Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)
[153]
The Artworld
ARTHUR DANTO
[orig. 1964]
Hamlet:
Do you see nothing there?
The Queen:
Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.
Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4
Hamlet and Socrates,
though in praise and depreciation respectively,
spoke of art
as a mirror held up to nature.
As with many disagreements in attitude,
this one has a factual basis.
Socrates
saw mirrors as but
reflecting what we can already see;
...
idle accurate duplications
...
of no cognitive benefit whatever.
Hamlet,
more acutely,
recognized a remarkable feature of reflecting surfaces,
namely that
they show us what we could not otherwise perceive—
our own face and form—
and so art,
insofar as it is mirrorlike,
reveals us to ourselves,
and is, even by Socratic criteria,
of some cognitive utility
after all.
Sure, why not?
Just make doubly sure you are
actually
looking at a
reflection
and not a
projection.
As a philosopher, however, I find Socrates' discussion defective on other, perhaps less profound grounds than these.
If a mirror
image of
o
is indeed an imitation of
o,
then,
if art is imitation,
mirror images are art.
But in fact mirroring objects no more is art than returning weapons to a madman is justice;
and reference to mirrorings would be just the sly sort of counterinstance we would expect Socrates to bring forward in rebuttal of the theory he instead uses them to illustrate.
That is,
we would expect
this to be
brought
forward
as such
specifically to say:
So what?
The faithfulness of true "reflection" is in fact precisely what makes it
quite
un-remarkable.
What
is
remarkable?
What if we could not
recognize
even
our own face and form
without aid of
reflecting surfaces?
That is some shit!
But surely we
would
know
what we are looking at
although previously we
could not
"recognize" it?
=+=+=+=+=
Does
the contemporary Reflection Theory of art
really, truly
refer to
own forms
which
really, truly
cannot be glimpsed otherwise?
Of course not!
The fidelity question is one thing.
But beyond even that,
where's the
cognitive benefit?
It seems, rather, that we did not really
need
to self-re-cognize until the world became cluttered to the brim with
mirrorlike
devices. That's the "cognitive" part we've been groping for above. . . but there's no benefit!
...
"is an imitation" will not do as a sufficient condition for "is art."
Yet, perhaps because artists
were
engaged in imitation,
...
the insufficiency of the theory was not noticed
...
[155]
...
Once rejected as a sufficient condition, mimesis was quickly discarded as even a necessary one;
...
It is, of course, indispensable in Socratic discussion that all participants be masters of the concept up for analysis, since the aim is
to
match
a
real defining expression
to a
term in active use,
...
a
theory
of art, regarded here as a
real definition
of 'Art', is accordingly not to be of great use in helping men
to recognize instances of its application.
Their antecedent ability to do this is precisely what the adequacy of the theory is to be
tested against,
the problem being only
to
make explicit
what they
already know.
...
Theories,
on this account,
are somewhat like mirror images
...
,
wordy reflections
of the
actual linguistic practice
we are masters in.
But
telling artworks from other things
is not so simple a matter,
even for native speakers,
and
these days
one might not be aware he was on
artistic terrain
without an
artistic theory
to tell him so.
And
part of the reason for this lies in the fact
that
terrain is
constituted artistic
in virtue of
artistic theories,
so that
one use
of theories,
in addition to helping us discriminate art from the rest,
consists in
making art possible.
This is more baldly-and-boldly stated here than in some other (later) places!
Terrain is constituted artistic
in virtue of artistic theories?
Theories
actually
make
art possible?
Really??
That is some shit!
It's hard to be generous with these statements while staying within the notion of "theory" which has just been laid out. He has
just gotten done
elaborating a construal of theory as more
reflective
than
constitutive.
But
that
was merely to characterize long-past
Socratic discussion.
These days,
on the other hand,
one might not
even
be aware,
let alone comprehending,
of just what
terrain
one stands on. The Socratics knew where they stood, or at least were adept at assuming so for very particular purposes; we do not even know, and/or we are not permitted by our circumstances even to provisionally assume that we do!
First:
Why
do we simply
need
to know? If this theory-driven self-location were to be shown to be superfluous (or impossible!), then problems of theory-boundedness and theory-drivenness are elided just that summarily.
Second:
Suppose that this elison fails. Even so, perhaps if one truly cannot tell where one is standing even in relation to the empirically observable and rationally construable environment, then one has wandered onto a part of the map that is notably unsuitable to human habitation. Perhaps human beings need to be able to live well without recourse to explicit theories. Perhaps we can go so far as to identify the freedom and ability to rely
only
upon implicit theories, to the exclusion of explicit theories, as a meaningful marker of the Good Life. Perhaps there is a case to be made for prescribing this
a priori,
by which time the discussion necessarily turns from the Philosophy which helped us to understand all of this to the Politics that restores the habitability of our patch of ground.
Short of that kind of painstaking litigation of terms and values . . .
It's just jarring to read a passage which, seemingly, puts such faith in the Top-Down at the expense of the Bottom-Up. The thesis that "terrain is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic theories" is reminiscent of that which says "culture is downstream of law." I'm not quite ready to accept either of these!
...
I
Suppose one thinks of the discovery of a whole new class of artworks as something analogous to the discovery of a whole new class of facts anywhere, viz., as something for theoreticians to explain.
No.
Don' wanna.
First,
you
explain, Professor, how and why any given
facts
come to demand
explanation;
for, at times,
we seem to be doing just fine
despite all that we can't explain,
yet, elsewhere and otherwise,
our very survival
seems to depend
on finding explanations.
Now, why should that be?
Surely with a few thousand years of Philosophy and History in our back pocket we can say
something
about the differences between these two scenarios which will allow us,
if only
sometimes,
to know which of these two situations we actually find ourselves in?
In science, as elsewhere, we often
accommodate
new facts
to
old theories
via
auxiliary hypotheses,
a
pardonable enough
conservatism
when the theory in question is deemed
too valuable
to be
jettisoned all at once.
Now
the Imitation Theory of Art (IT) is, if one but thinks it through, an exceedingly powerful theory, explaining a great many phenomena connected with the causation and evaluation of artworks,
bringing a surprising unity into a complex
[156]
domain.
Moreover,
it is a simple matter to shore it up against many purported counterinstances by such auxiliary hypotheses as that the artist
who deviates from mimeticity is perverse, inept, or mad.
Ineptitude, chicanery, or folly
are, in fact,
testable predications.
How funny!
I would say they are
testable
only given the fixity of certain background assumptions . . . and I suspect these assumptions turn out to be precisely those which have
not
been made in advance of both the "terrain" comment and the "new class of facts" comment.
Suppose, then, tests reveal that these hypotheses fail to hold, that the theory, now beyond repair, must be replaced.
And a new theory is worked out, capturing what it can of the old theory's competence, together with the heretofore recalcitrant facts.
One might, thinking along these lines, represent certain episodes in the history of art as not dissimilar to certain episodes in the history of science,
where
a conceptual revolution is being effected
and where
refusal to countenance certain facts,
while in part due to prejudice, inertia, and self-interest,
is due also to the fact
that
a well-established, or at least widely credited theory
is
being threatened in such a way
that all coherence goes.
Yep, all of this is
not dissimilar.
What's
totally different
is the function and provenance of
facts
in Scientific Theory as against Art Theory.
i.e.
The imperative that some facts
simply must
be
countenanced
issues from two different sets of background assumptions. Heeding those assumptions, as one does, the Art Person is able to do far better,
on the whole
without explanations than is the Science Person.
Facts are facts, however we define that. That is not at issue.
What is at issue
is
what happens
to human beings
whenever they arrogate to "countenance."
It is best to suspend such arrogations to the extent possible! As long as Art was constitutive of Theory rather than the other way around, this suspension came easily!
e.g. The anecdote of Nazis singing Schubert is a problem only for those "theories" whose
coherence
is
threatened
by it. For the rest of us, although no fans of Nazis nor, perhaps, of Schubert either, this anecdote falls somewhere between mere coherence and a veritable smoking gun. For the rest of us, art may remain constitutive of theory; theory may remain downstream of art; this no matter who sings whom. We may have theories, and we may take note of newly-established facts, but there is no
recalcitrance,
no
disrepair,
no
threatening.
Not here, anyway. Not for artists "in the grip of the daimon."
The whole problem
with the tail of Theory now wagging the Dog of art is that
those
art people indeed are forced to "countenance" each and every oncoming "fact," as if they indeed harbored scientific pretensions, but without access to any scientific equipment. Hence: Nothing actually gets
worked out,
its valence just gets inverted. Hence: "Anyone who sings Schubert must be a Nazi." That is how art people rescue an
old theory
without learning anything at all from
the heretofore recalcitrant facts,
without even acknowledging those facts explicitly. Even fraudulent scientists at least have to
concoct
a good cover story! So, the above analogy between artistic and scientific "theories" is only half right, and that is far worse news than if it were all right or all wrong. We had better get to work
making it wrong again.
It's not so much that Our Man here
advocates
for something perverse as that he neglects to say that
it is
perverse, which of course does suggest (always without proving) that he actually finds no perversity in it at all. Later in life he is quite transparent that this epoch of Upstream Theory was his personal and professional
peripeteia.
I'm sorry to say that I do find that perverse, for all of the above reasons and more!
(Earlier today while perusing a bibliography, I stumbled upon a book entitled
Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art?
I'm thus reminded to try to be clearer and more even-handed in everything I write here. I often enjoy Conceptual Art when I encounter it, and I often sense that it actually is
necessary,
though as of yet I can't say exactly why I feel this. I am, on the other hand, not just afraid of
Dantoism
but terrified of and by it. It's kind of like hating
fans
of the Packers or Warriors much more than I really hate the players, teams, or locales . . . )
Some such episode
transpired with the advent
of Postimpressionist paintings.
In terms of the prevailing artistic theory (IT), it was impossible to accept these as art unless inept art:
otherwise they could be discounted as hoaxes, self-advertisements, or the visual counterparts of madmen's ravings.
So
to get them accepted
as
art,
...
required not so much
a
revolution in taste
as a
theoretical revision
of rather considerable proportions,
Danto has such a peculiar conception of
getting
them accepted:
of what this means, and of what is involved in it.
e.g. In Chapter 2 (p. 34) of
After the End of Art,
"in the period of competing manifestos, declaring that something was not—was not really—art was a standard critical posture."
He takes this declaration—the declaration that some given object does not belong to some existing class of objects—completely literally and parses it as a sincere, indeed, fully
philosophical
thesis. If that's how such statements simply must be parsed then I guess I just have to accept that I'm already too jaded by immersion in the messy, practical side of art production to be fit for properly philosophical deliberation. I also risk skewing ahistorical here, since all of us on the practical side have heard every conceivable version of the
not-art
or
not-music
trope with our own ears, along with innumerable other howlers of every conceivable ideological flavor; and we've heard them from everyone: friends and relations, audiences, and yes, academic peers and professional colleagues. (In my experience, the latter group is by far the most prolific!)
The Dantoist probably wins this part of the argument: I have lived under a quite different Theoretical regime than that which prevailed during the aforementioned "age of manifestos," hence I really have no basis for direct comparison of remarks made under one regime with those made under the other, not even where the remarks correspond verbatim. Another way to put this: the
not-art
trope ceased to be a "standard critical posture" a long time ago; it survives only, indeed, in sincere philosophical debates, e.g., over whether or not
4' 33"
is "music."
This is how the argument has to go, at least to start. The counterargument is messier and much more difficult to handle. The counter to the counter will always be: "If you can't explain something simply then you don't understand it." And as long that sentiment carries the day we'll remain mired in academic tyranny and critical priestcraft.
I deploy the word "trope" advisedly here: it seems obvious to me that "it's not art" is
just something people say.
If critics no longer say it, that is because "criticism" became professionalized. It is not because manifestos stopped being written (they didn't), and it's certainly not because some "theoretical" revision has succeeded in attenuating the human organism's visceral response to the uncanny; succeeded, that is, where so many prior concurrent efforts failed. The one leg the Dantoist has to stand on here, perhaps, is that we are not much faced with reactions such as, "Yeeks! How
uncanny!"
For people to say, very specifically, "I don't know what
that
is, but
that
is
not art!"
does suggest some implicit "theory" formation, if we simply must call it that. I will have to keep an eye peeled for hints of Danto's own view on the implicit-explicit distinction; to me it seems like
the
crucial omission here. I'm probably never going to be convinced that this is any kind of
historical
artifact. It can be rendered that way rhetorically, but I'm not sure what that really proves; already that is a
narrative
in the unseemly sense rather than the matter-of-fact one. And here again, Danto's avowing of "essentialism" is head-spinning because so often in his work we are faced with, say, the thesis of
a
theoretical revision
of rather considerable proportions
having changed how people think! But another kind of "essentialist" finds that sort of thing especially hard to take seriously.
["...a theoretical revision of rather considerable proportions,"]
involving
not only
the artistic enfranchisement of these objects,
but
an emphasis upon
newly significant features of accepted artworks,
so that quite different accounts of their status as artworks would now have to be given.
As a result of the new theory's acceptance, not only were Postimpressionist paintings taken up as art, but numbers of objects (masks, weapons, etc.) were transferred from anthropoligical
What's
Funny Beyond Words
about this typo is that I tend to make almost the same one, only two characters earlier. It must be an unusually potent potential of the standard keyboard.
museums (and heterogeneous other places)
to
musées des beaux arts,
though,
as we would expect from the fact that a criterion for the acceptance of a new theory is that it account for whatever the older one did,
nothing had to be transferred out
of the
musée des beaux arts—
...
To be sure,
I distort
by speaking of
a theory:
Ya think?
historically,
there were several,
Oh . . .
a
theory
, not
a
theory
.
all,
interestingly enough,
more or less defined in terms of the IT.
Art-historical complexities
must yield before
the exigencies of logical exposition,
and I shall speak
as though
there were
one replacing theory,
partially compensating for
historical falsity
by choosing one which was
actually enunciated.
According to it,
the artists in question
were to be understood
not as
unsuccessfully imitating real forms
but as
successfully
[157]
creating new ones,
quite as real
as the forms which the older art had been thought, in its best examples, to be creditably imitating.
Art, after all, had long since been thought of as creative
...
, and the Postimpressionists were to be explained as genuinely creative, aiming, in Roger Fry's words, "not at
illusion
but
reality."
This theory (RT)
furnished a whole new mode of looking at painting,
old and new.
Indeed,
one might almost interpret
the crude drawing
...
the dislocation of form from contour
...
the arbitrary use of color planes
...
as so many ways of
drawing attention
to the fact that these were
non-imitations,
specifically
intended
not to deceive.
Here is a
theory
near and dear to my own heart. But
it too is intentionalist,
explicitly, at least in this particular rendering.
What (if anything) to do about that?
For the
non-imitativist
anti-intentionalist
(WHEW-IE!!),
the trick
is to contrive some piece of business
that has the
least possible chance
of being misparsed as imitative;
Our best efforts to this end
can never be foolproof. Cause for pessimism!
But I suspect we have
much better chances
nowadays than we did a hundred years ago!
An isolated incidence of
cause for optimism!
What all this minimization-of-chances entails could fill a library, but it's not a difficult problem. It is difficult to
exhaust
the possibilities but it's not difficult to
get started.
(And, to reiterate the omitted disjunction between science and art, "barely getting started" is about as far as us artists ever get anyway.)
Logically,
this would be roughly like printing
"Not Legal Tender"
across a brilliantly counterfeited dollar bill,
the resulting object (counterfeit
cum
inscription) rendered incapable of
deceiving anyone.
Any contemporary intentionalist worth their salt
(read: any
cognitivist-intentionalist)
ought to disagree with this part.
The
Postimpressionist
case is nothing half as
explicit
as any such
printing-
across
maneuver suggests.
The whole point of the Postimpressionist example is to show that even the obvious
interpretation
is far from obvious: the move away from naturalist representation brings precisely this ambiguity along with it, no?
It is not an illusory dollar bill,
but then,
just because it is non-illusory
it does not automatically become a real dollar bill either.
It rather occupies a freshly opened area between real objects and real facsimiles of real objects: it is a
non-facsimile,
if one requires a word, and a new contribution to the world.
Thus, Van Gogh's
Potato Eaters,
as a consequence of certain unmistakable distortions, turns out to be a non-facsimile of real-life potato eaters;
By this juncture, the distinction between
implicit
and
explicit
theory formation ought to be both admissible and obvious!
This passage certainly serves to embarrass the artist who has disclaimed the intention-to-imitate while nonetheless obviously depicting some "real" object. Perhaps it might also inspire them to
try harder.
Be careful what you wish for!
and inasmuch as these are not facsimiles of potato eaters,
Van Gogh's picture, as a non-imitation,
had as much right to be called a real object
as did its putative subjects.
By means of this theory (RT),
artworks reentered the thick of things
from which Socratic theory (IT)
had sought to evict them:
...
The Post-Impressionist won a victory in ontology.
This is quite literally
Classic Danto
here.
Be it granted that whatever
theory
comes down to us from Ancient times certainly concedes no such
ontology
to The Painter's Painting,
nonetheless I just have the damndest time believing that "paintings"
per se
well and truly had no such "ontological" status as objects in their own right until some interest group managed to
win a victory
on their behalf.
The vulgar unparsimoniousness of the
non-facsimile
thesis can only feed this suspicion.
It is in terms of RT
that we must understand
the artworks around us today.
Thus Roy Lichtenstein paints comic-strip panels, though ten or
twelve feet high.
...
reasonably faithful projections
...
, but it is precisely the scale that counts.
...
A
photograph
of a Lichtenstein is indiscernible from a photograph of a counterpart panel
...
but
...
is as inaccurate a reproduction as a black-and-white engraving of Botticelli, scale being essential here as color there.
Lichtensteins, then, are not imitations but
new entities,
as giant whelks would be.
Jasper Johns, by contrast, paints objects with respect to which questions of scale are irrelevant.
Yet his objects cannot be imitations, for they have the remarkable property that any intended copy of a member of this class of objects
[158]
is automatically a member of the class itself, so that these objects are logically inimitable.
Thus, a copy of a numeral just
is
that numeral:
a painting of 3 is a 3 made of paint.
...
Rauschenberg's bed hangs on a wall, and is streaked with some desultory housepaint. Oldenburg's bed is a rhomboid, narrower at one end than the other,
...
As beds, these sell at singularly inflated prices, but one
could
sleep in either of them:
...
Imagine, now, a certain Testadura—a plain speaker and noted philistine—who is not aware that these are art, and who takes them to be reality simple and pure.
It's easy enough to catch the reference and to see where this is headed. But one need be no kind of
philistine
to remain blissfully
un-
aware
that these are art! These beds are the "difficult" art, not Webern. That's my populist "theory."
Again, allowing the tail of Theory to wag the dog of Art can only be called
perverse
here. Do we
really
think that
this
kind of innocent "theoretical" ignorance ought to become a Scarlet Letter?
Do we
really
think that the equanimity with which this all is being laid out is the equanimity of the disinterested scholar?
He attributes the paint streaks on Rauschenberg's bed to the slovenliness of the owner, and the bias in the Oldenburg bed to the ineptitude of the builder
...
A philistine talking here? Or merely a
rationalist?
Rationalism,
quote-unquote,
certainly has its own pitfalls. They are
rather different
pitfalls than Philistinism's, that is all.
These would be mistakes, but mistakes of rather an odd kind, and not terribly different from that made by the stunned birds who pecked the sham grapes of Zeuxis.
They mistook art for reality, and so has Testadura. But it was
meant
to
be
reality,
according to RT.
Try Harder.
: ^ (
Can one have mistaken reality for reality?
How shall we describe Testadura's error?
What, after all, prevents Oldenburg's creation from being a misshapen bed?
Indeed, the viewer would have to arrive here already in possession of some explicit "theory." But
reality itself
is not the sort of thing upon which one brings a "theory" to bear in this way; and
this time
I just don't care what Aristotle or Kant may have said about it . . . not unless they have said it directly to our hypothetical art-audience! And not unless that audience has indeed
swallowed it whole!
This is equivalent to asking what makes it art, and with this query we enter a domain of conceptual inquiry where native speakers are poor guides:
they
are lost themselves.
II
To mistake an artwork
for a real object
is no great feat
when an artwork is
the real object one mistakes it for.
The problem is how to avoid such errors, or to remove them once they are made.
WOW! If this
one-two
doesn't sum up Danto all by itself!
There is no
problem
here, only a
solution.
Perhaps even
salvation!
If a trusted friend advises you not to climb into a certain bed, you do well to heed their advice. If, on the other hand, a petty bureaucrat informs you that all bears in the north are white, you, at minimum, might do well to ask a litany of obvious follow-up questions before believing them.
The artwork is a bed, and not a bed-illusion;
...
; and since, after all, one cannot discover that a bed is not
a bed, how is Testadura to realize that he has made an error?
A certain sort of explanation is required,
for the error here is a curiously philosophical one,
...
[159]
...
And yet Our Man, it seems, along with a privileged few others,
has
in fact
discovered
precisely this much.
We
begin by explaining,
explaining
=
the first sign
that
We
might be wrong
perhaps,
that the paint streaks are not to be explained away,
that they are
part
of the object,
so the object is not a mere bed
...
,
but a complex object
...
:
a paint-bed.
Similarly, a person is not a material body with—as it happens—some thoughts superadded, but is a complex entity made up of a body and some conscious states: a conscious-body.
Persons, like artworks,
Paging
Dr. Binkley!
must then be taken as irreducible to
parts
of themselves, and are in that sense
primitive.
Primitive! That is a promising deployment of a word! But there is nothing of the sort in evidence here. Rather, there is this other thing, this eminently
reducible part of
who-knows-what, this thing called "theory," which is profoundly . . . contemporary, and not primitive at all.
Or, more accurately, the paint streaks are not part of the real object—the bed—which happens to be part of the artwork, but are,
like
the bed, part of the artwork as such.
And this might be generalized into a rough characterization of artworks that happen to contain real objects as parts of themselves:
...
There is an
is
that figures prominently in statements concerning artworks
which is not the
is
of either identity or predication;
nor is it the
is
of existence,
of identification,
or some special
is
made up to serve a philosophic end.
Nevertheless, it is in common usage, and is readily mastered by children.
It is the sense of
is
in accordance with which a child,
shown a circle and a triangle and asked which is him and which his sister, will point to the triangle saying
"That is me";
...
or in the gallery I point, for my companion's benefit, to a spot in the painting before us and say "That white dab is Icarus."
Reminder that this is the very same writer who insisted, towards the end of his life, that aesthetics could not simply be absorbed into Cognitive Science! Ostensibly "theory" is the irreducible remainder?
I might say that "theory" in this case is just "convention," except that Our Man has appealed to the
children
of the (art)world to make his point here, and I am thus unsure whether he means by this to point up something hard-wired into our cognition? Or just something obvious and easily graspable?
We do not mean, in these instances, that
whatever is pointed to
stands for,
or
represents,
what it is said to be,
for
the
word
'Icarus'
stands for or represents Icarus:
yet I would not
in the same sense of
is
point to the word and say
"That is Icarus."
The sentence
"That
a
is
b"
is perfectly compatible with
"That
a
is not
b"
when
the first employs this sense of
is
and
the second employs some other,
though
a
and
b
are used nonambiguously throughout.
Often, indeed, the truth of the first
requires
the truth of the second.
The first, in fact, is incompatible with "That
a
is not
b"
only
when the
is
is used nonambiguously throughout.
For want of a word I shall designate this
the
is
of
artistic identification;
in each case in which it is used, the
a
stands for some specific physical property of, or physical part
[160]
of, an object;
and, finally,
it is
a necessary condition
for something to be an artwork that
some part or property
of it be
designable
by the subject of a sentence that employs
this special
is.
It is an
is,
incidentally, which has near
relatives in marginal and mythical pronouncements. (Thus, one
is
Quetzalcoatl;
those
are
the Pillars of Hercules.)
Well . . .
marginal and mythical
sounds exactly right!
Let me illustrate.
Two painters are asked to decorate the east and west walls of a science library with frescoes to be respectively called
Newton's First Law
and
Newton's Third Law.
...
As objects I shall suppose the works to be indiscernible:
...
B
explains
his work as follows:
a mass, pressing downward, is met by a mass pressing upward: the lower mass reacts equally and oppositely to the upper
one.
A
explains
his work as follows:
the line through the space is the path of an isolated particle. The path goes from edge to edge, to give the sense of its
going beyond.
...
Much follows from these artistic identifications.
I think he was on the right track calling these
explanations.
i.e.
If you have to "explain" the joke, or the artwork, it didn't land.
To regard the middle line as an edge (mass meeting mass) imposes the need to identify the top and bottom half of the picture as rectangles,
...
If it is an edge, we cannot thus take the entire area of the painting as a single space: it is rather composed of two forms, or one form and a non-form.
...
[161]
...
If we take the line as
through
space, the edges of the picture are not really the edges of the space:
...
As
B,
the edges of the picture can be
part
of the picture in case the masses go right to the edges, so that the edges of the picture are
their
edges.
...
the faces of the masses could be the face of the picture, and in looking at the picture, we are looking at these faces:
but
space
has no face, and on the reading of
A
the work has to be read as faceless, and the face of the physical object would not be part of the artwork.
Notice here
how
one
artistic identification
engenders another
artistic identification,
" . . . how each explanation may itself be explained . . . "
and how,
consistently with a given identification, we are
required
to give others and
precluded
from still others:
What if we can
only ever
be
precluded
and cannot actually be
required
?
indeed,
a given identification determines how many elements the work is to contain.
These different identifications are incompatible with one another, or generally so, and each might be said to make a different artwork, even though each artwork contains the identical real object as part of itself—or at least parts
of the identical real object as parts of itself.
So what did MacDonald have to say about this hypothetical? I know she didn't address this specifically, just like Beardsley
(purportedly)
had no theory of kissing and crying; but the contention that Beardlsey had (paraphrasing) "developed no theory that would have enabled him to theorize about" such things is asinine, and so would be any such contention here.
What did MacDonald have to say?
"There may, indeed, be good evidence to show that an artist had contemplated and even thought out a work which he never committed to word, paint, sound or other material. He may have described the work in a letter, diary or orally. But I doubt if an ordinary person would unhesitatingly assert that he had thereby
produced
the work. If the work were one of the plastic arts I think this would certainly be denied."
['Art and Imagination' (1953), p. 210]
Not that this proves anything that I am seeking to prove. It does show, at minimum, just how quickly all of this went off the rails!
There are, of course, senseless identifications: no one could, I think, sensibly read the middle horizontal
as
Love's Labour's Lost
or
The Ascendency of St. Erasmus.
Is there
anything at all
we can say about the
senseless
as against the
senseful?
Or do we simply
Know It When We See It?
Finally, notice how
acceptance of one
identification
rather than another
is in effect to
exchange one
world
for another.
Here is Formalism standing on its head.
The
whole
world
has already had its say by the time its slower, atomized creatures get around to making their precious
identifications.
It matters not what Our Man thinks about it.
...
And now Testadura,
having hovered in the wings throughout this
discussion,
protests
that
all he sees is paint:
a white painted oblong with a black line painted across it.
And
how right he really is:
...
if he asks us to show him what there is further to see,
...
we cannot comply, for he has overlooked nothing
...
[162]
...
We cannot help him until he has mastered the
is of artistic identification
and so
constitutes
it a work of art.
If he cannot achieve this, he will never look upon artworks: he will be like a child who sees sticks as sticks.
But
what about pure abstractions,
say
something that looks just like
A
but is entitled
No. 7?
The 10th Street abstractionist blankly insists that there is nothing here but white paint and black, and none of our literary identifications need apply.
Aah-haaah
. . . Once upon a time these "identifications" were born in/as "explan-ations," . . . and here we find the
abstractionist
also "explaining," just like all the
literary
folks; . . . the abstractionist
also
espouses a "theory,"
also
inhabits a "world," and in this (s)he is no different than any other artist.
Almost, but not quite. There is one immovable obstacle in the path of this postmodern bulldozer: it doesn't take a full-fledged Testadura to find
nothing here but
paint.
By now, audiences of almost every persuasion have seen a handful among their cohort land precisely here, more or less happily depending on the theory
du jour.
Of course we began this paper by examining an earlier cultural theoryboundedness, that which
excluded
such works from arthood
precisely
on the strength of the nothing-here ascription; and now that arthood has been extended to the abstractionists, we find them eager to embrace the old accusation, which has become (now is not the time to try to say why) their only defense against the willful slander of the post-Hegelian art critic. How peculiar!
It doesn't take a "philistine" to sleep on Rauschenberg's bed, but it
does
take a
Danto
to accept mere "explanations" as "identifications." Certainly
that
is not a theory that develops implicitly.
As we proceed, let's be sure to notice what happens to Danto's hypotheticals once the rage to explanation/identification is abdicated: the suggestion in the
A-B
hypothetical is that the explanation
makes
the work . . .
What then distinguishes him
["The 10th Street abstractionist"]
from Testadura, whose philistine utterances are indiscernible from his?
...
At the risk of overreading, I find myself thinking that Danto's
whole point
is that the
utterances
are
discernible
because the underlying "theories" they evince are discernible. In that respect we have arrived at this latest hypothetical all dressed up with nowhere to go: when theory-espousal has already been noncontroversially ascribed, there is not much left to explain; the critic is the one who explains it, the artists and audience alike now
both
become "philistines!"
But this merely begs the question: in reality, faced with these two "indiscernible utterances," we truly are not able to "discern" what is indicated therein about the utterers' respective views of a would-be art-object. Danto himself is the one who has
already
distinguished
the Painter from the Philistine; in the mere construction of the hypothetical he has already
ascribed
to each of them exactly what he needs them to believe. There is no mystery here. He finds exactly what he has set out for himself.
We may indeed be in the domain of the "primitive" here. There may indeed be nothing substantive to distinguish the philistine from the abstractionist. I only suggest that we replace "philistine" with "empiricist," since that is what's
really
at issue, both for us living in the dystopian 2020s and for Danto here in the heady 1960s. My early sense upon first reading of Danto's works of properly analytical philosophy is that we will find plenty of justification for reading "empiricist" as "philistine" therein; and as for herein, it is then a question of how fast and loose we are willing to play the intertextual game.
The answer,
unpopular as it is likely to be to purists of every variety,
lies in the fact
that this artist has returned to the physicality of paint
through
an atmosphere
compounded of
artistic theories
and
the
history
of recent and remote painting,
elements of which he is trying to refine out of his own work;
and
as a consequence of this
his work
belongs
in this atmosphere
and
is part of
this history.
. . . and now, all of a sudden, the abstractionist's own explanation
un-makes the work, which must instead be (re-)made via its (re-)situation in
atmosphere,
theories,
history,
and the like.
Why can the abstractionist's explanation be so easily overridden while Oh So
Much follows from
the conceptualist's explanation? That's not very sporting, chap!
He has
achieved
abstraction through
rejection
of artistic identifications, returning to the real world from which such identifications remove us (he thinks), somewhat in the mode of Ching Yuan, who wrote:
Before
I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw
mountains as mountains and waters as waters.
When I arrived at a
more intimate
knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that
mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters.
But now that I have got
the very substance
I am at rest. For it is just that I see
mountains once again as mountains, and waters once again as waters.
His identification of what he has made is logically dependent upon the theories and history he rejects.
Seems to me that it is, by now, Professor Danto who is the one making this particular
identification,
not the hypothetical abstractionist. If this is the premise, then the
nothing here but paint
identification will surely be offered in response; it is
all that can be
offered aside from obstinate silence. But maybe that's what this identification really is: it is no identification at all in Danto's sense but rather a response (the only seemingly viable one) to a dog who is being wagged by his own tail. What else to say to such a pathetic creature?
And/or:
somehow the abstractionist's "identification" is
dependent
on all the unheard, unseen forces of
theories and history;
whereas the Newtonian Conceptualists, simply by virtue of pushing
with
those particular forces rather than
against
them, are thereby permitted to
identify
like a mauve.
But this kind of "identification" itself has
quite a history,
stretching all the way back to the very first time some entrepeneurial human(oid) insisted against all available indications that the wares they were hocking actually were something much more-and-different than could ever be apparent visually or tactilely to any of their reasonable human(oid) conspecifics. The others always learned quickly (though perhaps "the hard way") not to trust such ambitious types; but now that we've all bet our lives on a global economy built on "trust," we are not allowed to be empiricists anymore. Not even in
The Artworld!!
How daft!!
The
difference
between his utterance and Testadura's "This is black paint and white paint and nothing more" lies in the fact that he is
still using
the
is
of artistic identification,
. . . Sounds more like
the
is
of
Intentionalism . . . and the
utterance
issues from Professor Danto . . .
so that his use of "That black paint is black paint" is not a tautology.
Told ya the Professor could quite well
discern
the two statements from the start!
Testadura is not at that stage. To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry—
Sic!!
Best typo ever!!
an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history
of art:
an artworld.
III
Mr. Andy Warhol, the Pop artist, displays facsimiles of Brillo cartons, piled high, in neat stacks, as in the stockroom of the supermarket.
They happen to be of wood, painted to look like cardboard,
and why not? To paraphrase the critic of the
Times,
if one may make the facsimile of a
[163]
human being out of bronze,
why not the facsimile of a Brillo carton out of plywood?
...
the Brillo people might, at some slight increase in cost, make their boxes out of plywood without these becoming artworks, and Warhol might make
his
out of cardboard without their ceasing to be art.
So
we may forget questions of intrinsic value, and ask
why the Brillo people cannot manufacture art
and
why Warhol cannot
but
make artworks.
Hmm. This would indeed seem to have nothing at all to do with these agents and everything to do with their wider
world.
But then, what of these agents' precious "identifications?" Is it as clear as Our Man says it is that the one or the other crossover maneuver simply
cannot
be done? It seems more that it
was not
done than that it
could not
be. We will encounter that sort of confusion again and again 'round these parts.
Well, his are made by hand, to be sure. Which is like an insane reversal of Picasso's strategy in pasting the label from a bottle of Suze onto a drawing,
...
But the difference cannot consist in craft:
a man who carved pebbles out of stones and carefully constructed a work called
Gravel Pile
might invoke the labor theory of value to account for the price he demands;
but the question is, What makes it art?
And why need Warhol
make
these things anyway?
Why not just scrawl his signature across one?
...
Is this man a kind of Midas,
...
?
And the whole world consisting of latent artworks waiting,
...
to be transfigured,
...
?
Never mind that the Brillo box may not be
good,
much less
great
art.
The
impressive
thing is that it is art
at all.
I would have thought that already by 1964 this was no longer the least bit
impressive.
Dare I conjecture that the
aesthetics
of commercial art must have something to do with this assessment? That seems like the only substantive difference between what is described here and what Duchamp et al had long since accomplished. After all, the element of
hand-making
is summarily dismissed here!
But if it is
[art],
why are not the indiscernible Brillo boxes that are in the stockroom?
Or
has
the whole distinction between art and reality broken down?
Well . . . Our Man himself seems rather intent on locating the
distinction
beyond (or short of) the perceptible realm. That is
as good as
no distinction at all!
Suppose a man collects objects (readymades),
including a Brillo carton;
we
praise
the exhibit for
variety,
ingenuity,
what you will.
Next
he exhibits nothing but Brillo cartons, and we
criticize
it as
dull,
repetitive,
self-plagiarizing—
...
Or he piles them high, leaving a narrow path;
we tread our way through the smooth opaque stacks and find it an unsettling experience,
and write it up as the closing in of consumer products, confining us as prisoners:
or we say he is a modern pyramid builder.
True,
we don't say these things about the stockboy.
But then a stockroom is not an art gallery, and we cannot readily separate the Brillo cartons from the gallery they are in, any more than we can separate the Rauschenberg
[164]
bed from the paint upon it.
...
scoured clean of paint, Rauschenberg's bed is a bed,
...
But then if we think this matter through, we discover that the artist has failed, really and of necessity, to produce a mere real object.
He has produced an artwork, his use of real Brillo cartons being but an expansion of the resources available to artists,
...
What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art.
It is the theory that
takes it up
into the world of art, and keeps it from
collapsing
into the real object which it is (in a sense of
is
other than that of artistic identification).
Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art,
and in order to see it as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting.
It could not have been
art
fifty years ago.
But then there could not have been, everything being equal,
flight insurance
in the Middle Ages, or Etruscan
typewriter erasers.
The world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less than the real one.
It is the
role
of
artistic theories,
these days as always, to make the artworld, and art,
possible.
It would,
I should think,
never have occurred to the painters of Lascaux
that they were producing
art
on those walls.
Not unless there were neolithic aestheticians.
I'm perfectly willing
to lose the
art
in order
to lose the
aestheticians!
IV
The artworld stands to the real world in something like the relationship in which the City of God stands to the Earthly City.
Certain objects, like certain individuals, enjoy a double citizenship, but there remains, the RT notwithstanding, a fundamental contrast between artworks and real objects.
Perhaps this was already dimly sensed by the early framers of the
IT who, inchoately realizing the nonreality of art, were perhaps limited only in
supposing
that
the sole way objects had of being
other than
real
is to be
sham,
Well . . . there
is
a
certain
standpoint from which these are the only two possibilities!
What, really, is so wrong with that standpoint?
What are the
really important
parts of human life that
really do not
depend, from the very start, upon precisely this standpoint?
I often think of sports here, which really are a "popular art"
par excellence
and are only denied being parsed as such because the people most concerned with this kind of parsing tend to be "nerds" rather than "jocks." But if sports are Popular Art, then they don't quite support the Dantoist in his greyfilling of the vacuum between Real and Sham.
Sports are real, but they don't matter.
To "matter" or not is one thing; to be Real or Sham is another thing entirely.
The Being
and
the Mattering
seem to be all mixed up in Danto's account here.
["Being and Matteringness"]
: ^ /
[" . . . real . . . sham . . . "]
so that artworks necessarily had to be imitations of real
objects.
This was too narrow.
So Yeats saw
...
It is but a matter of choice; and the Brillo box of the artworld may be just the Brillo box of the real one, separated and united by the
is
of artistic identification.
...
I shall now think of pairs of predicates related to each other as "opposites," conceding straight off the vagueness of this
demodé
term.
The term can never truly go out of fashion because it is the best heuristic that us feeble humans possess for working
with
rather than
against
ourselves when trying to think our way through a problem.
I
like to think of
each binary
as a
dimension.
x
coimplicated binaries
=
x-dimensional thinking
And now for Page 165 . . .
[165]
Contradictory predicates are not opposites, since one of each of them must apply to
every object in the universe,
F yeah!! FiLoSoPHY!!
But . . .
. . . I mean . . .
. . . where tf
has this shit been for the last several pages??
and
neither of a pair of opposites need apply to some objects in the universe.
An object must first be of a certain kind before either of a pair of opposites applies to it,
and then at most and at least one of the opposites must apply to it.
So
opposites are not contraries,
for
contraries may both be false
of some objects in the universe,
but
opposites cannot both be false;
for of some objects,
neither of a pair of opposites
sensibly
applies,
unless the object is of the right sort.
Then,
if the object is of the required kind, the opposites behave as contradictories.
Deep breath . . .
If
F
and non-F
are opposites, an object
o
must be of a certain kind
K
before either of these sensibly applies;
but if
o
is a member of
K,
then
o
either is
F
or
non-F,
to the exclusion of the other.
The class of pairs of opposites that sensibly apply to the
(ô)
Ko
I shall designate as the class of
K-relevant predicates.
And a necessary condition for an object to be of a kind
K
is that at least one pair of
K-relevant opposites
be sensibly applicable to it.
But,
in fact,
if an object is of kind
K,
at least
and at most
one of each
K-relevant
pair of opposites
applies to it.
I am now interested in
the
K-relevant
predicates for the class
K
of artworks.
And let
F
and
non-F
be an opposite pair of such predicates.
Now it might happen that, throughout an entire period of time, every artwork is non-F.
But since nothing thus far is both an artwork and
F,
it might never occur to anyone that non-F
is an artistically relevant predicate.
The non-F-ness of artworks goes unmarked.
By contrast, all works up to a given time might be
G,
it never occurring to anyone until that time that something might be both an artwork and non-G;
indeed,
it might have been thought that
G
was a
defining trait
of artworks
when
in fact
something might first have to be an artwork
before
G
is sensibly predicable of it
—in which case non-G
might also be predicable of artworks, and G itself then could not have been a defining trait of this class.
Let
G
be
'is representational'
and
let
F
be
'is expressionist.
At a given time, these and their opposites are perhaps the only art-relevant predicates in critical use.
Now letting '＋'
stand for a given predicate P and '—' for its opposite non-P, we may construct a style matrix more or less as follows:
F G
十 十
十 —
— 十
— —
The rows determine available styles, given the active critical vocabulary: representational expressionistic (e.g., Fauvism); representational nonex-
[166]
pressionistic (Ingres);
nonrepresentational expressionistic (Abstract Expressionism);
nonrepresentational nonexpressionist (
hard-edge
My note says:
?!
abstraction).
Plainly, as we add art-relevant predicates, we increase the number
of available styles at the rate of 2n.
It is, of course, not easy to see in advance which predicates are going to be added or replaced by their opposites, but suppose an artist determines that
H
shall henceforth be artistically relevant for his paintings.
Then, in fact,
both
H
and non-H become artistically relevant for
all
painting,
and
if his is the first and only painting that is
H,
every other painting in existence becomes non-H,
and the entire community of paintings is enriched, together with a doubling of the available style opportunities.
It is this retroactive enrichment of the entities in the artworld that makes it possible to discuss Raphael and De Kooning together, or Lichtenstein and Michelangelo.
Hmm. This seems merely to afford the parties to this
discussion
more ways to pull the wool over everyone else's eyes. It seems more a
dilution
than an
enrichment.
And the fact that it facilitates certain kinds of dialogue needs to be evaluated on the merits of the results . . . if there are any such merits.
The wisdom of
discussing
LeBron, Jordan, Kareem, and Russell
together
is open to all kinds of questioning now that we've had the opportunity to see what such an enterprise really comes down to!
The
greater the variety
of artistically relevant predicates, the
more complex
the individual members of the artworld become;
and
the more one knows
of the entire population of the artworld,
the richer one's experience
with any of its members.
In this regard,
notice that,
if there are
m
artistically relevant predicates,
there is always a bottom row with
m
minuses.
This row is apt to be occupied by purists.
Having scoured their canvases clear of what they regard as inessential, they credit themselves with having distilled out the
essence of art.
But this is just their fallacy:
exactly as many artistically relevant predicates stand true of their square monochromes as stand true of any member of the Artworld, and they can
exist
as artworks only insofar as "impure" paintings exist.
Strictly speaking, a black square by Reinhardt is artistically as rich as Titian's
Sacred and Profane Love.
This explains how less is more.
Drucker
says much the same thing. I attempted a rebuttal in that "review" but I suspect I didn't quite have the right juices flowing.
Let me try again, just briefly . . .
If you, the artist, do
desire and intend
to present
less,
and not to present
more,
then of course you may do so in whatever manner is consistent with your vision and with the social norms prevailing in your midst.
Privately
no one is obligated to agree that this is in fact what you have done.
Publicly,
however, ascriptions of desire of intent require robust evidential support in order to be actionable in any way.
Re: the latter point, the fleeting existence, somewhere, of some ever-expanding class of
predicates
is not going to hold up in court. If somehow it does, it certainly
should not.
Danto has said nothing here about
consent.
As far as the
public order
is concerned, an artist ought to consent to any "predicates." I am not saying, this time, that such consent needs to be
explicit!
But "reading" a painting as social action, or eco-semiotically, or against a cherrypicked faux-predecessor, none of these get anywhere near the notion of "consent" that I have in mind. All of this,
in public.
Private matters require little of this abstract stringency. But they had better
stay private!
If not, the rules change.
Yes, this notion of "consent" seems like too great of an entitlement for artists. It does strike me that way when I read it back to myself. But every time I read the preceding passage of Danto's I am forcibly driven back to it. Mainstream aesthetics seems not to have realized just what a truly
terrifying
passage this is.
Fashion,
as it happens,
favors
certain rows
of the style matrix:
museums,
connoisseurs,
and others
are makeweights in the Artworld.
To insist, or seek to, that all artists become representational, perhaps to gain entry into a specially prestigious exhibition, cuts the available style matrix in half:
there are then 2n / 2 ways of satisfying the requirement, and museums then can exhibit all these "approaches" to the topic they have set.
But this is a matter of almost purely sociological interest:
one row in the matrix is as legitimate as another.
I realize he's not aiming for any political argument here, and that not everyone needs to aim as such, not all the time at least . . . . but, good lord. Powerful people
do
insist
on such things all the time; this is as durable a feature of the "artworld" as it is of the rest of the world, and so it necessarily is of wide
interest
The
widest possible
interest, unfortunately.
An artistic breakthrough
consists,
I suppose, in
adding the possibility of a column to the matrix.
Artists then, with greater or less alacrity, occupy the positions thus opened up:
this is a remarkable feature of contemporary art,
and
for those unfamiliar with the matrix, it is hard,
and perhaps impossible,
to recognize certain positions as occupied by artworks.
Nor would these things be artworks without the theories and the histories of the Artworld.
[167]
Brillo boxes enter the artworld with that same tonic incongruity the
commedia dell'arte
characters bring into
Ariadne auf Naxos.
Whatever is
the artistically relevant predicate
in virtue of which they gain their entry, the rest of the Artworld becomes
that much the richer
in
having
the opposite predicate
available and applicable
to its members.
And, to return to the views of Hamlet with which we began this discussion, Brillo boxes may reveal us to ourselves as well as anything might:
as a mirror held up to nature, they might serve to catch the conscience of our kings.
