograde, stupid, and worse. It belonged in the dustbin of history. Though the reflexive, art-historical narrative was in some ways the converse conquest-of-appearances narrative (the former construing painting as a

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certain kind of object itself; the latter conceiving painting as merely a window onto another object), the two stories are parallel inasmuch as both posit a target toward which art history as a process was aimed. Thus, both histories, as progressive narratives, afforded the possibility of being brought to an end; narrative closure would be achieved when the target that energized artmaking was hit. The advent of cinema was the bulls-eye that ended the epic of the conquest of visual appearances. Would the reflexive chase after the essence of art be wrapped up as neatly? Not quite, according to Danto. This is where Warhol’s Brillo Box enters the picture, so to speak. The reflexive art-historical narrative, like many modern philosophies of art, presupposed that the essence of art was something that the eye could discern – such as pictorial flatness. But, Warhol’s Brillo Box unhorsed this presumption. For though Warhol’s piece was acknowledged to be an artwork, its everyday counterpart – the cartons in which Proctor and Gamble shipped Brillo to grocery stores – was not, despite the fact that the everyday carton and Warhol’s carton were perceptually indiscernible. What, on Danto’s account, Warhol thereby demonstrated was that art status does not categorically involve the possession of certain perceptual properties, since ordinary Brillo boxes and Warhol’s had (ex hypothesi) the same visible properties, but the latter was art and the former not. Moreover, this putative discovery constitutes a decisive peripeteia in the history of art. Why? According to Danto, Warhol, as presaged by certain experiments by Dadaists (notably by Duchamp with his readymades), realized that art status was not something the eye could descry. This had supposedly been the complacent presupposition of artists and aestheticians alike before the work of Warhol (especially) awakened us all from our dogmatic slumbers. What ­Warhol’s Brill Box insinuated was that art could look like anything – for example, it could look like an ordinary carton of Brillo boxes. Reflexive artists, art critics, and philosophers of art alike had been “looking” for the essence of art in the wrong place. They thought they would find it in the realm of discernibilia. But what Warhol indicated was that the essence of art resided elsewhere; it was indiscernible. Thus, according to Danto, Warhol was able to get the project of the definition of art on the right track. Thanks to Warhol (and others), the question – “What is the essence of art?” – was now in its proper philosophical form; it now had the right philosophical orientation. It was a matter of locating some set of perceptually indiscernible properties that were (ideally) necessary and sufficient criteria for membership in the republic of art. But this advance came with a cost, especially for artists. According to Danto, it debars them from further participation in the quest for the definition of

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art. For, as artists, their craft is ostensibly ill-suited for identifying the abstract ­criteria that are constitutive of art. That is a task for another guild, namely philosophy. As Danto puts it, artists would have to give up being artists and become philosophers in order to answer the question of the nature of art, once it has been posed, as Warhol did, in terms of indiscernibilia. So the end of the reflexive art-historical narrative comes not with closure – not with the answer to the question “what is art?” – but stops at the foothills of a solution, at which point the task must be handed over to philosophy. Artists arrive at the limit of what they can achieve as artists in terms of defining art, and then they have to turn the project over to philosophers, since philosophers rather than artists have the expertise and resources to handle inquiries into the ontology of things constituted of indiscernible properties. Artists have carried the quest for the essence of art as far as they can professionally, given their job description. The reflexive narrative of art history comes to a halt; from the perspective of the practice of art, it just stops. It does not secure closure in the way that the conquest-of-appearances narrative did. It does not reach a solution from inside the practice of art. Rather it delegates that task to others – specifically to philosophers, like Arthur Danto. Instead of being called the end of developmental art history, this juncture might better be labeled “art history retires,” i.e., art history is relieved from the task if pursuing the progressive agenda of reflexivity. Danto has never been as clear as he might be about why he thinks that artists must turn the task of defining the essence of art to philosophers. Though there are hints here and there, he has not explained at length his reasons for supposing that artists cannot, after Warhol’s reframing of the project, further contribute, by means of their artistic practice, to the analysis of the nature of art. My own suspicion is that Danto thinks this must be the case since artists in their role as artists traffic in visual images and visual images alone do not possess the wherewithal to identify the indiscernible properties that constitute art.4 Painting is nonverbal, but in order to define art in the requisite way one would need to advert to conceptual formulations. To see a monochrome canvas as art required a theory. But the theory had to be propounded in discourse that existed outside the painted canvas. The theory was not, so to say, the canvas itself. Theory building took place off the canvas – the domain of the artist – and in the artworld that surrounded it – the domain of the theorist and the 4 See Arthur Danto, “Approaching the End of Art,” in The State of the Art (New York, 1987), p. 216. I discuss this argument in my “The End of Art?” in History and Theory, Theme Issue 37, (December, 1998), pp. 17–29.

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philosopher. In order to enter the debate about the nature of art – in order to isolate the indiscernible properties that constitute art – the painter would have to put down his brushes (or whatever) and leave off creating appearances, and cultivate the very different kind of talents required to engage in theoretical or philosophical conversations. Since you can’t paint what is indiscernible, marking the pertinent indiscernible properties will depend on people other than painters. And the most likely candidates are the philosophers. Like Hegel before him, Danto seems to think that art has come to an end precisely because it cannot compete with the conceptual and linguistic resources of philosophy. Of course, there are differences between Hegel and Danto. Hegel emphasizes the limitation of art’s resources for conceptual articulation relative to the expression of the self-consciousness of spirit in general, whereas Danto cites the limitations of artistic facundity relative to the articulation of the self-consciousness of art via artistic means. Nevertheless, both calculate the end of art at just that point where due to limitations in art’s ­communicative powers – limitations due to art’s intimate connection to the realm of the senses – art is superceded by philosophy. Though some may take the end of art à la Danto to be a fall from grace, Danto, himself, does not. For, once art drops out of the forward march of history, artists are free to explore their own agendas. A brave new era of pluralism – which Danto labels post-historical – blooms, abetting experimentation in every direction. No longer driven by a single, tyrannical obsession, art can be a thousand and one different things. Caught in the grip of a developmental narrative of art history, artists had been subjected to an unforgiving discipline by art critics. But, with the end of that narrative, comes liberation. Now that art is over (in the sense of an ending Danto has in mind), the artist may follow her inclinations wherever they lead. There is no one place she has to go. The plurality of expression is the order of the day. Warhol revealed that art can look like anything. This possibility is in evidence everywhere in the contemporary artworld. This condition stands in sharp contradistinction to the world of Modernist art where the artwork had to acknowledge its flatness. If the period of Modernist art was historical, that is, describable by means of a progressive narrative, then the present epoch is post-historical, since there can be no plausible evolution of visual forms where art can look like anything. Thus does Danto explain the lay of the artworld today – the pluralistic, post-historical artworld of which he has become the reigning critic. Nor has the end-of-art thesis simply enabled him to explain the life of art in our times. It also allows him to celebrate it – to appreciate its wide-ranging and unruly diversity as a consequence of its emancipation from philosophy.

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Indeed, it may be the end-of-art thesis that Danto might invoke to meet the objections to his viewpoint cited in the second section of this paper. If the artworld is currently teaming with activity, Danto might argue that that is a function of the new found freedom that comes with the end of art. Moreover, the end of art may be a condition for the theoretical possibility of the endlessness of art, since once art could look like anything and identical-looking artworks can be different, the potential number of artworks can, in principle, reach some multiple of the total number of ordinary things. 4

Criticisms of the End-of-Art Thesis

An initial problem with the end-of-art thesis is one of ambiguity. It appears to be advanced as a theory about painting, or, at least, the visual or fine arts, but, on occasion, Danto seems to think that it applies to art in general. It is true that one finds strategies for framing the issue of indiscernibility – which are comparable to those of Warhol and Duchamp – outside the sphere of painting and sculpture. One thinks of John Cage in music, the Judson Dance movement, and some performance art (especially the performance arts, such as Happenings, that are the step-children of painting and sculpture). But it is not the case that even if the essence of every artform were a matter of a set of indiscernible properties that it would follow that every artform would be limited in such a way that it would have to turn over to the philosophers the reflexive task of defining itself, or, for that matter, art in general. For, the reason that Danto appears to give for the end of painting in particular is the nonverbal nature of painting. The realm of painting is appearance. Were the nature of art (fine art) something that was perceptually discernible, then maybe the painter could point to it by way of her easel. Her painting could exemplify the essence of art by underscoring it in a particularly pointed or salient way – by, for example, subtracting what she takes to be every extraneous feature from the canvas, as in the case of certain color field abstractions. But if the essence of art is strictly indiscernible, then putatively one cannot get at it through appearances alone. One needs language, especially the discourse of analysis and argument. One needs philosophy or some other form of theory very like it. Let us grant for the moment (but only for the moment) that this is true of painting. However, it is not true of all of the other arts. It is not true of literature, theater, opera, cinema, video, song and, in fact, much performance art as well as some postmodern dance. These artforms possess language and thus have the wherewithal, in principle, to argue and analyze. Nor is this a

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mere abstract possibility. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, for instance, discourses on the nature of fictional characters. Not all the arts are beset by the problem of speechlessness which Danto attributes to painting and, therefore, not every artform must turn necessarily to philosophy to articulate either its essential characteristics or the essential characteristics of art in general. Some arts can speak for themselves. Consequently, the end-of-art thesis does not apply to the arts across the board. ­Perhaps it only applies to the visual arts. But that is not quite right either. For, there are many genres of contemporary visual art that incorporate language – spoken, recorded, and written. These include installation art, conceptual art, language art, video art, collages, performance art, cinema, and so forth. These practices employ verbal discourse of every sort. Thus, all of them have the capacity to articulate reflexive hypotheses about the – albeit indiscernible – essence of art. In fact, some artists working in these modes, such as Joseph Kossuth, have actually attempted to do so. Of course, one might claim that when Kossuth tacked up on the gallery wall his theses defining art, he was wearing a philosopher’s hat. But doesn’t that simply beg the question? I once, when asked, defined art during a performance piece by Spalding Gray entitled Interviewing the Audience. I was one of the audience members Spalding Gray interviewed the night I attended the show. He asked me what I did. I said I taught philosophy. And then he asked me “What is art?” Surely, that was part of the performance; it did not occur outside the artwork. It was not during an intermission in which the audience was subjected to a word from the sponsor – ART. Consequently, I surmise that the visual arts in general are not for want of a voice – even a philosophical voice – at the end of the day. Perhaps Danto will respond that all of these genres only exist as beneficiaries of the work of people like Warhol and Duchamp. I am not convinced of that. But even if that were the case, it would not support the end-of-art thesis, since that thesis claims that artists in principle lack the means to pursue any further the reflexive interrogation of the nature of art. And the aforesaid practices show this to be false. It would make no difference if it was the discovery of the indiscernibility issue that allowed the visual arts to speak. In fact, there is something deliciously, even poetically, fitting if such a scenario rings true. It may be that, as a matter of fact, in the supposedly post-historical artworld, many visual artists have chosen to abandon the reflexive agenda (often for the sake of what they think of as political engagement). But, pace Danto, they have not been cast out of the garden of self-conscious theorizing due any essential insufficiency, such as the lack of access to linguistic discourse. Therefore, we have no reason to accept that, as a matter of philosophical necessity, the visual

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arts have reached the end of their line. Even if many contemporary audio-­visual installation pieces are not concerned with questions of self-identity, they have the means to address ontological questions, should artists be so disposed. Indeed, it is not even true that painting and sculpture cannot incorporate words. Certain genres of religious and historical paintings contain words. If certain religious icons – including stain glass windows – include scripture that telegraphs theology to the faithful, surely aesthetics could also be inscribed on the picture plane. Much sculpture incorporates text; even Danto’s beloved Brillo Box has words splashed all over it. Thus, there is no reason in principle why painting and sculpture must eschew verbiage. That at present they do is contingent, not necessary, as shown by the fact that throughout art history words and images – whether two dimensional or three dimensional – have co-existed side by side in the same art works. If this strikes you as counterintuitive, just remember also that titles are proper parts of visual artworks. Perhaps Danto will suggest that when words and pictures combine, the result is not truly art, or that only the pictures count as genuine art. This would be an unfortunate move to make for several reasons. First, there are many, so-called hybrid artforms – like opera – which are nevertheless genuine artforms. Second, the kind of purism that this gambit presupposes is precisely that which is associated with the species of Modernism that Warhol confounded – successfully according to Danto – and, in fact, is incompatible with the recognition that the quiddity of art is indiscernible. And such purism would sit uneasily with the celebration of post-historical pluralism is meant to advance. So far we have examined several reasons to reject the notion that art in general or the visual arts – either individually or collectively – have necessarily have arrived at the point where they must leave off the reflexive enterprise of interrogating their constitutive ontological conditions. If most artists today are less interested in the ontology of art than other issues, then that needs to be explained historically rather than in the metaphysical style to which Danto resorts. For, if the critique of art by art is presently in abeyance, then that is not a matter of logic, but of something else. Yet even if it were the case, as Danto suggests, that we are necessarily at the end of the trail with respect to art’s interrogation of its own nature, it is important to point out that that would not entail that we have reached the end of art in Danto’s special sense of that phrase. For Danto, the end of art would occur only when there were no more developmental, art-historical stories to be narrated. Supposing (mistakenly as I have tried to show) that the reflexive narrative is necessarily over does not imply that there might not be other developmental narratives about art to be told. For, the reflexive narrative is not the only available progressive, art-historical narrative.

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As we have seen, before it there was the conquest-of-visual-appearances narrative. Undoubtedly, there are others. Perhaps the art of the future will rededicate itself to the promotion of visual pleasure. And with the promise of evolutionary psychology, who is to say that there may not be some fairly determinate strategies to this end which artists can approximate successively, as they did the rendering of visual appearances? There is no a priori argument to show that there are no projects like this one to be mobilized and, therefore, no reason to imagine that there cannot be more developmental histories of the sort that the projects of mimesis and reflexivity, respectively, involved. So even if Danto had proven that the reflexive interlude was necessarily closed (a hypothesis that I contest), he has not shown that the artworld will not adopt some other progressive program in the future which program will once again call for a developmental art historical narrative – one which has not yet ended, since it has not yet begun. Surely no one now can know that such a possibility is foreclosed. Like Hegel, who, in his own times, proclaimed both the end of history as well as the history of art, Danto asserts that we are presently – hic et nunc – ­living after the end of art. Ours is a post-historical epoch as far as art is concerned. There is nothing more to be added to the reflexive narrative, and there are no further, alternative developmental narratives in the offing. But is it possible to close the book on either of these alternatives at present? There is some reason to be skeptical about both these counts. What is perhaps most surprising is that the grounds for this skepticism have been argued most elegantly by none other than Arthur Danto himself. Substantive philosophers of history from St. Augustine to Fukuyama have repeatedly announced the end of history. Hegel and Marx are perhaps the best known members of this visionary company. They pretend to tell the whole history of humankind – including the beginning, middle, and end (in the Aristotlian sense of closure). But how can one know that there is closure to a process – i.e., know that there are no last minute complications that once again will open up the horizon of narrative possibilities – until long after the event when sufficient time has elapsed so that one is sure that all the pertinent consequences of the event have born fruit. One could not have known that the Battle of Britain was over until it was absolutely clear that the Luftwaffe would never cast its shadows over Downing Street again. And that could only be known some time after the battle was literally over. It could not have been known in the thick of the fray. That is, in the case of a genuine historical narrative, a certain spate of time must exist between the end of an event and the telling of the story of said event from beginning to end. Such a narrative cannot be told in the midst of the

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event, because only time will tell if there are no further, relevant complications ahead. This temporal remove is a necessary condition for a bone fide historical narrative. But obviously, narratives of the end of history – including the end of art history – do not meet this requirement. Quite clearly, they are, of necessity, told prematurely. Indeed, narratives of the end of history would have to be told from a point outside history – a perspective no one, including the substantive philosophers of history, can inhabit. Because such narratives violate the criteria necessary for a discourse to count as an authentic historical narrative, stories about the end of history are not genuine historical narratives. Danto writes: we might think of philosophers of history as trying to see events as having a meaning in the context of an historical whole which resembles an artistic whole, but in this case, the whole in question is the whole of history, compassing past, present, and future. Unlike those of us who have the whole novel before us, and are able to say with some authority what is the significance of this event or that, the philosopher of history does not have before him the whole of history. He has at best a fragment of the whole past. But he thinks in terms of the whole of history.”5 Danto wants us to contrast the practice of the substantive philosopher of history with the pursuit of ordinary history. In the course of ordinary history, the researcher establishes the significance of an event in the past by connecting it to another event – perhaps as a consequence of the event in question – which latter event is known to the historian writing in the present, but which was not yet known at the time of the event being explained. That is, a work-a-day historian connects a past event to its fruition in future events, where the “future” events at issue are known to the historian because they are in his past. But the substantive philosopher of history does not have the temporal distance on the events he speaks of with such finality. Francis Fukuyama was not witness to the triumph of liberal democracy everywhere – since that event, should it ever materialize, lies in Fukuyama’s future, not his past – nor can Fukuyama have known, with any degree of reliability, if at all, that the world is headed for it. For example, he did not anticipate the onslaught of a ferocious fundamentalist Islamic jihad nor does he or anyone else really know how this debacle will turn out. Given Danto’s analysis of historical narration, it would 5 Arthur Danto, Knowledge and Narration, (New York, 1985), pp. 8–9.

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appear that no one can now declare – in a legitimate historical voice – that we are at the end of history whether that is understood as the triumphant of liberal democratic states everywhere, or, alternatively, as the disappearance of the state à la Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program. The substantive philosopher of history, in effect, is either a misguided or a phony historian. For, he attempts to cast the significance of past and present events in light of the whole of history, much of which lies in the future and about which he cannot claim knowledge. Thus, on Danto’s account, the substantive philosopher of history is a historian manqué – one who misunderstands the structure of historical knowledge. The substantive philosopher of history appears to be doing history. But the appearance is deceptive. Ironically, this devastating criticism of those substantive philosophers of history who have pronounced the end of history applies not only to the likes of Hegel and Marx, but to Danto, the philosopher of art history, as well. In 1989, Fukuyama was in no position to proclaim the triumph of liberal democracy everywhere. Among other things, he did not see the fundamentalist Islamic jihad coming, or, at least, he did not appreciate the challenge to liberalism it would pose. But similarly Danto is not historically situated now so as to be certain that the reflexive narrative of art history will not be rejuvenated. This could happen, since, as I have argued, the arts, including the visual arts, have the linguistic and conceptual resources to do so. Moreover, neither is Danto in a position to be sure that the artworld will not rise to another progressive agenda, perhaps one that we cannot yet imagine. So if Danto’s analysis of genuine historical narration is correct and his diagnosis of substantive philosophies of history is spot-on, then Danto himself would appear to be his own, most implacable critic with respect to the end-of-art-thesis. 5

Re-Reading Danto

Two of Danto’s most interesting philosophical hypotheses are at loggerheads – his analysis of historical narration and his end-of-art thesis. Can this clash be softened in any way or must at least one of these conjectures be abandoned. I think that something of value can be retrieved here, but it involves substantial modification and re-reading on both sides of the ledger. Let’s start with the analysis of historical narration. According to Danto, an historical narrative proper is about the significance of an event at time t1 relative to an event at time t2 as told by the historian at time t2+n (somewhere in the future of time t2). You cannot narrate the history of D-Day on June 6,

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1944; a proper history of D-Day can only be told long after the event when the consequences of the event have come to light, thereby throwing retrospective illumination on the doings on Omaha Beach. This is certainly the structure of one sort of historical narrative. But is it the only legitimate form of historical narration? For convenience, let us label it the scientific (in the broad European sense of the term) historical narrative – a narrative concerned exclusively with knowledge. But isn’t there also another quite common and legitimate form of historical narrative – the instrumental or deliberative, or practical or, as I prefer, orientational narrative? This is a historical narrative that is told with the aim of answering a question about what is to be done. The history of U.S. defense policies from the Cold War to the present might be told in order to reassess the course of future weapons development and deployment. Such a narrative might be told in order to clarify a practical decision. That is, in addition to scientific narratives there may be practical or orientational narratives. Or, for a less bellicose example, such a narrative might be told about public housing. Historical narratives like these have a deliberative dimension. They are at least as concerned with phronesis as they are with sophia. They are intended to organize our understanding of the past in a way that points to decisions about the future. Such narratives, ideally, must hew to the objectively ascertainable facts, since policy recommendations rooted in falsehoods are apt to go badly. But such historical narratives go beyond the present. They attempt to pith emerging tendencies that are pertinent to future possibilities in order to indicate a scenario for action in the present which scenario grows out of the relevant past. Instrumental narratives of this sort serve to orient the pertinent audience to the future by narrating the past and the present in a way that selects and emphasizes courses of events whose trajectory recommends the next step in the story. One encounters historical narratives like this quite frequently. Undoubtedly, they evolve quite seamlessly from the type of deliberative narratives we often tell in the course of our own lives. Confronted with the possibility of a new line of work in a new city, it is natural for us, and the friends we consult, to sketch scenarios of each alternative choice in order to compare them. We consider each future-oriented narrative with an eye to how well it incorporates what we value as the best parts of our previous life narrative as that pertains to the decision in question. The narrative we choose, in the standard case, should make substantial sense of our past in a way that connects with our anticipated future as we imagine that to unfold on the basis of our life history. All things being equal, we will

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choose the narrative that not only promises success but which maximizes the narrative continuity of our lives. A narrative that was, for the most part, disconnected to our past would be ill-advised, save in special circumstances, because it would not typically be sustainable. In order to be serviceable, an instrumental narrative roots its recommended scenario for the future to the past. We use these kinds of narratives not only to deliberate individually but corporately – this is one use of historical narratives – indeed, I’d speculate that the production of these kinds of narratives is a major factor contributing to society’s interest in supporting the institution of history. Perhaps this is not the kind of history that most academic historians pursue. But their scientific narratives are certainly valued socially, to an appreciable degree, because they supply the basis for instrumental historical narratives. Scientific narratives of Islam make possible the sort of deliberative historical narratives that are discussed on talk shows because of the present need people have to understand and orient themselves to the threat of Moslem fundamentalism. Books about the history of government violations of the first amendment appear in times when the authors wish to warn us that it may be endangered again. It is undeniable that many historical narratives are instrumental – that they are told to organize our understanding of the past and the present in order to orient us toward the future. Such historical narratives are not scientific – not concerned solely with the production of knowledge. But it would be strange to deny that they are legitimate. They represent an ineliminable form of human thought and deliberation. On what plausible grounds could it be recommended that the past plays no role in our contemplation of the future? And, in any event, it would be impossible to do so. The instrumental use of history to orient us to the future just is part and parcel of the way we think. Furthermore, the notion of orientating historical narratives may be relevant to the cognitive status of at least some end-of-history narratives. Some of them, suitably re-interpreted, may be instrumental historical narratives told in the present to orient action toward the future. Surely that is true of the most famous end-of-history narrative of modern times – Marx’s story of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the subsequent withering away of the state. Danto is certainly right that it is not a scientific narrative of the kind he is at pains to analyze in his book on the philosophy of history. But re-read charitably, it represents another, easily recognizable sort of historical narrative – a sort that is well-precedented and indispensable. It was an orientational narrative, first and foremost, for the working class and its allies. Admittedly, taken at face value, end-of-history narratives make claims that are impossible to substantiate in the here and now. Talk of the end of history is obviously extravagant. But many of these narratives can be re-interpreted

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– de-mythologized, we might say – without much strain in such a way that the result is a reasonable orientational narrative. For example, Fukuyama’s end-ofhistory narrative was told in order to prepare readers and policy makers for life in the world after the Cold War. At present, it appears that Fukuyama’s diagnosis was premature or worse, but it was not utterly ill-founded when it was first suggested, nor is historically grounded speculation of this sort illegitimate in principle. So, some end-of-history narratives may be re-interpreted, and reinstated as orienting narratives. End-of-history narratives are not necessarily history manqué. The upshot of this for Danto’s thesis is twofold 1) his end-of-arthistory thesis may not be, in principle, an illegitimate exercise in historical thinking, since 2) it might be re-read as an orientational narrative. If Danto concedes that there are genuine historical narratives that are deliberative or instrumental or practical narratives and which are intended to orient action in the future, then he may sidestep his own argument against substantive historical narratives just in case his end-of-art thesis is such a narrative. Of course, whether that thesis can be intelligibly be recuperated as an instrumental narrative depends upon the plausibility of our account of the reorientation Danto hoped it would afford. Part of Danto’s end-of-art-thesis can be glossed as the saga of the end of Modernism, as conceived by critics like Greenberg. For Modernists, the alleged project was to reveal the essential, discernible conditions of the fine arts – particularly painting and sculpture – by means of the artworks themselves. Putatively, their goal was to locate the metaphysical differentia that set visual artworks off from real things. Warhol, and others, supposedly brought this project to a close by showing that art status resided in the indiscernible properties of artworks, beyond the reach of the paintbrush, the chisel, or the blow torch. Whether or not Modernism was overthrown by the theoretical perplexities presumably spun by Pop artists and minimalists, or whether it died from other causes, such as exhaustion, is a task for future art historians to clarify. However, we are, I believe, in a position to agree that Greenbergian Modernism is a thing of the past. That is one reason why so many speak of post-modernism. Of course, if all Danto wants to say under the rubric of the end of art is that the Modernist moment is over, then few will bridle and some may even yawn. Indeed, if that is the whole of the story, then the end-of-art thesis is really a specimen of ordinary scientific history, since we are now at a sufficient historical remove to declare that the Modernist movement is down for the count and that it has been effectively pushed off the stage of living history by various successors. Danto is aware of this, yet he persists in speaking of the end of art history, not merely the end of modernism. Why?

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It is interesting to note that Danto published “The End of Art” in the middle of 1984; in October of that year, he became an art critic for The Nation.6 It is my conjecture that Danto’s end-of-art thesis is an orientational narrative that Danto told in order to prepare himself for the kind of art critic that he would be. Read in this way “The End of Art” is a manifesto for a new kind of criticism, viz., Danto’s kind of criticism. Greenberg was not only influential for his articulation of the Modernist canon. He also popularized a style of criticism that was imitated by subsequent critics, including many of whom rejected many of his assessments of art. Greenberg presupposed that artworks were involved in some form of critique and that the role of the serious critic was to chart how far the next work of art moved that critique forward. Critics following Greenberg hailed artists for advancing the critique begun by Modernists. Criticism of minimalism then dragooned phenomenology in order to broaden the alleged critique, claiming that artworks not only explored the conditions of the object but, in tandem, the nature of the perceptual relation between the spectator and the work. Next critics smitten by semiotics found artists who unmasked the nature of the artwork as a system of signs, while even later critics commended artists who interrogated the institutional/economic conditions of the artworld. This was the brief of the serious art critic after Greenberg. Critics such as Michael Fried, Leo Steinberg, Rosalind Krauss, and Douglas Crimp approximate this model in their own ways. But they all practice their criticism as if they were writing the history of the present. Just as Greenberg characterizes Cézanne as bringing art to the verge of the abstract, Krauss connects minimalists, like Serra, to Rodin and, more recently, Cindy Sherman and Mike Kelly to Pollock. David Carrier calls this style of criticism “philosophical art criticism.”7 The hallmark of philosophical art criticism is that it situates the work at hand in some sort of developmental narrative. However, though a philosopher, this is not the way in which Danto intended to ply his craft as a critic. The brunt of the end-of-art thesis is the claim that post-historical art – the pluralist art of the present – is not in fact susceptible to this kind of criticism. Thus, criticism à la Danto would be different. It would be pluralistic in a way that coincided with the unruly diversity of post-historical art. A pluralistic artworld, in other words, required a pluralistic critic. Each artwork would be analyzed in order to determine what it is about and then Danto would go on to explain how its mode of embodiment, its form, is 6 Arthur Danto, Unnatural Wonders (New York, 2005), p. 3. 7 David Carrier, Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism (Westport, Ct., 2002).

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appropriate to or expressive of what it is about. No artwork would be forced into the march of history. Matthew Barney’s work is examined in terms of the theme of sexual indeterminacy and Paul McCarthy’s with reference to abjection. They are not enlisted as poster-boys for the party of history. That kind of criticism does not suit the kind of wide-open variety of the art scene that Danto entered in 1984 and which, on his view, continues to proliferate in every direction even today. Danto claimed that art has come to an end. No one could know that in the sense of scientific history. It is even likely that Danto, the philosopher, knows that he cannot know that art has come to an end. But Danto the critic has surmised that a certain sort of criticism – the history of the present variety – no longer suits the post-Warhol artworld. In this respect, the end-of-art thesis may be re-read as a recommendation for a moratorium on the kind of criticism that spends most of its energies embedding artworks in the sweep of momentous historical patterns. Danto entitled his thesis “the end of art,” perhaps hyperbolically overstating the case for dramatic purposes. But what I think he was really getting at was a call for an end to one kind of art criticism in order to prepare for another kind – his own, which, of course, Danto feels better fits the unpredictable, pluralistic artworld he believes we inhabit. Danto likes to refer to these big Hegelian end-of-x stories as Bildungsromans in honor of the German coming of age novel in which the protagonist comes to self-understanding. Perhaps we can read between the lines of Danto’s endof-art thesis and interpret it as the bildungsroman of an art writer orienting himself to the contemporary artworld, and deliberating about what had to be done and about the kind of critic he would be. Taken literally, the end-of-art thesis is insupportable. And yet, re-interpreted sympathetically and in context, it does seem to make a point that it would be a shame to ignore. The history-of-the-present model of art criticism does appear obsolete given the challenges of the contemporary artworld. The kind of criticism Danto practices is far more profitable. Read as a scientific historical narrative, the end-of-art thesis falters. But re-interpreted as an orientational narrative advocating a new direction for criticism in the contemporary artworld, it is quite astute. Although, of course, whether this is an acceptable re-reading of Danto’s thesis or is merely a matter of putting words in his mouth is a question for Arthur Danto to answer.

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Chapter 8

Arthur Danto and the Problem of Beauty 1 On Why Beauty in the Narrow Sense Appears to be a Problem for Danto Arthur Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art is Danto’s most recent, through-written monograph on the philosophy of art.1 An obvious question, occasioned by its publication, is: what is it intended to add to Danto’s previous treatises on the philosophy of art, such as The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and After the End of Art? The simple answer, of course, is beauty. But, why, one asks, does Danto need to address beauty? I suspect that Danto has at least three motives for addressing the issue of beauty. The first is maybe the most proximate, but the least important. During the late nineteen-nineties, the artworld, where Danto presides as a leading critic, was abuzz with talk of beauty and its imminent rehabilitation. ­Second, the renewed respectability of beauty reminded philosophers that beauty and art had, it seemed, until the nineteenth century gone together like a horse and carriage. So, should not a complete philosophy of art have something to say about what they were doing together all that time? But lastly, and perhaps most seriously, beauty – narrowly construed – presents a clear and present philosophical danger to the concept of art that Danto currently defends. Thus, Danto, it seems to me, needs to come to terms with beauty as a matter of theoretical damage-control. Beauty, narrowly conceived, has the potential to threaten the generality of Danto’s theory of art. Therefore, Danto needs, so to speak, to contain it. How does beauty, narrowly construed, imperil Danto’s system? In order to answer this question, let us first review Danto’s system. As is well known, Danto now defends the view that a candidate x is an artwork only if 1) x is about something and 2) whatever x is about is presented or embodied in an appropriate form. The first condition here is the necessary requirement that a candidate have content – that it be about something. Danto often refers to this content as a meaning (or, perhaps, meanings). This content is semantic 1 Arthur C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago and LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Press, 2003). His previous monographs on the philosophy of art are: Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1981) and After the End of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). © Noël Carroll, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004468368_009 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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or thematic – meaning subject to interpretation. This meaning, in turn, needs to be realized or presented – frequently, Danto says, embodied – in a form that is appropriate or suitable to it. The form should fit the content – that is, advance it in a compelling, or, at least, suggestive way. For example, an archway celebrating a triumph should be imposing and substantial, such as the one in Paris; arches, like those of MacDonald’s are too flimsy to herald historic glory appropriately. One might also call the embodiment of what the artwork is about its style. On Danto’s account, the style of the artwork should contribute to the expression of whatever it is about. Although the notion of embodiment seems to demand manifestation in some physical medium, Danto’s application of the condition does not seem to require this, since he will count as an artwork Robert Barry’s untitled entry, “All of the things I know but am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 PM, June 15, 1969.” Presumably, this has a mode of presentation ingeniously suitable to and even appositively supportive of its content, namely, that art can be anything, even something non-manifest. Though widely admired, Danto’s concept of art has been frequently criticized. One criticism is a recurring objection to the necessity of his first condition – the content condition, the requirement that all artworks be about something, or, even more precisely, that they must bear meanings. For, aren’t there artworks, properly so-called, that are, so to say, beneath meaning, thematically or semantically construed? This is where beauty, in the narrow sense, enters the picture; since certain beautiful artworks might be unavoidable examples of artworks that are bereft of or beneath meaning. Beauty, narrowly construed, is a matter of that which is pleasing to the eye or the ear. It is a response-dependent property of sights and sounds – specifically of those sights and sounds that deliver pleasure to the human frame upon exposure. This is a conception that Socrates introduces – only to dismiss – in his attempt to characterize kalon (a word often, though I think misleadingly, translated as “beautiful” in English) in his Hippias Major. If by kalon we mean to signal the fine or the excellent, we may agree with Socrates’s rejection of the definition of beauty as what is pleasant to the visual and/or the auditory senses.2 Nevertheless, the suggestion that one sense of beauty, albeit a very narrow sense, is essentially involved with pleasing the eyes and ears, does seem to 2 Though I agree that Socrates is right to abandon as an account of kalon (the fine) that kalon is a matter of pleasing the pertinent senses, I don’t agree with the reasons Socrates adduces for this conclusion in the text.

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capture a primary usage of the concept of beauty. When we call a person or a landscape beautiful, isn’t this just what we have in mind? But, returning to Danto’s concept of art and to his problem with beauty, might not something be an artwork that is simply beautiful in the narrow sense – for example, a ravishing pattern. We look at it and exclaim “Wow!” We can’t take our eyes off of it. It irresistibly engages our ancient, mammalian perceptual system and caresses it pleasureably. We like to look at it. Yet it is dumb beauty – a delightfully contrived artifice; although, from a semantic or symbolic or thematic perspective, it is a meaningless one. Call it eye candy, nevertheless, even if it says nothing, few will deny it is an artistic achievement. However, Danto’s conception of art would seem to have no accommodation for works like this one which probably most informed ­art-lovers, in contrast, would readily countenance as examples of the genuine article. In other words, Danto’s general theory of art requires that artworks be about something and that their mode of presentation suggest some comment or perspective upon whatever they are about or that the form otherwise reinforce or advance the content of the work. But isn’t likely that there are artworks, properly so-called, that are made solely with the intention to delight the eye or ear – to afford visual or auditory pleasure? Call these beautiful artworks simpliciter: works whose purpose is discharged exhaustively by the presentation of a design that upon being perceived elicits a palpable pleasure or a thrill, engendered by the act of looking or hearing, with no greater import. Think of a delightful tune or a lovely pastel abstraction. Since these artworks have no meaningful content, they would seem to be counterexamples to Danto’s philosophy of art. One response that Danto has made to criticisms like this is blunt – to wit: there are no such artworks. Danto challenges critics to come up with one.3 For every putative example, Danto believes that he can show that they really are about something. Many beautiful artworks from the past that may strike us as mere eye-candy actually served ritual or religious or political or other cultural purposes. If we knew more about the culture from which they emerged, we would grant this. Give him an example, and Danto boldly promises to reveal its meaning.4 3 See Arthur Danto, “Art and Meaning,” in Theories of Art Today, edited by Noël Carroll (­Madison, WI.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), pp. 130–140. 4 Danto might attempt to reject examples like these on the grounds that they do not really threaten his definition of art. He might argue, for example, that all his aboutnes condition requires is that it be appropriate to attempt to interpret artworks, not that all artworks have

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Furthermore, with various modern works of art that may appear to be simply beautiful – say, some Minimalist abstractions – Danto will argue that far from being meaningless they contribute to a dialogue about the nature of art. A work by Frank Stella, for example, “says” something about the function of the edge of paintings by calling our attention to it. Thus, does Danto pledge to disarm all the counterexamples – traditional and modern, beautiful or otherwise sensuously arresting – brought forth to embarrass his theory. One hardly knows whether Danto or even Danto assisted by an army of art historians and anthropologists are up to the task of vanquishing all the plausible existing examples in this neighborhood. Yet it does not seem to me that Danto can banish the problem of simply beautiful artworks (a.k.a. sheer eye candy) by such feats of interpretive legerdemain. For even if every legitimate artwork so far can be assimilated in this way by Danto’s theory (a proposition about which one may be reasonably skeptical), certainly it is conceivable that an artist could create something intended to be simply beautiful, construed narrowly, and that, in fact, would thrum our perceptual apparatus delightfully; which design, moreover, informed art lovers would be disposed to regard as art. Perhaps, the work abstractly deploys the sort of serenely appealing symmetries that, since the dawn of humanity, have served as positively reinforcing attractors for creatures like us.5 Such a work would not be about what is appealing to humans. It simply would be appealing. Let us imagine that the piece is the product of an artist armed with a vast understanding of the psychology of the human perceptual system, a MRI, and the technical staff to go along with it. He relentlessly probes the relation interpretations. So long as the eye-candy in question strikes reasonable people as worth exploring for possible interpretations, Danto may say, it meets his conditions and, furthermore, this removes the troubling art works from the board. However, I still maintain that there can be beautiful art works that just dazzle us without eliciting from us any inclination to interpret them. 5 Contemporary psychology has correlated a nearly universal association of symmetry with human beauty and attempted to explain this by suggesting that such symmetry is a sign of health and, therefore, a reproductive asset from an evolutionary point of view. In this regard, the appealing and attracting pleasure that arises from symmetrical sights has its biological origins, so to speak, as an adaptive carrot. For an introduction to this view with references for further reading see: David Buss, Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind (­Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), pp. 118–119 and 141–142. Interestingly, this hypothesis was already suggested in the ancient world. Galen commenting upon the Stoic Chrysippus attributes to the latter a belief in a connection between health and the harmony of the parts of the body which he, Galen, illustrates by reference to the Canon of the sculptor Polyclitus. See: J.J. Pollit, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 14–15.

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between our pleasure centers, the flow of dopamine, and the stimuli that trigger it. His project is the greatest alliance of art and science since folks tackled perspective in the Renaissance. And it is a great success. Everyone who sees the work produced as the result of this research feels joyously absorbed, as if enveloped in a pleasant embrace. If we hung a picture from this artist’s series on our wall, who would deny that it is an artwork? Danto would have to. But then surely that is the worse for Danto’s concept of art. In order to negotiate this line of objection, Danto needs to tell us how beauty, narrowly conceived, fits into his philosophy of art in a way that either explains or explains away examples like the preceding one or, at least, renders their disenfranchisement tolerable. And that is the burden of his book The Abuse of Beauty. 2

On Why Beauty Has No Place in Danto’s Concept of Art

In order to comprehend Danto’s approach to the problem of beauty, one first needs to grasp his theory or definition of art. Central to that conception of art is a commitment to the view that beauty, understood narrowly, is not part of it. Danto reaches this conclusion through a philosophical argument that is buttressed by a certain confluence of historical narratives. The philosophical argument is quite simple. The first premise is nicely captured by the slogan: art is not something that the eye can descry. You cannot tell whether or not a candidate is an artwork simply by looking. Whatever property or properties are constitutive of art status, they are not manifest ones. This premise is ostensibly established by the consideration of artworks including Marcel Duchamp’s readymades (for example, his metal, canine, grooming comb), and Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box both of which are by this late date incontestably artworks while, at the same time, also being indiscernible from their real-world-non-artwork counterparts (ordinary steel combs, on the one hand, and Brillo packing cartons, on the other). Consequently, since there are genuine artworks, like these, that are indiscernible from their realworld-non-artwork counterparts, then discernible properties are not among the necessary or essentially defining properties of art. But beauty, narrowly conceived, is, if nothing else, a discernible property. That it tickles the relevant senses is in large measure what we intend by the concept of sheer beauty. Therefore, such beauty is not among the essentially defining properties of art – or, more simply, sheer beauty is not a necessary constituent of the concept of art. Stated in a nutshell, the argument goes like this:

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1.

If some property x is part of the concept of art (i.e., is a necessary or essentially defining feature of art), then it is a property that is, in principle, indiscernible (something that cannot be eyeballed, something that cannot be detected by the senses). 2. Beauty, narrowly construed, is, by definition, eminently discernible (it is what gives pleasure to the eyes and the ears). 3. Therefore, by modus tollens, beauty is not part of the concept of art. The first premise of this argument is bolstered by two art historical narratives. The first, pursued at length in Danto’s After the End of Art, is the story of the reflexive artworld aspiration, after the advent of photography, to define itself essentially from within the resources of art – to show forth, for example, by means of painting, what painting really is. This led to the attempted Modernist (à la Clement Greenberg) reduction of painting to the salient foregrounding of flatness followed by the Dada-inspired, Pop-Art riposte of indiscernibilia, like Warhol’s Brillo Box, and Roy Lichenstein’s cartoon panels. The latter artworks, and other pieces like them, while defeating the claim that a discernible property, like flatness, could define the painterly artwork, however, did not deliver a comparable definition of art, but instead, on Danto’s view, established that such a definition could not be developed in terms of discernible properties, thereby, in the process, disenfranchising beauty, that most discernible property, as a plausible defining property of art.6 Consequently, in appreciation of this scenario, Danto’s conception of art contains no mention of beauty. But there is also a second, in some respects converging, art historical narrative that Danto mobilizes against any consideration of beauty as an essential feature of art. It is the story of the avant-garde’s often politically motivated war against beauty – the avant-garde’s attempt to stamp out beauty – a dogged and intractable campaign, continuing into the present day by the progeny of the likes of Dada, Surrealism, and Fluxus, which campaign Danto calls the abuse of beauty. Stated briefly, this story begins in an artworld that for centuries – even millennia – regarded beauty as the outward sign of the good and the true and which for that reason, conceived of the role of art as the portrayal of a culture’s conception of the good and the true in the robes of beauty. Then the plot 6 In this way, Danto, like Plato and Hegel before him, disbars art from doing metaphysics on the grounds that its medium is bound to the senses such as vision – though, I hasten to add, that Danto’s metaphysics are different from those of his predecessors. For more analysis of Danto’s disenfranchisement of art, see Noël Carroll, “The End of Art?” History and Theory Theme Issue 37, Vol. 37, No. 4 (December, 1998), pp. 17–29.

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thickens. Artists, notably in the West, come to suspect deeply their culture’s conception of the good and the true due to the horrors in which these conceptions seem to be implicated – wars, like the First World War, the squalor of industrialization and urbanization, political oppression, economic exploitation, imperialism, and so on – you name it. In response, artists set out to kill the messenger – art (a.k.a. the beaux arts). This is the origin of what Danto calls “kalliphobia.”7 It explains the emergence of German Expressionism, with its pronounced figural distortions, and then Dada, and Fluxus, but also tendencies like Conceptual Art, which, in many cases, not only abjures any glimmering of beauty, but sensuous properties altogether. Of course, by the time that Dada, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art arrive on the scene, this story flows into the previous one. For in the passion to drive beauty from the republic of art, every discernible property is eschewed as a necessary feature of art. In an act of supreme renunciation, we might think of the intractable avant-garde as proclaiming that everything (every manifest property) must ultimately go. In some cases, even objecthood is disavowed in order to evade commodification. The consequence of this for the philosophy of art is that, since many bonafide practitioners have exiled from their artworks discernible properties like beauty, no comprehensive conception of art can rest upon discernible properties, including beauty, narrowly construed. That is, once again, the first premise of Danto’s argument is put in place by gleaning the moral of a historical narrative. But this second narrative – the abuse of beauty narrative – also provides us with another reason to divorce beauty from the concept of art: a great many artists, representing substantial art movements, have divorced it from the practice of art. Thus, if theory reconstructs practice, then beauty, narrowly construed, cannot be part of the concept of art sub species eternitas. And, of course, Danto’s characterization of art makes no explicit reference to any discernible property, most notably, for our purposes, no mention of beauty, narrowly conceived. As you may recall, according to Danto, x is a work of art only if 1) x is about something and 2) x is realized in a form or style appropriate to whatever it is about. Nevertheless, this leaves unexplained the perennial, seemingly intimate relation of beauty to art as well as unanswered the question of how we can in good philosophical conscience cashier works of sheer beauty, as imagined previously, from the order of art.

7 Arthur Danto, “Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art: Or Whatever Happened to Beauty?” in his Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005), pp. 321–332.

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3 Explaining (or Explaining Away) the Relevance of Beauty to Art Properly So-Called Nowadays Danto likes to refer to his conception of art as a matter of embodied meanings. Artworks have meanings – semantic or thematic content. That is, they are about something. And said meanings are presented, realized, expressed, or embodied in a form suitable or appropriate to them. What is the relevance of beauty to artworks? In short, beauty, narrowly construed, is one form of embodiment, one way of presenting whatever the artwork is about to an audience. Moreover, in some cases, this mode of presenting whatever the work is about may be appropriate – as in the case of a positive allegorical rendering of the virtue of charity which represents it as beauteous, perhaps even in the form of a lovely woman. In other instances, embodying a certain subject charmingly – for instance, visually prettifying what one actually intends to exemplify the horrors of war – can miss its mark. When beauty is relevant to art, it is because the beauty contributes to whatever the work is about. In this regard, beauty is important for art just so far as it is an aspect of artistic meaning, namely as a contribution to the embodiment of that meaning in a manner that is suitable or subservient to or facilitative of whatever the work is about. In this way, Danto is able to neatly fold sensuous beauty into his otherwise rigorously cognitive theory of art. Beauty, narrowly construed, is only one of the traditional aesthetic properties – properties, as Alexander Baumgarten would have it, of sensuous cognition – which Danto’s theory of art might initially appear to neglect. But his treatment of beauty, narrowly construed, indicates how he will handle the lot of them. Aesthetic properties, like heaviness, will be relevant to artworks just insofar as they promote the content of those artworks. The heaviness of the façade of the courthouse, for example, can be pertinent to the architectural artistry of the building in that it may help to convey the feeling of the gravity of the law. Aesthetic properties of this sort, of which beauty, narrowly construed is a primary example, are, in a way of speaking, part of the pragmatic address of the artwork – a rhetorical feature, if you will. Such properties may move the audience in a way consonant with the theme that the artwork aspires to transmit. The faith of martyrs is portrayed beautifully in order to make it attractive – in order to inspire emulation. This is why beauty is always on the side of the angels. Buddha is often embodied in supremely handsome figures so as to make viewers love his teachings. In other words, beauty – where it is pertinent to works of art qua art – has

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a rhetorical function within the work to perform, namely: to embody whatever the work is about or to express its meaning in a fashion that reinforces or forwards or is otherwise conducive to the assimilation or acceptance of the content of the artwork. The meaning that the work is supposed to advocate, where advocacy is what is in question, can be served by embodying it in a beautiful form – frequently, for example, in the outward form of a beautiful human body. By the way, Danto can tell a similar story about ugliness – as a response-­ dependent, sensuous property – in artworks. Where ugliness, so conceived, is relevant to the art in a piece, this is due to the contribution that the ugliness at issue makes to the meaning of the work. Satan is embodied in monstrous forms in order to make us shrink in revulsion from the evil ways he symbolizes. The statue of The Prince of the World at the Cathedral of St. Sebald in Nürnberg reveals the flesh on its backside to be in an advanced state of decay for the purpose of engendering in the faithful an aversion, rooted in an experience of disgust, to worldly things. Ugliness, like beauty, can function as a rhetorical lever8 and, thus, can count as a legitimate strategy for instantiating the embodiment clause of Danto’s definition of art. It is in this way that aesthetic properties like ugliness and beauty make ontological contact with nature of art as propounded by Danto. They are not part of the concept of art, but they are respectable, typically effective, and well-precedented ways of instancing the concept’s requirement of embodiment. Where beauty, narrowly construed, is in the service of the meaning or content of the artwork, Danto calls its internal beauty. Although internal beauty as such is not a defining feature of art, where it occurs, it can be a proper part of the artwork qua art because it can be one of the (many) ways of implementing the embodiment condition of the concept of art. Another way of putting this might be to say that when beauty conspires in the appropriate embodiment of the content of the artwork, then it is artistic beauty, since it is beauty that functions to satisfy one of the necessary conditions of art. This, of course, suggests that there can be beauty in an artwork that is not connected to the content or meaning of the work. Danto calls this external beauty and this is not a proper part of the artwork, even though it may be attached to it. Likewise, a piece of sheer eyecandy belongs to the category of external beauty – beauty on the outside with nothing (no meaning, no content) on the inside. Perhaps a golden shot glass 8 See, for example, Noël Carroll, “Ethnicity, Race, and Monstrosity: The Rhetorics of Horror and Humor,” in my Engaging the Moving Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 88–107.

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s­ tudded with glittering, eye-catching jewels, but with no purport whatsoever, is an example of external beauty as would be any other sort of mere mute decorative design. Danto’s notion of internal beauty provides art historians with an extremely useful heuristic for addressing aesthetic properties, like beauty, where they are functioning as internal properties of the artwork. Once the art historians ascertain the meaning of the work, their next order of business is to divine the way in which the beauty of the work contributes to its meaning. Why is the value of liberty, for example, embodied as a bare-breasted woman? Yet this heuristic may not only serve the purposes of the art historian, but also those of the art critic, as Danto has shown with his explications of the function of internal beauty in individual artworks, such as Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic, and in entire oeuvres, such as that of Robert Mapplethorpe. Danto’s heuristic with regard to internal beauty, moreover, is applicable to artforms other than painting, photography, and sculpture. Quite obviously the practice of text setting in music is an effort to match the commitments of hymns to sensuously beguiling sounds that encourage assent. And one can also find the employment of internal beauty in recent motion pictures. In the film Brokeback Mountain, the homosexual interludes between the two cowboys are most often set within cinematically pronounced contexts of stunning, natural landscapes. The horizon line is recurrently low and the screen fills-up with the bluest of breathtaking skies; the cloud formations, with their strong white volumes, are equally mesmerizing. Without a doubt, the director Ang Lee is emphasizing the beauty of the natural vistas in these scenes in order to mark thematically these moments in the cowboys’ lives as the most special, most pleasurable, most intense, most satisfying, and, yes, the most beautiful in their otherwise straitened experience. Internal beauty is the most important philosophical discovery of Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty. Not only is Danto’s heuristic a singular contribution to art history and to the criticism of the arts in general; the idea of internal beauty also answers the theoretical question of why beauty can be important to art genuinely so called. It is not because beauty, narrowly construed, is, as the phrase the beaux arts insinuates, a defining feature of art but because some beauty in the narrow sense – specifically internal beauty – is a tried-and-true, very humanly accessible way of appropriately embodying and/or rhetorically advancing that which the pertinent artwork is about. Internal beauty, that is, can be a proper instance of artistic embodiment, while not being the whole of it. Thus does the proposal of internal beauty dissolve the philosophical quandary of why it is that beauty historically has stood in and, in truth, still stands in such an intimate relation to the practice of art,

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while also not figuring as a necessary or essential condition of the concept of art. Furthermore, it is my hypothesis that by means of the notion of internal beauty, Danto hopes to fend off those critics of his theory who charge that it permits no room for beauty. His rejoinder is that, in fact, as just demonstrated, his philosophy of art has ample space for beauty, narrowly construed, so long as we are talking about internal beauty. Indeed, the link between Danto’s concept of art and internal beauty is quite a nice one – smooth and logically unforced. Moreover, I suspect that Danto thinks that as art historians, art lovers, and philosophers of art internal beauty is the only beauty that does and should concern us. It’s paintings like Raphael’s The Transfiguration that we care about, not pretty pinky rings. The beauty that is not internal beauty – the eye-candy simpliciter and the external beauty attached, but not intrinsically so, to artworks – no more deserves our attention than the swaths of pleasant wall paper at Home Depot. This line of rebuttal, supposing it to be Danto’s, of course, may not be so much a matter of explaining the relation of external beauty to the concept of art as it is an attempt at explaining its apparent relevance away. But if it is Danto’s intention, as I have just interpreted it, to explain away the possibility that works of sheer beauty can be artworks, I do not think that he will be ultimately successful. On the one hand, this approach will not square with ordinary usage. Few will deny that a pretty pastel, abstract design is a work of art, even if it is only a trivial one. Nor at this late date in the evolution of secular hedonism can Danto deny that piece such as this might be nothing more than an altogether mute pleasure machine. That is, he won’t be able to talk his way out of cases like this. Moreover, shifting artforms, does Danto really intend to dispute the fact that the impressive numbers of pleasing orchestral tunes – sans titles, texts, and/or programs – are works of art? In addition, even art historians, art lovers, and philosophers of art should be wary of quarantining experimentation in the production of sheer beauty – call it external beauty, if you want – from the practice of art, since the innovation and discovery of what provokes sensuous pleasure, notably the beauties of sight and sound, promise to inaugurate fresh strategies for artistic embodiment. Surely the continuous interrogation by artists of beauty is scarcely a dispensable part of the process we identify as the practice of art. Thus, I do not think that Danto has conclusively defeated the problem of artworks without meaning which was introduced in the first section of this essay. A leading possibility in this regard, as indicated, involves putative artworks of

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surpassing beauty in the narrow sense. By introducing the notion of internal beauty, Danto has substantially decimated the range of counterexamples to his theory which hail from the direction of the beautiful. Nevertheless, he has not, to my mind, demonstrated that an artist might successfully create a work solely intended to bring pleasure to the senses by means of abstract sights and/or sounds which the rest of us would of necessity have to refuse on conceptual grounds to countenance as an artwork. However, rather than ending this section on a dour note, let me propose a friendly amendment to Danto’s theory of the concept of art. Let us emend Danto’s aboutness condition to read: x is an artwork only if it possesses a point or a purpose. Of course, the point or purpose of the work might be to impart some meaning or to expound some theme or to advance some content. But it also might be merely to deliver an absorbing and pleasureable experience through the manipulation of sights and/or sounds. Or, the point might be to elicit some other kind of experience sans meaning. The purpose of certain flicker films in the nineteen-sixties, for example, was to cause afterimages in the viewer in order to alert them to neglected aspects of our perceptual apparatus. On this reformulation, x is a work of art only if 1) x has a point or purpose 2) which it presents, embodies, realizes, or implements in an appropriate form, manner, or style. This version of the theory saves the adherents of a Dantoesque persuasion from counterexamples that might well up from the realm of art beneath meaning. Danto, of course, might reject this proposal, possibly on the grounds that the characterization of art just submitted is not sufficient to distinguish art from many other things, including most functional tools. Doesn’t a hammer have a purpose and isn’t the form of the hammer with its weighted head appropriate to the purpose of driving nails? Fair enough. But Danto’s own version of the theory is comprised of only two necessary conditions that do not add up to sufficiency either. Thus, both Danto’s official view and our suggested reformulation need more teeth. Something needs to be added. A suggestion: Might not that something have to do with the atmosphere of theory and of the histories of art that Danto taught us about in his first essay in the philosophy of art – “The Artworld?”9

9 Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” reprinted in The Philosophy of Art, edited by Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995), pp. 201–223.

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Arthur Danto’s Concept of Art and Beauty in a Broader Sense

Thus far, this essay has examined the relation between Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art and beauty, narrowly conceived. By beauty, narrowly conceived, I have been thinking of beauty as a response-dependent property of sights and sounds that give rise to pleasure. This is a notion introduced but then abandoned by Socrates in the Hippias Major, although later endorsed by the ­Stoics.10 This is version of beauty that I think Danto has foremost in mind in his discussion of beauty – especially internal beauty – in his treatise The Abuse of Beauty. It is also the construal of beauty that I myself prefer because it is the most simple and least ambiguous one available. However, it is undoubtedly not the only conception of beauty on offer. For, as remarked earlier, sometimes the notion of beauty is run together with ideas of the fine, the excellent, the good, and even the true. Now is not the time to attempt to catalogue all of the broader senses of beauty which are still in play, since even if I had the erudition (which I do not), I do not have the space. Nevertheless, I would like to call attention to at least one of the broader notions of beauty, since by its lights Danto’s concept of art is not in principle in any way remote from beauty but, ironically, is but another instance of the equation art and beauty, that is, in a sense of beauty broader than that encountered so far. As I have already repeated more than once, Danto’s theory of art is that x is an artwork only if 1) x has content and 2) x presents this content in an appropriate form. However, this characterization is also historically a characterization of beauty in one of its broader senses. Danto freely and evenly proudly admits that the origin of his account of the concept of art derives from the philosophy of Hegel.11 But Hegel, in turn, acknowledges that he got the idea from Hirt’s consideration of the beautiful in several arts. The formula for art that Hegel appears to proffer (and which Danto expropriates) – namely, that art has a content presented in an appropriate manner – is precisely a theory of beautiful art. For Hirt, the beautiful is the perfect and the perfect is “that which is adequate to its aim, that which nature or art aimed at producing within the given genus or species.”12 Adequation or appropriateness here is a case of beauty in the broader sense. Thus, the theory of art 10 11 12

See Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics (The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nihoff, 1980), p. 122. See G.W,F, Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin, 1993), Chapter Two, Section XXXI, p. 20. Ibid.

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from which Danto allegedly takes his marching orders, when traced back to its ­origin in Hirt, could be parsed as: art equals beautifully portrayed content.13 Nor did the pertinent understanding of beauty originate in Hirt. It is a very ancient idea. It appears in Vitruvius’s De Architectura as what has been called décor theory, or, more formally, the “rational theory of appropriateness,” (where the Latin décor is a translation of the Greek to prepon).14 As expounded by Vitruvius, the leading idea of the décor theory is that the form of a beautiful work of architecture should be appropriate to its meaning. With respect to columns, since the Doric order is the most austere, it is to be used in temples to martial divinities like Mars, Minerva, and Hercules, while the Corinthian order, being more ornate, is most suitable for floral gods and demi-gods like Venus, Flora, and the Nymphs.15 Moreover, Vitruvius’s theory here may have been inherited from Theophrastus’s On Style which, in turn, got it from Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Indeed, to refer to the Hippias Major once again, the idea that kalon is “the appropriate” is an notion that Socrates introduces only to reject it. Where beauty in this particular broader sense is a matter of the adequation of form to content, it is conceivable that something that is not beautiful or even ugly, narrowly construed – that is, something that is displeasing to sight or hearing – could, nevertheless, be beautiful in this second sense. This is how we get the idea of a beautiful picture of a hideous thing. The statue The Prince of the World is a case in point. Though literally revolting it is a suitable (a.k.a. beautiful in the larger sense) presentation of its animating idea or meaning. Thus, anything that counts as a work of art in terms of the theory of the concept of art put forward by Danto thus far is also, in terms of this broader understanding of beauty, also beautiful. But, in that case, there is not, as Danto assumes, any real distance between the concept of art and the domain of beauty and, therefore, no reason to ponder their subtle connects and disconnects. Undoubtedly, Danto will want to reject this conclusion by hewing closely to what I call beauty, narrowly construed. I think that is the right way to go in philosophical discussions of beauty in general and I would also agree that it is the narrow view of beauty that seems generally implicit in Danto’s discussion. 13

14 15

In my essay “Beauty and the Genealogy of Art Theory,” I argued that a certain conception of beauty, as derived from Kant especially, shaped the trajectory of much subsequent art theory. As indicated above, I now think that it may be the case that Hegelian versions of art theory are also indelibly marked by a background of traditional conceptions of beauty, albeit a different conception than the Kantian theory of free beauty. See my “Beauty and the Genealogy of Art Theory,” in my Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 20–40. J.J. Pollitt, pp. 68–69. Ibid.

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Nevertheless, the fact that his concept of art emerges historically in the context of a discussion that moves so freely between beauty and art suggests that he might revisit his sources in order to disentangle his commitments from theirs, and to articulate the differences in this vicinity with greater analytic clarity than he has so far.

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Arthur Danto, His Philosophy of Art and Critical Practice 1

Essentialism without Critical Value Judgments

In response to the observation that, like so many previous philosophies of art, his is also essentialist, Arthur Danto countered that his theory was not covert art criticism.1 In this regard, Danto was alluding to an objection, popularized by Morris Weitz, that challenged the best known theories of art in the European tradition on the grounds that what were proffered as classificatory definitions of the essence of art were actually advocacy briefs gussied up as philosophy.2 For example, the property of significant form that Clive Bell taught generations of aesthetes to look for in paintings, according to Weitz, was not really the essence of art from time immemorial, but rather the value to be gotten from the sort of art that Bell loved – specifically Neo-Impressionism.3 Although Weitz thought that alleged essentialist theories like Bell’s could be “de-mythologized” as exemplary criticism, Weitz also believed that philosophies of art framed in an essentialist idiom are always misguided; in the name of the essence of art, they unavoidably and erroneously sponsor one kind of art over the others. Thus, in denying that his theory of art is covert art criticism, Danto means to be defending his conception of art by distinguishing his brand of essentialist theorizing from that of predecessors like Bell, Tolstoy, Collingwood, and so forth. That is, insofar as Weitz’s diagnosis has been endorsed by many as a decisive objection to any essentialist theory of art, Danto is at pains to establish that it does not touch his. On Weitz’s view, which Danto appears to accept to in large measure, it is easy for one to mistake something like Bell’s putative definition of art as philosophical, but once subjected to conceptual scrutiny, it reveals itself to be nothing more than a specimen of art criticism, indeed, a partisan sort to boot. That which Bell advanced as the essence of art was nothing but a projection of the 1 Arthur Danto, “Responses and Replies,” in Danto and His Critics, edited by Mark Rollins (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), p. 206. 2 Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,” Vol. 15, no. 1 (1956), pp. 27–35. 3 Clive Bell, Art (Capricorn Books, 1950). © Noël Carroll, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004468368_010 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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property that Bell esteemed in the type of art he championed – to ­wit: significant form. Bell then went on to generalize his preference for this ­feature of Neo-Impressionism as the quiddity of all art, properly so-called. What posed as philosophy was, in fact, merely evaluative art criticism. In his own defense, Danto declares that his philosophy of art is not reducible to art criticism, despite its essentialism, and, therefore, his concept of art is immune to Weitz’s objection that any such theory of art is simply nothing but art criticism. By his example, Bell set the agenda for subsequent philosophies of art. On the one hand, given his charge that absent an essentialist account of art, we “gibber” when we speak of art, his successors took the production of a definition of art as their primary charge; while, on the other hand, like Bell, they were predisposed toward confusing their preferences for certain kinds or styles of art as exemplifying the hallmark of art universally. In this way, to their discredit, generations of so-called philosophers of art blurred the distinction between philosophy – with its commitments to essentialism – and criticism. Such philosophers discovered, conveniently enough, that only the variety of art that appealed to them was genuine. This, moreover, followed from the would-be philosopher’s definition of art, although this way of proceeding, of course, suffers the logical liability of begging the question. For, the definition of art the philosopher was forwarding presupposed and was weighed in favor of the kind of art and its attendant properties that the author on the docket applauded, while being biased against the kind of art he or she disvalued. Consequently, when Arthur Danto denies that his theory of art, though essentialist, is covert criticism, he, Danto, is maintaining that his theory is not guilty of the recurring error – notably that of circularity – which beset previous essentialist philosophies of art. That is, Danto stresses the conceptual independence of his philosophy from criticism, because he senses that a leading, albeit debunking, line of objection to essentialist theories of art is that said theories are covert criticism. Danto concedes that his theory of art is essentialist, but he hastens to argue that it does not have this disreputable feature – it is not criticism in mufti. For, Danto asserts that no particular value judgment follows from his philosophy in the manner that such judgments would appear to follow from Bell’s theory whose position appears to ordain that only paintings possessing significant form are genuine art while also, for that very reason, good. By art criticism, I surmise that Danto has in mind the issuing of specific evaluative judgments and he maintains that no such value judgments follow from his philosophy of art. Art criticism, in this sense, appears to be independent from his philosophy of art. However, I think that, as Danto himself would

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admit,4 a certain approach to art criticism is implied or, at least very strongly suggested, by his philosophy of art. In other words, even if Danto’s conception of art does not straightforwardly lead to critical value judgments, it does enjoin a critical methodology.5 That is, it is scarcely the case that Danto’s critical practice and his philosophy of art are unconnected. 2

Danto’s Definition of Art and His Critical Practice

Danto’s theory of art does not provide us with a general premise that when applied to a particular artwork yields a value judgment – a thumbs up or thumbs down in case after case. Nevertheless, Danto’s conception of art is not altogether divorced from art criticism, since it dictates a very constant and predictable critical procedure. As Danto proudly grants, his theory of art follows Hegel’s. For Hegel, something is a work of fine art only if it 1) possesses content, 2) presented in a certain manner, 3) where the manner perspicuously serves the presentation of the content.6 Likewise, for Danto, a candidate is a work of art only if 1) it is about something, 2) that is conveyed by a mode of presentation 3) that is appropriate to whatever it is about.7 On Danto’s view, artworks have meaning (aboutness) and that meaning is embodied (or is intended to be embodied) in a form that is fitting to it. Thus, Danto speaks of artworks as embodied meanings – meanings conveyed by suitable forms (forms, that is, in the sense that we refer to the human body as “the human form”).8 This definition, furthermore, appears to be functionalist as well as essentialist, since it seems the role of art is to transmit embodied meanings.

4 See for example, Arthur Danto, “Introduction:: Art Criticism After the End of Art,” and “The Fly in the Bottle: The Explanation and Critical Judgment of Works of Art,” in Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the gap Between Art and Life, (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2005). 5 The question of whether or not Danto’s philosophy of art circuitously invites certain value judgments will be addressed in the penultimate section of this essay. 6 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, translated by F.P.B. Osmaston (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1975), Vol. I, p. 22. 7 This definition of art and its relation to Hegel’s is repeated several times in Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997). I comment on this proposal in Noël Carroll, “Danto’s New Definition of Art and the Problem of Art Theories,” in The British Journal of Aesthetics 37 (October, 1997), pp. 386–392. 8 Indeed, one of Danto’s collections of criticism is entitled “embodied meanings.” See Arthur Danto, Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Girous, 1994).

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Danto’s definition of art, then, pretty clearly recommends a certain critical practice – that the critic tell his audience what the work is about and then demonstrate how the design of the work manages to articulate the meaning of the work in a suitable manner. Perhaps unsurprisingly this patent recurs throughout Danto’s own art criticism. For example, in his discussion of Renee Cox’s Yo Mama’s Last Supper – which shows a naked woman at a dinner party – Danto proposes that the work is about Christ; it is the Last Supper according to Renee Cox (whose sobriquet is “Yo Mama”).9 Moreover, the photograph, through its design, perspicuously expresses a definite perspective on Christ. Putatively, its topic is Christ the persecuted, Christ as the martyr Jesus, both the savior of and the representative of the oppressed, the wretched, and the downtrodden. Renee Cox is able to articulate her take on Christ, according to Danto, by allusively replacing the traditional male figuration of Jesus with that of a nude woman, where, Danto points out, women and persons of color are paradigmatic victims of oppression. The mode of presentation here is akin to a metaphor. Just as Jacques-Louis David insinuates that the assassinated Marat perished in Christ-like sacrifice for the downtrodden by alluding visually to similar portrayals of the disposition of the body of the expiring Jesus – resulting in something like the message “Marat, Our Savior” – so Cox, as Danto explicates her photo, metaphorically identifies Jesus with what is unmistakably (since naked) a woman in order to underscore the Lord’s status as the epitome of suffering. In this way, Danto shows how Cox proposes a visual form for or embodiment of her idea about Christ which conveys it with elegance and clarity. Danto’s theory of art has three parts: 1) aboutness or content or meaning, and 2) an appropriate, 3) mode of presentation or embodiment (where a mode of presentation is appropriate if it articulates and/or reinforces and/or comments upon the creator’s perspective on the content of the work). In parallel fashion, at the heart of most of Danto’s critical endeavors, we find the following threestep procedure: 1) identify what the work is about, its meaning, 2) characterize its mode of presentation or embodiment (a.k.a. its style or form) in a way that 3) demonstrates that its form suitably subserves or is appropriate to whatever it is about. Danto’s conception of the nature of the work of art, in other words, directs what the art critic needs to tell us about particular artworks. On the face of it, no particular value judgment is mandated by Danto’s conception of the artwork. But his theory is not utterly separated from art 9 Arthur Danto, “Renee Cox: Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” in Unnatural Wonders, p. 106.

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criticism, since it, in effect, sets the agenda for what the art critic, qua art critic, owes his or her audience – namely, an account of what the work is about, a characterization of its mode of presentation or embodiment, and an explanation of the manner in which the content and the form correspond. Although his richly ornamented essays may sometimes camouflage it, this is the regimen that Arthur Danto the art critic follows conscientiously. Nor should this be surprising, since he is taking his marching orders from the philosophical definition of art that he has propounded in the foot-steps of Hegel. Indeed, Danto maintains that this is exactly the procedure that Hegel himself, in his role as art critic, consistently practiced. Danto calls what he does interpretation, since it is involved in excavating the meanings in artworks. Since these meanings are embodied, the relevant artworks must be dissected in the course of being deciphered – that is, Danto must explain how the works at hand succeed in conveying whatever they are about. At the same time, Danto regards interpretation as the essence of what is called aesthetic experience. Thus, Danto’s criticism serves as an exemplar for his readership to emulate in their own pursuit of the aesthetic experience of artworks. Although aesthetic experience is often framed as non-cognitive – as, for instance, an experience of disinterested pleasure – Danto’s conception of it is boldly cognitive, a matter of finding an interpretation that fits the work. Non-cognitive conceptions of aesthetic experience and the kinds of criticism that are committed to facilitating this variety of aesthetic experience are implicitly, even when not explicitly, evaluative, since the affordance of disinterested pleasure is prima facie typically worthy of commendation. Danto’s art criticism, on the other hand, presents critical interpretation as the prototype for aesthetic experience, where interpretation can be a rigorously cognitive affair, which, in turn, need not necessarily engender anything resembling pleasure. Danto’s version of aesthetic experience and the criticism that models it, therefore, are not as obviously linked to evaluation as are the non-cognitive varieties. So, we see that, although Danto’s critical practice is bound up with his conception of art and the aesthetic experience thereof, his views on these matters do not appear to commit him to issuing – as deductions from his philosophical system – value judgments with respect to specific artworks. Thus, Danto’s theory of art does not seem liable to the Weitzian, anti-essentialist objection that it is covert art criticism, despite the fact that it proposes an essentialist definition of art which very clearly influences the itinerary of Danto’s own critical essays.

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Danto’s Philosophy of Art History and His Critical Practice

Just as Danto’s ontology of the artwork – his definition of art – shapes his art criticism, so too is his philosophy of art history – with its notorious hypothesis concerning the end of art – also intimately connected to his critical practice. For, if art history has ceased to be a going concern, in the way that Danto alleges, then a new kind of art criticism is in order, specifically the kind of pluralism that Danto advocates. According to Danto, art history has ended. What Danto means by this provocative conjecture is that the evolution of art toward a specific goal is over. The goal in question was the self-definition of art by means of art. On ­Danto’s account, that reflexive project of self-definition – as embraced by painters painting – has been taken just far as it can go. The dream that art could disclose its own nature is no longer sustainable. Art history, conceived as race to some ontological finish line, is over.10 Artists, notably Andy Warhol, have supposedly gotten the question of “What is art?” into its proper philosophical form by compelling the aesthetician to explain how indiscernible Brillo cartons – those by Warhol and those by Proctor and Gamble – can resemble each other perceptually in every respect, while only Warhol’s count as art. The painter or sculptor can, through their works, provoke such a challenge, Danto agrees, but the answer would require philosophical analysis and disputation of the sort that putatively is not within the reach of artists employing solely the resources of fine art. Perhaps a less contentious way of getting at Danto’s point is to say that what critics, notably Clement Greenberg, called Modernism is no longer the driving force in the artworld. According to Greenberg, and those he influenced, the trajectory of serious modern art after the emergence of photography was a concerted effort by artists to discover the essence of art by composing canvases that would saliently exhibit – by way of exemplification – the property or properties that defined their status as artworks. Greenberg thought that among the most pertinent properties were the literal shape of the support and the flatness or two-dimensionality with regard to painting. Thus, he recounted the evolution of modern art as importantly a succession of endeavors to acknowledge features like the flatness of painting to better and better effect. 10

Danto first presents the end of art thesis in Arthur Danto, “The End of Art,” The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 81–115. I discuss the thesis critically in Noël Carroll, “The End of Art?” in History and Theory, theme issue 37 (1998), pp. 17–39.

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Manet flouted perspective. The Cubists contracted the picture plane further. Pollock reduced it to line and color. Rothko dissolved it into pure hue. And then Louis soaked his canvasses in paint until the picture plane and its color became as one. Modernist art, according to Greenberg, was the march upward to the surface of the painting. The history of Modernist art was one of progressive development and its progress could virtually be measured as, among other things, paintings got more and more flat. Flatness was taken to be an essential feature of the pertinent fine art – that which differentiated paintings as artworks from mere real things. This view of the nature of art, in addition, gave critics a way of evaluating artworks and even ranking them. Since it was assumed that the ambition of art after the advent of photography was self-definition, and that one of the essential or defining characteristics of fine art is flatness, then paintings that acknowledge such supposedly ontological facts are, prima facie, praiseworthy. The job of the critic in this context is to locate the work under review along the timeline of this progressively soaring arc, applauding the paintings that advance the acknowledgment of their nature more efficaciously than their predecessors, while chiding those works – such as Dali’s Surrealist landscapes – that wallow in the “illusionism” of, among other things, deep space. This story, however, does not have a happy ending. The primacy of flatness as that which differentiates painted artworks from real things was assaulted from within the precincts of the artworld by painters like Jasper Johns who in painting flat things like targets, numbers, and flags that illustrated that there was no necessary boundary between painterly artworks and real things in terms of flatness. For, one could pledge fealty to one of those flags by Johns with no loss of allegiance, since even though his flag might be flat, it was a functional flag-emblem too. What Johns and other Pop artists thereby demonstrated was that whatever differentiated painterly artworks from real things was not a discernible property like flatness, but something indiscernible whose secret remained for the philosopher to articulate with words and concepts. If fine art was defined by a discernible property like flatness, painters could have shown that saliently. But indiscernible properties, one supposes, elude the painter’s medium, almost by definition. Thus, did Modernism come to a halt, to be superseded by Pop, Minimalism, Postmodernism, and so on. It is this juncture that Danto has identified as the end of art history – the end of the history of art as the progressive story of art’s self-definition. Under the Modernist dispensation, ambitious art had a single purpose and could be evaluated in light of how well it achieved that aim. But once that aspiration was revealed to be chimerical, then artists were free to

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pursue their own purposes, including political advocacy and institutional critique. Since it was no longer feasible to imagine that every artwork was competing on the same racetrack, each artist was thenceforth free to chart her own direction. The Modernist art critic is monistic with respect to the end or goal of art. However, art after the collapse of Modernism, the practice of sophisticated art becomes pluralistic and, therefore, calls upon the talents of a very different kind of art critic than Greenberg and his followers. For, after Modernism, there is not but a single task – such as self-definition – driving artists onward, but many, including incommensurable ones. Art history can no longer be thought of as progressing toward a single target (if it ever could have been persuasively thought of that way). Rather, in the wake of Modernism, artists invent their own targets and then take aim. The critic does not survey this activity from a fixed vantage point, but needs to find a different, revealing angle of view for each artist, one at a time. Danto calls the end of Modernism the end of art – the end of art history construed as the progressive evolution toward a single goal. Art after Modernism is post-historical in the sense that artworks can no longer be interpreted and evaluated with respect to a unified, ongoing, overarching developmental narrative in the way that Greenberg plotted modern art. There is no longer one big story of art, but rather lots of co-existing short stories. And for each artist, the post-historical critic needs to spin a unique chronicle. Perhaps needless to say, Arthur Danto is the archetypal pluralistic critic. Whereas the Modernist critic is an essentialist proscribing how a painted artwork must look, Danto’s definition of art allows that artworks can look like anything, including mere real things. Likewise, by way of his end of art thesis, Danto eschews the notion that art has any preordained telos, like self-definition, that blossoms gradually with the forward passage of time. Just as Modernism assigned art a destiny, so too it charged the art critic with a very specific brief: to witness the entelechy of art flower over time and to declare which works were “on the side of history” and which were not. But if that alleged history has come to an end, then the role of the art critic must change as well. From being a teller of The History of Art, the critic must become a teller of many tales. The kind of criticism that Greenberg popularized influenced many of the most important critics who followed him, including Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Craig Owens, Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, and others who, while deviating from many of the details of Greenberg’s artistic pantheon and the taste that informed it, nevertheless conceived of their task as Greenberg did in terms of fitting emerging work in the present into the march of art-historical time.

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David Carrier has called this kind of art criticism “philosophical.”11 It endeavors to tell, oxymoronically enough, the history of the present – to show how each new work in the here and now is contributing to The Evolving History of Art, howsoever that is conceived. But by declaring the end of art, Danto strategically jettisons the burden of philosophical art criticism. For if there is no longer an ongoing, singular history to recount, then there is no pressure to fit new work into its postulated pattern. New works can be interrogated on their own terms which not only can be but are now in the post-historical present plural. Thus, Danto’s philosophy of art history which declares art to be at an end and which liberates art to experiment in every direction consequently also paves the way for a new type of art criticism. Danto’s philosophy of art history, in other words, dialectically clears the path for the kind of art criticism that Danto believes is apposite for the contemporary, pluralistic, post-historical artworld.12 There may be philosophical reasons to be suspicious of Danto’s declaration that art has ended in the sense that he intends that slogan. Nevertheless, it is hard to gainsay the polemical service of that hypothesis in rhetorically undermining the dominant style of “philosophical art criticism” while, at the same time, carving out a conceptual space from which to launch a new species of pluralistic art criticism – a practice of artwriting that does not try to transform the so-called story of art into an evaluative grid. That is, the end-of-art thesis, while not entailing specific value judgments in the way in which practices Greenbergian formalism does, nevertheless serves Danto’s critical purposes by contesting the guiding assumptions of philosophical art criticism in a way that makes pluralism a compelling alternative. 4

Art Criticism without Evaluation?

As we have seen, in contrast to someone like Greenberg, neither Danto’s definition of art nor his philosophy of art history appears to imply specific value judgments. A particular artwork is not pronounced to be good in virtue of ­falling into step with the parade of teleologically driven, art history, nor if it satisfies some essential definitional requirement of looking a certain way – for 11 12

David Carrier, Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism (Westport, Ct.: Praeger, 2002). This theme is pursued at greater length in Noël Carroll, “Danto, the End of Art, and the Orientational Narrative,” in Arthur Danto: The Library of Living Philosophers (LaSalle, ­Illinois: Open Court Publishers, forthcoming).

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example, by being an imitation of the beautiful, or possessing expressive properties, manifesting significant form, or being self-acknowledgingly flat (or flatter). Perhaps because of this, Danto seems to believe that his primary task as a critic is to educate his readership about art, presumably by telling them what particular artworks are about, and the way in which they embody or articulate whatever they are about. “What else might a critic do?”, you might ask. One answer is: issue value judgments. However, Danto wants to disown that role. In fact, at one point, Danto goes so far as to suggest that it is fundamentally the business of the galleries and the museums to evaluate individual works, which they do by presenting them to the public. Then Danto, the critic steps in and explains how the works so exhibited work – that is, how they embody their meanings. But does this view of the division of labor in the artworld really follow from Danto’s philosophy of art? Does Danto actually abide by this Dragnet/Sgt. Friday-ish – “just the facts, ma’am” – approach to criticism? And, even if he did, is it theoretically plausible to think that art criticism is primarily a matter of explaining the operation and meaning of visual forms, sans any pressure to evaluate. Let us address these three questions in what follows. First, does Danto really eschew evaluation? No, as is perhaps predictable, Danto, like everyone else, can’t resist offering evaluations – for example, he hails David Hockney’s My Parents as “among the masterpieces of the ­century.”13 Danto may evaluate less than Robert Hughes, or Michael Kimmelman, or Hilton Kramer, or Peter Schjeldahl. But he evaluates. Perhaps because he had a long career as a teacher whose expertise or job description was explaining things, his forte does seem to be interpretation. Nevertheless, he does make value judgments. Furthermore, where the value judgments are negative, that the judgments are his cannot be disputed by claiming they were made by representatives of artworld- institutions like galleries and museums. For, except in cases of exhibitions of decadent art, the curators of such institutions rarely hang work with the intention of signaling its badness. Nor does Danto’s theory of art enjoin a moratorium on value judgments. In fact, it authorizes them, or, at least, value judgments of a certain kind. Recall that Danto’s theory requires that something is an artwork only if it is about something and only if it is presented in a form of embodiment that is appropriate. This then assigns certain discursive responsibilities to art critics. These 13

Quoted by Cynthia Freeland in her talk “Danto and Art Criticism” which was delivered an the annual meetings of the American Society for Aesthetics in Milwaukee in the fall of 2006. Freeland’s essay and mine, though developed independently, converge on a number of points.

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include not only the obligation to say what the work means or is about, and the requirement to characterize its form of embodiment, but also to establish that the mode of presentation of the work is appropriate to its content. But note that appropriateness is a normative concept. If the relation between the form of embodiment of the work and its subject is appropriate, then that is – at least, prima facie – artistically good to the extent that the design is appropriate. By acknowledging that the goodness here is prima facie, I, needless to say, agree that this presumption may be over-ridden or outweighed, for instance, if the content and/or the mode of embodiment, or both are hackneyed. Nevertheless, in the standard case, when demonstrating that the artist has discovered a mode of embodiment that is appropriate to her content, Danto is issuing an implicit, positive value judgment, most especially in those cases where no qualifications are introduced. An implicit value judgment is built into the kind of criticism that flows from Danto’s essentially functional definition of art, since finding the embodiment of what the work is about to be appropriate to its content, without circumspection, is a de facto recommendation of the goodness of the work to the degree that the embodiment is fitting or appropriate. That Danto does not always grade the works in question may be a personal stylistic quirk or perhaps it is a strategy for keeping within his word count. After all, when one writes journalism, even haute journalism, something’s gotta’ give. So, Danto does evaluate and the evaluation is even linked to his philosophy of art. Earlier, I said that Danto’s philosophy appears unconnected to rendering particular value judgments. But that is only how matters appear. Since something is an artwork only if it succeeds in conveying its content through an appropriate mode of presentation and since appropriateness is a normative concept, when the critic, such as Danto, demonstrates that the candidate at hand instantiates the properties that garner it art status, said critic at the same time indicates that the work is good, at least ostensibly, to the degree that the embodiment is appropriate. Yet, though Danto does evaluate, he does not usually rank.14 He points out what is good in artist x and artist y, however, he does not typically say that x is better than y, or vice-versa. And, furthermore, this reticence about ranking does seem connected to his philosophy of art, since in accordance with his philosophy of art, the critic says why this embodiment in this case is appropriate. The critic Danto does not appeal to any general standard of appropriateness because his philosophy of art offers no general formula for appropriateness. It 14

Or if he ranks, then, again like Hegel, it is generally in virtue of cultural import.

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must be determined on a case by case basis. In this regard, what the critic is doing is explaining why each of the pertinent works of art is good in its own way.15 (This, of course, is just further way of limning what it means to be a post-historical pluralist). I think that Danto would agree with this. Isn’t it the moral of his story about why it would never occur to him to compare works by Brice Marden and Joan Mitchell?16 A critic like Greenberg who has a limited criteria of goodness (and of authentic art status) like reflexively inflected flatness can rank every work in terms of the extent to which it accomplishes the acknowledgment of this property. Danto’s expectation of appropriateness is far more open ended, since there are an indefinitely large number of ways of being appropriate. Each artwork may be appropriate in its own way and the critic shows the worthiness of the piece by finding that particular way and elucidating it for others. Though this does not amount to ranking the work, it still functions implicitly as a critical recommendation concerning the value of the work. When Danto as critic protests that he is not usually issuing value judgments, I think he misrepresents his practice. He misconstrues his avoidance of ranking as evidence that he is not evaluating. But ranking is only one form of evaluating. There are other forms, such as saying what is good about a work on a case by case basis. And Danto, I submit, generally engages in this sort of valuing, if only most frequently implicitly, by unraveling the appropriateness of the mode of embodiment of his subjects to that which it embodies. Moreover, this kind of criticism is well precedented: it is an instance of the organic view of art which regards the parts of artworks, properly so-called, to be functionally integrated in the whole. Danto, following Hegel, has an organic theory of art which endorses an organic style of criticism, one in which in disclosing the form of embodiment of the work to be suitable to its meaning implicitly congratulates the achievement of the artist. In this approach, explication without qualification is prima facie evaluation. Danto does not to have to announce in each of his critical pieces that “I, Arthur Danto, hereby affirm that such-and-a work is good.” His readers – who embrace organicism as if by cultural osmosis – understand Danto to be speaking well of those works whose fitting correlation of form and meaning he reveals with insight and wit. Most organic critics probably come to their practice intuitively. They are not explicitly taught a doctrine which they then self-consciously apply. As a philosopher of art, however, Danto has worked out a theory of art that corresponds neatly with his organic/explicatory (or interpretive) procedure. And, at 15 16

See Danto, “The Fly in the Bottle,” p. 361. Ibid.

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the very least, implicit, positive, critical evaluations do emerge from the revelation of the unity of the work. Moreover, this is related to Danto’s philosophy of art which takes the function of art to be to display a certain content in an appropriate embodiment. Undoubtedly, Danto is onto something when, as we described in the opening section of this essay, he draws a distinction between his own essentialist philosophy of art and those of many of his predecessors. For, the criterion of appropriateness that he employs is surely much more open-ended than a criterion like flatness or even the expression of emotion. In many traditional, essentialist philosophies of art, individual evaluative judgments followed mechanically from the conceptualizations of art status that rested on discernible properties of a highly restricted sort. And, although Danto’s implicit evaluations are connected to his philosophy of art, said evaluations, insofar as they rest upon contextually situated interpretations, cannot be mechanically deduced from his theory. But this is best characterized by saying that Danto’s theory and practice are not programmatic rather than by denying they are either essentialist and evaluative. Even though Danto downplays evaluation in his practice, not only is it often in evidence, but it would seem to be inherent in the kind of philosophy of art Danto espouses in relation to the responsibilities such a theory naturally assigns to critics. But even if his philosophy of art did not commit the critic to evaluation, the question remains of whether Danto could reject evaluation by claiming, as he sometimes does, that it is not his job as a critic, but the business of the curators who organize the shows to anoint what is good. The critic simply interprets or explains what the artworld has antecedently elected. This strikes me as an utterly impracticable view of criticism for theoretical reasons. Suppose we agree with Danto that an art critic is first and foremost an interpreter. Even so, criticism cannot be sharply divorced from evaluation, since interpretation has to be selectively focused. Every element of an artwork is conceivably interpretable in multiple ways. Why do art critics, including Danto, focus their attention on the features of artworks that they do – such as the unity of its form of presentation and its meaning? Clearly, I submit that it is because such features as these are the ones that are relevant to the artistic quality of the work. The critic focuses upon these features because they are the features which are pertinent to artistic goodness. Evaluation, that is, sets the framework in which interpretation becomes possible. Ultimately, it is evaluation that determines the direction of interpretation. For this reason, the very thought that there might be artistic interpretation without evaluation – if only an implicit evaluation – is an unlikely one. Furthermore, the proposal that the evaluation could be delivered by a group

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other than those involved in the criticism, properly so-called, of the work is imponderable inasmuch as the evaluation of the work and its interpretation are best comprehended as integrated phases of the same process. 5 Summary In this essay, I have been preoccupied with examining Arthur Danto’s views about the relation of his philosophy of art (including his philosophy of art history) to his criticism, along with his related contention that he not really involved in evaluating artworks, but rather is committed almost exclusively to interpretation. Although I concede that there is something to the contrast that Danto draws between traditional, essentialist philosophies of art and his own version of essentialism, I have argued that the relation between Danto’s philosophy of art and his criticism is not as remote as he insists. His art criticism and his philosophy are made for each other. Likewise, I worry that Danto’s apparent disavowal of evaluation in favor of interpretation is exaggerated. Danto, the critic, is consistently, if only usually implicitly, immersed in evaluation, indeed, and ironically, in virtue of the very type of organic theory of art that he defends. Broadly speaking, this essay has concentrated upon reviewing what might be called Danto’s meta-criticism of his own critical practice. In this regard, I have had the temerity to question Danto’s own view of his art criticism. This, of course, should not be misunderstood in any way as a dismissal of that criticism which I, for one, appreciate as the best criticism on art on offer in the contemporary artworld. Certainly, one can excel as a critic, even if one’s theory of one’s own criticism is less compelling. In my opinion, Arthur Danto is the greatest art critic of our moment. Nevertheless, some of his explicit meta-critical remarks about his practice appear to mischaracterize what he is actually up to. And what makes the situation even more piquant is that a more accurate portrayal of Danto’s critical practice is available, contra Danto, by taking a closer look at the relation between his philosophy of art and his art criticism than he, Danto, advises (perhaps because of his undue anxiety in response to Weitz’s objections to essentialist theories of art).

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Chapter 10

Arthur Danto and the Political Re-Enfranchisement of Art 1 Introduction A recurring theme of Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art is that of the philosophical disenfranchisement of art.1 This is Danto’s version of the Ancient ­Quarrel between poetry and philosophy. In terms of cultural politics, philosophers – since Socrates met Ion – have attempted to demote the authority of poets (and, by extension, artists in general). Philosophers have sought to achieve this through a number of strategies – from the denial that art can provide knowledge to the idea that art is detached from the practical – including the political – life of the culture at large. Danto’s own end-of-art thesis may be the most recent variation on this motif. However, even if Danto’s philosophy of art history contributes to the philosophical disenfranchisement of art, Danto’s philosophy of art can be interpreted as a way of re-enfranchising art politically. 2

Disenfranchising Art

By the time Plato recorded the adventures of Socrates, the rivalry between poetry and philosophy was spoken of as “ancient.” The crux of the matter was this: Homer was said to be the educator of the Greeks, but Plato thought a more suitable candidate for the job was his own teacher, Socrates. Thus, Plato waged full-scale war against the poets, culminating with the recommendation that they be banished from his Republic as Socrates had been banished from Athens (in part due to the way in which he was represented by poets like Aristophanes). Danto calls Plato’s revenge-quest the “philosophical disenfranchisement of art.” It began in ancient Greece and it has continued in various ways into our own time. Moreover, with the philosophical disenfranchisement of art comes 1 This theme begins in his “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art” and threads its way through his writings thenceforth. See Arthur Danto, “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,” in his Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). © Noël Carroll, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004468368_011 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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political disenfranchisement and this in two ways: 1) art is disenfranchised as a serious player in the realm of cultural politics in general, and 2) in the realm of politics proper, art is denied its voice. Just as Plato rejected the idea that the sophists were fit to be the educators of the Greeks, so too did he distrust the poets and artists. In his first skirmish with the poets, Plato uses the rhapsode Ion – the singer of the Iliad and the Odyssey – to stalk Homer. Socrates repeatedly stresses that rhapsodes and, by extension, poets don’t know anything. And if they don’t know anything, then they clearly have nothing to teach. Thus the Greeks should look elsewhere for their tutors. And it is hard to resist the surmise that Plato is implicitly recommending that they look towards those who specialize in the love of knowledge, a.k.a. the philosophers. In his Republic, Plato’s arguments heat up. The artists cannot offer the Greeks knowledge, because, since what they describe or depict by way of imitations are particulars; they are at a third remove from genuine knowledge – i.e., knowledge of the Forms. This disenfranchises the artists philosophically in the sense that artists are said to lack access to the font of philosophical knowledge, the Platonic Ideas. But, as Danto argues, it also denies that art has political efficacy. Danto writes: It has been insufficiently appreciated how political the theory [of art as imitation] is, for it has the effect, if credited, of paralyzing the artist: if audiences appreciate that art is illusion, sufficiently like it to be mistaken for it but situated outside reality, so that it could have neither the causes nor the effects of reality – an idle epiphenomenon – then art is metaphysically ephemeralized. It can tell us nothing we do not already know, and the artist is reduced to a mere simulator, with knowledge of nothing save how to imitate. So he cannot have the authority of someone who works in reality – like a carpenter, or a navigator or a doctor – or who understands how to know reality, like the philosopher, rather than, as a mirror, someone who knows only how to render appearances. Mimesis was, then, less a theory of art than a philosophical aggression against art (one which, by the way, makes Aristophanes impossible), vaporizing art by situating it in a plane where it can do no harm because of how dangerous it was when not in that plane and interacting effectively with political reality. How deeply this theory of ephemerality has been internalized by artists themselves is testified by Auden’s thought that “poetry makes nothing happen.”2 2 Arthur Danto, “Dangerous Art,” Beyond the Brillo Box: Visual Art in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1992). p. 185. Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Here we see that Danto suspects that Plato not only disenfranchised art philosophically, but also, in effect, attempted to strip it of instrumentality altogether by consigning it to a world elsewhere – or, perhaps more accurately, to a world nowhere. Art was thus theoretically stigmatized as inconsequential. Moreover, this separation of art from the world of practical affairs (including political affairs) widened exponentially with the development of the aesthetic theory of art. The foundation for the aesthetic theory of art was laid in the eighteenth century, when the notion of disinterested pleasure was mobilized to characterize the experience of beauty. Beauty, it was said, was a sensation of delight untainted by interest. This notion figured prominently in Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment. Furthermore, insofar as it was commonplace to associate art proper with beauty – as in the phrase the beaux arts – it was but a short step from correlating beauty with disinterested pleasure to characterizing art works as artifacts designed or intended to afford experiences of disinterested pleasure. Such a conception of art, of course, disenfranchised art politically, since politics is a sphere where interests compete. Political art would be, by definition, art that is committed to the advancement of certain interests. But then political art is not really art by the lights of the aesthetic theory of art; for political art stirs up interested pleasure. The pleasure provoked by a national anthem, for example, is mixed up with the pleasure of pride one feels for her country. That is, the music is designed to reinforce a very interested pleasure. So-called political art, it turns out, according to the aesthetic theory of art, is not actually art at all, but pseudo-art, something art-like, but alloyed with the arousal of interest. Authentic art is putatively dedicated to stimulating disinterested pleasure, pleasure that has nothing to do with any other social interests, including political ones. The aesthetic theories of Schopenhauer and Bell explicitly proclaim that art lifts us out of or releases us from the everyday, including everyday politics. Art is autonomous which means separate from every other social ­practice – cognitive, moral, economic, religious, and political. That art is autonomous intellectually repeats the theme of the philosophical disenfranchisement of art. Art does not serve up knowledge; it is not in the service of cognitive interests. But the aesthetic theory of art also disenfranchises art politically by separating art conceptually from political interests, among all the rest. To a certain extent there is something truly ironic about this consequence of the aesthetic theory art, since it was arguably motivated, at least in part, as a firebreak against the sort of censorship of art that Plato and moralists ever since have sponsored. The aesthetic theory maintains that, because art is autonomous, when it is approached properly – that is, by one possessed of an Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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aesthetic attitude and stationed at a suitably distanced, aesthetic remove – it poses no threat to the common good. That is why otherwise morally incendiary works are given a pass, if they have artistic merit – why, indeed, artistic merit is said to be redeeming. Art supposedly transcends worldly interests; it lifts us out of the realm of human desire; it promotes experiences that we are said to value for their own sake. Art is free in the sense that it is free from interest and it is claimed that artists should be free to explore whatever they wish. Genuine art qua art is separate from the rest of society. This viewpoint, Danto maintains, “allowed the artist perfect freedom, but at the cost of total and logically guaranteed harmlessness.”3 Perhaps, to a certain degree, the aesthetic theory of art was predicated upon putting in check Plato and subsequent censors’ anxieties about the harmfulness of art by declaring art categorically harmless or, at least, useless (not sub-serving any interests). Yet that prophylactic was bought at the high price of marginality. Danto may exaggerate the situation when he contends that the whole of Western philosophy has been involved in a massive and systematic effort to disenfranchise art from any practical role in life.4 But, like many effective hyperboles, this one points us in the direction of truth. Art has been insulated theoretically from the rest of social life, including politics, to the point that most of our contemporaries do not take art (or, at least, high art) very seriously; it does not, quite evidently, shape political thinking significantly. Art has freed itself from servitude to church and country, but that freedom in large measure is a matter of neglect or, if attention is paid to it, the art work is framed in terms of an almost willful diminution of its efficacy – as when Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexual politics were explicated-away by his defenders (!) in terms of mere formal designs. Perhaps the most recent disenfranchisement of art has been served up by Danto, himself. He has argued that art has come to an end.5 What he means by his end-of-art thesis is that a certain progressive, developmental process has come to a resting point and can proceed no further. The historical process that Danto has in mind is the project – often referred to as Modernism – of the self-definition of art by means of art. That is, artists – or ambitious artists – since the time of Manet have, so it is argued, been engaged in trying to discover and acknowledge the essence of their art forms by means of works in the very art forms they sought to define. Painters, for instance, were gradually homing-in on the nature of painting, which many of them thought was involved 3 Danto, “Dangerous Art,” p. 188. 4 Danto, “Dangerous Art,” p. 192. 5 Arthur Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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in, among other things, its two-dimensionality. This program, of course, was philosophical inasmuch as it was concerned with the ontology of painting, its conditions of possibility. The Modernist project with respect to painting presumed that whatever property or properties defined paintings as such, they would be perceptible properties – properties one could eyeball. Danto, however, argues that the Modernist endeavor was up-ended by works like Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. Why? Because Brillo Box ostensibly revealed that whatever defined art, it could not be something perceptible. Why? Because Brillo Box by Warhol is an art work, but none of the hundreds of thousands of Brillo Boxes by Proctor and Gamble are art works. Therefore, whatever it is that is constitutory of art status cannot be discerned by the naked eye. It must be indiscernible. This marks the end not only of the Modernist movement, but of the project of the self-definition of art by means of art. Why? Because artists, such as painters, work by means of appearances and, if that which defines art is indiscernible, then the artist can’t foreground it by means of paint. An artist, like Warhol, advanced the question of the nature of art as far along as he could working within the resources of appearances; Warhol, Danto likes to say, got the problem of the definition of art into its proper philosophical form by framing it as a issue of indiscernibilia. But now the question of the nature of art belongs to philosophers, folks, who in the tradition of Plato, can penetrate through appearances to essences. Just as Homer’s team had to be replaced by Socrates’s guys, so the Modernists have to give way to Danto and his crew. The philosophical project of the definition of art can no longer be entrusted to artists, because it has left the realm of the senses. Art, with respect to the project of self-definition, comes to a halt, blocked by a conceptual impasse it cannot surmount. And thus art is disenfranchised philosophically once again. However, even if Danto’s end-of-art thesis disenfranchises art philosophically, it does not disenfranchise art politically. In fact, political engagement is one of the things that art can pursue now that the attempt to define art by means of art has come to a halt. Moreover, Danto’s philosophy of art also makes political art possible, because of the way in which Danto’s approach vehemently rejects the sorts of aesthetic theories of art that reduce the status of art to that of something separate but harmless (or ineffectual) politically and otherwise. 3

Danto and the Possibility of Political Art

By taking the task of defining art out of the hands of artists and appropriating it for himself and his guild, Danto disenfranchises art philosophically. And Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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undoubtedly in terms of cultural politics, this might be read as scoring a point for philosophy and against art with respect to their ancient rivalry. Yet, at the same time, both Danto’s philosophy of art history and his philosophy of art are theoretical contributions to the rehabilitation of the possibility of political art after Modernism. An evolutionary and programmatic conception of the history of art – like the reflexive Modernist project of self-definition – while freeing the artist from the hurly-burly interests of everyday affairs, nevertheless, at the same time, enslaved the artist to an agenda. Once the two dimensionality of painting was disclosed and acknowledged, other questions followed, such as questions about the nature of the painting’s edge, and so forth. A next step would always be mandated, until the project of self-definition was complete. In conversation, Danto once described to me the way in which he imagined the Modernist program of interrogating the essence of painting. He envisioned the artists like pharaoh’s slaves, chained to great, rectangular slabs of stone and hectored onward by critics liberally administering tongue-lashings. And so it would continue, until the pyramid of Modernism was finished. But by subverting the intellectual sustainability of Modernism, through his articulation of the significance of Warhol’s work, Danto freed the slaves. Construction of the pyramid could be abandoned in good conscience and artists were once again free. Free to do what? Free to return to serving largely human ends; free to play a role in the enhancement of human life.6 Free to express sadness and joy; free to console, heal, and outrage. Free to warn or inspire. And this, of course, includes the freedom to produce political art, divorced from any pressure to acknowledge the essence of art. In liberating itself from the philosophical project of self-definition, art is philosophically disenfranchised, but in a way that opens up the possibility of being politically re-enfranchised. Several other elements of Danto’s philosophy are also extremely congenial to the re-enfranchisement of political art-making. Danto’s philosophy of art, for example, is adamantly opposed to the aesthetic theory of art, one of the most influential philosophical devices for disenfranchising art. Danto is opposed to formalist versions of the aesthetic theory as found in authors like Clive Bell insofar as Danto maintains that the properties that make something an artwork are indiscernible, whereas significant form, Bell’s favorite criterion for art status, is the sort of thing that the eye can track.

6 Arthur Danto, “Approaching the End of Art,” The State of The Art (New York: Prentice Hall, 1987), pp. 217–218.

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Furthermore, Danto rejects any theory of art that maintains that the elicitation of an aesthetic experience is the hallmark of art status. He argues that this cannot be the case, since, in crucial instances, we would not know whether or not we should react aesthetically to a candidate, unless we already knew it to be a work of art.7 In order to respond to the aesthetic properties of a Pollock drip painting, one must already regard it as a work of art, rather than as a canvas paint-rag. Therefore, undergoing an aesthetic experience cannot be taken as criterial for art status. Hence, the aesthetic theory of art is compromised and, with its downfall, the mixing of art with mundane, other-than-art-world interests, including political ones, can once again be embraced as legitimate. In many of the most influential versions of the aesthetic theory of art, aesthetic experience is supposed to be different from and standing in contrast to cognitive experience. Relatedly, we are said to value an aesthetic experience for its own sake, not because of some interest it serves, like the acquisition of knowledge. The knowledge to be garnered from a work of art is not germane to its art status because it is not a suitable focus for aesthetic experience. On one very important view of the matter, cognition and aesthetic experience are twain. Thus, the communication of knowledge is, strictly speaking, beside the point with respect to art and aesthetic experience. Even though for millennia, people from Aristotle to Hegel, along with many ordinary folks in between, thought of the communication of knowledge as part of art’s function, under the aesthetic theory of art, catering to the interests of cognition is at best irrelevant to aesthetic experience and, in many cases, a downright aesthetic distraction. Because of the hard line that the aesthetic theory of art erects between aesthetic experience and cognition, art is shoved out of the knowledge game and, thereby, philosophically disenfranchised, once again. But Danto rejects not only the aesthetic theory of art, but also the notion of aesthetic experience or appreciation that it appears to presuppose. For Danto, art must have content – it needs to be about something. In order to respond appropriately to an art work, on Danto’s account, cognition must be engaged. The viewer, reader, or listener must figure out what the work is about – must interpret it – in order to appreciate it. Interpretation and appreciation are so closely related in Danto’s view that they fade into each other. Knowing what the work is about – and in many cases applying it to one’s own life – is part and parcel of our normal commerce with art works and not some alien excrescence, as many of the leading versions of the aesthetic theory of art would have it. 7 Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 94–95.

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The pertinence of Danto’s willingness to countenance the cognition/interpretation of the art work as a large part of aesthetic appreciation – in lieu of the art work’s possession of content – is a boon to the political re-enfranchisement of art. Art works have content – they are not simply significant forms – and that content may be political content. Furthermore, attending to that content is part of what it is to appreciate the art work appropriately. Thus, where the content of the work is political, taking in its point is precisely what we ought to do aesthetically. Interpreting and coming to see Three Penny Opera in terms of the ways in which it shows that the social conditions of capitalism abet exaggerated egoism (“What keeps a man alive?”) is part of what it is to appreciate Brecht’s work correctly. In addition to holding that aboutness (i.e., being about something) is a necessary condition for art, Danto also believes that art works are essentially rhetorical.8 The aim of rhetoric, of course, is to move audiences to see things a certain way, to have certain feelings towards them, and to prompt definite attitudes in viewers, listeners and/or readers. Rhetoric employs tropes like metaphor, ellipses, and enthymemes in order to draw the audience into its web of beliefs and feelings. Likewise, art works are rhetorical. They are meant to transform the world by transforming the ways in which audiences view circumstances and feel about them. Art works cannot be isolated from the world outside of the art world. For, the artist depends upon our beliefs and emotions regarding the world we inhabit in order to prompt the perspectives and arouse the feelings the artist intends us to take toward the circumstances her art works are about. And, as well, the artist typically intends that we take those perspectives and feelings and use them as a model or a metaphor for our own lives. With regard to the rhetorical dimension of art, Danto says: … it is not all that difficult to find rhetorical aspects in the most exalted art, and it may just be one of the main offices of art less to represent the world than to represent it in such a way as to cause us to view it with certain attitudes and with a special vision. This had been the explicit aim in the period of the High Baroque in Italy, where artists were mandated to cause feelings in viewers in order to heighten and confirm faith; and it remains the clear aim of Socialist Realist and generally political art in the world today. But it is difficult to imagine art that does not aim at some 8 Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Chapter 7.

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effect and insofar at some transformation in or some affirmation of the way the world is by those who experience it fully.9 Danto’s view that a rhetorical dimension is analytical to the concept of art obviously clears the way for the possibility of political art making. Of course, it does not require that art be political (i.e., be about political subject matter)10 as certain Politicized Post Modern Art Theorists prescribe.11 But it does make political content a permissible terrain for artistic exploration, one that had been declared out-of-bounds for so long by the concerted efforts of Modernist critics, on the one hand, and aesthetic theorists of art, on the other. Danto’s philosophy of the nature of art reverses the political disenfranchisement of art secured by the aesthetic theory of art, just as his philosophy of art history repeals the political disenfranchisement of art imposed by Modernism. Of course, although politically re-enfranchised, not all artists choose to vote. Some artists will pursue political aims, others, not. Some like Roy Lichenstein may be pre-occupied with debates internal to the art world, while others, like Judy Chicago, are committed to mixing it up politically. Danto’s end-of-art-thesis predicts and approves of pluralism. But under that umbrella, political artists need not worry that they will be derided as pseudo-artists. For, on Danto’s account of art, political art making as an instantiation of the rhetorical aspiration to move audiences to adopt certain beliefs about, perspectives upon, and attitudes and feelings toward the circumstances the art works are about is a function that belongs to the essence of art, properly so-called. And, for Danto, the role of the critic in response to political art is finally to interpret what the art work is about and then to explain how whatever it is about is embodied or expressed. This, of course, is precisely what Danto does with respect to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. He identifies Maya Ying Lin’s edifice in terms of it discharging of the public function of commemoration by creating, in effect, a monumental book of the dead, a political project – of which Danto’s rhetoric encourages our approval – which promotes solace and reconciliation over a great national tragedy.12 Whereas Modernist criticism ill-suits art that performs social services, Danto’s art

9 Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. 167. 10 Sometimes Danto tends to elide the rhetorical and the political in a way that suggests that all art is political insofar as it is rhetorical. However, I think that this dilutes the concept of the political more than is useful. 11 Politicized Post Modernism will be discussed in the next chapter. 12 Danto, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” The State of the Art, p. 116.

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criticism is open to it. And that too is part of Danto’s contribution to the political re-enfranchisement of art. 4 Summary The theme of the philosophical disenfranchisement of art is one that Danto has traced from the time of the Greeks into the present. It arrogates the domain of knowledge to philosophy, and, in one way or another, denies that art has anything worthwhile to teach. But, also, with the attempt to disenfranchise art philosophically, there is also an attempt to disenfranchise art politically. Sometimes this is connected to the idea that art has no claims on knowledge, including political knowledge. But at other times, it is connected to the theory that art is completely divorced from the realm of practical affairs, including political ones. Danto, while rehearsing, in his own terms, the philosophical disenfranchisement of art, interestingly enough, facilitates the political re-enfranchisement of art. His philosophy of art history sounds the death knell of the purist project of Modernist reflexivity, thereby freeing artists to create as they will, including, should they so desire, political works of art. However, Danto’s philosophy of art also allows for political art because 1) it dethrones a major theoretical impediment to political art, viz., the aesthetic theory of art, and 2) it connects art essentially to cognition and rhetoric, thereby making room for art works that engage cognition politically and address audiences rhetorically. And lastly, Danto’s art criticism is nicely suited to handling political art, since political art will be about something – some political message or sentiment, often one that is progressive in nature– whose embodiment Danto can explain while also, in many cases, endorse.

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Chapter 11

Danto, Pluralism, and Politics 1

Between Modernist Autonomy and Post-Modernist Engagement

When Arthur Danto launched his career as an art critic, a great deal of the more sophisticated varieties of art criticism had been turned over to art historians. Michael Fried and Leo Steinberg had led the way Benjamin Buchloh and Rosalind Krauss followed, as did her students, such as Craig Owens, Hal Foster, and Douglas Crimp – to name only some of the more influential examples. Perhaps not surprisingly, much of this criticism involved placing works in art historical narratives. But these narratives were generally not modest affairs, like the narrative of this or that movement. They aspired to document the March of History – the march of art history and its role in the history of the broader culture. As the notion of a march implies, these art historical narratives were progressive in nature. Art history was moving forward; it had a direction, indeed a target. The role of the art critic was to declare whether the work at hand “was on the side of history,” or not – that is, whether it showed evidence of backsliding. The critic beat the drum, keeping the artists in step. And if the artist wasn’t in line with the purposive trajectory of history, it was the critic’s job to castigate him. Call this: the art critic as the Grand Historical Drill Master. This kind of criticism was highly programmatic. The critic had the marching orders, or, to change metaphors, the blueprint, and the critic was responsible for encouraging artists who abided by them and for chiding the shirkers. Because these stories were connected to the history of the culture at large, they had political ramifications. But since the relevant story-arcs were programmatic, the politics that correlated with them were programmatic as well. However, due to his suspicion of historical pre-destination – his suspicion of progressive, teleological narratives of the March of History – Danto was able to restore to the art world the possibility of flexible art criticism, art criticism suited to the work at hand and its context, including, where relevant, its political context. In this way, Danto challenged the kinds of programmatic thinking that dominated previous ambitious, art criticism, and with it, the sorts of summary political judgments associated with those programs. The two programs that I have in mind especially are Modernist art criticism and Post-Modernist art criticism (or, more precisely, Politicized Post-Modernist

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art criticism). In some ways, these two approaches are at odds with each other. Modernist art criticism, as fashioned by Clement Greenberg, tends be inner-­ directed, focusing upon charting the destiny of art in its pursuit of philosophical self-understanding.1 In this respect, the Greenbergian approach is primarily insular socially. On its account, art is an autonomous realm unto itself. Its mission is to discover its own conditions of possibility, and not to engage directly in political action.2 But this, of course, amounts to a political program of sorts, for example, a reflex distrust of politically committed art, particularly of the sort that traffics representation, like Socialist Realism. Politicized Post-Modernist art criticism was and is more socially oriented.3 It resembles the New Left version of Western Marxism. Its stance is anti-capitalist, but its clientele is not the proletariat, but rather a Marcuse-like coalition of women, persons of color (both here and abroad), gays, greens, students etc. Politicized Post-Modernist art criticism is committed to emancipation and key to that emancipation is confrontation with capitalism, often in terms of laying bare the semiotics of consumerism. That is, Politicized Post-modernist criticism is Marxism under the influence of Jean Baudrillard. It is committed to unmasking the economy of the sign in late capitalism where the forces of semiosis are thought to have displaced the forces of production as the engine of economic growth and control. Artists like Richard Prince are interpreted in light of this program and recommended for their contribution to the historic struggle against capitalism by means of their decoding and recoding of capitalist emblems, such as cigarette advertisements. Politicized Post-Modernist criticism allied itself with post-structuralist theory with its extreme emphasis on semiosis. Undoubtedly, this helped shape the terms of Post-Modernist critical rhetoric in which the politically correct artists are those whose work is said to deconstruct the media-made codes of late capitalism, homeopathically fighting symbols with symbols. Politicized Post-Modernist criticism also came outfitted with a view of history – one 1 Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1961). 2 Although Greenberg, himself, does allow that “historically correct” art performs a social function indirectly by – like the monks of the middle ages – preserving the values of culture in dark times (times overwhelmed by fascist, [soviet] communist, and capitalist kitsch). 3 It should be noted that one can be a Post-modernist art critic without being a Politicized Post-modernist critic. For example, one might be a Theoretical Post-modernist crtic, by which I mean a critic committed to the application of post-structuralist theory to art. Perhaps Rosalind Krauss is an example of this option. The kinds of Dantonian reservations toward Post-modernism art criticisms rehearsed in this article only pertain to what we are calling Politicized Post-modernist criticism, since the purpose of this essay is to focus on the political significance of Danto’s practice.

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which declaimed the end of meta-narratives (those outlines of world history propounded by the likes of Kant, Hegel, and Marx). But this commitment on their part was at least ironical and in three ways. Their denial of meta-narratives itself took the form of a whopping meta-narrative, a dialectical exercise from which post-structuralism and deconstruction emerge triumphant. Perhaps theirs was to be the last meta-narrative (but, of course, we’ve heard that before). Second, the Politicized Post-Modernist view of modern history – as the battle between capitalism and its repressed – remained in large measure Marxist, despite the alleged eschewal of meta-narratives. And, the commitment to universal emancipation, of course, is not only compatible with the central meta-narrative of the Enlightenment, but flows from it. That is, for all the railings of Politicized Post-Modernists against the Enlightenment, their critico-political practice seems Enlightened. In spite their protestations of the death of meta-narratives, a belief in the March of History is evident pretty close to the surface of Politicized Post-Modernist criticism. Its view of criticism is progressive in two senses – not only is it underwritten by a generic hope for progress, but that progress, in turn, is measured normatively in terms of political emancipation. And furthermore, the Politicized, Post-Modernist critic recommends artists to their readership on the basis of their participation in that program. Although Modernists and Post-Modernists stand at odds with respect to each other with regards to the programs they expect artists to implement, nevertheless they converge in their view: 1) that there is a program to be implemented by the history of art; 2) that artists are to be commended for their furtherance of that program (and condemned for their failure to get on board the train of history); and 3) that a certain political posture is connected to that program – neutrality in the case of Modernism and engagement in the case of Post-Modernism. But, for Danto, there is no reason for artists “to get with the program,” since he denies that there is a program for art history, in particular, and, as well, for history in general. And this lack of faith in any historical programs, maybe needless to say, is what gives rise to Danto’s pluralism. For, with that pluralism comes not only the freedom for artworks to look like anything. It also liberates art from the political perspectives of both Modernism and Post-Modernism. According to Danto’s philosophy of art history, artists are now free to be either engaged or apolitical – to be either emancipatory or reflexive. History with a capital H is no longer imagined to dictate the political outlook appropriate for all right thinking artists. Artists may choose their own projects, whether political or otherwise, and it is the task of the critic to assist audiences in understanding that work through interpretation.

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The future is wide open and the role of the critic, à la Danto, is to catch up with it, not tether it to an agenda, historical or otherwise. Politically, inside the art world, Danto’s philosophy of art history is tantamount to a declaration of independence or enlargement of freedom for artists (and by extension to the critics who interpret them). And externally, the art world’s political relationship to the so-called real world has, from Danto’s critical perspective, become suddenly optional. Accordingly, the artist can embrace political projects or not and, likewise, the critic need not uphold a party line, but rather offer commentary suitable – both aesthetically and politically – to the specific works in question. 2

Danto, Modernism, and Pluralism

As I have argued elsewhere, Danto’s thesis of the end of art may be best construed as an account of the fall of Modernism as that movement was theorized by Clement Greenberg and defended by people such as Michael Fried. Danto’s philosophy of art history really contains two end-of-art stories. The first story begins in ancient Greece and was revived in the Renaissance; it concerns the commitment to the “conquest of visual appearances” or, to say it differently, to the perfection of ocular verisimilitude. This narrative secures closure with the invention of photography and then especially cinematography. For cinematography not only captures the look of things accurately; it captures the look of things in movement. Of course, this didn’t mean that painters stopped painting representational works. But it did entail that visual art no longer had a historical mission, since its mission had been accomplished. Ambitious artists would have to look elsewhere, if they still had an appetite for a historic project. On many accounts, including both Greenberg’s and Danto’s, the next really big thing was Modernism, the quest on the part of artists to determine and acknowledge by means of art the nature of their art. Like the aspiration to conquer visual appearances, this was an evolutionary narrative. Modernism had a target which, if hit, would bring closure to the Modernist episode in the history of art. And, if the Modernist mission could not be exchanged for another with comparable linear, developmental potentials, the resolution to or finale of the Modernist saga would bring with it the end altogether of the evolutionary history of art. Greenberg contended that among the essential features of painting was the two-dimensionality of its surface. The earliest stages of Modernist art appear when Manet violates the laws of perspective and Cézanne begins to reduce objects to geometric shapes, a project hastened by the Cubists whose energetic Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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articulation of the picture plane contracted it. Fauves, Abstract Expressionists, and color field painters successively more assertively emphasized the surface qualities of painting in order to disclose and acknowledge that paintings are flat things. Clearly, Modernist painting on this account is committed to medium specificity. That is, the Modernist march to the surface of the picture plane is mandated by the ambition to celebrate what painting qua painting really is. It involves a quest to reveal that which is unique about painting. That is why when Fried wants to disparage Minimalist painting, he does so by calling it theatrical, thereby accusing it of indulging in the effects of another and alien art form. Modernism thus enjoins a form of purism. In the first instance, this involves a commitment to the purity of the medium – the promise not to get mixed up in the business of other art forms. But that obsession with the nature of one’s own art form also naturally invited a kind of socio-political quiescence. Ambitious art was supposed to be concerned with its own identity. Art, properly so called, should not be placed in the service of other domains of culture, such as producing illusionistic images promoting various social causes, including political ones. The visual arts should be pure in two senses; they should not attempt to blend in with other art forms, like theater; and they should remain autonomous from other domains of culture, like politics. The Modernist commitment to disclosing the nature of the visual arts through art required both of these kinds of purism. Fried’s disdain for theatricality in painting – the overt appeal of the art work to its audience – rehearses the desire for mediumistic purism, on the one hand, and the rejection of politics on the other (since what is politics, if not a matter of addressing an audience?). But, according to Danto, the Modernist program could not be sustained. For, Modernism presupposed a distinction – such as flatness – that the eye could descry between art works and real things. But, Danto argued, art works like Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box belied that aspiration, since, although it was an art work, it was indiscernible from its real world counterparts – the packing-­ cartons of boxes of Brillo Pads manufactured by Protor and Gamble and stored in the recesses of grocery stores. On Danto’s view, the appearance of indiscernibilia, like Brillo Box, heralded the end of art. By this, he has in mind the end of art as the pursuit of the project of self-definition of art by means of the resources available to artists. For, what Warhol’s Brillo Box, and related works, show is that, however one is to define art, it cannot be by means of art, since whatever marks the difference between art and real things cannot be some discernible property or of set of properties. But since the visual artist specializes in what is discernible, viz., appearances, Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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the visual artist cannot show us that which distinguishes art works and real things. He cannot draw, so to speak, the boundary line because it is invisible. Danto grants that Brillo Box is a philosophical achievement in the adventure-story of the project of art’s self-definition, although it is not the achievement that exegetes like Greenberg had hoped for, since rather than discovering the nature of art, Brillo Box, as Danto interprets it, it shows that the characterization of the essence of art is not something that can be done within the resources available to artists. Brillo Box, Danto says, brings the question of the nature of art as far along as artists can take it; it gets the question of the nature of art in the right philosophical form – pitching it as a matter of finding the ontological difference between art works and their indiscernible, real world counterparts. But, Danto contends, that is not something that artists can fruitfully pursue within their medium Rather, they must turn the problem over to philosophers whose job-description includes theorizing the difference between indiscernibilia – between, for example, perfectly coherent dreams and reality, causes and effects versus successive, constantly conjoined events, prudent versus moral actions, and so forth. Thus, Danto declares, art comes to an endpoint – or, more precisely, the developmental history of art construed as the project of art’s self-definition reaches a terminus. If art is to be defined, Danto – perhaps with himself in mind – indicates that it will be done by a philosopher, rather than by an artist plying her trade. Of course, this conclusion is highly controversial. For if Danto, as he has often claimed, is pronouncing the end of art across all of the art forms that belong to the so-called Modern System of the Arts, then there is at least one glaring problem with his argument.4 Obviously, literature is an art. Moreover, literature is an art form that is broader than merely fiction. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is literature. So is much philosophy. In the past, Plato, Hume, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and, Nietzsche, among others, have produced works esteemed as literature. More recently, Quine was noteworthy for his literary accomplishment. And in the realm of aesthetics, Barthes, Goodman, and Danto are considered literary stylists as well as theorists. Therefore, since literature is art, and philosophy can be literature, it is not obvious that turning the question of art’s definition over to philosophy necessarily provokes the end of art as Danto conceives that eventuality. 4 It should be noted that there is often an ambiguity – some might charge an equivocation – in Danto’s philosophy of art history in terms of whether the art in question is all art – as in the sense of the Modern System of the Arts – or just the visual arts or only painting.

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However, even if there are loopholes like this in Danto’s end-of-art thesis, it is clear that, retold as the end-of-Modernism thesis, it has traction. For Modernism, as constructed by Greenberg and his followers, did presume a discernible differentia between art works and real things such that by saliently foregrounding such distinguishing marks, the artist could disclose and acknowledge it. With respect to painting, flatness was thought to be a pertinent differentia. But after Brillo Box, the dream that artists working in the realm of appearances might establish the difference between art works and real things dissolved, since Brillo Box demonstrated that that difference was not of the realm of appearances. No wonder Clement Greenberg hated Pop Art so much. Of course, the Modernist narrative was never comprehensive with respect to the range of endeavor in art in the modern period (say from around the second half of the nineteenth century to the present). The Modernist story did not even cover the waterfront with are respect to avant-garde art. The Modernist narrative was highly selective. It thrust much artistic activity beyond the pale of art history.5 Surrealism, for instance, was treated as a retrograde aberration best forgotten, with no place in the March of History. Likewise, Soviet Constructivism, not to mention Socialist Realism. For these movements had philosophical and political commitments; they were not dedicated to the reflexive contemplation of the nature of art in splendid isolation. Thus, with the implosion of the Modernist project, both the history and the future of art are simultaneously blown wide-open. For artistic achievements, like Brillo Box and the readymades by Duchamp that presaged them, erased the supposedly discernible frontier between art and everything else. Henceforth, not only could art look like anything – whether or not it celebrated its readily detectable flatness – art could also embrace a multitude of projects. For instance, Janine Antoni arranges installations comprised of things as unlikely as blocks of chocolate and lard in order to embody a phenomenological meditation on bulimia.6 Or Damien Hirst can float a dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde in order to provoke thoughts about mortality. Art can look like anything as well as be about anything, on Danto’s conception of art, so long as whatsoever its form of embodiment, its form be appropriate to whatever it is about. This prospect ushers in a period – which Danto calls post-historical (i.e., after the March of History) – of radical pluralism, in contrast to Modernism. In regard to the politics of the art world, the king is dead and the inmates are free 5 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 6 Arthur Danto, “The 1993 Whitney Biennial,” in Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1994), pp. 315–316.

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to take over the institution. To be counted as art, properly so called, the work no longer had to participate in the Long March from the depths of Renaissance space to the flat surface of the picture plane. To be art, all that was necessary for a candidate is that it be about something which topic it embodies in a form that is suitable to expressing whatever it is about. Since there are an indefinitely large number of things to be about and probably even more ways to manifest them, the horizons of artistic invention become virtually limitless. There is no question that from a political perspective inside the art world, Danto’s forceful articulation of the end of the Modernist hegemony affords an empowering acknowledgement and endorsement of a vast expansion of the freedom of artists to explore whatever they will. And, of course, along with everything else, the pluralism of the post-historical art world also encompasses the opportunity for art works to be about political concerns. Danto – needless to say, never disposed to play the role of the lawgiver – does not require that post-historical art be political. But in rejecting the Modernist historical mandate that genuine art must be about exploring its own nature, Danto provides the political license that the politically inclined artist needs in the contemporary post-historical period of art making. Moreover, as a critic, Danto himself is open to politically significant art, often defending it with greater penetration than many of its leading interpreters. As is very evident to anyone who has paid only casual attention to the fine art of the past two and a half decades, much of its art is political – or socio-political. Danto, as in his discussion of Robert Colescotte’s project of “putting blacks into art history,” defends this possibility in terms of the ways in which it is a virtually natural development from the decline of the Modernist hegemony.7 Likewise, Danto recognizes the cultural-political motivation of the aforesaid installation by Janine Antoni’ and is able to interpret, with amazing lucidity and sympathy, how it manages to illuminate what it is about through its ingenious embodiment of the recent feminist theme of the relationship of eating disorders and love. Part of Danto’s affirmation of the pluralist present after the end of art, is that political art can be and is back. Political art is an authentic possibility for the serious artist in the aftermath of the Modernist March of Times. But, although political art is an option at the moment of Danto’s pluralistic end of art, it is not a new historical mandate. In this way, Danto’s critical point-of-view differs from one of the leading alternative, critical takes on the significant art of the 7 Arthur Danto, “Robert Colescott and Russell Connor,” in Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1990), pp. 275–278.

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period since Danto assumed his role as a commentator on the arts – namely, the Politicized Post-Modernist criticism of art. 3

Post-Modernist Political Advocacy and Post-Historical Pluralism

When Danto began writing criticism in the mid-nineteen eighties, not only was Modernism on the wane, but so was Modernist criticism. Rallying around the notion of Post-Modernism, a younger generation of critics was emerging and they championed a new cadre of artists. Many of these critics regarded themselves as politically engaged and so they rejected the hermeticism of Modernism with its preoccupation with the in-house, art world question concerning its own essence. Instead, they hankered for a social relevance for art. Some of these younger critics were Craig Owens, Douglas Crimp, Hal Foster, Alan Sekula, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. Writing in publications like Art in America and October, they were the strongest emerging critical tendency in the art world in the period immediately prior to Danto’s becoming an art critic. Thus, it is particularly instructive to contrast Danto’s approach to art and politics to that of the Politicized Post-modernist critics. Of course, the Politicized Post-modernist critics were anything but clones. Each had his or her own style and preferred artists. So, for the purpose of drawing out the contrast between Danto and this group of critics, some streamlining is in order. To that end, I will elect Hal Foster as my representative of the larger tendency of Politicized Post-modern art criticism and I will concentrate on his book Recodings to illuminate the difference between Politicized Post-modernist art criticism and Post-Historical art criticism for the purpose of elucidating the political significance of that difference.8 I have chosen Hal Foster as my representative Politicized Post-modernist art critic because of the clarity of his writing and because of his commitment to explaining the theoretical foundations of his practice. His book Recodings was probably the most influential introduction at the time when Danto enlisted as an art critic. It is a collection of essays published in the nineteen-eighties, a heady moment when Politicized Post-modernist art criticism was hitting its stride. Foster’s articles and book were so much in evidence in the art scene by the mid-eighties that it is hard to imagine that Danto was unfamiliar with the doctrines Foster was broadcasting. Indeed, it seems that Danto’s critical idea of 8 Hal Foster, Recodings (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1985).

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Post-Historical Art is, in certain respects, designed to stand as an alternative to Politicized Post-modernist art criticism. Although unsatisfied with the obsessive purism of Modernist criticism, Politicized Post-Modernist criticism à la Foster shared some similarities with its predecessor. On the Modernist view, the art work was construed as a form of critique, in the Kantian sense. That is, the art work was an interrogation of its own conditions of possibility. Likewise, the Politicized Post-Modernist critic views the art work as an exercise in critique. However, given Politicized Post-Modernism’s alliance with post-structuralism, the role of artistic critique was presumed to be that of a critique of semiosis – of the signs and codes of the culture – rather than the critique of art qua art. And like the Modernist, Politicized Post-Modernist critics, like Foster, opted for a progressive view of history as an epochal battle – not of flatness versus illusionism – but of the cause of emancipation against capitalism and the various forms of repression it putatively enforced. Of course, the capitalism of the late twentieth century was different from that of Marx’s time. In countries like the United States, the ceaseless process of the capitalist expansion of the market, it is argued, comes to depend more and more upon consumption rather than upon production (where consumption in turn is mediated by signs, and codes, as manifested in the endless flood of advertisements). Capitalism is thought to dominate the circulation of these signs to a point where the purported monopoly of the codes by the economic elite has now become a decisive form of social control. Moreover, capitalism does not simply create these signs itself. It also has an immense capacity to absorb and to co-opt virtually every attempt to defy it. Avant-garde transgressions of bourgeois values, for example, not only serve capitalism by undermining tradition but can also be turned into commodities by the likes of a Saatchi and Saatchi. Even gestures of sub-cultural resistance – like graffiti and hip-hop – may be dragooned into the service of the market. In this context, the task of a Politicized Post-Modernist critic, such as Foster, is to encourage the artists who are dedicated to unmasking the codes of capitalist domination and recoding them. That is, the codes that capitalism uses to exert social control – such as sexist imagery – are to be displaced from their typical settings and re-contextualized in a way that reveals their ideological point and purport. Thus artists strive to invest often apparently or ostensibly transparent symbols with new significance, as Barbara Kruger does by juxtaposing the types of images of women – as posed, pursued and passive that are usually exploited in television shows, movies and ads – to pointed printed matter that underscores how women are constructed as objects for the dominant male gaze.

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Furthermore, just as the Modernist project delegated whole artistic movements beyond the pale of history, so Politicized Post-Modernist criticism has its nemeses. Supposing that the Post-Modern era is distinguished by its preoccupation with semiosis, the Politicized Post-Modernist critics draw a distinction between two ways of relating to signs and codes. One way is politically progressive; the other is reactionary. Post-Modern architecture, as exemplified by Robert ­Venturi and Michael Graves, falls into the latter category. These architects recycle forms and symbols from the past, thereby violating the austerities of Modern Architecture with allusions and ornamentation. In this regard, they acknowledge the phenomenon of semiosis in a way befitting the era of Post Modernism. But their failure to take a critical stance toward this material degenerates into a readily marketable kind of nostalgia. It serves to allure and pacify the spectator. Such work is pastiche rather than critique where Post-Modern pastiche is nothing less than an example of co-opted avant-garde art.9 In contrast, the “good” species of Post-Modernism – progressive Post Modernism – confronts capitalist hegemony and co-optation in both the art world and the world beyond. Artists like Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, Louise Lawler, Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, and Andrew McCollum are applauded by Politicized Post-Modernist critics for the ways in which they subversively disclose how art has been transformed into a commodity by art institutions, including galleries and museums whose alleged pluralism is suspected of being merely a way of tamping down and absorbing dissonance.10 In a similar vein, Politicized Post-Modernist critics also recommend artists who realize that the existing modes of mass representation suffocate contemporary culture through forms of ideological domination that are inscribed in their very structures; whose machinations the pertinent artists expose by appropriating these images, dislodging them from their original context, and reframing them by strategies including collage, juxtaposition, and hyperbole in such a way that the viewer putatively becomes aware that he or she is being manipulated by culturally constructed, albeit camouflaged, objects that have been masquerading as natural and transparent. In the nineteen eighties, some of the artists who benefited especially from this mode of criticism included Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, James Casebere, Robert Longo, Martha Rosler, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. For example, Holzer’s piece Truisms – alphabetical lists of conflicting commonplaces presented as, in some cases, public information posters – could be praised for confounding the viewer’s expectations through the presentation of blatantly 9 10

Foster, “(Post)Modern Polemics,” Recodings, pp. 121–136. Foster, “Subversive Signs,” Recodings, pp. 99–115.

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contradictory nostrums which experience then putatively revealed to and for viewers the false homogeneity of the street signs that line our daily byways.11 Although Danto’s notion of post-historical art/criticism and the politicized version of Post-Modernist art/criticism both begin with the assumption of the decline and fall of Modernism, it should be clear that the extension of the domain of art that Danto is talking about is different than the domain of art that concerns the Politicized Post-Modernists. Danto’s conception of post-­ historical art is genuinely pluralistic – all kinds of artistic experimentations are possible – both in terms of art that is political or not, and with respect to different orders of politics. The Politicized Post-Modernist’s viewpoint is far more Manichean. All art making falls under the shadow of the challenge to capitalism and its oppressive regimes – racism, patriarchy, homophobia, economic imperialism, consumerism, ecological wastage, etc. Art which dissects the ideological codes that make such processes effective, and which evades co-optation, are admired by Politicized Post-Modernist. As for the rest, if you’re not for the PPM, then you’re against it. Although Danto and Politicized Post Modernists may agree in their specific criticisms of certain works – as they do in their response to David Salle’s sexist imagery – Danto’s criticism is more generally flexible. This is perhaps most obvious when it comes to Danto’s willingness to appreciate art that may not have a direct political message. However, even when it comes to staking out a political response to a work of art, Danto’s approach permits a more varied range of response, since Danto is not committed to the supposition that all politics – and by extension all political art – is ultimately reducible to a single battle with a single narrative, such as the epochal face-off with consumer capitalism and the semiotic enslavement and consciousness-pollution of its citizenry. Danto can acknowledge that there may be more political struggles than just this one and that sometimes these other struggles may have a deeper claim upon our allegiance than Politicized Post Modernism countenances. For example, during the debacle regarding Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, Politicized Post Modernists generally fell in line with the defense of Serra’s sculpture. Various arguments were made, suggesting that, for instance, Serrra’s wall forced an acknowledgment from those who used the Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan that the possibility of a genuine public has been fragmented, sundered due to capitalism.12 Serra’s structure was, in other words, interpreted as a specimen of the sort of semiotic resistance that Politicized Post Modernists endorse, while also being aimed at exactly the kind of target that they contend 11 Foster, “Subversive Signs,” Recodings, pp. 108–109. 12 Foster, Recodings, p. 212, n. 13.

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that the March of History has ordained – namely, the capitalist degradation of the public sphere. However, since Danto has not tied his politics to the sort of overarching historical narrative that ratifies Politicized Post Modernism criticism, his critical response can be more nuanced, tailored specifically to the politics of the particular situation at hand, in contrast to the one-size-fits-all strategy of the PPM critics. With respect to Tilted Arc, Danto, though progressive politically, broke ranks with the orthodoxy, and argued for the removal of Serra’s sculpture from the Federal Plaza on the grounds that it betrayed the purpose of public art, whose function is to serve the needs and to defend the rights of its p ­ ublic.13 Serra’s sculpture failed to measure up to this goal, however, by making the Federal Plaza an even more alienating and inhospitable place than it already was. Admittedly it “heightened the contradictions” on this occasion, but at the discomfiture of the people – the pertinent public – who used the plaza, and this was done in the most undemocratic manner by failing to involve that community by neglecting to include its members in the decision making processes that led to the imposition of Tilted Arc on the Federal Plaza. Whereas Serra and his Politicized Post Modern defenders were willing to sacrifice the needs and desires of the people who worked in the Federal Plaza to the exigencies of the March of History, Danto’s pluralism enabled him to appreciate that what justice required in the situation involved consideration of more than one perspective. Instead of surveying the debate over the removal of Tilted Arc from the Federal Plaza from the vantage point of a monumental historical narrative, Danto’s disavowal of historical agendas enabled him to assess the issue in light of the lives of individuals in such a way that fairness could trump supposedly historical necessity. As has already been observed, Danto’s conception of post-historical art encompasses more art than the body of work that the Politicized Post Modernist critic regards as authentically Post Modernist. Where Politicized Post Modernism is narrow, the population of Danto’s version of the post-historical is wide and various. Politicized Post Modernist critics, like Foster, perhaps predictably, suspect pluralism, presumably including Danto’s. They worry that its openness to any and all comers – its toleration – augurs indifference.14 Yet that anxiety is hardly realized in Danto’s criticism whose constant inventiveness and illuminating insights with respect to particular artists and to what is distinctive about their accomplishment engenders enthusiasm and, with 13 14

Arthur Danto, ‘Tilted Arc and Public Art,” The State of the Art (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1987), pp. 90–94. Foster, “Against Pluralism,” Recodings, pp. 13–32.

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respect to artists with political aims, sympathy. And, in any event, one suspects that, since the bottom line is everywhere the same when it comes to Politicized Post Modernist criticism, if there is indifference abroad in the art world, it is not the fault of Danto’s post-historical pluralism. 4 Summary When Arthur Danto began writing art criticism in the mid-nineteen eighties, two critical perspectives dominated – one in decline (Modernism) and the other ascending (Politicized Post Modernism). Although opposed along several dimensions, these two critical approaches had several features in common. Both presupposed knowledge of the normatively correct course of art history and they recommended or deprecated art accordingly. Both of these approaches were highly programmatic. Moreover, those programs were connected to certain political inclinations – political quietism with respect to Modernism; political engagement with respect to Politicized Post-Modernism). Although opposed in this regard, Modernism and Politicized Post-Modernism tended – each in its own way – to straight-jacket artist experimentation both aesthetically and politically. And in both cases, this attempt to regiment the art world was based upon the critical presumption that the relevant critics knew which way the winds of history were blowing – or, at least, should be blowing. Because Danto rejects the kind of historical foreknowledge which Modernist art critics and Politicized Post-Modernist critics assume, he has been able evolve a criticism suitable – both aesthetically and politically – for what he dubs our “post-historical art world.” It is pluralistic in concert with the pluralism that issues from Danto’s end-of-art thesis, (which, when rephrased as the end-of-Modernism thesis, I believe is quite compelling). This pluralism, moreover, has political repercussions both within the art world and beyond. Inside the art world it liberates artists from the tyranny of the Big Historical Programs – what I previously called the March of History. But it also has ramifications for political art in the world at large. In contrast to Modernist art criticism, it carves out a space for political art to flourish, if that is what artists care about. And, in contrast to Politicized Post Modernism, it not only legitimatizes the artistic freedom to pursue other than political interests; it allows political artists and audiences to explore political concerns that are unconnected to the eschatology of anti-capitalism. By rejecting narratives of the March of History, Danto’s critical approach to art invites us to greet art history as it unfolds aesthetically and politically, thereby delivering criticism as well as art from the intellectual confines of what Karl Popper once called historicism. Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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The Philosophy of Art History, Dance, and the 1960s For more than a decade,1 in numerous books and articles, the art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto has advanced the controversial conjecture that art history has come to an end. In his 1997 book, After the End of Art, Danto goes so far as to offer a date for the end of art – namely, somewhere around 1964 – and he has even dared to name the artist who he believes brought closure to the history of art. That artist is said to be Andy Warhol, whose exhibition of his Brillo Box at the Stable Gallery on East Forty-seventh Street in Manhattan is alleged by Danto to have brought art history to a climax.2 This is a bold if not foolhardy claim, courting paradox openly, since as anyone can see there are still tens of thousands of painters painting. But Danto, like everyone else, must know this. Indeed, Danto should know it better than many, since he is a practicing art critic, one who, among other things, has won the National Book Award for his discussions of the contemporary art scene. So Danto must mean something rather special when he talks of the end of art – when he alleges that Warhol liquidated the tradition in 1964. What might that be? Before I try to answer that question, another question is likely to occur to you, the reader. It is: Why are we talking about Danto and his theory of the end of art, since that is a theory about painting and we are here to talk about dance? My justification for this apparent digression begins, of course, with the date that Danto has elected for the end of art – 1964. For 1964 was not only the year Warhol rocked the artworld scene with Brillo Box; the 1963–64 season was also when the Judson Dance Theater engineered a comparable revolution in the dance world. Nor are the two phenomena simply a matter of two ships passing in the night. The two revolutions trumpeted many of the same themes, such as the attempted blurring of the distinction between art and reality. That is, if Warhol by means of his Brillo Box tried to problematize the boundary between artworks and everyday artifacts such as industrial packages, then, in like manner, Steve Paxton’s Satisfyin Lover attempted to question any categorical difference that might be said to distinguish dance from ordinary, 1 This article originated as a talk at the festival Talking Dancing in Stockholm, Sweden, in August 1997. 2 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). © Noël Carroll, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004468368_013 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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everyday movements like walking. Moreover, since Warhol’s accomplishment, according to Danto, was to create artworks that were indiscernible from real things – Brillo boxes that were works of art which nevertheless looked just like mundane, ordinary Brillo boxes – then one wonders whether Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and the other innovators of the Judson Dance Theater don’t deserve the same sort of commendation for their attempt to level the difference between dancing and ordinary movement, between choreography and, for example, eating a sandwich. Perhaps the Judson Dance Theater brought dance history to a climax in a manner that is strictly analogous to the way in which Danto alleges that Warhol brought closure to painting. That is, perhaps Danto’s insights about Warhol might enable us to reconfigure the history of dance so as to enable us to see the significance of the Judson Dance Theater in a new light. But before we think about the relevance of Danto’s theory for dance, we need to come to terms with it on its home grounds, painting. Danto says that the history of painting came to an end somewhere around 1964. But what could “end” mean in this context? As we have seen, it makes no sense to say that painting stopped in 1964 – that there were no more paintings made after 1964. People are still painting today; inasmuch as there are more people today than there were in 1964 and earlier, there are probably more people painting today, in the period Danto claims is after the end of art, than there were at work in the heyday of art. So, when Danto speaks of the end of art, he cannot mean that people have stopped painting. Instead, the sense of an ending that Danto has in mind is the end of a certain developmental process. Some of you may recall Woody Allen’s humorous and altogether fanciful history of the sandwich. The Earl of Sandwich starts out with an assortment of ingredients: slices of bread, condiments, meats, and so forth. He wants to combine them in a convenient way for eating. His early experiments are failures. First he piles meats and condiments on a single piece of bread, but when he grabs it, he gets mustard all over himself After years of brooding over this failure, he tries another experiment; he puts the single piece of bread between two pieces of meat, with the mustard spread between the salami and the bread. That’s better, but his hand still gets greasy. Finally, a lightbulb goes off in his head and the problem is decisively illuminated. He puts the salami and the condiments between two pieces of bread and waves the result triumphantly. The problem is solved. The sandwich is invented. The story of the sandwich is over. Or, to speak more precisely, the developmental history of the sandwich, the story of the progressive attempts to get the design of the sandwich just right, comes to a close. The problem has met with a solution;

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the evolution of the sandwich in terms of the purposes that set the process in motion is complete. True, people go on making sandwiches, even into our own day. And every once in a while modifications are made on the basic design of the sandwich: the triple-decker sandwich, the Dagwood sandwich, and so on. But in a certain sense, the story of the sandwich is over once the basic design of the sandwich is in place. The story of the sandwich, its developmental history, has come to a close; everything that comes after that, including all the sandwiches you and I might make, are, to change metaphors, icing on the cake. Our sandwiches, though undeniably sandwiches, are posthistorical sandwiches. This is a silly example. A more serious one might be Newtonian physics. At a certain point in the nineteenth century, physicists dreamed of the possibility that complete knowledge of the physical universe was within their reach, if only some details of the Newtonian system could be worked out. Imagine everything had gone as planned. Then we might have spoken of the end of physics, even though engineers would have still gone on applying Newtonian formulas in the process of building bridges. The Newtonian project would have come to an end, even though children would continue to be taught physics and adults would continue to use it in the construction of various technologies. Perhaps adjustments or refinements of physics would be made here and there. But the story of physics, for all intents and purposes, would have been over. When a practice has a project, one can imagine the project coming to an end. Narratives are our typical means for representing such projects. If the president is kidnapped near the beginning of the story, that sets in motion the problem of rescuing her. When that problem is solved (when the president is rescued), the story comes to an end. It has what literary theorists call closure. Presumably the president goes on doing things after she is rescued. But that is not part of the story. The story is over when the problem is solved and the project is discharged. There is life after narrative; it’s just not part of the story. So, the sense of ending that Danto has in mind is the kind of ending – the kind of closure – that pertains to stories, to the past configured as a historical narrative, indeed configured as a developmental, historical narrative. Just as Hegel did not mean that the sun would never rise again after the end of history, Danto does not mean canvases will not be painted after the end of art. He, like Hegel, only means that a certain story has reached its terminus; that Warhol, somewhere around 1964, had solved a certain problem, or, more accurately, brought a certain project as far along as it was possible to bring it. That is, when Danto says that we have reached the end of art, what he means, stated less paradoxically, is that a certain developmental project has evolved to a point at

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which no more progress is possible. It turns out that Danto does not think that Warhol, like the Earl of Sandwich, completely solved the problem that confronted him. Rather, Danto argues that Warhol brought his problem as close to a solution as any painter could. Of course, this is an obscure way of speaking, unless I divulge what Danto takes to be the problem that challenged Warhol, along with indicating its place in the evolving tradition of Western painting. In order to do that, I must offer a brief sketch of Danto’s account of the history of painting. Here it is important to remember that Danto thinks of history in terms of narratives, and of narratives as underwritten by human purposes and projects that aspire toward solutions. The earliest stages of art history for Danto, as for many others, essentially involve the history of pictorial representation. This history starts in Greece and then is taken up again in the Renaissance. It is underwritten by a project: verisimilitude, or the approximation of the perceptual appearance of real three-­ dimensional things by means of flat surfaces. The aim of this sort of art (which we might call mimetic after the theories of mimesis of Plato and Aristotle) is vividly, if hyperbolically, captured in those Greek anecdotes about birds mistaking pictures of grapes for real fruit and artists mistaking trompe l’oeil drapery for actual curtains. Call this aspiration: the conquest of perceptual reality. This project is the engine that drives art history for centuries. It is the existence of this project that enables art historians from Vasari to Gombrich to compose a narrative history of art. There is a problem: the representation of the appearance of three-dimensional things on. flat surfaces. Succeeding generations of artists can be plotted along an evolutionary trajectory inasmuch as each development, such as the refinement of perspective, brings the project closer and closer to realizing its aims. The construction of pictorial space via perspective is followed with even more heightened realism with respect to shadow and texture. And so on. Art movements such as realism and even impressionism can be explained as stages in the evolving story of approximating the look of perceptual reality. Moreover, this process is abetted by theory; philosophers of art repeat in treatise after treatise that art is essentially representational. This is the first stage of the history of art, its beginning, in the Aristotelian sense; it contrasts with a middle and an end. It is clearly a developmental history, the history of a project that informed the practice of painting for generations. Perhaps it was not the project of every painter, but it is of such overriding concern both practically and theoretically that it renders a rather comprehensive chunk of art history intelligible. As a story, it is more comprehensive than any other competing story we know.

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But stories require complications; they are not just beginnings. There are also middles. And the story of art as the history of representation reaches a crisis point. This occurs roughly in the nineteenth century and can be marked by the invention of photography. Photography, it might be said, realizes the project of mimetic art only too easily. Photography, as it is refined, is capable of capturing the visual appearances of things automatically. And when photography is developed into cinema, it seems to surpass the wildest dreams of mimetic art, for cinema not only represents the visual appearances of things mechanically in a way that comes to rival painting; it goes painting one better by capturing a dimension of visual appearances categorically denied to painting – namely, movement. Thus, cinema is even more realistic in this respect than painting could ever be. Photography and cinema, in effect, bring the project of art – construed in terms of perceptual verisimilitude – to a conclusion. But this, then, raises a new problem: what will be the vocation of art after the conquest of perceptual reality? Would the history of art construed as a developmental story end with masses of painters queuing up for job retraining programs? Of course, this is not what happened. Instead, at the level of both theory and practice, artists and philosophers identified new projects for painting. Noteworthy among these are formalism of the sort championed by Clive Bell with help from Kant, and expressionism of the variety defended by many philosophers of the first part of the twentieth century, including R. G. Collingwood and Susanne K. Langer. According to the formalist program, art was never really about representation; it is about the creation of significant form, which raises in spectators a species of aesthetic experience that earlier theorists would have called beauty.3 For formalists, painting is about the play of structure and color – the play of formal elements. Historically, one can read this as an act of recuperation in the face of the fact that photography and cinema put representational painting out of business. Moreover, it presents a way of radically recuperating art history. Art history, on this view, was never really about the conquest of perceptual appearances according to the formalists. All genuine art of the past was really about formal invention. At the same time, the demotion of representation and the concomitant elevation of form by the polemics of theorists and critics such as Clive Bell and Roger Fry made experiments in abstract painting more intelligible.

3 See Noël Carroll, “Beauty and the Genealogy of Art Theory,” Philosophical Forum 22, no. 4 (1991): 307–34.

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Formalism, however, was not the only available reaction to the end of the representational project. Expressionism is another. For the expressionist, art is not about capturing the appearances of the perceptual, external world but rather about clarifying the inner world of feelings. Through strategies such as distortion, German Expressionists sought an iconography of the soul, while abstraction, in the case of artists such as Kandinsky, also provided a serviceable medium for expression. But even if formalism and expressionism provided vocations for art after the closure of the developmental history of representational painting, these vocations were different in kind from the one afforded by mimetic art. Why? Because mimetic art gave painters a project – a clear progress toward that end in a fairly straightforward manner; one could gauge closer and closer approximations of perceptual appearances. And inasmuch as there was a clearly defined end to the project, an assessable solution to the problem, it enabled painters to live in a story that promised a climax. But that is not the case under either the formalist or the expressionist dispensation. Artists could discover formal structure after formal structure, or clarify an indefinitely large number of emotions. But there was no specifiable end that could be conjectured to either enterprise. There was no formal structure whose discovery would herald a completion of the formalist agenda, nor was there any emotion whose expression would mark the end of the trail. Formalism, and expressionism provided artists with ways to go on after the goal of representation was effectively closed, off. They did not, however, generate new developmental narratives; they lacked a project with clearly defined closure: Thus, they did not provide the grounds for a continuing narrative of art – one with a beginning, middle, and end. This pause in the forward-moving propulsion of the story of art, however, was only a momentary stopping point. For during the period of reaction to the closing of the mimetic project, another option, an alternative to both formalism and expressionism, appeared, which once again afforded a project for painters. It was a project with a clearly defined target, a project, therefore, that opened the possibility that painting could once again tell of itself a developmental story. That project is what has come to be called modernism. According to modernist theory, as enacted by painters and recounted by critics, the role of art was to be define its own essential nature. Painting became a form of critique an interrogation of its own conditions of possibility. Given the fate of the mimetic project, the nature of painting was no longer thought to reside in representing perceptual appearances accurately; it was to be sought elsewhere. Like the mimetic project, the modernist project had clear-cut targets For, presumably painting had an essential nature. Successive

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approximations of that nature would move the modernist project toward completion. Artists had a definable goal once again, which, among other things, meant that painting could once more be characterized by a developing narrative. One version of that story, as told by Clement Greenberg and repeated by many others, is that modern art is an adventure in clarifying the nature of its basic elements such as, among other things, two-dimensionality of the picture plane, composed essentially of line and color! Cubism, on this account, works in a shallow pictorial space, one to be contracted virtual centimeter by virtual centimeter until it appears coextensive with the canvas in the work of Morris Louis, while the work of Jackson Pollock is said to be about exhibiting the ontological fact that line and color are the fundamental constituents of painting. The painting itself was thought to be a real thing, rather than a representation of something else. That real thing belonged to a certain category, painting, a category with its own integrity, its own nature, constituted of features such as flatness. For Danto, it is into this modernist narrative, this story of art’s project of self-definition, that Warhol and kindred spirits make their decisive interventions. Pop artists such as Lichtenstein and Johns challenge the modernist oppositions such as flat painterly things versus representations by making paintings of comic-book panels and flags that are at once, in certain senses, both flat and representations – since they are representations of flat things. Perhaps it was their devilish deconstruction of his basic categories that so ill-disposed Greenberg to Pop Art. A basic presupposition of modernism à la Greenberg was that paintings are real things rather than representations. Nevertheless, they were a distinct sort of real thing, painted things with their own essential perceptual characteristics, such as flatness. Put bluntly, paintings were still thought to be different from other sorts of real things in perceptually discernible ways. The importance of Warhol for Danto is that Warhol undermined this presupposition by creating objects such as Brillo Box, which were artworks at the same time they were perceptually indiscernible from other sorts of real things, notably ordinary Brillo boxes by Proctor and Gamble. That is, Warhol in effect proposed that something could be a work of art irrespective of the way it looked; a work of art could look like anything. This challenged Greenberg’s version of modernism, since that was based on the presupposition that the critique of painting could proceed by using the means of painting, the visual elements of painting, to show for anyone to see what differentiates painting in its essential nature from everything else. But the argument implicit in Warhol’s Brillo Box is that whatever makes something

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art is something the eye cannot descry, since though Warhol’s Brillo Box looks just like an ordinary Brillo box, his Brillo Box is art and Proctor and Gamble’s is not. Warhol demonstrated in other words, that artworks could look like anything, that they did not have necessary self-defining, perceptible features. Warhol proposed that artworks could just look like ordinary, everyday things. Warhol’s achievement, then, according to Danto, is a contribution to the definition of art, but one that brings the modernist project to a halt rather than to a conclusion. For by proposing that art can look like anything else, Warhol places an insurmountable barrier in the way of the modernist project. The idea behind modernism was that painting] could interrogate its own nature by deploying its own means, its perceptible properties, reflexively. The modernist painter, in other words, could discover and make others see the nature of painting in virtue of the way the relevant paintings looked. In contrast, Warhol’s experiments implied that what made something art was not a matter of the way things looked, an argument perhaps already presaged by Duchamp’s readymades. This, of course, represents a contribution to the discussion of the nature of art initiated by modernism. But it also indicates a limit to how far painters operating as painters, that is, as people whose medium is how things look, can contribute to such a discussion. For if how things look is ultimately irrelevant to art status, then visual artists using the media at their disposal do not possess suitable means to show what makes something art rather than something else – just because whatever that differentia might be, it is something that is indiscernible perceptually. Warhol proposed that the difference between artworks and real things is not something you can eyeball. But if that differentia is not something you can show or see, then it is not something to which painters as visual artists can give us perceptual access: it is not something they can show us. Thus, according to Danto, Warhol and other artists of the sixties brought the modernist narrative to a halt by making works that implied that the nature of art was not a topic that could be pursued to the bitter end in the medium of painting. It required another medium. And predictably enough, Danto, a philosopher, says that that medium is philosophy. So, for Danto, with Warhol’s work, art history as a progressive narrative reaches a stopping point, a point beyond which it can go no further. This is no tragedy, however, for the work of Warhol and others is also liberating. Inasmuch as it implies that art can look like anything, it ushers in an era of radical pluralism when art can take on any form, from performance art to installations of every configuration. Thus, art in posthistorical times ­(Danto’s name for our own epoch)has given up the prospect of having a story, a progressive myth to tell about itself, but in return it possesses a newfound freedom and diversity.

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There are, of course, a number of problems of detail with Danto’s theory of the end of art. And yet, the large movements Danto traces in the coordinated development of Western art practice and theory do concur with much of the tradition’s self-understanding. That is, Danto has retold the story of painting in terms that the art world already, if only vaguely, acknowledges, though he has, perhaps, told it with more explanatory elegance than is customary, linking the different moments in the dialectic into a seamless narrative network. And for our purposes, this raises two questions: first, to what extent, if any, can the model Danto has constructed for the history of painting serve as a model of the history of dance; and second, if it is so serviceable, can Danto’s observations about Warhol help organize our understanding of the significance of comparable choreographic artists such as Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, Douglas Dunn, and others? The answer to the first question is that Danto’s history of fine art tracks the evolution of dance practice and theory to a remarkable degree. That is, the history of dance – as the development of choreographic practice and theoretical speculation – can readily be told as a story whose major moments correspond very closely to the major movements in Danto’s history of painting. If Western theatrical dancing proper can be said to begin roughly in the eighteenth century with the theoretical writings and practice of Jean-Georges Noverre, it must also be agreed that Noverre operated within a context dominated by representation theories of art.4 For example, in 1747, Charles Batteux published a treatise entitled The Beaux-Arts Reduced to a Single Principle.5 For Batteux, everything that is to count as a work of art meets the same criterion, which is imitation, an idea common, as we have seen, to Western philosophers as early as Plato and Aristotle. Noverre was a man with a mission. As a choreographer, he was committed to getting dance taken seriously. To do this, he aspired to have the dance recognized as an art form. And since the presiding theory of art was that art is essentially imitation or representation, this committed, Noverre to arguing that dance is representation. Of course, like other philosophers, such as Adam Smith, Noverre knew that not all dance was representational. As Smith put it, much of, the dance of his and Noverre’s time, from peasant jigs to court masques, was not representational but rather a succession of airs and figures, a matter of cadenced steps 4 See Jean-Georges Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets, trans. C. W. Beaumont (New York: Dance Horizons, 1966). 5 Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe, ed. Jean-Remy Mantion (Paris: Aux Amateurs de Livres, 1989).

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functionally aimed at displaying grace and agility.6 But Noverre was not concerned with describing dance as it was. He was concerned with saying what dance should become – what dance should become in order to be considered art, the most obvious means at Noverre’s disposal for having dance taken seriously. Thus, Noverre advocated that dance forsake its ornaments and airs and become an art of imitation. Noverre writes, “A well-composed ballet is a living picture of the passions, manners, customs [and] ceremonies ... of ... nations.”7 And he argued that ballets must be devised with action in order to achieve this purpose. Of course, the drama Aristotle correlates with mimesis derives its name from the Greek word for “doing.” So in calling for dance to become the imitation, of action (or of doings), Noverre is effectively calling for dance to become a kind of theater rather than a collection of charming steps. The development of the ballet d’action the form associated with Noverre’s writing and practice and which dominates the period of the Romantic ballet as well, is essentially linked to the mimetic or representational theory of art. Noverre’s constant analogies between drama and painting, the two arts Plato used to exemplify mimesis in his Republic, are especially telling in this regard. Throughout his letters, Noverre is at pains to claim that dance has powers comparable to painting and theater and that the appropriate line for the evolution of dance to follow is to exploit these powers. Otherwise, dance will not assume its proper place in the system of the fine arts. Thus the upshot of Noverre’s practices and polemics is to segue the initial development of dance in the modern period (the only period of Western dance about which we can speak with confidence) to the first stage of the grand story of art that we have heard from Danto. If the first act of dance history corresponds to the beginning of Danto’s story of art, what of later episodes? As the authority of the view that representation is the essence of art eroded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we find that serious thinking about dance, like serious thinking about painting, turns in the direction of alternatives such as formalism and expressionism. The formalist moment is perhaps best articulated by the critic-theorist André Levinson, who worked in Russia and later France. Perhaps struck by the aesthetic superiority of the divertissements of the Russian Imperial Ballet over its story elements, Levinson locates the value of dance in its capacity to create compelling patterns of movement that command our attention for their own sake. Levinson is also what we might call an essentialist, about dance; 6 Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 7 Noverre, Letters on Dancing and Ballets, 16.

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he believes that dance should exploit those of its capabilities that differentiate it from every other art form. He disparages the notion that dance should be drama on the grounds that choreography should be its own art and not a ­subaltern to theater. Assembling a theoretical heritage’ that he believes includes Théophile Gautier, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry, Levinson argues: I can not think of anyone who has devoted himself to those characteristics which belong exclusively to dancing, or who has endeavored to formulate specifically the laws of this art on its own ground.... No one has ever tried to portray the intrinsic beauty of the dance step, its innate quality, its esthetic reason for being.... It is the desire of the dancer to create beauty which causes him to make use of his knowledge of mechanics and that finally dominates this knowledge. He subjects his muscles to a rigid discipline; through arduous practice he bends and adapts his body to the exigencies of an abstract and perfect form.8 Just as we find in the history of painting, in dance, formalism provides one option for responding to the collapse of the representational theory of art. But as in the history of painting, expressionism in dance another. Modern Dance – the dance of Graham, Humphrey, Wigman, Limón, and others – coalesces around the conviction that the proper function of dance is, the expression of feelings. These convictions find voice not only in the writings of certain choreographers but in the theoretical speculation of critics and theorists like John Martin and Susanne K. Langer.9 Both Martin and Langer are committed to expression theories of art. Both see the substance of dance in expressive movement, which Martin calls “meta-kinesis” which Langer locates in what she calls the realm of virtual powers. For Langer, that the scope of dance proper is delimited to the domain of virtual powers distinguishes it from drama, which for her is an affair of destiny. In contrast, Martin’s view, that the arrangement of dance forms is dictated by “the logic of inner feeling,” signals a necessary departure from the regulative standard of theatrical imitation (insofar as the logic of feeling is different from the logic of action, i.e., from the logic of narrative). Thus expressionism, like formalism, eschews Noverre’s ideal of dance as essentially a theater art. Moreover, 8 Andre Levinson, “The Spirit of the Classic Dance,” in Dance as a Theatre Art, ed. Selma Jeanne Cohen (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1974), 113. 9 John Martin, The Modern Dance (New York: Dance Horizons, 1972); Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner’s, 1953).

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expressionism, especially as it figures in modern dance, will become one of the major provocations leading to the development of what is now referred to as postmodern dance. Furthermore, as Danto’s history of art predicts, by the middle of the twentieth century a form of dance modernism begins to appear alongside formalism and expressionism as a response to the decline of representation. In some of the abstract ballets of Balanchine10 and the dances of Merce Cunningham, choreography that appears committed to disclosing the basic constituents of dancing begins to command increasing attention. However, as a critique of the nature of dance, this work retains the appearance of dance. No matter how pared down, Balanchine’s vocabulary is still balletic, while Cunningham’s leaps and partnering, though subverting the tradition, clearly look like dancing. Like the heroes of Greenbergian modernism, Balanchine’s and Cunningham’s ­critiques of dance remain, so to say, from the inside. They pursue the question of the nature of dance through an idiom of forms that are usually still perceptibly dancerly, forms that contrast discernibly from what might be called “everyday movement” or even “real movement.” Of course, it is at this point in the story that what we refer to as postmodern dance begins to assume a significance parallel to that which Danto attributes to the work of Warhol and his 1964 exhibition of Brillo Box. For Danto, Warhol’s achievement resides in bringing the art world to the realization that works of art could look like anything, including mundane, ordinary objects. Likewise, at roughly the same time, in and around Judson Church, choreographers were creating dances with similar theoretical commitments. Just as Warhol problematized the distinction between artworks and ordinary objects, these choreographers challenged the distinction between dance movements and ordinary movement.11 Judith Dunn’s Acapulco, for example, comprised hair brushing, playing cards, and ironing a dress. In Robert Dunn’s composition class, Steve Paxton presented an untitled piece in which he ate a sandwich. In Satisfyin Lover, Paxton sends a platoon of people across the space walking in the unaffected way that one might stroll down the street, sustaining our interest by means of a structure that invites the comparison of different styles of walking. And Paxton returns to the subject of ordinary walking again in Flat, where he undresses, 10 11

See, for example, David Michael Levin, “Balanchine’s Formalism,” Dance Perspectives 55 (Autumn 1973). For an overview and description of dances by members of the Judson Dance Theater, see Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (1980, 1983; reprint, Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993).

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dresses, and ambulates in circles punctuated by moments of arrest. Likewise, Simone Forti’s See-Saw presents an ordinary child’s game as an opportunity for spectators to notice the microphysics of everyday movement. And Douglas Dunn composed a chair piece that involved nothing more than ordinary, though very deliberate, standing up and sitting down. A strategy of postmodern dance with particular significance for leveling the boundary between dance movement and ordinary movement was the task. In Room Service, Yvonne Rainer has her performers carry a mattress through the space. Here everyday work movements are presented in a dance-world context in order to recall to mind the intelligence exhibited by the body in discharging mundane tasks. Theoretically, however, the work also suggests that ­movements that do not look like dance can be dance when framed in a way that underscores neglected properties of movement. In Deborah Hay’s no. 3, three helpers toppled and dragged three stacks of bricks while Hay ran evenly in circles. Similarly, the invented tasks in Simone Forti’s Slant Board and Rollers present the audience with movements that do not look like dance but which become dance when exhibited in an aesthetic context in which our attention is less concerned with what is being done or accomplished and more concerned with how it is done: its mechanics, energies, and qualities. Task performances insinuate, in other words, that if a major subject of dance is the exhibition and perception of movement for its own sake, then the movements that we shall count as dance need not look at all like those bequeathed to us by tradition as dancerly. A dance movement can look like anything, even ordinary movement and work. An important strategy of Pop artists for leveling the perceptual distinction between art and other things was, of course, to create artworks that were indistinguishable from the artifacts of popular culture. By presenting comic-book panels or movie stills as artworks, people like Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and Warhol attacked the distinction between high art – or art proper – and popular art. This line of attack is also evident in the work of postmodern choreographers. In Elaine Summers’s Suite, the last section is organized around the then-popular dance, the Twist. Not only did the dancers twist, but the audience was invited to join in. This not only suggested that popular dancing like the Twist was dance properly so-called but also, insofar as earlier sections of the dance were named “Galliard” and “Saraband,” Suite insinuated that the distinction Between high art dance and ordinary social dancing has frequently been quite porous. If, using Danto’s account of Warhol, we identify a major aim of early postmodern dance as articulating the perspective that dance movement can looks like anything, then we are in a position to explain why Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A

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has always been regarded as so theoretically important. Although this dance suggests the kind of energy levels expended in ordinary movement, it does not look like everyday movement. But at the same time, it does not look like anything our culture could readily recognize as dance. It is designed in such a way as to thwart the traditional categories we use for recognizing movement as dance movement, thereby insinuating that something can lack all the perceptible features we associate with dance movement and yet still be dance. Trio A eschews arresting gestural shapes, using neither frozen moments nor movements like pirouettes or jetés that evoke a sense of an abstract, choreographic geometry or gestalt. No special parts of the body are privileged. Head, hands, and legs all move, not only defying the idea of a balletic line but also making it difficult to summarize the style in terms of a part of the body, as one might with the style of Limón in terms of emphasis on the upper torso. There are no repetitions or variations, as the dance forgoes even the vaguest rhythmic structure, and there is no demarcation between phrases. Perhaps needless to say, there is no story, character, attitude, or action. The dance even lacks a legible floor plan; it is not organized by means of an abstract geometry. In a sense, Trio A is a study in negations, an eschewal of the relevance of many of the central cultural criteria that we typically mobilize in order perceptually to recognize movement as dance. All these negatives, however, do add up to a positive thesis: namely, that any movement can be a dance movement, no matter what it looks like. In this way, Rainer and others managed to bring the evolving conversation of dance history roughly to that point to which Danto claims Warhol brought the conversation of art history in 1964. One question that always arises in discussions of postmodern dance is, why isn’t Merce Cunningham regarded as a postmodern choreographer? Certainly, he is respected as a forerunner. But why isn’t he accorded a central place in the visionary company of postmoderns? Perhaps we can answer that question by recalling Danto’s history of art. For Danto, modernists, notably those of the Greenbergian persuasion, were committed to pursuing the critique of painting via emphasis on the perceptible properties of painting: things like flatness, line, and color. They presupposed that art had certain discernible features, features you could eyeball. Warhol raised the ante in the game of critique, proposing artworks indistinguishable from real things. In this light, one might say of Cunningham that his important work is analogous to the Greenbergian stage of modernism. Though many still might find his work incomprehensible (in the same way that spectators may still be confused by abstractionists like Stella), they nevertheless are able to recognize perceptually that Cunningham’s movements generally fit into traditional categories of dance movement. In contrast to Paxton’s Satisfyin Lover, Cunningham’s

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leaps, however small, don’t look like ordinary walking. Cunningham seminally advanced the critique of dance, but he stopped short of attempting to erase the boundary between dance movement and ordinary movement. That boundary (what Danto calls with respect to Warhol the indiscernibility question) remained to be crossed by Paxton, Rainer, and others. It was not until that border was pierced that these choreographers became postmodern and even, in a certain way of speaking, postmodernist. I hope that I have been able to show the relevance of Danto’s philosophical history of art to dance history. I would not wish to endorse all of Danto’s theses.12 For example, Danto claims that Warhol has ended the progressive narrative of art for all time, and I am not convinced that anyone, including Danto, can know that.13 Danto also points to: another way in which Warhol is important to the history of art: he contends that Warhol liberated art, initiating a period of great pluralism, insofar as after Warhol, anything can be art. In this sense, Warhol is the founding intelligence of our posthistorical art world. Surely a similar place of honor is due those choreographers who were Warhol’s contemporaries: Rainer, Paxton, Gordon, Forti, Dunn, and many others. They, too, demonstrated that anything could become dance no matter how it looked – from Contact Improvisation to we know not what. In retrospect, they have extended the range of possibility for contemporary dance momentously. They have opened a new world of dance: not an end to dance, but perhaps a new beginning. 12 13

For my criticisms of Danto’s After the End of Art, see Noël Carroll, “Danto’s New Definition of Art and the Problem of Art Theories,” British Journal of Aesthetics 37, no. 4 (1997): 386–92. For criticism of Danto’s thesis that art history is over, see Noël Carroll, “The End of Art?” in History and Theory, theme issue no. 37 (1998): 17–29.

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Arthur Danto Goes to the Movies 1 Introduction In this essay, I would like to review the significance of Arthur Danto’s work for the philosophy of the moving image. His seminal essay, “Moving Pictures,”1 sketches an ontology of cinema, but, in addition, his philosophy of art history is relevant to the history of avant-garde film in the nineteen-seventies, while his practice as a journalistic reviewer can serve as a model for future movie criticism. In order to substantiate these claims, I will divide this essay into three parts. The first part, entitled “Danto’s Ontology of Cinema” will set out his central claims about the nature of the moving image critically – noting its shortcomings, but also amending it, I hope, in ways that advance our understanding of the moving image. Next I will try to show the way in which Danto’s theory of the-end-of-art marks a turning point in the direction of what was called The New American Cinema. And finally I will propose Danto’s critical practice as providing a compelling exemplar for movie criticism. 2

Danto’s Ontology of Cinema

Danto’s essay, “Moving Pictures,” is an attempt to analyze the essence of moving pictures. In it, he appears to isolate three, necessary feature of movies, although he does not explicitly claim that they are jointly sufficient conditions. Stated summarily, something is a moving picture (1) only if it is possible that the image move, (2) only if it is not about actors, and (3) only if it possesses the possibility of incarnating an artistic vision. Danto’s argument for his first condition for being a moving picture – namely, that moving pictures move – is of a piece with his well-known strategy of deploying ontological indiscernibles in order to chart essential, metaphysical boundaries. A key inspiration for Danto’s meta-philosophical strategy is the Cartesian thought-experiment that imagines A Perfect Dream that is indiscernible from

1 Arthur Danto, “Moving Pictures,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies Vol. 4., no. 1 (winter, 1979), pp. 1–21. © Noël Carroll, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004468368_014 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Actual Waking Life. The challenge here is to determine what ontologically determines the difference between what we call reality from its exact oneiric simulacrum. This is a philosophical challenge rather than a scientific one, because no amount of observation, the ultimate currency of science, can tell the difference. Only an analysis in the form of a transcendental deduction – a.k.a. a hypothesis to the best explanation – can. Danto is attracted to this method because he believes that it solves the demarcation problem – the question of what differentiates science from philosophy. Danto thinks that the method of indiscernibles achieves this. Why? Well, by definition, if two items are strictly indiscernible, then no amount of observation will distinguish them. But observation is the métier of science; all scientific claims must finally be grounded in observation. Therefore, problems of indiscernibility, by definition, cannot be solved by science. Or so Danto claims. Thus, he surmises they are philosophical problems. In order to solve them, the philosopher must present a hypothesis that locates a difference that makes a difference between the indiscernibles. Perhaps Danto’s best known application of the method of indiscernibles is his comparison of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and the manufacturer Proctor and Gamble’s packing container of the aforesaid product. Danto asks what makes Warhol’s Brillo Box art whereas Proctor and Gamble’s is a mere real thing. Danto hypothesizes that at least part of the answer is that Warhol’s Brillo Box is “about something” whereas Proctor and Gamble’s has nothing to say. For Danto, Warhol’s Brillo Box is about art. Proctor and Gamble’s container is putatively mute. With regard to cinema, Danto applies this method of indiscernibles for charting metaphysical boundaries by imagining two indiscernible projections – a slide of the title page of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and a film of the same opening page. The two look the same; the eye cannot cut the difference. Yet, they are different ontologically. For example, if you know that you are looking at a film projection of the title page of War and Peace, then it is rational upon first viewing to anticipate that something might move in the frame – a hand might reach in to turn it, or it might incinerate. On the other hand, if you know that you are looking at a slide of the title page, it would be irrational to expect movement ever. For it is not of the nature of slides to move. Slides are still pictures. Of course, once you have seen Danto’s epic film production of War and Peace, it would be irrational to expect that an unmodified replay of it would result in movement in the image. But on first viewing it would be eminently reasonable, since what it is to be a moving picture just is that it has been produced by means of a technology that makes pictorial-image movement possible. That is why we call them “moving pictures” or, more colloquially, “motion

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pictures,” in contrast to paintings, frescoes, photographs, and the like which we naturally enough categorize as “still pictures.” By means of the War and Peace thought-experiment, Danto demarcates the border between the fine art of painting and cinema. The possibility of movement in the image is the differentia. But other artforms move. Theater possesses the possibility of movement and, indeed, like cinema, most theater moves. So what distinguishes the moving picture as an artform from theater as an artform? To address this distinction, Danto proposes another set of indiscernibles: a documentary film of a theater production of a play X and an original movie adaptation of the very same play X for the screen, which looks exactly like the documentary of the aforesaid play. That is, the movie employs the same actors, the same sets, and the same blocking as the original production and the same camera positions that were employed by the documentary of said production. So, both look exactly alike. So what differentiates them? Danto hypotheses that the documentary is about actors, whereas the movie, which Danto calls “a screenplay proper,” is about characters. That is, suppose the play X is about John and Mary and they are played by Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward both on stage and in the adaptation in the screenplay proper. According to Danto, the documentary of X is about Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, whereas the screenplay proper of X is about John and Mary. Consequently, Danto surmises, screenplays proper – movies as artworks – are about characters and not about actors. This hypothesis, needless to say, requires some qualifications, since sometimes the fictional characters in a movie may be actors as in the case of All About Eve or Sunset Boulevard. So, sometimes screenplays proper may be about actors in the sense of actors-as-characters rather than actors-as-actors. All About Eve is about the character Eve-the-actress; it is not about Anne Baxter. Of course, Buster Keaton is playing Buster Keaton in Sunset Boulevard, however, there is still a distinction here, since Buster Keaton is playing the character Buster Keaton, since the actual Buster Keaton is not a friend of the fictional character Norma Desmond; only the character Buster Keaton can be. Danto derives a third essential feature of cinema from the phenomenon of camera movement. Danto’s thinking in this matter is not easy to follow. In fact, I am not sure that I understand it. Roughly, it seems that from the possibility of camera movement in cinema, Danto wishes to argue that moving pictures give us experiential purchase into an artist’s way of seeing. According to Danto, the moving camera makes its very mode of recording part of the record. Furthermore, camera movement itself may make the audience aware of it, as in the case of Michael Snow’s La Region Centrale. In this way, camera movement

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may exhibit a form of self-consciousness, which finally may be a reflection of the artist’s way of seeing. Moving pictures, thus, have the potential to grant audiences access to the motion picture maker’s subjectivity – his or her way of seeing. Perhaps Michael Snow once again provides an example of what Danto is getting at. In Wavelength, the gradual, virtual forward-movement of the telephoto lens permits us to participate in Snow’s own act of seeing as the camera hones-in upon its destination. To recapitulate, through these various considerations, Danto appears to conclude that something is a moving picture only if (1) it possesses the potential for movement in the image, (2) it is not about actors-as-actors, and (3) it possess the possibility of giving audiences access to the artist’s way of seeing. Of these three necessary conditions, I am least convinced by the last. I do not understand the special connection that Danto claims to obtain between camera movement and self-consciousness. Doesn’t every artform possess the resources to exhibit the artist’s vision (understood more broadly than strictly ocular vision – and, even if we restrict vision to “ocular vision,” don’t painting, photography, sculpture, etc. possess comparable resources)? So, what Danto alleges about camera movement does not seem to say anything special about moving pictures, although he gives every impression that that is what he intends to be doing. But, as well, his claims about the implications of camera movement are strained. First, it needs to be said that, most camera movement is not self-­ conscious. Most camera movement is transparent. That is, we “see through it” and do not notice it, because it is headed toward something that is pertinent to the narrative; it points to what we need to see in order to “forward” the story. There is a commotion; the crowd opens; the camera pushes toward the characters who are causing the ruckus. We don’t pay attention to the camera movement because it is tracking, so to speak, our interests. Camera movement becomes noticeable when the motive that energizes it becomes opaque. We are struck by the camera movement in the famous trolley sequence in Murnau’s Sunrise because it does not seem to be guiding us anywhere. It appears to be a matter of self-display for its own sake. It can be labeled reflexive in the sense that it calls attention to itself. It might be called “a self-conscious camera movement,” for being so self-demonstrative, but “self conscious” in this case is not necessarily self-consciousness in the sense that an artist can be said to be self-conscious. To suppose that, as Danto seems to, is an equivocation. Likewise, if we equate, the artist’s literal pathway of seeing as recorded by a camera movement with an artist way of seeing thematically, equivocation may once again be in the offing.

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Of course, an artist might use opaque camera movement as a means to expressively project his/her self-consciousness. And in that sense, Danto is right in saying that the moving image possesses the possibility of projecting self-consciousness via camera movement. But it is not clear why Danto thinks that gets us closer to the essence of the art of cinema, since the moving image has other resources to this end, as do all the other arts. Danto’s second necessary condition for being a motion picture is also somewhat confusing. Danto presents us with the distinction between the documentary of a stage play and what he calls a screenplay proper. It is not completely clear to me what drawing the distinction between these two specimens is supposed to accomplish. Is the intention to draw a distinction between motion picture recordings and motion pictures as artworks? But Warhol’s artistic film accomplishment Empire and an indiscernible surveillance recording of the Empire State Building will have the same leading “character,” namely the Empire State Building. Artistic cinema cannot be distinguished from non-art cinema in terms of recording. Or, in other words, being a screen play proper is not a necessary condition for art cinema, since documentaries like Night and Fog, Man with the Movie Camera, and Las Hurdes can be art. Nor can the recording versus screenplay proper supply a necessary condition for being a motion picture, since documentaries are also motion pictures. Perhaps, Danto means the distinction between a documentary of a production of play X and a screenplay proper adaptation of play X to shed light on the distinction between theater art and motion picture art. But it is hard to see how it can shed any light here since the distinction between a documentary of a stage production of play X and a screenplay proper will be exactly the same as the distinction between a documentary of a stage production of play X and a production of play X where they are visually congruent. Undoubtedly, there is the distinction that Danto draws between screenplays proper and documentaries of stage productions. But the question is: what work does Danto think this work does for him? Is it supposed to mark the difference between theater and motion pictures in the way that the indiscernible projections of War and Peace delivered a distinction between motion pictures versus all forms of still pictures, including paintings and photographs? Well, it can’t do that since it ranges over two kinds of motion pictures. Nor can it mark a distinction between theatrical artworks and cinematic artworks, because the latter two categories both differ from the documentaries Danto imagines in essentially the same way. They are about characters. Consequently, I take Danto’s attempt to say something about the difference between theater and cinema in this way to be misguided, because he seems to be confused about what he is up to. Does he want to cleave theater from

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moving pictures in the way he sorted still pictures from moving pictures? Or, as he sometimes suggests: is he interested in differentiating theater art from motion picture art. Or, is he after the difference between motion picture art versus motion picture nonart? As I have suggested, there are problems with each of these attempts as well as a confusion about which one , if any of them, are at issue for Danto. On the other hand, Danto does make one very interesting suggestion about how to locate the border between theater and motion pictures by noting that the relation of the theatrical production to the play it is a production of is like the relation of a particular to its Platonic Form, whereas the relation of different instances of the same motion picture is, recalling Wittgenstein, like the relation of two instances of today’s newspaper. That is, theatrical productions are performative interpretations of the same play, whereas performances of the same motion picture are physical tokens of the same type. Since I have been so critical of Danto’s analysis so far, you may wonder why I have bothered to draw your attention to it. The reason is simply that I think that his first condition for being a motion picture is profound. Comparing the slide of the title page of War and Peace to a motion picture projection of it, as one might have seen in a credits-sequence of a nineteen-thirties, studio adaptation of a novel, Danto surmises that motion pictures are pictures that move – or, more accurately, pictures which in virtue of the technology that produces them have the possibility of moving. There are some movies that do not picture movement. Hollis Frampton’s Poetic Justice – images of pages of a shooting script – is one example. But it is still a moving picture, because it was produced by a system of devices that had the capacity to produce the impression of movement – an idea that Danto might get across by saying that it is reasonable for the first-time viewer who knows that Poetic Justice is a moving picture to believe that the image might start moving. With one emendation, this does strike me as a necessary condition for being a movie. The emendation is this: instead of talking about moving pictures, we should speak of moving images. A picture, moving or otherwise, is a specific kind of image. It is an image whose subject one can recognize by looking – that is, roughly speaking, without inferring or decoding. But not all cinematic images are pictures. There films, like Viking Eggling’s Symphonie Diagonale, that are composed of abstract images and films by Stan Brakhage of unrecognizable imagery due to multiple superimpositions and other forms of occlusion, as in his Text of Light, that are not, strictly speaking, pictures. But they are images. Thus, if we enlarge Danto’s domain of discourse to moving images, then it appears that his formula can be adapted to capture the gamut of cinema. For it

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seems indisputable that something is a moving image, only if it possesses the possibility of moving in the sense that it is the product of a technology that has the capacity to create the impression of movement. Of course, there are ­“movies” that don’t move. But they would not be “movies” if they were produced by an image making technology that was incapable of delivering the impression of movement. Moreover, even if one regards Danto’s finding as obvious, one has to grant that the thought-experiment he developed to prove it is a stroke of genius. Common sense often requires uncommon insight to support it. That is, philosophers often arrive at conclusions that echo common sense, such as “there is a material world” or “everything has a cause.” What elevates common sense to philosophy is the discovery of ways of supporting common sense with a compelling argument, as Kant did with respect to causation. In “Moving Pictures,” Danto discovered a nonobvious way in which to validate the obvious. One objection to Danto’s account of moving pictures is that he appears to countenance images that don’t move – like the title page of War and Peace – as full-blooded movies. Patently, it might be said, they are not. But is this so obvious? There are freeze frames in motion pictures. These are stylistic choices subject to interpretation because they can be used to mean something as they function connote the immortality of Bruce Lee in The Chinese Connection as he leaps at a Japanese firing squad. So if a brace of frozen frames in a movie can be legitimate elements of style, why not whole films comprised of frozen, motionless frames? Stillness is a stylistic possibility for moving images, whereas it is not for slides, since a photographer does not choose to make her image still. She has no choice. The creator of a moving image, on the other hand, can choose to have the image move or not. And when she makes it the case that the image is motionless, we ask why? In Poetic Justice, Frampton opted for still images to draw attention to the difference between writing and filming. Stillness, in other words, can be used to signify something in movies, whereas it cannot be used in this way in photographs, since stillness is not an option in photographs. Still movies are movies precisely because they can used to make meaning in virtue of the capacity of movies to move and, therefore, also not to move. That is a profound implication of Danto’s ontology of cinema, an implication realized by a number of avant-garde movies. 3

Danto and the History of the Moving Image

Danto is not only famous as a philosopher of art. He is also a philosopher of the history of art – something rare among Anglophone philosophers and more in Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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the tradition of Hegel. And like Hegel, though for different reasons, Danto has announced that art has come to an end. By announcing the end of art, Danto did not intend to say that artists would cease to make art. Rather he intended to declare that a certain developmental narrative has come to a stopping point.2 What developmental narrative was that? It was modernism as characterized by art critics like Clement Greenberg.3 On that view, the history of modern art from roughly Manet onwards was best construed as a progressive attempt to define art by means of art. One aspect of this reflexive project was that artists, starting in the nineteenth century, began to acknowledge the essential nature of paintings as flat objects. Manet gestured in that direction by eschewing perspective; the impressionists then dissolved space into color as would the Fauves. The Cubists contracted pictorial space by shattering it into shards. Color field painters like Rothko evaporated space; Pollock’s drip paintings displayed the picture plane as constituted essentially of line, color and canvas. And Lewis saturated his canvasses in paint until the paint and the surface of the canvas were fused as one in a radical affirmation of flatness. Notice this narrative is progressive. Serious artists have a target that they mean to hit – defining the nature of art by way of creating artworks that exemplify the essence of art or aspects thereof. Art history – serious art history – follows the trail of artists who progressively approximate an artistic characterization of the nature of art – that is, art history documents those artists who come closer and closer to hitting the target. Modernism, as a historical project, supposedly moved forward as painters working under its aegis continued to emphasize and thereby acknowledge the essential conditions that made the art of painting possible, such as not only its necessary flatness, but also the edge of the painting, which emphasis signaled the necessity of boundedness to pictorial composition. Modernism, on this account, has painting attempting to define itself by using the very resources of painting to do so. This is the task that ambitious painter have elected once photography arrived on the scene and the task of capturing the look of things could be achieved automatically. Thus post photography, the history of serious painting became the reflexive or self-definition of the art of painting by painting. However, according to Danto, this progressive project collapsed from within. For Danto, that collapse was decisively marked by the appearance of Andy 2 Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 3 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and CriticismI, ed. John O’Brian, Vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance: 1967–1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 85–93. Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Warhol’s Brillo Box. You’ll recall that for Danto the significance of ­Warhol’s Brillo Box is that it was indiscernible from the real thing, namely Proctor and Gamble’s box. But what does this imply? That an artwork, such as Warhol’s Brillo Box, is visually indiscernible from a real thing. And this entails that is not in virtue of any perceptible difference that we distinguish between art and nonart. Or, to put the matter bluntly, we cannot define art by reference to visual or discernible features. Yet, if this is the case, then the modernist project is rendered impossible. Why? Because it promised to disclose the nature of the art of painting by painting – that is, by visual means or discernibilia. But works such as Warhol’s Brillo Box indicate that this cannot be done since whatever demarcates the boundary between artworks and real things is not something that the eye can discern. So, it is not something that can be presented visually. Thus, with Warhol’s Brillo Box – and related works like Cage’s 4’33” in music and the ordinary movement of Judson Dance Theater – Danto argues that art has come to an end; that art history, conceived as the progressive process of self-definition has stopped in its tracks. That is, the modernist project has reached a point where it can proceed no further – where the story can no longer be told. Instead, we have entered a post-historical period of art, one not dominated by an overarching progressive agenda, but one open to a multitude of diverse projects. These projects could range from postmodernism to AIDs activism, feminism, expressionism, semiotic recoding, and even the return to the pursuit of beauty. The consequences of Warhol’s breakthrough were perhaps subliminal at first, but artists responded intuitively by initiating projects that no longer took their marching orders from modernism. Danto’s end-of-art thesis, it seems to me, not only illuminates developments within the past few decades in the world of the fine arts. It is also relevant to the history of the moving image during the comparable time span. For the avant-garde or experimental cinema, undoubtedly influenced by the aesthetics of the art galleries, underwent a parallel trajectory form reflexivity to post-historical diversity. Although different in important respects from the attempt at self-definition in the painterly and sculptural avant-gardes, historically, filmmakers have often been concerned with defining the uniqueness of cinema. One might interpret Ferdinand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique as an early attempt to identify cinema as movement inasmuch as movement appeared to be the only unifying theme of Leger’s disparate collection of images. Likewise, Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera is, at least in part, a reflexive inventory of the devices that comprise the emerging medium of film.

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This reflexive urge toward self-definition became most pronounced in the movement that was called Structural Film in the last third of the twentieth century. Structural Film, as the label suggests, are films that are generated by a highly structured set of rules – like Gehr’s Serene Velocity, Takei Imura’s 1 in 10 or Frampton’s Nostalgia – or that had a highly perceptible shape – like Snow’s Wavelenght or McColl’s Line Defining a Cone.4 These films were most often reflexive – exploring features of the medium that differentiated the moving image from other media or examining features of the medium in terms of the ways in which they engaged the cognitive and perceptual faculties of viewers. For example, the soundtrack of Frampton’s nostalgia describes, in mock, art-historical language, the photographs in the shots we are about to see next. When we see those photographs, they are resting on a burner; gradually they incinerate. By describing the photos before showing them, Frampton calls our attention to the vast phenomenological distinction between verbal representation and pictorial-photographic representation, underlining experientially the abstractness of the former in vivid contrast to the repleteness of visual representation. But then by burning the photographs, Frampton draws our attention to the temporality and capacity for movement of cinema in contrast to photography and painting. Indeed, nostalgia might be called an exercise in media differentiation. Snow’s Wavelength interrogates the phenomenological effect of zooming-in, albeit at a gradual pace. Indeed the gradual pace itself provides us with a space for reflection, allowing us to see how the virtual movement of the camera-eye engages anticipation and, as it zeroes-in protentively up on its destination. Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma is one of the most complex Structural Films, exploring reflexive themes across several dimensions. It has three parts. The first part presents a blank screen, while on the soundtrack, the speaker rehearses the alphabet, using theological examples for each letter – as in the case of the letter “A” which is exemplified by a lesson about Adam’s Fall. The use of the alphabet here signals that we are about to be introduced to a sense-making system. The next section of the film is a homage to montage. First we see a run of images of the letters of the alphabet at the pace of one letter per second. The letters then give way to scenes projected at the same pace; each of these scenes, however, has a word in it somewhere that corresponds to the letter it is replacing. Moreover, these scenes themselves constitute a veritable inventory 4 See Noël Carroll, “Film in the Age of Postmodernism,” in my Interpreting the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 303–312.

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of cinematic devices, like fast and slow motion, superimposition, split screens and the like. It is as if Frampton is reflexively laying out the rhetoric of film device by device. Then the lettered scenes are gradually replaced by unlettered scenes. We catch-on that the editing will conclude when all the letter images are replaced by unlettered scenes. This structure actively engages the viewer’s memory and anticipation in a way that is apperceptively palpable and that acknowledges their indispensability to the phenomenon of editing. Of course, film is not only a product of editing, the sloganeering of Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein notwithstanding. Thus, the last shot of Zorn’s Lemma is approximately a long-take, long shot of a couple and their dog crossing a snow covered field. This image, so to speaks, thereby nods in the tradition of film theory best represented by Andre Bazin with its emphasis on the photographic provenance of cinema. But, at the same time, it does not simply treat photography as another member on the list of cinematic devices. It foregrounds the way in which the long-take, long shot encourages the viewer to engage the image – to explore it for significance. Films like Zorn’s Lemma exemplify the reflexive ambitions of the Structural Film, an endeavor that promised to interrogate cinema in a way that was comparable to, although not exactly the same as, the phenomena of modernism in the realms of painting and sculpture. Structural Filmmakers hoped to demonstrate reflexively what makes cinema cinema by cinematic means. Undoubtedly some works, like Gehr’s Serene Velocity (which proposed movement as a necessary condition of the moving image), made definite contributions to defining the moving image.5 However, by the late nineteen-seventies, this project began to lose momentum. If we want to explain why this happened, Danto’s hypothesis about the end-of-art in other precincts of the artworld is highly suggestive. Undoubtedly, the drive to define the moving image was underwritten by the desire to define the moving image as a unique artform. This desire was the longstanding desire of film theory: to enfranchise cinema as a distinctive artform. And surely that was what was really at stake for Structural Filmmakers. For, they were interested in asserting the art status of cinema. But obviously, it is one thing to define the moving image, as Serene Velocity does partially, and quite another thing to establish its credentials as an autonomous artform. One could make a contribution to the former project without getting any closer to defining what makes cinema art. What motion picture 5 See Noël Carroll, “Philosophizing through the Moving Image: the Case of Serene Velocity,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Winter 2006), pp. 173–185.

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historians can derive from Danto’s end-of-art thesis is that Danto’s account of the failure of the modernist project to isolate the essential conditions of painting-as-an art through painting can be extended to the problematic of Structural Film. That is, just as the project of modernism was foreclosed from the outset, so was that of Structural Film, construed not just as an attempt to defining the moving image, but as the aspiration to characterize the nature of the moving image as art. Alerted to the problem of modernist painting, the motion picture historian can identify a parallel challenge besetting Structural Film. Whereas Warhol’s Brillo Box showed that whatever made it art as distinct from a so-called “real thing” was not perceptible – and, therefore, not susceptible to being presented visually – a similar moral appears derivable from Warhol’s Empire. Empire, as is well known, is an eight hour film of the Empire State Building. It is an example of the art of cinema, although an indiscernible eight hour stretch of surveillance footage would not be. It would a “real thing,” in Danto’s idiom. Thus, available within the very heart of Structural Film was evidence that the project was conceptually blocked from the get-go. Like modernism in painting, Structural Film was superseded by a diversity of sometimes overlapping avant-garde projects such as, The New Talkie, Punk Film, Feminist Film, the return of the Psychodrama, and more.6 Artists intuitively surmised that the Structural Film moment was languishing and set out in new directions. What they sensed as a problem, if only subliminally, can be conceptualized by motion picture historians in terms of Danto’s end-ofart thesis with respect to painting and sculpture. As with modernism, so with Structural Film: the reflexive quest confronted a conceptual limitation that it could not surpass. 4

Danto and Moving Image Criticism

As a philosopher of art history, Danto dubbed our current period “post-historical” – that is, after the end of modernism and its accompanying, progressive (historical) narrative. Interestingly, it is within this very period that Danto was a practicing art critic, most frequently for the periodical The Nation. And maybe unsurprisingly, Danto developed a critical practice perfectly suited to the post-historical artworld.

6 Carroll, “Film in the Age of Postmodernism,” pp. 300–332.

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As a philosopher, Danto, like Hegel, thought that something was an artwork only if (1) it had a subject or was about something which (2) it embodied in a form that was appropriate to whatever it was about.7 This formula then became the patent for his art criticism. That is, the task of the art critic was to identify what the work in question was about – that is, to interpret it. And then to explain how the artist’s choices advanced or embodied or articulated whatever the artwork was about by showing the way in which those choices were adequate or appropriate or fitting to that subject matter. So, for example, Danto might explain how Robert Maplethorpe’s resort to the polish of fashion photography to depict his homoerotic subject matter was an artist choice intended to validate gay lifestyles as beautiful. This critical modus operandi stood in stark contrast to the style of criticism associated with modernism and its vicissitudes. That species of criticism was historical in the sense that, with each artwork, it determined whether or not the artwork fit into the march of history – the progressive modernist narrative – in terms of whether the new work contributed to or impeded the reflexive program of defining art. That is, did the new work fit into the ongoing story or not? Was it on the side of history or was it regressive or, worse, reactionary? But, for Danto, in post-historical times, there is no dominant story into which everything must find its place. To a certain extent, every work is a singularity. And Danto’s critical approach is eminently capable of accommodating that. Each artwork will have something that it is about which it will embody in its own distinctive way. Whereas modernist art criticism has a “one-sizefits-all” standard, Danto’s approach is calibrated critically to the scale to which specific artworks aspire. In this way, Danto’s critical approach is superior to the modernist model for post-historical times – indeed, arguably for all times. Of course, Danto presuppositions have been challenged. His critical approach is based, at least implicitly, on his theory of art. But against his theory of art, it has been charged that not all art is about something in Danto’s sense – that is, not all art has to be interpretable. Some art may be beneath interpretation – perhaps purely decorative or just pleasing to the senses. And this entails that Danto’s critical model suffers from a noteworthy lacuna, viz., it may have nothing to say about artworks that are beneath interpretation. Nevertheless, it seems that this gap in Danto’s critical approach, though not in his theory of art, can be readily repaired. Instead of saying that all art is about something, let us say that all art has a purpose – as works of decorative art may have the purpose of being visually pleasurable without having 7 Danto, After the End of Art.

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anything to say. To contend that all art has a purpose which is embodied or articulated or presented in a way (or ways) intended to be suitable to realizing that purpose is not a definition of art, but it is a serviceable framework for criticism: identify the purpose or purposes of the work and, in light of that purpose (or those purposes), assess the suitability or adequacy or appropriateness of the artist’s choices in embodying, advancing, or articulating that purpose (or those purposes). Call this criticism “Danto-modified.” Danto-modified criticism seems to suffice admirably for the period of post-historical art, if not for all times. Moreover, its relevance for the criticism of the moving image should be straightforward. Just as the Structural Film project invited narrative criticism – commending work that appeared to move the reflexive program forward and disdaining the rest – Danto-modified criticism has is more viable now that the Structural Film project has ground to a halt. In accordance with this approach to criticism: identify the purpose or purposes of each movie and assess whether its form – the body of choices the movie maker elects to implement the purpose – is adequate to the task. Is Buster Keaton’s use of long shots in his silent features suited to his aims? In order to answer that question, the critic needs to isolate Keaton’s aims and then to explain how Keaton’s choice of the long shot format advances his purposes. Nor does this approach to movie criticism limit one to only formal considerations, since inasmuch as the critic is concerned with the moving-image maker’s purposes, he/she may ask not only about their manner of implementation, but also about the worthiness of those purposes. That is, was that purpose worth the effort spent in embodying it, or is that purpose a contribution to society, or even is it harmful? With regard to the history of the moving image, it should be obvious that most of that history has been more like the present so-called post-historical era than like the episodes – such as of Structural Film – that have been programmatically aimed at a single goal like the progressive self-definition of cinema. Most of the actual history of the movies has involved a multitude of movies, pursuing a multitude of myriad purposes in every direction. And for that ­reason, Danto-modified criticism should be our most advisable practice.

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Chapter 14

Warhol’s Empire In the sixties in New York – roughly from 1963 to 1976 by my reckoning – we had a lot of time to spare. As the city emptied out and lurched toward bankruptcy, things were cheap. My first apartment in Manhattan was $69 a month for four rooms. It didn’t take much to get by. The choreographer David Gordon told me that he only needed to work for a couple of days a week as a window dresser to make a living. The rest of the time could be devoted to art – making it, watching it, talking about it, and so on. As a result, the era spawned a number of monumental temporal artworks, along with audiences with the time to watch them. Not surprisingly, many of these films thematized the experience of temporality. For example, Michael Snow’s Wavelength engaged anticipation and Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma, memory. But perhaps the most challenging of these monuments was Andy Warhol’s eight-hour Empire which premiered at City Hall Cinema at 170 Nassau Street on March 6, 1965. When I was a film student, there was a (perhaps apocryphal) rumor floating around the Anthology Film Archives that Jonas Mekas screened Empire twice for Stan Brakhage. The first time Brakhage was unimpressed. Mekas asked him whether he watched it at sound speed (24 frames per second) or silent speed (16 frames per second). Brakhage said he had watched it at sound speed; Mekas pointed out that it was a silent film. Brakhage soldiered back into the screening room, emerging eight hours later to declare it a masterpiece. In those days, there were giants. Needless to say, few, even in my sixties, had the stamina of a Brakhage when it came to film viewing. But the truth is – as with its predecessor Warhol’s six-hour Sleep – that one did not have to watch Empire from end to end in order to appreciate it. One could view it for a while, duck out and get a smoke, a drink, or even a meal, discussing what you’d seen, and then slip back and catch a bit more. Indeed, the film was designed to be unwatchable by mere mortals, but this practical unwatchability proved to be the source of its various philosophical points. Empire was shot from the 44th Floor of the Time-Life Building. Warhol, John Palmer, and Jonas Mekas aimed a new Auricon camera at the Empire State Building and held that image steady from daylight to darkness. Lights flitted off and on in the windows of the building, but there seemed to be no observable human movement. The image taxed the perceptual capacities of most viewers. The human visual system samples the environment for change and tracks movement. © Noël Carroll, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004468368_015 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Warhol’s virtually lapidary image provided the viewer with little stimulus to chase and exhausted the prospects for scanning almost immediately. Warhol’s image is simply inhospitable to human viewing; it makes the perceptual system idle, engendering the unpleasant sensation of boredom. And in that way, it makes palpable the falsity of the theoretical rhetoric of the “Camera Eye.” The camera is not like the typical human eye. It is capable of a relentless stare that few, if any, humans can muster. Camera “vision” is inhuman to all literal intents and purposes. Machine “vision” is not human vision. Although Christian Marclay’s Clock is three times longer than Empire, it is in no way as unwatchable as Empire, not only because it articulates the human narrative of the daily routine, but because, like Marclay’s earlier Telephone, via editing, the image track keeps changing, refreshing attention by serving up something new to look at.1 Our visual apparatus, as Hugo Münsterberg suggested, operates more like editing than the long take, long shot. Thus, in the sixties, during the heyday of the debate in America between the realists and the montagists – between the photographers and the editors – the virtual unwatchability of Empire testified, albeit indirectly, on behalf of the Russians. But Empire not only entered debates in film theory; its defiance of the mechanisms of human attention and its resulting unwatchability also challenged one of the deepest presuppositions of philosophical aesthetics, what has been called “acquaintance principle.”2 This is the claim, implicit in Kant’s aesthetics, that in order to appreciate a work of art, you need to experience it in its entirety, first hand, yourself. You cannot rely on the testimony of others. After all, they might have missed something that you would have caught or they might have reported their observations inaccurately either by omission or commission. Nor could your appreciation rest on documents, like photographs, 1 Even Warhol’s Sleep is less demanding than Empire since the camera changes position occasionally. Another film, also entitled Clock (by Yoko Ono with John Lennon), is perhaps also worth mentioning in this context. Made in September of 1971, it was a single shot, long take of the face of a clock recording one hour in the lobby of the St. Regis Hotel, recording and accompanied by Lennon’s soundtrack. Since the film apparently no longer exists, it is difficult to interpret it. Perhaps, it was an affirmation of Ono’s Fluxus commitment to dismantling the boundary between art and the ordinary. But, in any event, it was probably less taxing experientially than Warhol’s experiments with temporality insofar as it had music to make it more endurable. 2 See Paisley Livingston, “On an Apparent Truism in Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 43/3 (2003) pp. 260–78; Malcolm Budd, “The Acquaintance Principle,” British Journal of Aesthetics 43/4 (2003), pp. 386–92; James Shelley, “The Problem of Non-perceptual Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 4/3 (2003), pp. 363–378. Noël Carroll, “Non-Perceptual Aesthetic Properties,” Art in Three Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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of a portion of the artwork, since the document might be misrepresentative. Consequently, a condition of appreciation, properly so-called, putatively was that you experience the artwork whole and face-to-face. However, Empire appears to be a metacinematic artwork that can be appreciated philosophically by those who have not seen it themselves and thus are without direct experience but who rather must depend on the reliable testimony of others. This is a cinematic affront to the principle of acquaintance that parallels the achievement of Marcel Duchamps’ Fountain – that toilet that few saw directly but only through the photograph by Edward Steichen and yet who nevertheless have since, so to speak, plumbed its depths endlessly. The practical unwatchability of Empire, surrounded as it is with bountiful interpretive debate about the nature of cinema, demonstrates that appreciation without acquaintance is possible, at least, if you agree with Arthur Danto, the foremost philosophical exegete of Warhol’s work, that interpretation can be a form of aesthetic experience.3 That Empire need not be watched – and for many cannot be watched, unwatchability being its theme – and yet can be legitimately discussed and interpreted and thereby appreciated is probably Empire’s singular philosophical achievement, but not its only one. For Empire also advances on the cinematic front the profound discovery of Warhol’s Brillo Box. If Warhol’s Brillo Box, by being effectively indiscernible from the Brillo cartons manufactured by Proctor and Gamble, drove home the idea that art was not something that one could discern by looking; Empire by being indiscernible from surveillance footage (which was becoming increasingly familiar in the sixties), reinforced the indiscernibility thesis with respect to film. That Empire is art is not something you can determine simply by watching it. It is art because, given its avant-garde, filmworld context of presentation, you can interpret its content, even without watching it. Many films are unwatchable because they are disgusting (The Human Centipede and its sequels) or because their violence is unbearable (Jordan Wolfson’s virtual reality spectacle Real Violence). Empire is visceral in a different way. It exhausts our capacity to attend, but not our capacity to speculate. And therein lies its genius.4 3 Danto believes that aesthetic experience is essentially a matter of interpretation. One need not go this far to buy the argument above. One need only claim that interpretation can be a species of art appreciation, especially when it comes to metacinematic motion pictures. See Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 4 I wish to thank P. Adams Sitney and Amy Taubin for their assistance in preparing this essay; but only I am responsible for its imperfections.

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Chapter 15

Danto’s Philosophy of History 1

Historical Retrospecton

For Arthur Danto, historical thought is essentially a matter of retrospection in the sense that the historian comments on the events, actions, and thoughts of agents in the past from a perspective in their future which, in turn, is in the historian’s past. For example, the historian describes the United States’ entry into the Great War in 1917 as its turning point, something that could only been known in 1918 and, therefore, in the future of the American entry into World War I, but nevertheless in the historian’s past, that is, sometime after November 11, 1918. Danto calls this mode of thought variously as “historical knowledge as such” and “the historical mode of cognition” and he proposes to offer his readers “the phenomenology of historical consciousness.”1 In order clarify his understanding of historical retrospection, Danto contrasts his account of historical thinking with two other conceptions of history (i.e., history as a practice of inquiry), both of which he argues are mistaken because of their failure to take heed of the retrospective dimension of historical cognition. These mistaken conceptions of history are the substantive philosophy of history, on the one hand, and what might be called “the eye-witness view of history,” on the other hand. The substantive philosophy of history is exemplified by thinkers like Saint Augustine, G.F.W. Hegel and Karl Marx who present the history of the world up to and including its end, whether that be the City of God, the Ideal state, or the withering away thereof. What I am calling “the eye-witness view of history” is the commonplace prejudice that the very best history would be a record from witnesses living in the past of everything that transpired as it was unfolding and their reactions to it moment by moment. It would tell us everything they saw, felt, and experienced exactly as they saw, felt, and experienced it exactly as it occurred. And the more such informants, the merrier.

1 Arthur Danto, Narration and Knowledge (1985, 2007), pp. 342–347.

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The Substantive Philosophy of History

Danto’s argument against the very possibility of constructing a substantive philosophy of history2 begins by pointing out that what these philosophers aspire to is the construction of a narrative the whole of history. However, on Danto’s view, in order to compose a genuine narrative of the entire course of history, one would have to know, really know, how the story ended. But that would require, so to speak, standing outside of history. Yet, that is a position, no one can inhabit. The substantive philosopher of history is, like the rests of us, inescapably inside the historical process. The whole story of human history, logically speaking given Danto’s concept of narrative, cannot be narrated until after “the fat lady sings.” However, no one lives there. Of course, Danto is relying here upon what he takes to be the nature of narrative proper. A narrative proper, according to Danto, is not just a time-ordered chronicle of the events and states of affairs that happen. A proper narrative connects those events in such a way that the ending of the story discloses the significance of the events, actions, and states of affairs that come before it. That is, a narrative proper, in Danto’s sense, has what literary critics call “closure.” Thus, although the substantive philosophers of history pretend to be telling the whole history of the world, they are not truly doing so just because as long as humans are still alive, not all the facts are in. Something may happen after the substantive philosopher of history has published his treatise that will cancel his diagnosis, as Francis Fukuyama learnt after his The End of History and the Last Man hit the bookstores in 1992.3 From Danto’s viewpoint, the substantive philosopher of history is not only a failed narrator, but also a failed historian, since narrative is the mode of discourse appropriate to the historical mode of cognition insofar as narrative closure is what reveals retrospectively the significance of the moments described in the preceding chain of events. And what else, if not explaining the significance of past events, is the fundamental role of the historian? Thus, the substantive philosopher of history is nothing but a historian manqué. His identification of the end of history is at best an attempted prophecy and at worst a wish. For example, according to Marx, with the inevitable arrival of communism, “I could fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a minute, without ever becoming hunter, 2 Narration and Knowledge, pp. 1–16. 3 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992).

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fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”4 But this story of a utopian return to an Eden after the demise of the capitalist division of labor cannot count as genuine history, because it is not in the past of the historian. As Lydia Goehr points out, Danto emphasizes when a historian can write what about the past.5 Substantive philosophers of history violate the relevant temporal constraints on genuine history writing by describing what has not happened yet. Because a genuine historical narrative focuses on something in the historian’s past, it will be incomplete just because the historian or her successors have a future. That is why as the future arrives, new historical narratives must be written, going beyond the previous ones. By attempting to fix the end of history, the substantive philosopher of history fails as a historian because he presumes to know the future historically. He pretends to tell a story that he is in no position to tell. Danto cannot be charged with begging the question here, since the idea of narrative on which his argument depends does seem to mark an intuitively recognizable distinction between a time-ordered list of a series of events in roughly the same spatio-temporal neighborhood, often referred to as a chronicle, and a narrative proper which connects those events in terms of their significance. The latter does seem to require closure (which requires knowing where the story ends). Consequently, if this account of narrative is accepted and proper historians are identified as narrators of this sort, then substantive philosophers of history are not proper historians, since they do not really have access to knowledge of the end of history. Parenthetically, Danto’s demonstration of the limitations of the substantive philosophy of history not only clarifies his notion of historical retrospection, but also dismisses the substantive philosophy of history as an acceptable philosophical approach to history. It takes the entire historical process itself as its object which, as Danto argues, is not feasible as long as future development is still open to living humans. But this failure of the substantive philosophy of history paves the way for an alternative philosophical approach, namely, what Danto calls the analytical philosophy of history. This is the kind of philosophy that Danto himself practices. It takes historical inquiry as its object of study and takes up such questions as the nature of the kind of cognition that is definitive of history as the investigation of the past which involves the refutation of false conceptions of historical inquiry like the substantive philosophy of history and the eye-witness view of history. 4 Quoted by Danto in Narration and Knowledge, p. 395. 5 Lydia Goehr, “Afterwords,” in Narration and Knowledge, p. xx.

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The Eye-Witness View of History

Danto’s objection to the eye-witness view of history, like his dismissal of the substantive philosophy of history, also rests upon its failure to appreciate the role of retrospection in the production of historical knowledge as such. The eye-witness view of history is the commonplace view that what history, as a process of inquiry, ideally aspires to is a representation of the past exactly as it unfolded on a moment-to-moment basis to its inhabitants – that is, a representation of the past as it appeared to our ancestors – just as they saw it, so to speak. And, at least according to Hayden White, something like this goal is also shared by many living historians who desire to hold a mirror up to the past.6 However, Danto rejects this wish by demonstrating how far short it falls from the actual practice of genuine historical research. Danto refutes the eye-witness view of history by means of a thought experiment that reveals, as Oscar Wilde might say, that one should be careful what one wishes for. For the satisfaction of the wish that encourages the eye-witness view of history would actually thwart some of the most important features of what we recognize as the genuine practice of history as inquiry. In order to defeat the witness view of history Danto invents a science fiction machine called “The Ideal Chronicler.”7 The Ideal Chronicler registers every historical fact as it emerges. It describes each fact as it would appear to an observer at the moment of its emergence. It is epistemically constrained, as an actual observer would have been, to having no access to the future. It produces a chronicle, a list of time ordered events. It is an ideal chronical because it supplies a list of every event that transpires with no gaps in the record. Indeed, it is this feature of the ideal chronicle that probably mistakenly convinces many that this is what they want of history – a complete record with nothing left out. But the ideal chronicler diverges from actual historians in Danto’s view because it can have no knowledge of what is in the future of the events chronicled. In other words, the ideal chronicler lacks something that is essential to historical cognition according to Danto, namely, a retrospective vantage point from which to discern the significance of the events that preoccupy them. In order to demonstrate this, Danto invites readers to think about what he calls “narrative sentences.” “When the United States invaded Afghanistan, America entered its longest war to date” is a narrative sentence. It says something about America’s invasion of Afghanistan that could only be known in the 6 Hayden White, “Interpretation in History, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, 19780), p. 51 7 Knowledge and Narration, pp. 149–82.

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future of that invasion – specifically at the point in time when it became the longest war waged by the United States. With the notion of the narrative sentence in hand, Danto is ready to unmask what is wrong with the Ideal Chronicler and the eye-witness view of history it elaborates. Why? Imagine that the Ideal Chronicler works by churning out each fact as it appears in a descriptive sentence constrained, like a historical witness, by lacking knowledge of the future. Can the Ideal Chronicler print out a sentence like “When the United States invaded Afghanistan, it entered its longest war to date”? Certainly not: because that would require knowledge that would only become available many years hence. In short, the Ideal Chronicler is necessarily incapable of producing narrative sentences. It can describe historical events in the past as they appear in the present of the Ideal Chronicler. But the Ideal Chronicler has no knowledge of what is in the future of those events and states of affairs. Thus, unlike the practicing historian, the Ideal Chronicler cannot tell its readers the historical significance of the events it records in light of the ongoing flow of events of which they are integral parts. Consequently, insofar as the disclosure of the significance of past events in the unfolding chains of events that comprise the historical process is a primary, if not the primary, task of the historian, the Ideal Chronicler cannot serve as a model of historical research, and the eye-witness view of history which it realizes so completely must be abandoned. It is not up to delivering what we want most from historians – not only a list of what happened, but accounts of the significance of what happened. Narrative sentences are an invention of Danto’s that enables him to show what is wrong about the desire for an Ideal Chronicler. It is not the case that Danto is claiming that all genuinely historical sentences are narrative sentences. Clearly, they are not. But the reason that they cannot be processed by the Ideal Chronicler reveals something about history as inquiry for Danto: namely that history writing is retrospective; that the historian discovers the significance of past events by connecting those events to events in the future of those events, but which are in the past of the historian. What we expect from historians is not a simple chronicle – a time ordered list of this event followed by that and then what came next. What we want is arrangement of those events in terms of their significance as revealed in the ongoing development of the relevant events. Just as the significance of ­Oedipus’ killing of the old man and his retainers at the crossroad is disclosed subsequently, so the significance of the Boston Tea Party only gains historical weight in the historical narrative of the American Revolution. What comes later in the story gives meaning to what came earlier. So, even if not all historical sentences

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are narrative sentences, narrative sentences illuminate the essential, narrative, retrospective structure of historical knowledge.8 4

The End of Art

Before turning to a critical discussion of Danto’s analytical characterization of historical inquiry, note should be taken of Danto’s best-known foray into history writing, namely his conjecture that art history has come to an end. In a series of articles, Danto has argued that sometime around 1963, with the exhibition of certain works by Andy Warhol – most notably his Brillo Box – art came to an end. On the face of it, this claim seemed patently absurd. Surely since 1963 more art has been created in the United States than at any other comparable time period in its history. However, this response to Danto’s conjecture rested upon a misunderstanding. For Danto’s conception of the end of art had to do with his sense of the nature of narrative, including historical narratives, and the way in which the end of a story casts retrospective significance upon the events that led up to it. Danto’s proclamation about the end of art had nothing to do with the volume of art productivity and everything to do with how that productivity could be characterized in the form of a historical narrative. From Danto’s perspective, the structure of a narrative, properly so called, could be exemplified by the old proverb: “For want of a shoe, the horse was lost, for want of the horse, the rider was lost, for want of the rider the battle was lost, and for want of victory, the kingdom was lost.” In this story the significance of the failure of the horse to be shod, which could not be known until after the fall of the kingdom, is clarified retrospectively. According to Danto, this kind of story can no longer be told about the artworld. In that sense, a certain sort of art history, as a form of inquiry, can no longer be told. Thus, it is a certain mode of art history as inquiry, not art history as process, that has come to an end. For Danto, there have been two great narratives in art history. The first can be called “the conquest of visual appearances.” It is the quest for the highest degree of verisimilitude possible. Started by the Greeks, restarted during the 8 See: Arthur Danto, “The End of Art,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, 1986), pp. 81–115; Arthur Danto, “Approaching the End of Art,” in The State of the Art (New York, 1987), pp. 202–218; Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, 1997). For criticism, see Noël Carroll, “The End of Art?” History and Theory volume 37, #4 (1998), pp. 17–29.

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Italian Renaissance, and contributed to by Netherlandish painters, the artists of the Baroque and Neo-Classical periods, and nineteenth century realists like Courbet, graphic artists came closer and closer to capturing the appearances of the visible world. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion tells one version of this story. Moreover, according to Danto, this story had a happy ending. Photography and then cinema, which adds the impression of movement to the visual array, complete the aspiration to reproduce visual appearances. And once the quest has been realized, the art historian could emplot the significant contributions that led to the closure of the project. However, the very success of the first great narrative of Western art history putatively led to a crisis. Once the narrative question of whether or not the conquest of visual appearances could be achieved, the question emerged of what the aspiring artist was to do next. Several projects recommended themselves. Two notable ones were expressionism and formalism. In the case of expressionism, artists would create designs expressive of typically unnamed affective states, such as emotions and moods. Formalism, in contrast, encouraged artists to produce what was called “significant form,” visually arresting compositions of line, color, and vector. Both these projects were generative, but their respective developments could not support the kind of linear narrative represented by the story of the conquest of visual appearances. Why not? Because neither project promised closure. Expressionists could paint, one after another, of the indeterminately large range of affective states, but there was no determinate point at which the job would be done. Likewise, there are probably enough kinds of significant forms to keep artists busy till the end of time. But there will be no closure in sight just because it is so unclear what would constitute closure for a formalist. Expressionism and formalism could be chronicled. But they could not support the kind of retrospective narrative exemplified by that of the conquest of visual appearances. This is because they lacked a determinate target, one that the art historian could recognize retrospectively had been hit. And lacking that, the historian would be unable to single out, in an evolving narrative, the contributions that made that achievement possible. Nevertheless, another option appeared on the horizon which had an animating target of the sort that promised the possibility, if achieved, of once again organizing art history as inquiry as a retrospective narrative. And that narrative, for want of a better label, can be called Modernism. Roughly speaking, Modernism is the view that the vocation of art is to interrogate the nature of art by artistic means – to disclose the essence of painting by painting, for example. Modernists are committed to answering questions

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like “What is the nature of painting?” and “What is the nature of sculpture?” by the way they structure their works in their respective media. Certain modernists think of flatness as an essential feature of painting which encourages them to emphasize the surface of their painting rather than attempting to counterfeit the impression of three-dimensional space. Rather than conceiving of painting as a window onto the world, various modernists concentrate, so to speak, on the qualities of the glass itself. Furthermore, this affords a way to construct a developmental narrative that promises the possibility of closure, since painting, ex hypothesi, has an essential nature which presumably can be made manifest by the way in which certain paintings have been composed. This narrative begins with Manet who eschewed various perspectival choices which foregrounded the two-dimensionality of the painterly object. Impressionism dissolved the picture plane into dabs of paint which also had a flattening effect, especially when looked at close-up. Cubists contracted pictorial space by fragmenting it, Pollack by reducing it to line and color, and Morris Louis by soaking it in paint, thereby fusing the surface and the medium. Each Modernist movement and each Modernist artist used technique in a way that refined what they thought was an essential feature of painting and/or invented more and more sophisticated ways in which to acknowledge what they already identified as the relevant conditions of possibility of the medium. The history of art could be recounted as on the march again. It had a goal toward which it was headed, and it would achieve its aim once all the essential features of painting were revealed by means of the artistic choices of Modernist artists. And this is where Warhol enters the story that Danto is telling. The Modernist program presupposes that the essential features of painting can be isolated by means of painting. But what are the means of painting? Discernibilia – that is, things the eye can discern by looking. Warhol’s Brillo Box, on the other hand, is indiscernible putatively from the everyday Brillo cartons that P ­ roctor and Gamble manufacture. Warhol’s Brillo Box is an artwork; none of Proctor and Gamble’s Brillo cartons are artworks. Therefore, whatever accounts for the nature of art is not something that we can discern by looking. Thus, it is not something that the artist can disclose by plying her trade, just because she trades in discernibilia. Danto draws several consequences from this state of affairs. First, since whatever constitutes art is indiscernible, Modernists must give up on the attempt to isolate the nature of art by means of painting. If they want to continue the project of defining art, they must give up painting and become philosophers. Moreover, since the developmental trajectory of art has been stopped in its

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tracks, artists are now free – in what Danto designates as the post-history of art – to explore their own interests. Art no longer has a corporate project. For Danto, this is all to the good. Consequently, Danto’s conception of the end of art is very open to the highly productive art world we see today. Hence, the ongoing activity of the contemporary art world is not a counterexample to Danto’s hypothesis, but a confirmation of it. Of course, the way that Warhol provokes the end of the Modernist narrative is quite different from the way in which photography and cinema brought closure to the conquest-of-appearances narrative. Photography and cinema realized the aspiration that animated the quest for verisimilitude. Warhol derailed the Modernist project, revealing retrospectively that Modernism was a quixotic venture from the get-go. Indeed, Danto thinks that Warhol’s intervention was so decisive that there will never again be the kind of art historical narrative represented by the two, aforesaid stories ever again. Discussion. Although it is quite clear that the interrelated themes of retrospective significance and narration are the dominant ones in Danto’s philosophy of history, it is less obvious what specific philosophical claim these themes are meant to serve. Is Danto maintaining that the discovery of retrospective significance and/or narration are essential to historical knowledge or cognition, or perhaps more broadly, to history as inquiry. Are retrospective significance and narration supposed to be unique to history as inquiry, sufficient to demarcate historical inquiry from scientific inquiry? What is the import of Danto’s emphasis on these themes? When Danto first published his work on the philosophy of history, the notion that narrative was the essential medium of historical inquiry was abroad. ­Narrative, in this light, was advanced in contrast to scientific inquiry. One might easily assume that Danto belongs to that tendency. However, retrospective narration is not sufficient to demarcate historical inquiry from scientific inquiry. Darwin’s theory of evolution, the tectonic plate theory of the movement of the continents in geology, and the Big Bang Theory in cosmology are all retrospective narratives. So, narrative of the kind that interests Danto does not sharply distinguish between historical and scientific inquiry. Nor, by the way, does narrative distinguish between the work of the professional historian and the layperson recounting the past in everyday language. Moreover, retrospective narration is not an essential medium for the transmission of historical knowledge. A graph comparing the naval strength of the great powers on the brink of World War I or a map of medieval shipping routes in the Mediterranean are no less contribution to the fund of historical knowledge than the story of the rise of Jim Crow laws after the American Civil War. So, retrospective narration is neither a necessary or a sufficient condition for

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historical inquiry. Nevertheless, by pointing to its centrality in historical discourse, Danto did make a singular contribution to the discussion insofar as he dispelled the notion that what we really desire from history is an account of how folks back then saw it unfolding moment by moment. Danto’s insight that a genuine historical narrative requires a retrospective standpoint pinpointed a yawning conceptual flaw in substantive philosophies of history. Insofar as Francis Fukuyama located the end of history – the triumph of liberal capitalism everywhere – in his own future, he was not, despite appearances, doing history proper. He was not situated in the right temporal position to know that the tendencies he observed in the present would result in the conditions he heralded. In this, Danto not only established that the analytic philosophy of history rather than the substantive philosophy of history was the appropriate locus of philosophical research, but he also revealed a systematic error perpetuated by substantive philosophers of history. One way of describing that flaw would be to say that although substantive philosophers of history presented their accounts as scientific narratives, they were not, specifically because they were not genuinely retrospective. However, one might question whether scientific narration is the only kind of legitimate historical inquiry. Aren’t some legitimate forms of historical inquiry practical? For example, Robert Kagan’s The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Emerging Imperial World recounts recent history in order to alert readers to what needs to be done in the evolving international situation.9 Not all historical inquiry is scientific in the preceding sense. Much of the very justification of the practice of history is practical – that is, as a source of usable information. In that regard, perhaps we can re-interpret many of the substantive philosophies of history more charitably than Danto does. When Kant anticipates the emergence of a cosmopolitan world-federation, he is not pronouncing it to be a done-deal.10 It is rather a plan or a recommendation of how to proceed into the future. It is intended to orient or to guide princes in the present about the direction of their activities. Likewise, Marx’s prognostications about the revolution of the proletariat and the withering away of the state might be re-read as charting a pathway through an uncertain future. In this way, substantive philosophies of history might be reconceived as orientational narratives, rather than scientific narratives, and be valued for their 9 10

Robert Kagan, The Jungle Grows Back: America and our Imperiled World (New York, 2018). Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in Kant on History, edited by Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, 1984), pp. 11–26.

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practical usefulness.11 This would not only account for their recurring seductiveness, but also would give them some purchase on one of the legitimate functions of historical inquiry, thereby salvaging them somewhat from Danto’s otherwise decisive, conceptual onslaught. Moreover, this re-interpretation of substantive philosophies of history may be relevant to a heretofore unacknowledged problem with Danto’s end of art thesis. As we have seen, Danto has argued for the utter rejection of substantive philosophies of art and yet his end of art thesis is unmistakably a substantive philosophy of art history. Thus, strictly speaking, Danto himself has provided us with the very best criticism of his own view himself. However, if we re-­conceive his end of art thesis as an orientational historical narrative, rather than a scientific historical narrative, we may re-read it as a useful guide to art making and art criticism in the wake of the decline of the Modernist project. That is, the end of art thesis may be construed as a useful critical recommendation to the post-historical artworld rather than an attempt at metaphysics. 11

Noël Carroll, “Danto, the End of Art, and the Orientational Narrative,” in The Philosophy of Arthur Danto, edited by Randall E.Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago, 2013), pp. 433–452.

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Chapter 16

Danto’s Comic Vision: Philosophical Method and Literary Style 1 Introduction Arthur Danto numbers among the few contemporary philosophers whose writing it is really a pleasure to read. Although rarely recognized, the source of that pleasure is Danto’s humor. His philosophical writing is consistently comic (as is his critical writing). Of course, the humor is obviously not of the knee-slapping variety. Yet it is pervasively playful. Danto will introduce a thought experiment and then explore it in several directions. Unlike many other contemporary philosophers, he is not stingy in laying out his examples. Whereas it is more customary for most other philosophers to sharpen their thought experiments like arrows in order to hit their target while carrying no wasted verbiage, Danto elaborates his, often with humorous, even whimsical, incidents and observations as when discussing the artist J., Danto describes him as “seething with a kind of political rage,” when J. demands the inclusion of his red canvas into the gallery of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.1 That is, Danto includes more than he needs to do the job philosophically in his examples and that “more” is typically delightfully droll. Danto’s thought experiments are never without philosophical effect. But, in addition, they are packed with enough clever asides that they also read like routines. Danto not only constructs powerful thought experiments; he riffs on them. In this chapter, I am less interested in Danto, the philosopher, and more intrigued by his achievement as a writer, specifically as a comic author. Of course, since his writing is philosophical, his philosophical method is intimately connected to his literary style. And, as Danto, himself, argues in the last chapter of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, a writer’s style – any writer’s, but in this case, Danto’s – expresses the attitudes of the man (or of the woman – to expand upon Buffon). In what follows, I will try to show how Danto’s meta-philosophical commitments naturally dispose him toward certain literary devices that, interestingly, recur especially in comedy. I will show the ways in which these comic 1 Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 2. © Noël Carroll, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004468368_017 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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strategies figure importantly in Danto’s philosophy of art. And I will conclude by suggesting that what this style indicates is something about Danto’s overarching perspective – his mode of being in the world (at least, as a philosopher but possibly beyond that as well). 2

Danto’s Philosophical Method

I have had occasion more than once in this book to comment upon Danto’s meta-philosophy. He maintains that all philosophical problems have the same character. He contends that “a problem is not a philosophical problem unless it is possible to imagine that its solution will consist in showing how appearance has been taken for reality.”2 Danto’s method of constructing indiscernible counterparts is perfectly suited to demonstrating how appearance can be taken for reality. For example, works that really are art works, such as Duchamp’s readymades or Warhol’s Brill Box, are indiscernible from their ordinary, counterparts to the extent that, for instance, a detached, everyday bathroom fixture, lying in a back room in a museum warehouse, might be mistaken, on the grounds of its appearances, for a genuine art work, such as Fountain. As observed earlier in this book, Danto thinks that this is the shape of all philosophical problems. Philosophical problems are displayed in their proper philosophical form, once they can be advanced as a problem of indiscernible counterparts – twins, so to speak, between whom the eye can detect no visual difference, but who are nevertheless twain, such that, for example, the younger twin, on the basis of her appearance, could be mistaken for the actual older twin. That is, philosophy begins once a comedy of errors becomes possible. Furthermore, Danto believes that this structure generalizes across the history of philosophy. There are, indeed, an arresting number of cases to support Danto’s conjecture. Descartes, undoubtedly Danto’s ur-example, invites us to imagine perfectly coherent dreams that are indiscernible from reality; one could mistake such a reverie for the world of waking life. Hume taunts us with the comparison between causally related events – such as windows actually shattered by stones – versus events that appear precisely the same – events that are constantly conjoined but unconnected – e.g., windows that shatter on their own exactly as stones enter their space-time co-ordinates. 2 Arthur Danto, Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1989), p. 6.

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Kant uses the idea of two indiscernible shop keepers (perhaps they are identical twins) who count out the correct change to customers in order to illuminate the difference between a moral action and a merely prudent one. Wittgenstein points out that two bodily motions can look the same in every respect – say raising one’s arm – where one could be an action and the other only a reflex or a spasm. Alan Turing argued that the behavioral output of a machine could look the same as the behavioral output of an intelligent being in such a way that the output of one might be taken for the output of the other. Betrand Russell cooked up an example where a world brought into existence five seconds ago appeared exactly the same as the world that issued eons ago from the Big Bang. And so on. The reach of Danto’s historical conjecture, then, is admittedly estimable. Whether it is as comprehensive as Danto claims is something that I have disputed earlier. For example, could the question of the nature of the just society, which motivated Plato greatest philosophizing and continues today in the work of Rawls and his followers, be stated in terms of indiscernible just and unjust societies? Isn’t it hard to grock the idea of indiscernible just and unjust states? But, in any event, there is no denying that Danto’s hypothesis covers many very central cases. Moreover, Danto’s generalization has certain theoretical – or meta-theoretical – attractions. Specifically, it suggests, should one want it, a way of drawing the border line between philosophy and science. It affords a demarcation boundary. Science ultimately trades in observable differences. Science has an empirical basis. In science, it is believed that something will turn up that is discoverable or discernible between the putative indiscernibles that scientists can investigate and pinpoint. But the differences that underlie the indiscernibles that philosophers explore lie outside of experience and are, so to speak, conceptual. So Danto’s meta-philosophical hypothesis is compelling – especially for philosophers (unlike Quine) who worry about the demarcation problem – in part because Danto’s meta-philosophy appears to give folks a way of saying why the aforesaid great moments of philosophy were philosophy and not science. (In a related vein, it also gives one a way to explain why philosophy is not obsolete to students convinced of scientism – surely another, though minor, boon). For Danto, the philosopher traffics in indiscernibles in order to discover the principle or principles that assign one of the indiscriminable counterparts to one category, say moral action, and the other counterpart to another kind, such as prudential action, even though that which belongs to which is something that could be mistaken using only the resources of the naked eye. Rather than

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by mere observation, the difference is established, on Danto’s view, by transcendental argumentation, which, in turn, is to be understood as an argument to the best explanation on behalf of the principle that sorts otherwise indiscriminable entities/events into what our intuitions tell us are nevertheless contrasting categories. In this way, a distinction is implicitly drawn between philosophy and science insofar as philosophy transcends experience whereas science interrogates and organizes it. Because the test of conceptual analysis is its capacity to sort indiscernibles into different categories, it differs categorically from scientific analysis which searches for experiential, a.k.a. empirical, differences. Danto dubs his indiscernibles, “philosophical pairs,” and, in accordance with the conception of philosophical problems articulated in the opening paragraph of this section, Danto holds “… it is clear that mistaking one member of a philosophical pair for the other is a very easy thing to do, all the more so if no difference between them need ever be imagined as revealing itself in experience at all.”3 Thus, the existence of solely conceptually discriminable, but otherwise indiscernible entities grants philosophy an utterly unique hunting license. This is undeniably a very pretty idea. For a philosopher, like Danto, invested in conceptual analysis as the means of isolating essences, it establishes an essential divide between philosophy and science. Whether or not Danto has discovered that essential divide is a question for another time. At this juncture, we are more interested in what this meta-philosophical commitment amounts to in terms of Danto’s literary style of exposition. 3

Comedy Tonight

If the creation of indiscernible counterparts is a distinctive mark of Danto’s philosophical imagination, it is also, at the same time, one of the most evident elements of his literary imagination. Moreover, the proliferation of indiscernibles is also a comic device, dating back at least to Plautus’s Menaechmi, a farce involving the mistaking of the identities of twin-born children. This theme was mobilized often by Italian and French dramatists and first appears on the English stage in 1563 with the production of Jack Juggler. Of course, the most famous example of this kind of farce in the English language is William Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. Since then the comedy of 3 Danto, Connections to the World, p. 11.

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look-alikes has been a staple of theater and then screen – first the large screen (movies) and then the small screen (TV). Examples include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, a musical adaptation of Menaechmi, and Big Business, to mention but two. In his treatise Laughter, Henri Bergson offers a categorization of this sort of comic invention under the rubric of the equivocal situation or the reciprocal interference of [event] series which phenomenon he characterizes in this way: “a situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.”4 For example, in Howard Hawks’s film Bringing Up Baby, there is a scene in which Susan, the character played by Katherine Hepburn, mistakes for her own gentle leopard, called Baby, a ferocious, identical-looking leopard recently escaped from a traveling circus. Here the situation is, in Bergson’s terminology, equivocal, since we can see it under two interpretations simultaneously – from Susan’s perspective (where on her interpretation the leopard is tame and safe enough to handle roughly) and from the perspective of what is the case in the world of the fiction (where the snarling leopard appears ready to pounce). Humor is generated by the incongruity or disparity between these two interpretations of what is going on. Just as a pun is based on ambiguous homonyms that carry two or more meanings, so the equivocal situation of mistaken identity depends upon a situation or an event that can be seen from the perspective of two conflicting interpretations both of which match the observable data from their respective vantage points. Twins, of course, are immensely serviceable characters for this species of comedy. Since it is given in the fiction that one twin is the spitting image of the other, it is easy for third parties to mistake them, as when Antipholus of Syracuse beats the Ephesian Dromio in Comedy of Errors for spouting what the Syracusean Antipholus takes to be nonsense. Needless to say, situations become all the more reciprocally interfering in Comedy of Errors for there being not just one, but two sets of twins – twin masters and servants from Syracuse and Ephesesus. Of course, Danto’s indiscernibles are not characters but categories, for example, art works and real things. The problem is that candidates for these categories can be philosophical twins, or pairs, as Danto calls them. Warhol’s Brillo Box and Proctor and Gamble’s are probably Danto’s favorite examples in the realm of aesthetics, but there are many others, beginning perhaps with 4 Henri Bergson, Laughter, in Comedy, edited by Wylie Sypher (Garden City, New York: A Doubleday Anchor Book, 1956), p. 123.

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Duchamp’s readymades. Instead of two Dromios we get identical looking artifacts – a dog’s metal grooming comb that is an art work by Duchamps and another just like it that is not. And again, the mirth that these two objects provoke here is incongruity, since the category of art itself is frequently regarded as the antithesis of the category of real things. To put an ordinary thing in the category of art, or vice-versa is, as they say, a howler – an absurdity bordering on a contradiction. Moreover, the fact that one might mistake Duchamp’s canine grooming comb for an everyday one is confirmed by the outrage of the bourgeoisie who feels affronted by a category error – an outrage, furthermore, that one suspects, in addition, gives the cognoscenti a delicious jolt of sudden glory. The task of the philosopher in such situations is to save our conceptual scheme from collapsing into an utter farce and to put things into order by discovering the principle that determines what belongs to the concept of art versus what are merely real things In that way, the philosopher thereby brings about a happy ending to the confusion of candidates migrating from one category to the next, as if from room to room in a play by Georges Feydeau. Danto’s philosophical pairs have real philosophical work to do and they achieve it quite expeditiously. However, few readers can miss the relish Danto takes in concocting them. This is no more evident than in the bravura opening of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace where in two or three pages Danto introduces us to eight indiscernible, monochromatic, red canvases, some art works, some not, and all different from each other, ranging from: a painting imagined by Kierkegaard of pharaoh’s army under the Red Sea: a painting called Kierkegaard’s Mood; another, a very close-up rendering of Red Square; one with Hindu reference to the Red Dust state of Samsara; another entitled Red Table Cloth; a canvas primed but never painted by Giogione; a canvas painted red by no one in particular (and, in any event, not an artist); and ­Untitled by J. (an artist). Danto presents these indiscernibles in order to probe the difference between art works and real things which then leads him eventually to suggest aboutness as a necessary condition for art status. Nevertheless, it is clear from all of the witty asides, interjections, and mock, art-historical apercus that Danto invents in the course of cataloguing his gallery of indiscernibles that he is having great fun and is inviting readers to do likewise. The stories he contrives about the origins of each of these fancied red canvases are themselves delightfully diverting. So in addition to the overall set-up – with its entertaining indiscernibles – being comic, it is also filled-out in a way that is consistently amusing. Throughout Danto’s writings on the philosophy of art, indiscernibilia abound: Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Menard’s; Rembrandt’s Polish Rider and

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another created by a virtually miraculous, stochastic splattering of paint on a nearby canvas; the artifacts of the Basket People and the Pot People; and so forth. These indiscernibles are introduced in order to motivate certain philosophical questions on the way to solving them. For example, the indiscernible novels of Cervantes and Menard that Danto offers us by way of that other comic writer – Borges – address the question of the individuation of art works which Danto argues is a genuine philosophical problem because of the possibility that two artworks, such as these two novels, could appear to be precisely alike in every respect, while nevertheless striking us as radically different. Likewise, Danto plumbs the nature of cinema by searching for the differentia between a movie of the first page of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and a photographic slide of the same stretch of literature.5 The function of these exercises in indiscernibilia is to bring into clear focus a philosophical problem. They are finely wrought, theoretical engines that abet philosophical insight and direct it. But they are also amusing in their own right – comically amusing for the way in which they incongruously confound disparate categories – and they are worked out with wit and a wink. Although Danto is known for writing about such somber philosophers as Nietzsche and Sartre, his own approach to philosophy begins in levity and continues in high spirits. 4

A Happy Ending

In the concluding sections of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,6 Danto takes up the question of style. Approvingly, he cites Buffon’s adage that style is the person. Danto tries to make the meaning of this saying more explicit by adding that style is the way in which one represents the world, minus the world.7 An author’s style expresses that person’s way of seeing the world – how one structures or organizes one’s experience of events and states of affairs and evolves one’s attitudes toward them. Like Schopenhauer, Danto thinks’s of a person’s style as the “physiognomy of the soul.” In fact, one function of art, for Danto, is making available, objectifying, or publicly embodying one’s way of seeing the world and one’s attitude toward it in a way that can be inspected by others. 5 Arthur Danto, “Moving Pictures,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 4:1 (Winter, 1979), pp. 1–21. 6 The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, pp. 197–208. 7 Transfiguration, p. 198. Moreover, style as the way one represents the world can be intelligibly equated with a person in Danto’s philosophy, since Danto believes that persons are essentially systems of representation.

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Although Danto’s discussion of style is intended to pertain to artists and their creations, it seems fair to extend it to writers with styles as distinctive as Danto’s. And in that regard, I hope I have said enough to convince you that Danto’s style is comic, especially, but not exclusively, in virtue of his constant resort to the use of indiscernibilia. One objection to this claim might be that Danto, himself, maintains that a style is something that one possesses un-self-consciously. It is a mode of seeing or representing that we engage without being aware of adopting it. It is what the person is. In contrast, consciously embraced strategies of representation, Danto regards as mannerisms in contrast to style. But, given this distinction, the reader may feel that it is wrong to identify Danto’s deployment of indiscernibles as a feature of his style, since clearly Danto is fully aware that that is his preferred manner of representing philosophical problems. As I have documented, he has theorized the method explicitly. He virtually has a patent on it. Therefore, the reliance upon indiscernibles for the purpose of representing philosophical problems can not be an element of style for Danto. If anything, it is a mannerism in Danto’s terminology. However, even though the method of indiscernibles is a part of Danto’s philosophical repertoire about which he is fully aware, I am not sure that the same can be said of its contribution to his literary style (that is, as opposed to his philosophical modus operandi). He knows the work the method of indiscernibles does philosophically, but I don’t think that Danto intends it – and his consistently amusing elaboration of the technique – as a conscious presentation of self. And yet it does project Danto’s attitudes. With respect to philosophy, Danto’s comic writing expresses the attitude that doing conceptual is great fun, full of intellectual pratfalls, ideas suddenly falling into (and out of) place, the incongruous made congruous, and laughter. As well, for centuries, comedy has been associated with happy endings and Danto’s adventures in indiscernibilia typically conclude philosophically with saving the part of our conceptual scheme under scrutiny from falling into incoherence.8 Thus another aspect of Danto’s comic vision of philosophy is its optimism, its confidence that getting a question into its proper philosophical form puts us on our merry way toward its resolution. However, even if it makes sense to call Danto’s philosophical vision – as manifested in his literary style – comic, does it express anything about the

8 Here, of course, I am alluding to the traditional way of distinguishing comedy from tragedy. It is, perhaps needles to say, that not all comedies end happily.

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man, minus his philosophy? Of course, I cannot say for sure, nor do I presume to. But let me end with a personal anecdote that suggests it just might. When Danto delivered the Trilling Lecture at Columbia, I was invited to be one of his commentators. My remarks focused on the relation between ­Danto’s philosophy of art and his philosophy of art history. I claimed that Danto needed his philosophy of art history in order to indemnify his philosophy of art from the possibility of future counterexamples. For if art had truly reached the point where art works could look like anything, then no new art objects would ever again be made that could ruffle Danto’s system. Danto, I charged, assuaged his anxiety as an essentialist by means of his argument that art had ended. In the discussion that followed, Akeel Bilgrami asked Danto if indeed he suffered the anxieties of an essentialist. Danto’s response was quite telling. He said: “Well I’m not really an anxious kind of guy.” And, I, at least, have always wondered if that magnificent existential lightness isn’t reflected in the comic optimism and playfulness of his literary style.

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Chapter 17

The Age of Danto Arthur Danto was the most important Anglo-American philosopher of art of the second half of the twentieth century and his influence continues today. Interestingly, Danto’s earliest philosophical reputation was not primarily based on his work on art, but upon his contributions to epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophies of action and history. Danto’s career as an aesthetician began with his encounter in 1964 with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. Thinking about that work led Danto to develop both a theory of art and a philosophy of art history, both of which, in turn, underwrote his stellar career as an art critic for the magazine The Nation. The insight that Danto derived from Warhol’s Brill Box was that art was not something that the “eye could decry.” That is, you cannot tell that something is an artwork simply by looking; art is not a perceptual category. After all, Warhol’s Brillo Box, which is art, looks just like Proctor and Gamble’s Brillo boxes, which are not art. The difference between an artwork and its real-world counterpart, in other words, can be indiscernible. What makes something art is something you cannot see – a context which Danto called the Artworld – an atmosphere of history and theory. This approach to theorizing rejected dominant formalist approaches from Clive Bell to Clement Greenberg. It signaled a momentous change in Anglo-American philosophy of art which began to take the history and context of art far more seriously. At the same time, because philosophers – such as Nelson Goodman, Richard Wollheim and Danto who had established reputations in arenas of philosophy other than aesthetics – began to write about art, the discipline of the philosophy of art itself gained unprecedented prestige. Because of Danto’s forays outside of analytic philosophy – including books on Sartre, Nietzsche, and Hindu mysticism – many readers tended to miss the fact that Danto is an essentialist. That is, his philosophy of art seeks to define the ahistorical essence of art. Thus far, he has not claimed to have nailed down the concept of art completely, but only that he has identified two necessary conditions that anything that is an artwork needs to satisfy. Namely, something is a work of art only if it is about something and only if it embodies or articulates whatever it is about in an appropriate form. For example, Warhol’s Brillo Box is about, among other things, the commodification of art, a theme it embodies, appropriately enough, by being indiscernible from a commercial object. © Noël Carroll, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004468368_018 Noël Carroll - 978-90-04-46836-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/03/2024 08:00:09PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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As should be evident, this formula for identifying art is also serviceable as an elegant recipe for pursuing art criticism. On this view, the task of the art critic is to determine what the artwork is about and then to explain how the stylistic choices the artist elected embody (or fail to embody) the meaning or content of the artwork. And this, of course, is the patent for the art criticism Danto produced so magnificently as during his tenure as an art critic. If Danto’s philosophy of art sounds like Hegel’s, the same can be said of his philosophy of art history. For, like Hegel, Danto argues that art history has come to an end. What Danto means by this is that the kind of progressive, modernist narratives of art history propounded by Greenberg and his followers are no longer available – that is, can no longer be told. Why not? Greenberg thought of modernist art as a reflexive adventure of self-definition – of artists exhibiting the essential features of their medium, like the flatness of the picture plane, by means of painting in a way that exemplifies those very features. But this assumes that art status is a perceptual property. And Warhol, according to Danto, stopped this story in its tracks by showing that artworks could be indiscernible from real things, like Brillo boxes. In other words, Brillo Box showed that art could look like anything. And if artworks can look like anything, then artworks do not possess some unique manifest properties that painters can show forth emphatically or foreground. For Danto, Warhol liberated artists from the allegedly historic responsibility to define the medium of painting by means of painting. Art history with a capital H – art history with what the Greeks called a telos or guiding purpose or end – is no longer feasible. Instead, artists can explore whatever purposes they choose and in any visual style they fancy. We have entered what Danto calls a post-historical period of art, a phrase perhaps more apt for the pluralism of the present period than the notion of postmodernism since it is not tethered narrowly to certain privileged themes such as pastiche and the representation of representation. Danto’s philosophy of art history is intimately connected to both his theory of art and his art criticism. In order to deliver up the ahistorical essence of art, one must defend one’s definition of art from the future – from artworks now unimagined. Danto thinks he has achieved this by establishing that post-­ Warhol art can look like anything. That means that future artists cannot make anything – anything visual – that would refute his theory. But Danto’s philosophy of art history also suits his mode of art criticism. In fact, his history and his criticism are made for each other. The critic Danto can handle anything the art world can serve up, no matter what it looks like. The work just has to be about something and to be embodied in a form that Danto can explain successfully in terms of the way in which it articulates its meaning

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or content (its aboutness). In short, Danto’s critical approach, as derived from his theory of art, is perfectly adjusted to the pluralism of the post historical period of art history that Danto himself has both discovered and christened. The intricate, unified package of art theory, the philosophy of art history, and the practice of criticism that Danto has constructed is arguably unrivaled by any other contemporary commentator. That it so perfectly fits the contours of our post-historical condition warrants thinking about ourselves as living in The Age of Danto.

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Appendix: Two Brief Notes on What Art Is In 2013, Arthur Danto published a collection of essays entitled What Art Is.1 It was to be his last book.2 Two of the essays in that book – “Wakeful Dreams” and “Kant and the Work of Art” – are particularly relevant to recurring themes in this volume – Danto’s theory of art and his criticism – and for that reason deserve brief comment here. 1

On “Wakeful Dreams”

In large measure, “Wakeful Dreams” recounts some of Danto’s recurring preoccuptions, albeit illustrated with many original, penetrating, and wide-ranging critical observations. It concludes with a rehearsal of Danto’s notion that artworks are embodied meanings – that is, the notion that something is an art work only if 1) it presents a content (a meaning) that 2) is embodied in a form that is appropriate to its content (meaning). However, in “Wakeful Dreams,” Danto adds a further condition to this formula, namely that art works are wakeful dreams.3 Danto introduces this notion with a nod to Descartes’ question of how we might distinguish between being awake versus experiencing a perfectly coherent dream – a dream, say, of being awake and in front of a fireplace. Descartes’ challenge here is to attempt to differentiate between perceiving and dreaming. Danto then goes on to analogize Descartes’ challenge to the one posed by Warhol’s Brillo Box – that is, how do you tell by looking the difference between the Warhol, which is an art work, and an ordinary Brillo Box which is a packing crate, insofar the objects in question are visually indiscernible? Descartes sketched a dream of being awake, whereas we perceive Warhol’s Brillo Box while being awake, but nevertheless perplexed by the question of whether and how it differs from Proctor and Gamble’s apparently identical packing case. Danto suggests that the Warhol is like Descartes’ dream, only one we encounter when awake and, thus, a waking dream. Danto later amplifies this with an example of a postmodern-type dance involving a woman ironing. Again, the issue is the indiscernibility of an art 1 Arthur C. Danto, What Art Is (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013) 2 I am not counting the collection of lectures that he gave at the Acadia Summer Arts Program in Maine and which were published by A.S.A.P. (n.d.) after Danto’s death. 3 Danto, “Wakeful Dreams,” in What Art Is, p. 48.

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work – in this case, a dance – and an everyday behavior which is intended to remind us of Descartes’ thought experiment. In addition to Descartes, Danto recruits Plato in support of his literary conceit. In Book X of his Republic, Plato asserts that painting – and, by extension art – is a matter of appearances, just as dreams are made of appearances. A main difference is that art works are appearances encountered while we are awake. These are suggestive analogies. However, it seems that Danto wants us to take them literally. He wants us to agree that something is an art work only if it 1) possesses a meaning 2) embodied 3) as a waking dream. But is this last condition a plausible addition to his theory of art? It is hard to see why? From Warhol’s Brillo Box is like a dream in virtue of indiscernibility, Danto seems to attempt to derive Warhol’s Brillo Box is a dream, albeit a waking one.4 But you can’t infer a fact from a metaphor. Furthermore, even if the sole purpose of the mobilizing the dream claim is to allude to the indiscernibility of the essence if art, the dream claim would be readily disposable because it would be redundant. The necessity of the indiscernibility of the essence of art has been already established for Danto by the requirement that art works have meanings, since meanings are, Danto asserts, invisible.5 Danto also tries to exploit the analogy between artworks-as-appearances (according to Plato) and dreams-as-appearances. But even if this analogy is added to the indiscernibility analogy (with which it is somewhat at odds), they would be cancelled not only by the dis-analogy of the wakefulness of our experience of artworks, but also by the fact that not all artworks are matters of appearance. Novels are not for even though we require our senses in order to access novels, our senses are not typically involved in our appreciation of novels. In “Wakeful Dreams,” Danto admits that he has not worked out his idea completely. So, perhaps, he might have had some other way to advance it. I have tried to conjecture what it might have been. One thoroughly speculative thought that I had – which Danto does not mention in text nor is it implied by the text – is that Danto might be using the idea of the dream to capture the notion that we are ontologically distanced from art works. We cannot enter the world of the fiction in order to save Desdemona nor reach into the picture to apply first aid to the dying Marquis de Montcalm. 4 By “waking dream” Danto is not referring to the phenomenon of the lucid dream. By “waking dream” Danto intends to demarcate dreams that we can share intersubjectively. Lucid dreams are only experienced by the dreamer. 5 “Wakeful Dreams,” p. 37.

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Such has frequently been cited as a metaphysical boundary between art works and their audiences. Similarly, we are observers of ourselves in dreams. Yet, we – qua dreamers – lack agency in our dreams, especially in our nightmares. That is, we cannot enter our pictures as agents. Perhaps it is this phenomenon that Danto was getting at by invoking the concept of dreaming. But even if this is what he had in mind – which, admittedly, is not something that we can claim to know – it would be of little moment. For, although much art is metaphysically remote in the ways just described – not all art is. There is interactive art. For instance, I once attended a play by Brecht in which the audience served as the jury for a political trial that was being conducted onstage. Also, if Dominic Lopes is right, computer art, by its very nature, is interactive.6 And so on. Thus, if Danto intended to point to the alleged ontological barrier between art and its audience by enlisting the idea of the dream, it would not have advanced his thesis, since not all artworks are metaphysically impenetrable. Of course, I have just refuted my own conjecture, not Danto’s. However, if there is some other way of sustaining his dream-hypothesis, it remains to be discovered. 2

“Kant and the Work of Art”

In the “Acknowledgements” to What Art Is, Danto agrees that he and Kant have much in common, particularly in terms of “how close my views on criticism are to Kant’s ‘aesthetic ideas.’”7 However, Danto’s critical practice strikes me most frequently as divergeing markedly from the identification of what Kant calls “aesthetic ideas.” For Danto, as follows from his theory of art, the job of the art critic is to identify the meaning of the work and to show how that meaning has been articulated or embodied by the work in terms of the choices in composing the work that the artist has elected. Danto obviously thinks of the aesthetic idea that animates the work as its meaning, which Danto identifies while elucidating how the work articulates or embodies it. But are the so-called “meanings” in the works that Danto characteristically excavates from the works he criticizes aptly described in terms of Kant’s “aesthetic ideas.” 6 See Dominic McIver Lopes, A Philosophy of Computer Art (New York: Routledge, 2010). 7 Danto, “Acknowledgements, What Art Is, p. 163. Danto also said this explicitly when he gave this article as a talk at the Philosophy Colloquium at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

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“Aesthetic ideas” are the products of artistic genius. Recall Kant says “by an aesthetic idea I mean a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept , can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it.”8 For Kant, an aesthetic idea provokes reflection without closure. For example, the movie Citizen Kane invites viewers to contemplate whether human lives, like that of Charles Foster Kane, are explicable or not; but the film asserts no conclusion of its own. It is intended generate thinking about its theme rather than broadcasting the filmmaker’s thesis. Can Kane’s life be summarized by the single word – “Rosebud” – or is it a puzzle whose pieces will never fit together? Orson Welles leaves it to the audience to chew on that question. However, when Danto analyzes an art work, the meanings he attributes to the work are not typically open-ended in the way in which Kant’s aesthetic ideas are. Rather Danto’s interpretations of the meaning of art works are usually what Kant would “determinate.” Consider Danto’s analysis of Jacques Louis David’s Marat Assassiné: David portrays Marat in the bathtub …. In front of him is Corday’s dagger and some spilled blood. Marat is lying back, in death, with the instrument of his death in front of him. I interpret Marat in his bathtub as comparable to Jesus in his sepulcher. The painting suggests that he will rise up as Jesus did, but in any case, there is also the thought that he died for the viewer as Jesus died for died for Christians, so Marat is a corresponding martyr for the sansculottes, as the ordinary revolutionaries were called. But just as Jesus expected something of those present, namely that they should follow in his steps, there is an injunction that, since Marat died violently for the Revolution, you, the viewer must follow in Marat’s steps.9 Personally, I find Danto’s interpretation of David’s painting very persuasive, as I do a great many of his analyses. But like so many of the rest of Danto’s interpretations, it is very determinate, as Kant would say, with respect to the meaning of the painting. This is not a problem, of course. The meanings, in Danto’s sense, of many – most? – art works (perhaps especially religious ones) are very determinate. Most art works are not “aesthetic ideas.” I suspect even 8 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), p. 182. 9 Danto, “Wakeful Dreams,” p. 31.

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Kant would agree, since aesthetic ideas for him are the products of genius and most art works are not. However, if, as I assert, the specimen of criticism above is extremely representative of Danto’s modus operandi as a critic, then his critical practice is not as close as Danto thinks it is to Kant’s treatment of aesthetic ideas. This is not to say that Danto could not interpret a film like Citizen Kane as posing an open question – that is, as asking “Is a human life like Kane’s ultimately explicable or not?” He could then go on to point out how the film manages to articulate this question without ever delivering a decisive answer to it. BUT that is not the way in which he, Danto, characteristically proceeds. Usually he tells us pretty compellingly what he thinks the art work means – that is, what it is about – in the course of showing us how the work carries that off – how the work works. Thus, Danto has the wherewithal to accommodate works in which genius-artists present aesthetic ideas, although he rarely treats art works this way. However, this may not be a defect in Danto’s critical practice, since most artworks are not the products of genius nor aesthetic ideas either.

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Index abstract expressionism 54, 157

intentional fallacy 9

Beardsley, Monroe 2, 8n, 43, 64n Bell, Clive 8, 33, 41, 63, 129–130, 145, 148, 171, 219

Judson Dance Theater 6, 90n, 103, 167–168, 178, 190

Carrier, David 112, 137 Collingwood, R.G. 50, 129, 171 cubism 16, 54, 173 Descartes, René 12, 38, 211, 223-224 Dickie, George 3, 28n, 35n, 69n, 70n, 86n Duchamp, Marcel 11, 16–17, 26–27, 38–39, 76–77, 81, 87, 100, 103-104, 118, 159, 174, 198, 211, 215 Empire 6, 186, 193, 196–198 expression theory 2, 14-15, 16n, 21n, 46, 66, 87, 177 Fukuyama, Francis 106–108, 111, 200, 208 genetic fallacy 9 Goehr, Lydia 4n, 201 Gombrich, Ernst 98, 205 Goodman, Nelson 43, 64, 158, 219 Greenberg, Clement 3, 81, 89, 98–99, 111–112, 119, 134–137, 140, 154, 156, 158–159, 173, 189, 219–220 Hegel, G.F.W. 75, 91, 102, 106, 108, 119n, 126, 133, 169, 189, 199 iconology 14–16 imitation theory 12, 21, 50, 67 impressionism 99, 170, 189, 206

Kant, Immanuel 38, 63, 127n, 145, 171, 188, 197, 208, 212, 223, 225-227 Kossuth, Joseph 56n, 69, 104 Krauss, Rosalind 112, 136, 137n, 153, 154n Langer, Susan K. 50, 171, 177 minimalism 19, 111–112, 117, 157 neo-expressionism 13, 79, 94 neo-impressionism 63, 129–130 Plato 143–147, 170, 175–176, 212, 224 Rainer, Yvonne 168, 175, 179, 180–181 reflexive art 16–17, 19, 21–23, 59, 61, 100–101, 119 retrospection 199, 201–202 Socrates 115, 126–127, 143–144, 147 structural film 191–193, 195 style matrix 31–35 surrealism 73, 119, 159 Tolstoy, Leo 46, 50, 129, 183, 216 Vasari, G. 26, 80, 99, 170 Weitz, Morris 11–12, 17, 24n, 37n, 50–51, 63, 129–130, 133, 142 White, Hayden 202

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