| Phi 220 Spring 2016 |
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For Mon.: intro. & §§I-III, pp. 571-581.
For Wed.: §IV, pp. 582-584, and this handout.
Danto’s paper is obviously influenced by the changes happening in art around the time it was written, especially the end of the era of abstract expressionism and the beginnings of Pop art.
• Danto’s introductory paragraphs begin with a rejection of what he will call the “Imitation Theory” (IT) of art. That rejection is nothing new, but don’t miss his comments on the relation between art and theories of art, something that will prove to be central to his view of art.
• Section I discusses art from the beginning of the twentieth century and from the time (in the 1960s) when Danto wrote this. Notice the motivation for the second theory of art he considers. (He offers no full name for this theory, only the abbreviation “RT” but the context should suggest the label he might use.) This theory dates from the first period Danto discusses. He notes how it might seem appropriate also for the art of his day (i.e., the Pop art of Lichtenstein et al), but he goes on to pose a problem for it.
• Much of section II is designed to introduce and illustrate Danto’s idea of a particular sense of the word “is,” what he calls the is of artistic identification. You should think through his examples and try to come up with some of your own. Don’t miss the last few paragraphs, pp. 579f, where Danto points to the further development of this idea that will appear later in the paper.
The rest of the paper is devoted to the Danto’s idea of the “artworld.” This is, of course, related to the art world—i.e., the world of artists, critics, galleries, museums, etc.—but the inhabitants of Danto’s artworld are works of art so the question of what makes for the artworld is the question of what makes something a work of art.
• Danto’s discussion of Warhol’s Brillo boxes in section III leads up to his discussion of the role of theory in the last paragraph of the section (p. 581). Notice that he asserts the dependence of art on theories of art not only for works like Warhol’s but for art generally. In a later book, Danto developed similar ideas in slightly different terms:
… To see something as art at all demands nothing less than … an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art. Art is the kind of thing that depends for its existence upon theories; without theories of art, black paint is just black paint and nothing more.… It is essential to our study that we understand the nature of an art theory, which is so powerful a thing as to detach objects from the real world and make them part of a different world, an art world, a world of interpreted things. What these considerations show is that there is an internal connection between the status of an artwork and the language with which artworks are identified as such, inasmuch as nothing is an artwork without an interpretation that constitutes it as such. But then the question of when is a thing an artwork becomes one with the question of when is an interpretation of a thing an artistic interpretation.…
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981), p. 135.
• In Danto’s final section, he develops these ideas further by suggesting that the history of the artworld is tied to the introduction of new “art-relevant predicates.” His point in “Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art” could be understood to fit what he says about the predicate G at the top of p. 583: by creating unbeautiful art, the Dada movement (among others) showed that beauty was not a defining trait of art and made it an art-relevant predicate. Art-relevant predicates could be said to provide for varieties of artistic meaning (think of the idea from “Kalliphobia” of beauty being “internal” to the meaning of a work), and the introduction of new art-relevant predicates would then be a development in the history of artistic meaning. Understood in this way, Danto’s final comment suggests a link with Hegel, who might be understood to have offered a history of artistic meaning that showed how it serves to “reveal us to ourselves.”
In later work, Danto had more to say about the significance of history, and he eventually began to speak of the “end of art.” The following quotations are a sample of his discussions of that idea, which is related to the idea that art in the 20th century came to be about art. (In the discussion from which the last group of selections is drawn, he seems to have in mind two stages: first, specific arts come to be about themselves and later, in the 1960s, the question what art as such is begins to be raised.)
From: “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 33 (1974), pp. 139-148. [The quotations are from the very beginning and very end of the article.]
In the present state of the artworld, it is possible that a painting be exhibited which is merely a square of primed canvas, or a sculpture shown which consists of a box, of undistinguished carpentry, coated with a banal tan chemtone applied casually with a roller.…
…
… As for the somewhat empty works with which I launched this discussion, I have this to say: what they are about is aboutness, and their content is the concept of art. The artists might as appropriately have written a paper like this, called it The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and counted their effort a contribution to the philosophy of art, the line separating the two having all but vanished. When philosophy's paintings, grey in grey, are part of the artworld, the artworld has shaded into its own philosophy, and by definition grown old.
From: “The End of Art,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 81-115. [This essay was originally published in The Death of Art, Berel Lang, ed. (New York: Haven Publications, 1984).]
… [In Hegel’s theory,] art is a transitional stage in the coming of a certain kind of knowledge. The question then is what sort of cognition this can be, and the answer, disappointing as it must sound at first, is the knowledge of what art is. Just as we saw is required, there is an internal connection between the nature and the history of art. History ends with the advent of self-consciousness, or better, self-knowledge. I suppose in a way our personal histories have that structure, or at least our educational histories do, in that they end with maturity, where maturity is understood as knowing—and accepting—what or even who we are. Art ends with the advent of its own philosophy.… [p. 107]
…
… Now if we look at the art of our recent past in these terms, grandiose as they are, what we see is something which depends more and more upon theory for its existence as art, so that theory is not something external to a world it seeks to understand, so that in understanding its object it has to understand itself. But there is another feature exhibited by these late productions which is that the objects approach zero as their theory approaches infinity, so that virtually all there is at the end is theory, art having finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself, and remaining, as it were, solely as the object of its own theoretical consciousness.
If something like this view has the remotest chance of being plausible, it is possible to suppose that art had come to an end. Of course, there will go on being art-making. But art-makers, living in what I like to call the post-historical period of art, will bring into existence works which lack the historical importance or meaning we have for a very long time come to expect. The historical stage of art is done with when it is known what art is and means.…
“The end of history” is a phrase which carries ominous overtones at a time when we hold it in our power to end everything, to expel mankind explosively from being.… But the great meta-historians of the nineteenth century, with their essentially religious readings of history, had rather something more benign in mind.… For these thinkers, history was some kind of necessary agony through which the end of history was somehow to be earned, and the end of history then meant the end of that agony. History comes to an end, but not mankind—as the story comes to an end, but not the characters, who live on, happily ever after, doing whatever they do in their post-narrational insignificance. Whatever they do and whatever now happens to them is not part of the story lived through them, as though they were the vehicle and it the subject. [pp. 111f]
…
As Marx might say, you can be an abstractionist in the morning, a photorealist in the afternoon, a minimal minimalist in the evening. Or you can cut out paper dolls or do what you damned please. The age of pluralism is upon us. It does not matter any longer what you do, which is what pluralism means. When one direction is as good as another direction, there is no concept of direction any longer to apply. Decoration, self-expression, entertainment are, of course, abiding human needs. There will always be a service for art to perform, if artists are content with that. Freedom ends in its own fulfillment. A subservient art has always been with us. The institutions of the artworld—galleries, collectors, exhibitions, journalism—which are predicated upon history and hence marking what is new, will bit by bit wither away. How happy happiness will make us is difficult to foretell, but just think of the difference the rage for gourmet cooking has made in common American life. On the other hand, it has been an immense privilege to have lived in history.[pp. 114f]
From: “Art, Evolution, and the Consciousness of History,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 44 (1986), pp. 223-233.
… We have entered a period of art so absolute in its freedoms that art seems but a name for an infinite play with its own concept, as though Schelling's thought of an end-state of history as “a universal ocean of poetry” were a prediction come true. Art-making is its own end in both senses of the term: the end of art is the end of art. There is no further place to go.
…
For the indefinite future, art will be post-historical art-making. It would be inconsistent with this insight into history to look for a further history for art.… [p. 233]
From: After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1995 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997).
… Modernism in art marks a point before which painters set about representing the world the way it presented itself, painting people and landscapes and historical events just as they would present themselves to the eye. With modernism, the conditions of representation themselves become central, so that art in a way becomes its own subject. [p. 7]
…
… My sense is that modernism … is marked by an ascent to a new level of consciousness, which is reflected in painting as a kind of discontinuity, almost as if to emphasize that mimetic representation had become less important than some kind of reflection on the means and methods of representation. [p. 8]
…
… That [the canon of modern art] is closed today, in the minds of many, myself included, means that … a distinction emerged between the contemporary and the modern. The contemporary was no longer modern save in the sense of “most recent,” and the modern seemed more and more to have been a style that flourished from about 1880 until sometime in the 1960s.… [p. 11]
…
… If we think of 1962 as marking the end of abstract expressionism, then you had a number of styles succeeding one another at a dizzying rate.… Recently people have begun to feel that the last twenty-five years [said in 1995], a period of tremendous experimental productiveness in the visual arts with no single narrative direction on the basis of which others could be excluded, have stabilized as the norm.
…
The sixties was a paroxysm of styles, in the course of whose contention, it seems to me—and this was the basis of my speaking of the “end of art” in the first place—it gradually became clear … that there was no special way works of art had to look in contrast to what I have designated “mere real things.” To use my favorite example, nothing need mark the difference, outwardly, between Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and the Brillo boxes in the supermarket. And conceptual art demonstrated that there need not even be a palpable visual object for something to be a work of visual art. That meant that you could no longer teach the meaning of art by example. It meant that as far as appearances were concerned, anything could be a work of art, and it meant that if you were going to find out what art was, you had to turn from sense experience to thought. You had, in brief, to turn to philosophy.
In an interview in 1969, conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth claimed that the only role for an artist at the time “was to investigate the nature of art itself.” This sounds strikingly like the line in Hegel that gave support to my own views about the end of art: “Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is.”… The philosophical question of the nature of art, rather, was something that arose within art when artists pressed against boundary after boundary, and found that the boundaries all gave way.… Only when it became clear that anything could be a work of art could one think, philosophically, about art. Only then did the possibility arise of a true general philosophy of art. But what of art itself? … What of art after the end of art, where, by “after the end of art,” I mean “after the ascent to philosophical self-reflection?” Where an artwork can consist of any object whatsoever that is enfranchised as art, raising the question “Why am I a work of art?” [pp. 13f]
…
What I know is that the paroxysms subsided in the seventies, as if it had been the internal intention of the history of art to arrive at a philosophical conception of itself, and that the last stages of that history were somehow the hardest to work through, as art sought to break through the toughest outer membranes, and so itself became, in the process, paroxysmal. But now that the integument was broken, now that at least the glimpse of self-consciousness had been attained, that history was finished. It had delivered itself of a burden it could now hand over to the philosophers to carry. And artists, liberated from the burden of history, were free to make art in whatever way they wished, for any purposes they wished, or for no purposes at all. That is the mark of contemporary art, and small wonder, in contrast with modernism, there is no such thing as a contemporary style. [p. 15]