1 Stephen Davies, Philosophy, University of Auckland Important note: This is a final English draft and differs from the definitive Spanish versionversion, which is published in Enrahonar: Quaderns de Filosofia, 32/33 (2001): 191-‐201, trans. Gerard Vilar, as "Una improbable última paraula sobre la mort de l'art,". I have been assured by the University of Auckland's research office that if they have made this publicly available then it does not violate the publisher's copyright rules. "Probably not the last word on the end of art" Arthur C. Danto is a self-‐described realist and essentialist about art (1986i, 1991, 1993, 1997). This is to say, he believes that the facts settling whether or not something is art are not arbitrarily specified, but depend on objective features of the work, its history, and its relationship to theories and practices of the artworld. Many of the relevant fact-‐makers are relational rather than intrinsic, but they are features of the world to be discovered, not created at will, by people. Moreover, Danto believes that art has an unchanging essence. Something is an artwork only if it possesses the defining characteristics that all and only artworks share. Essentialism is compatible with change within, and variety among, a concept's instances. The accidental (that is, non-‐essential) properties of individuals can alter through time, and different individuals can possess contrasting accidental properties. More interesting than this, it can be part of a concept's essence that its instances alter historically or that its application changes through history. That is, among the necessary conditions characterising a kind of thing there may be one specifying a pattern to the temporal changes required in its instances or in its extension. For instance, certain unstable isotopes might be defined in part by reference to the period in which it takes half of a given amount to decay. Or, to take a different kind of example, there may be an historical necessity to the unfolding of evolution, given that there are close mutual dependencies between
2
different species as a result of which changes in the fitness of one species affect the survival chances of others. Danto views art as essentially historicised (1973, 1986, 1993, 1997); that is, as inevitably subject to a pattern of change and development. As he sees it, the extension of the concept of art is historically indexed, so that whether or not something can be an artwork depends on when it is offered as such. The prior history of art production must prepare a setting into which newly created pieces can be accepted if they are to qualify as artworks. Moreover, he believes that art history necessarily has a particular internal structure; that is, the elaboration and direction taken by the narrative of art's history is dictated by art's very essence. More precisely, Danto holds that art's historical challenge and purpose is to reveal its own nature, and that it achieves this in a series of stages, all but the last of which misrepresent the essence that it aims to display. As Danto acknowledges, his theory follows the spirit of Hegel's (1984, 1986, 1987, 1992, 1993). Hegel also maintains that the history of art involves a cognitive progress towards the unveiling of its true nature, at which point its historical development comes to an end.ii Danto differs from Hegel over, among other things, the chronological period spanned by art's historical phase.iii He locates it as falling between 1400 and 1964. He argues that art was made both prior to and after these dates, but it was only within them that art was engaged in realising its function. When art finally discharged its historical mandate, it entered its post-‐ historical phase. It continues to be made, but it no longer is driven and guided by its historicised nature. Here is a summary of the main points in Danto's account:iv
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Art's historical period began in about AD 1400.v Prior to that time, in its pre-‐ historical phase, art was made but was not recognisable as such. Once launched on the tide of history, art sought for several centuries to achieve perceptual verisimilitude, taking mimesis as its goal and (mistakenly) also as its defining characteristic. The next phase, that of Modernism,vi begins in 1880.vii This was a period in which many directions were explored as art sought a new agenda for its self-‐justification. The movements of the time were united in rejecting the past's prevailing narrative; no longer were they concerned mainly with beauty and representational fidelity. To mention one key example, Duchamp's readymades were dedicated to exposing the irrelevance of aesthetic properties, as traditionally conceived, to an artwork's status or interest. Yet each art movement regarded the others as competitors, and (wrongly) claimed that it had identified the one true path for future art. What emerged eventually from this mêlée was a concern with the material of paint itself, with shape, surface, and pigment. In addition, the central role of artistic theory in enfranchising artworks emerged more clearly as it became evident that a thing's art-‐status does not depend on its appearance. By 1964, with the emergence of Pop Art, it was apparent at last that a concern with its own essential nature had energised the art of the Twentieth Century. The history of art now could be seen as dedicated to formulating a perspicuous version of the question about art's own essence. With Pop Art, this question received its most philosophically enlightening articulation: why is this art when something just like it is not? In his earlier writings on this topic, Danto was inclined to say that art answered the question it proposed, thereby being transmuted into philosophy (1984, 1986, 1987). More recently, he suggests that art is incapable of responding to the query it spent half a millennium in raising and refining. In this view, Pop Art's achievement consists in posing the question in a form that makes it possible for philosophers to address it, whereas they were in no position to do so formerly (1992, 1997).
4
Having gone as far as it could towards self-‐knowledge, art leaves its historical phase and enters its post-‐historical era.viii At this time, anything becomes possible in that anything can be art, because art no longer is ruled by an historical imperative. No movement or style is more legitimate or authentic as art than any other. Art becomes truly polyglot. The master narrative, the story of art's history, has ended, and nothing has, or could, take its place.ix Critical Discussion To have the significance he claims for it, Danto's thesis must concern all art. If his account applies to a subset only, instead of describing art's end he is recording merely the completion of an epicycle within art's wider ambit. On the face of it, Danto's theory is open to the charge of parochialism just made. When he writes of "art," he focuses almost exclusively on the visual, plastic arts and ignores music, drama, and literature. It is plausible to suggest that these artforms have their own, distinctive histories and preoccupations. Though they have had their crises in the last hundred years, it is far from clear that these reflect the move to philosophical self-‐awareness that Danto identifies as crucial to the coming of art's end.x Moreover, Danto acknowledges that mimesis is not prized in Chinese and African art (1992), so neither could participate in the process that led to the end of art. Also excluded from art's historical journey are Western artworks from prior to 1400 and after 1964. If it does not concern non-‐Western art, High Arts other than visual, plastic ones, or Western art not created in the period 1400-‐ 1964, Danto's theory lacks the universality that it requires if it is to be convincing and important. It appears that he mistakes the end of a phase in the New York artworld for the very crux of art's history.
5
Danto could reply by noting that he does not exclude the works mentioned above from the realm of art, but only from its history, which is that passage of time within which art was impelled to a condition in which it could fulfil its historical role by calling into question views established in the West about its essence. Not all art participated in the process by which art's historical destiny was worked out. In reply one might ask: Why think that the end of the narrative that is art's history has implications for art, given that most art exists outside the context established by that narrative? And here is a response: It is the historical period of art that makes art what it is; that is, the narrative that is art's history plays a hand in constituting art as it is. As Danto puts it (1997), those who made and viewed art prior to 1400 could not conceive of it as such.xi While this response might serve for cases in which something becomes art as a result of being appropriated or retrospectively enfranchised by the Western artworld, it is unattractive where this is not the case. For instance, it is false (and objectionably ethnocentric) to maintain that Chinese art depends for its art-‐status on its recognition by the Western artworld. Rather, the artists concerned make art in the context of their own, autonomous artworld, which is similar to the Western one without being identical to it.xii Furthermore, it is not obvious that musical and dramatic works depend for their art-‐status on the visual artforms that interest Danto. Once more, it is possible to imagine how Danto might argue for his view: It is not only through its direct involvement with works that the artworld controls what is art. The dawning of the key moments of art history -‐-‐ the mimetic period, Modernism, the post-‐historical age -‐-‐ all involved Kuhnian paradigm shifts (1984, 1997). That is, one conceptual scheme replaced another with which it was
6
incommensurable. Now, what counts as a fact is not independent of the paradigm within which one operates; in effect, a new paradigm creates new facts and determines which have explanatory power. So, while it is a fact that there is art in China independently of its being appropriated by the formalised art institutions of the West, that fact stands as such only in relation to art-‐paradigms that, in the West, grew out of art's historical progress towards philosophical self-‐ enlightenment. In this connection, consider the terms in which Danto criticises the Institutional Theory of George Dickie (1986, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1997). According to Danto, the art-‐status of works such as Duchamp's Fountain is there to be discovered, not something that could be achieved by fiat. There were reasons why Duchamp's piece was art that were independent of its being offered as, or declared to be, art. But though he is a Realist about such facts or reasons, Danto regards them as relative to a conceptual paradigm that was adopted comparatively recently. Indeed, he thinks that this schema was not available previously. It became accessible -‐-‐ required, even -‐-‐ only when the artworld attained the degree of self-‐ consciousness that made possible the rejection of Modernism. In his view, then, there are facts that settle what is and what is not art. Rather than constraining and directing the narrative that is art's history, however, their factual status is conditional on the conception of art and history presupposed by that narrative. History is answerable to the facts, maybe, but only where the facts are generated within the conceptual paradigm that also sets the agenda for the narrative that tells, and in telling makes, the history of art. Now, though, it is appropriate to question the exclusivity of the paradigm on which Danto focuses. If the word "art" has an homonymous use in a range of discourses, and is not confined to the High, visual arts, then the paradigm he identifies is
7
encompassed by a more general one. As I claimed above, Danto's approach is parochial.xiii That is, there is a wider paradigm and narrative for art than the one he regards as definitive. In fact, he discusses just one loop within a much wider conversation, and the narrative for that epicycle does not control or create what art is. The end of the narrative that fascinates Danto is not, as he claims, the end of the narrative of art, though it might correspond to the completion of one spiral within the wider vortex of art's history. So far I have suggested that Danto's theory lacks the scope needed to justify the terms in which he presents it, which is as one that uncovers art's trans-‐historical essence. I now turn to other objections to his account. While Danto rejoices in the decline of philosophical positivism (1986, 1997), an aspect of those doctrines rightly remains respected: If an empirical claim is meaningful we should understand what would falsify it (whether or not it also could be verified). It seems to me that Danto's views are worrisome because it is so difficult to know how they could be falsified. After all, the end of art's history is not observably different from its continuation, according to Danto, since art is made on either side of the divide. Of course, that is part of his point and method -‐-‐ he constantly invokes indiscernibly similar items to motivate the philosophical arguments that identify their crucial differences.xiv But whereas Hegel has a developed metaphysics that provides a framework for his account of art history, Danto has nothing so grand as a prop for his. In his hands, arguments from indiscernibility function negatively -‐-‐ they show only that artworks need not look different from real things, that movements of the body can appear the same as actions, that fictions can have the form of historical narratives, that dreams can have the phenomenological vivacity of waking experience, and so on. They do not substitute for the philosophical demonstration that would be needed to justify the metaphysical character of a positive thesis, such as that art had an historical
8
destiny which it fulfilled in 1964, thereby climaxing more than 500 years of development directed by two paradigms each of which we now can see to be mistaken. It would be an error to treat metaphysical issues as if they are straightforwardly empirical, and hence as falsifiable by observation, but it is not obvious that this point can be used in Danto's defence, because it is not plain that he provides a metaphysical underpinning for his account of art's historical essence. What is more, some of Danto's most emphatic claims and predictions seem to be at odds with reality. For instance, he often insists that the hallmark of art's post-‐ historical phase is that anything goes (1986, 1992, 1994, 1997). Everything is permitted, since nothing is historically mandated. More recently, though, Danto has come to see that the liberation of the post-‐historical artworld is not unqualified (1997). Artists are free to adopt any style they like, but if the cultural and intellectual setting that gave that style its significance now is absent, they are not free to give their work the content and import that former artists might have done. Invoking a familiar distinction in the philosophy of language, Danto holds that artists can mention styles they appropriate, but cannot use them. "To imagine a work of art is to imagine a form of life in which it plays a role. ... A form of life is something lived and not merely known about. ... One can without question imitate the work and the style of the work of an earlier period. What one cannot do is live the system of meanings upon which the work drew in its original form of life. ... In saying that all forms are ours, then, I want to distinguish between their use and their mention. They are ours to mention in many cases, but not to use. Someone who simply tried to 'paint like Rembrandt' would have, despite the fact that everything is possible, a very difficult go of things today. ... Rembrandt's painting ... was very much of its own time and place, even if his message ... speaks as fluently to us as to his contemporaries. ... To transmit that message ourselves, we must find means other than those he used" (1997: 202-‐209).xv
9
These sentiments are consistent with a theme that was present in Danto's earliest writings on art, where he insisted on art's historicity. Not everything could be an artwork at every time; some artworks could be created as such only by a particular artist at a specific time and place (1964, 1973). Look-‐alikes either would not be art, or, as art, would have a different identity and content. Nevertheless, the passage quoted above represents a radical departure from Danto's former accounts of post-‐1964 art. In it he accepts (rightly, I think) that history continues to affect the identity and significance of artworks created in art's post-‐historical period, which always has been described by Danto as a time when anything can be art and artists are free. Although art may have become liberated from the historical imperative that led to the creation of works that provoked people to ask why one thing was an artwork while another that it resembled was not, it is not altogether exempt from the influence of art's past. Indeed, the post-‐historical phase is no less historicised than any other in this central particular. It always has been, and still is, the case that the art of the past can be mentioned in the present but cannot be used as it was in its own time. Now though, we are bound to wonder what can be meant by the claim that the history of art has come to an end. All it entails, apparently, is that artworks no longer need to impersonate real things, since art's philosophically provocative duty already has been discharged. It does not mean, as one might have supposed, that artists now can make any artwork they like, but only that any thing might be made into an artwork. What an artwork can be and can mean is no less a function of the times in which it is made than was so prior to 1964. I conclude that Danto's conceding (as he should) that there still are historically governed limits on what art can mean and do, even in its post-‐historical period, has a significantly deflationary effect on the philosophical interest of his thesis.
10
An earlier change in Danto's position has a similar result. At first he suggests that, at the end of its history, art is transmuted into philosophy (1984, 1986, 1987). Later he adopts the more plausible view that art is distinct from philosophy. The end of art is marked by works with a form that posed the philosophical question about art's nature. Prior to that time, philosophy was not well-‐placed to address art's nature, because it assumed a thing's observable, aesthetic character must be essential to its being an artwork. With Pop Art, this presupposition was revealed as bankrupt. Yet art was incapable of resolving the philosophical puzzle it generated, so, with the arrival of art's post-‐historical stage, art passed on to philosophy the burden of discussing and revealing its essence (1992, 1993, 1997). This revision, though appropriate, undermines the attractiveness of Danto's theory. In the first place, it makes art seem much less powerful than formerly. Art finally leads us to ask how its works are distinct from mere real things, but it cannot answer the question it raises. That is, according to Danto's account, the main historical purpose of art, the impulsion that directed its progress in the West over some 600 years, culminates in its issuing a challenge which seems not all that different from the most elementary question of definition: in virtue of what is this thing of one kind rather than another? All this is a far cry from theories that identify the value and importance of art in terms of its power to enrich human experience. In the second place, if one judges the worth of a philosophical question by reference to the interest and adequacy of the answers it receives, it could be argued that art achieved little in arriving at its historical close. It would be widely agreed, I think, that philosophers have made only limited progress in defining art in the past thirty years. Probably the most widely held philosophical position denies that art can be defined on the grounds that it lacks an essence, being united only by family resemblances that hold between its instances. Danto is an
11
unabashed essentialist about art (1993, 1997), yet he admits that he has only identified (in 1981) two necessary conditions that are not jointly sufficient for something's being art: that it be about something and that it embody its meaning (1997).xvi Despite Danto's explication of these notions, both claims are controversial and somewhat obscure, as is his invocation of the "is" of artistic identity and his insistence that artworks possess only one meaning, which usually is that intended by their artists. I do not mean to suggest that philosophers have contributed nothing to our understanding of art through their attempts to define it, nor that the enterprise of definition has been ignored. Current theories, including George Dickie's "Institutional Theory," have been influenced by Danto's discussion. However, though Danto claims to have originated the Institutional Theory (1992, 1997), he criticises it for ignoring the discourse of reasons in terms of which the artworld enfranchises pieces as art. And I suspect he is likely to respond in a similar way to some other recent definitions, such as those proposed by Jerrold Levinson,xvii Noël Carroll,xviii James D. Carney,xix and Robert Stecker.xx These treat art as historicised, but they do not seek explanations of the kind Danto seems to regard as required in an adequate definition of art. That is, they do not set out to explain the history of art as motivated by a quest the point of which -‐-‐ philosophical self-‐awareness -‐-‐ could not have become apparent before the mid-‐1960s. If art passed to philosophy the challenge of analysing art's essence, philosophy has dropped the bundle, yet no one seems much the worse for that fact. One other revision in Danto's position deserves critical scrutiny. At first his attitude to post-‐historical art seemed to be negative. He described such art as lacking the purpose history formerly had given it, as being incapable of saying anything new, and he predicted that the institutions of the artworld would wither and die (1984, 1986). Soon, though, a more upbeat characterisation emerged. In
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being liberated from history, art had delivered itself of a burden (1992, 1997). Art remains subject to the external influence of fashion and politics, but internal dictation by the pulse of its own history is now behind it (1992). In general, Danto celebrates the polyglot multiplicity and the freedom enabled to artists by the end of art and, with it, the break-‐down of superseded, stifling distinctions, such as those between art and craft and between high and low art (1991, 1997). The end of the narrative that is art's history need not be accompanied by any loss of vitality, withering away, or internal exhaustion in new art, Danto decided (1997). With the duty it owed to history done, art might return to the serving of largely human ends, he speculated (1987, 1997).xxi Of course, Danto never was a gloom merchant. His philosophical theory was not premised on any prior judgment about the bankrupt nature of contemporary art. Rather, it emerged from the philosophical thoughts to which he was led by his excitement at various artistic movements of the 1960s. So it is not surprising that his considered response to the post-‐historical scene is optimistic. All the same, there is something unsettling about the implications this has for his general theory. It is difficult not to read him as saying: now that art no longer is the servant of history, at last it can both please and be itself. That should not be what he means, because his main thesis is that art was most emphatically and graphically being itself in the course of working out its historical destiny. Nevertheless, the impression he creates is that the period in Western visual art from 1400-‐1964 was a grand sidetrack; the historical imperative that governed that phase was tangential to what art would have been if it had been left to its own devices. That historical impulsion came from within art and was directed at revealing its essence (or, anyway, making it possible for philosophers to approach that topic usefully), according to Danto. But in also allowing that its historical duty was a burden, something from which art later could be liberated, he surely intimates that the historical phase does not express art's nature after all. Though it cannot be what
13
he means, Danto implies that an account of art's essence is basically irrelevant to art's practice and freest voice, even if, for a time, art was driven by an obsession to reveal its own essential nature.
Stephen Davies, Department of Philosophy, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, NEW ZEALAND.
[email protected]
14
Publications of Arthur C. Danto cited in the text. (1964)
'The Artworld,' Journal of Philosophy, 61, 571-‐584.
(1973)
'Artworks and Real Things,' Theoria, 39, 1-‐17.
(1981)
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.
(1984)
'The End of Art. In The Death of Art. Berel Lang (ed). New York: Haven, 5-‐35.
(1986)
The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press.
(1987)
The State of the Art. New York: Prentice Hall.
(1990)
Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
(1991)
'Narrative and Style,' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 49, 201-‐ 209.
(1992)
Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in a Posthistorical Perspective. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
(1993)
'Responses and Replies.' In Arthur Danto and His Critics. M. Rollins (ed). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 193-‐216.
15
(1994)
Embodied Meanings. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
(1997)
After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
16
Footnotes i
Full references to Danto's publications are listed at the article's end. Mostly I refer to books some of which contain articles that were published earlier. But I distinguish 'The End of Art' from The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, in which it also appeared, because it was the first article in which Danto addressed this topic.
ii
For an excellent summary, see Robert Wicks 'Hegel's aesthetics: An overview.' In The Cambridge Companion to Hegel. Frederick C. Beiser (ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 348-377.
iii
For Hegel, art achieves its metaphysical goal in classical Greece; the history of art already has run its course by the arrival of the "romantic," Christian period. Danto mistakenly thinks that Hegel dates the end of art from 1828 (1990, 1997). Danto believes that the history of art ended in his own life-time and apparently takes Hegel to hold an equivalent opinion.
iv
For a masterly overview of Danto's theory, see Noël Carroll 'Review Essay of Danto's The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, and The State of the Art,' History and Theory, 29 (1990): 111-124 and his 'Danto, Art, and History.' In The End of Art and Beyond: Essays after Danto. Arto Haapala, Jerrold Levinson, & Veikko Rantala (eds). New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997, 30-45.
v
In 1990 and 1994, Danto identifies its beginning as 1300; also, he distinguishes the period 1300-1600 from that of 1600-1900. In 1991, he has it beginning in the Thirteenth Century. In 1997, he gives AD 1400 as the
17
time when art first became self-conscious and artists were recognised as such.
vi
Also called by Danto "the Age of Manifestos" and "the era of ideology." Whereas the first period is summed up by Giorgio Vasari, Clement Greenberg comes to epitomise the values and preoccupations of Modernism (1997).
vii
In 1984 and 1987, Danto identifies 1905 (and Fauvism) as its start. By 1992, he locates the beginning of Modernism in the latter third of the Nineteenth Century with Van Gogh and Gauguin. In any case, the invention of movies (1984, 1994) and a growing awareness of the art of other cultures (1992, 1994) were factors in the repudiation of the model that had previously dominated art's conception of itself and its purpose.
viii
In labelling the current state of art, Danto favours "post-historical." He is reluctant to use "contemporary" or "postmodern" (1997). The former is too weak in that it does not acknowledge the closure that has been achieved, while the latter is too strongly linked to a certain sector in the art market.
ix
Danto admits that he did not anticipate the extent to which the imperatives of fashion and political correctness would replace that of history (1992, 1993). Whereas the latter is dictated by art's historicised nature, those of fashion and politics are external, being imposed on art from the outside.
x
In 'General Theories of Art versus Music,' British Journal of Aesthetics, 34 (1994): 315-325, I argue that music does not conform to Danto's theory.
18
xi
If I read him right, Danto would say something similar of the Africans -that they do not acknowledge their carvings as art, and that African pieces which have become art did so only by being viewed from a perspective established within the Western artworld (see1992).
xii
Danto seems to accept the cultural autonomy of Chinese art (1992). I discuss the idea that non-Western cultures share with the West a basic concept of art in 'Non-Western Art and Art's Definition.' In Theories of Art. Noël Carroll (ed). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming.
xiii
An unsympathetic critic might hold that there is a strong personal element in Danto's account, as if he regards the fate both of art and of philosophical aesthetics to be bound up with his own development and actualisation as a critic and philosopher. For example, see Hilde Hein 'The News of Art's Death Has Been Greatly Exaggerated.' In The End of Art and Beyond: Essays after Danto. Arto Haapala, Jerrold Levinson, & Veikko Rantala (eds). New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997, 46-60.
xiv
For discussion, see John Andrew Fisher 'Is There a Problem of Indiscernible Counterparts?' Journal of Philosophy, 92 (1995): 467-484.
xv
Of course, Stanley Cavell anticipated such views in 'Music Discomposed.' In Must We Mean What We Say? New York: Scribner, 1969, 180-212.
xvi
For an account of the definition implicit in Danto's theory, see Noël Carroll 'Essence, Expression, and History: Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art.' In
19
Arthur Danto and His Critics. M. Rollins (ed). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993, 79-106.
xvii
'Extending Art Historically,' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (1993): 411-423.
xviii
'Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art,' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51 (1993): 313-326.
xix
'Defining Art Externally,' British Journal of Aesthetics, 34 (1994): 114-123.
xx
Artworks: Definition, Meaning, Value. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
xxi
At the same time, Danto is reluctant to accept that art answers a deep, ongoing human need and he also denies that his is a theory about such matters (1997).
