Danto - The End of Art. a Philosophical Defense

8/8/2019 Danto - The End of Art. a Philosophical Defense

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THE END OF ART: A PHILOSOPHICAL DEFENSE.

ARTHURC. DANTO'

ABSTRACTThisessayconstructs hilosophicalefenses gainst riticismsf mytheory f theendofart.Thesehave o do with hedefinition f art; he concept f artistic uality;he roleofaesthetics;he relationshipetweenphilosophy ndart;howto answer hequestion Butis it art?";he difference etween he end of artand "thedeathof painting"; istoricalimaginationnd he future;he method f using ndiscernibleounterparts,ikeWarhol'sBrillo Box and heBrillocartonstresembles;he logicof imitation-and hedifferencesbetweenHegel'sviewson theendof artandmine.Thesedefenses mplify nd ortify hethesisof the endof artas set forth nmyAfter the End of Art: ContemporaryArt and thePale of History (1997).For the mostpart,historicalnarrativesdo not belong to the eventsthey transcribe,even if their writers n fact were part of them. To be sure,one writesa narrativeonly when somethingis felt to havecome to an end-otherwise one is writingakind of diaryof events,nevercertainof what will belong to the finalnarrative ndwhatwill not. Still, the narrative tself is external o whatit transcribes: therwisea furthernarrativemust be written which includes the writing of the first narra-tive among the events narrated-and this can run to infinity. By contrast,I havethemost vivid sense thatAfter the End of Art belongs to the same historythatitanalyzes, as if it, itself, is that history's end-a perhaps prematureascent tophilosophicalconsciousness of the art movementsthat are its subject. I know,from his great commentator,AlexandreKojeve,2 hatHegel saw himself situatedin the same historyof which he wrote the philosophy,as if the ascent to philo-sophical consciousness in his narrativewas the end of that (of all) history.History,as he saw it, endedin therecognitionthat all were free-and how couldtherebe historyafter that?Thingswould happen,of course,andfreedomhad tobe foughtfor andpreserved.But there would be no furthernarrativeof the sortthe historyof freedomexemplified,but simply a vast postscriptof free individ-ual lives, as when, the warover,those who participatedn it arescattered o pur-sue theirpersonalends. That was, with qualification, he same narrativevisionMarx and Engels proposed-an end of history when class conflicts had been

1. I do not in these endnotescite the papersI discuss,as theyall appear n this issue of Histoty andTheory.

2. AlexandreKojeve, Introduction o theReading of Hegel, transl.James H. Nichols (Ithaca,N. Y.,1980), 34-35.


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128 ARTHURC. DANTOdefinitivelyresolved, leaving the survivors o practicehuntingor fishing or liter-ary criticismas they wished, in a world of fay ce que voudras.But in an immea-surablymore modest but similarway, the claim that art historyis at an end couldhave been the end of arthistory-a declarationof artistic reedom,and hence theimpossibility of any further large narrative.If everyone goes off in differentdirections, here is no longer a directiontowardwhich a narrative an point. It isa wholesale case of living happily ever after.And that,I haveclaimed, is the stateof the art world after the end of art.

I know that without certain transformationsn artistic practice, a philosophysuch as mine would have been unthinkable, o that my philosophy of art historyis necessarily differentfrom what I might have achieved had I written philo-sophically aboutartwhen abstractexpressionismwas at the flood, or cubism orfuturism,or impressionismor neoclassicism. I hold myself fortunateto havelived through he sequence of artisticstyles which culminated n pop artand min-imalism, and to have learnedmore from whatI saw in New Yorkgalleriesin the1960s than I possibly could have learnedfrom studyingaesthetics, based, as thelatter inevitably must be, on earlier artistic styles. And yet I do not feel thatthephilosophy of artI developed both in The Transfiguration f the CommonplaceandAfterthe Endof Artwas only relevant o the artthatoccasionedit. I did not,for example, as if writinga manifesto,declare thatpop art was what the historyof arthadbeen stumblingtoward, ts telos and fulfillment.No: pop art and min-imalism madeplainthe immediatepromiseof a radicalpluralism,of which theyof course could be partif someone cared to pursuethem-but with no greaterright than realism, surrealism,performance, nstallation,cave art, or folk artorwhatever.My aim has been essentialist-to find a definition of arteverywhereand always true.Essentialismand historicismarewidely regardedas antithetical,whereasI see them not only as compatiblebutcoimplicatedwith one another,atleast in the case of art. It is the very fact, I believe, that there is an essence of artthat makesartisticpluralisma possibility.But thatmeans that art'sessence can-not be identified with any of its instances, each of which must embody thatessence, however little they resemble one another.Whatgave essentialisma badname was precisely such an identification,as in the case of Ad ReinhardtorClementGreenberg.Whatmadeessentialism seem impossiblewas the conditionof ultimatepluralism,since worksof art hadoutwardlyso little in common.Mycontributionwas to make plain that only when these extreme differenceswereavailablecould one see the possibilityof a single, universalconcept.

Such were among the extravagant heses I found myself defending at theremarkably ntense discussions which took place in the author'scolloquiumorganizedfor the Zentrumur InterdisciplinareForschung n Bielefeld by Prof.Dr. KarlheinzLUdeking,of the Hochschule der Bildenden Kunstin Nuremberg,and Dr. OliverScholz, of theFrei UniversitdtBerlin.LUidekingnd Scholz madea radicaldeparturerom academicprotocol-a paper,a commentary,a responseto the commentary,and questionsfrom the floor in the remainingfew minutes.Instead, they asked for two fifteen-minutepresentations o begin each section,


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THE END OFART:A PHILOSOPHICALDEFENSE 129leaving two and a half hoursfor the give and take carriedforwardby the moreextended papers printed here. In candor, the first session was so intense that Iwondered what there could be left to say. But in fact the intensity was-well-intensifiedthroughthe remaining sessions, as membersof the wider Bielefeldphilosophicalcommunity oined the discourse. It is as a monument o these mar-velous interchanges hat David Carrier nvited the participants o move the dis-cussion on to a differentplane-and, thankingeveryone involved,I would like,within my powers, to respond to the challenging essays thathave resulted. Thecolloquium was not so muchan honor as an education.

I. THEDEFINITIONOFARTBy essence I mean a realdefinition,of the old-fashionedkind, laying out the nec-essary andsufficientconditions for something to fall undera concept.The maineffort of TheTransfigurationf the Commonplace'was to providea fragmentofa real definition for art.This was in no sense a mere philosophicalexercise. Itwas, rather,a responseto anurgencyin the art world of the mid-1960s. The pre-vailingwisdom regarding he definitionof art, based on a thesis of Wittgenstein,was that there can be no definitionof art,since no single propertyor set of prop-erties was exhibitedby the class of artworks,as can be verified when we try tofind it. But neither is a definitionreally needed-for we all are able to pick theartworksout of a set of objects,leavingthe non-artworks ehind.And clearlywecannot account for our abilityto do this by appealto a definition,since there isand can be none. Whatwe have at best is a family-resemblance lass of things,amongwhich there arepartialbutonly partialresemblances.

In the mid-1960s, however,it was no longerclear that we could pick the art-works out from the non-artworks ll thateasily, since art was being made whichresemblednon-artworks s closely as maybe required.My favoriteexamplewasAndy Warhol'sBrillo Box, which looked sufficientlylike actual Brillo cartonsthat one could not tell, from a photograph,which of them was which nor whichwas art and which was not.4A set of metalsquares,arrayedon the floor,could bea sculptureor a floorcovering.5A performanceby an artistteachingfunk danc-ing to a groupof personsappeared imilarto a dance teacher nstructinga groupin funk dancing.6A 600-pound block of chocolate could be an artworkwhileanother such block would be merely 600 poundsof chocolate.7And so on, allacrossthe face of the art world.Clearly, here were no manifestoverarching im-ilarities in this partialclass of artworks.But equally clearly, neither could wepick out which was the artwork n an indiscerniblepair,and which was not. Butthis was in principleperfectlygeneral:for anynon-artwork, n artwork ould be

3. ArthurC. Danto, The Transfigurationf the Commonplace Cambridge,Mass., 1981).4. ArthurC. Danto, "TheArtWorld," ournalof Philosophy 61 (1964), 571-584.5. This refersto certain worksof Carl Andre.6. The workreferred o is AdrianPiper's video, Funk Lessons.7. This workis Gnaw, by JanineAntoni.


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130 ARTHURC. DANTOimagined which resembled it as closely as might be required.And for any art-work, a non-artworkcould be imagined like it to whatever degree. So whatcouldn't be an artwork, or all one knew?The answer was that one could not tellby looking. You could not after all pick the artworksout like cashews from a potof peanuts.

This was the situationto which the Transfiguration ndeavored o respond.Itbegan by treating artworksas representations,n the sense that they possessedaboutness. Since not all representations re artworks, his did not carry us veryfar, but it at least helped force a distinction between an artworkand its non-artcounterparts, eal or imagined.An artist was affirmingsome thesis by means ofthe block of chocolate, or at least it was appropriate o ask what it was about,whereas it would have been inappropriateo ask what a mere large lump ofchocolatewas about. But one could always, on the hypothesis that one was deal-ing with an artwork, ground an interpretivehypothesis-an ascriptionand ameaning-on certainof its properties,which wouldhaveno particular alience ifthe.objectwere merely an object.An artwork, n this sense, embodiesits mean-ing when it is seen interpretively.Anything, of course, can be seen interpretivelyas long as one supposes it to embody a meaning. Upon discoveringthat it doesnot, the interpretationwithersaway.A flightof birdsgets read as a sign from thegods until one stops believing in the gods, after which a flightof birds is a flightof birds.

Aboutness and embodiment was as far as I got in the Transfiguration f theCommonplace.I had no sense that it was more than a start. In attemptingtodefineknowledgein Theatetus,Socratesgot as far as sayingthatknowledgewastrueopinion-but he was awarethatsomethingmore was required,and though athird condition was added later-knowledge is justified true opinion-everyepistemologistknows that a fourth condition is required,and no one is entirelycertainwhat this would be. Still, my two conditionssolved the problemI set outto solve, andI had a pleasantshock of recognitionwhen, later,I found in Hegel'sfamous statementabout the end of artprecisely the same two conditions citedwhen he attempted o explainartistic udgment:"(i)the contentof art,and(ii) thework of art'smeans of presentation."' arenthetically, think thatHegel believedno such intellectualeffort was requiredwhen art, by its own means alone, wasable to presenteventhehighestrealities in sensuous form.9Partof what he meantby talking of the end of art was that art was no longer capable of this. It hadbecome an object ratherthan a medium throughwhich a higher reality madeitself present.But in any case, it seemed to me that the two componentsof thedefinition were in effect imperatives or the practiceof artcriticism, namely, (i)determinewhatthe content is and(ii) explainhow the content is presented.

8. G. W. F.Hegel, Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectureson Fine Art, transl.T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), 11.9. Ibid., 7.


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THE END OF ART:A PHILOSOPHICALDEFENSE 131II. QUALITY

Kudielka eels, perhapsrightly, hat I have resisted the additionof the concept ofquality as among the "essential actorsof art."When Hegel speaks of content andpresentation,he makes explicit that artistic udgment should address"the appro-priateness or inappropriateness f one to the other." t bears remarking hat thesecond critical imperativedoes not seem to apply to what Hegel calls symbolicart,whose meaninglies outside itself. It stands to its meaning the way a namestands to its bearer,andthough, in naming our children,we seek names thatwillembodythepersonwe hope theywill become, namesand bearersareexternal oone another.Since symbolic art fails the second imperative, his may count as acriticism of symbolic art,which Hegel in any case regardedas primitive.On theotherhand, Hegel appearsnever to have conceived of abstractart. Who did in1828? The critic Thomas Hess wisely observed that "Abstractart has alwaysexisted, but until this century, t never knew it existed."10f, from the perspectiveof abstraction,we think of the pyramid, o use Hegel's paradigmof symbolic art,an interpretation f its meaningas embodied does not seem out of the question.Classical and romanticart, in Hegel's scheme, explicitly embodytheir contents.Kudielkasays, en passant, that classical art was, for Hegel, the highest art-butHegel speaks indifferentlyof "The beautiful days of Greek art, like the goldenage of the laterMiddleAges."'IIClassical statuaryand Gothic rose windows serveas examples of art "in its highest vocation."But so does symbolic art, if we thinkof it as abstract.

The notion of qualityhas recently become, in the American art worldespe-cially, a vexed matter.12It has, for example, seemed to be inconsistentwith themulticulturalismwhich has raised thepossibilityof incommensurability etweenand among the artworksof differentcultures.It may be true thatwe oughtnot tojudge the work of one cultureby the criteria of excellence which belongs toanother.Still, that does not abolish the conceptof quality,since within the workof a given culture,not everything s of the same quality,and there is some senseof how works are to be ranked, nsofar as they differ at all. I am, on the otherhand, unprepared o add qualityas a third condition,for the same reasonthat Iwould be reluctant o place conditions on the concept of content. It has some-times been arguedby American critics that the categoryof art rules out certaincontents-that the gamy photographsof Robert Mapplethorpecannot be artbecauseof theirgaminess.It maybe a criticism of Mapplethorpehathis contentis offensive, but that s a moralrather han an art-critical ssessment.On theotherhand,thereis a differencebetween not embodyingcontent-as in everyinstanceof symbolic art as Hegel understood t-or embodyingit badly.It is an artisticcriticism of a work that it embodies its content poorly. Once content is estab-

10. Thomas Hess, AbstractPainting: Backgroundand the AmericanPhase (New York, 1951), 4.11 Hegel, Aesthetics, 10.12. See Michael Brenson, "IsQuality an Ideawhose Time has Gone?"New YorkTimes (July 22,

1990), section II, 1.


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132 ARTHURC. DANTOwished, whole menu of hypothetical mperativescomes up on the screen, andone discusses how the work might have been better-or might have beenworse-from the perspective of embodiment. Perhaps I made these considera-tions insufficiently explicit, but since quality, on this account, is a modality ofembodiment,I see no groundsfor adding it to my list.

What desperatelyrequires analysis, of course, is the notion of embodiment.The simplest case of embodiment s exemplification, o which Nelson Goodmandrew attention: 3a sample shows what it means because it itself is what it means,the way a swatch of gabardineexemplifies the kind of fabric it is. But thingsquickly get more complex. Christ was God's embodiment-the word madeflesh-and representations f Christendeavorto show how his divine nature smade manifest:by beauty, uminosity,or whatever(his fleshliness is mademan-ifest throughblood and the expressionof pain.) But these quicklybecome con-ventions.What does the fact that a pitcher in a Cubist paintingis embodied innested facets imply? I concede to Kudielka hat I have not developedthese mat-ters at all rigorously.

III.AESTHETICSMartinSeel finds unacceptablewhat he perceives,I believe rightly,as a certain"irritating ias"in my writing againstaesthetic appearance.His arguments that"thecreation of unique appearancesn the world" s the point of all artisticpro-duction. Hence I show a certainErscheinungsvergessen.Even Hegel, afterall,spoke of art in its prime as presenting"the highest realitiesin sensuous form."'And it mustbe conceded thatsomethingmustembodythe content-the way theface embodies feelings-and that it is, as Seel contends, difficultto imagine acompletelydematerializedwork of visual art(though HenryJames comes closein his story "TheMadonnaof the Future"by calling the unrealized paintinga"masterpiece").Of course,this is using "aesthetic"n the way Kantused it in the"Transcendental esthetic" section of the Critiqueof Pure Reason, as havingtodo with the senses as sourcesof knowledge.This is not how the term is custom-arilyused today,where it refers, rather, o appreciative esponsesto beauty-tothe aestheticas contrastedwiththe phenomenalpropertiesof things.I don't thinkthatI have been neglectfulof the materialpresenceof meaningsin art,since somuch of my writing s an effort to showhow meanings are,so to speak,inscribedin the objectswhich presentthem. But I will admittheremay be a problemwithaesthetics understoodas "thesense of beauty," o use Santayana'sexpression.Itis not thatI am indifferentto aesthetic considerationsas a personor even as aphilosopher,nor thatI would denythat a good manyworks aremade specifical-ly to produce aesthetic pleasure in viewers. It is just that I am disinclined toinclude this as a thirdcondition in the definitionof art.

13. Nelson Goodman,Languages of Art (Indianapolis,1976).14. Hegel, Aesthetics, 7.


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THE END OF ART:A PHILOSOPHICALDEFENSE 133In this, I think,I follow MarcelDuchamp, who set out specifically to sunder

aesthetics from art through the Readymades, which he selected in part on thebasis of their dull and uninflected appearances.They were, he hoped, beyondgood and bad taste. No one, he once remarked,even sought to steal the metalgrooming comb which might, with the snow shovel, serve as a paradigmof thisportion of his oeuvre. It may be that in other culturesthese very objects wouldbe anythingbutdull-Francis Naumanonce told me that a woman in Francehadnever seen a snow shovel, and we can imagine cultures in which a groomingcomb would be beyondtheir metallurgicmeans. But in ourculture, heyare com-monplaceand dull. And since they are art, it is difficultto say that Duchampwasinterested n "uniqueappearances."They are unique as art-but not as objects.Such aestheticresponseas theremay be is accordinglynot to the comb or theshovel as such, but to whateverremainsof the artworkwhen one subtracts,as itwere, the sensuous properties.As I see it, Duchampwas endeavoring o excludeaestheticsfrom theconceptof art, and, asI thinkhe was successful in this, I havefollowed his lead.

Indeed,the idea of uniquenessencountersa serious problemwith the kinds ofexamples to which I typically have recourse in these discussions-pairs (ortriplesor whatever)of indiscerniblecounterparts,ike the eight or so indiscrim-inable redsquareswith which the Transfiguration egins.'5They share all sensu-ous properties,which is what makes themsensuouslyindiscernible.But theyareuniqueas works of art,each having, and indeed each embodying, a differentcon-tent. We respondto them as art-but thatis not responding o them as mere redsquares.It is not seeing but interpretive eeing that is at issue, which in effectmeansframing nterpretivehypothesesas to meaning.One may respondto themaestheticallyas well-or one may not.

I hada furtherreasonfor distancingaesthetics fromart.Aesthetics has been afairly marginalphilosophicalsubject, especially in analyticalphilosophy.But Ifelt that art has a philosophicalexcitement to which philosophers,however ana-lytical in bent, should be responsive. I glumly studied aesthetics with IrwinEdmanand,far morephilosophically,with SuzanneK. Langer.But I was neverable to connect what they taughtme with the art that was being made in the1950s-and I could not see why anyone interested n art should have to knowabout aesthetics.It was only when I encounteredWarhol'sBrillo Box that I saw,in a moment of revelation,how one could makephilosophyout of art.But BrilloBox has only the sensuouspropertiespossessed by Brillo boxes, when the latterare conceived of merelyas decoratedcontainers.A lot of Warhol'sworksareaes-theticallyas neutralas the personalityhe endeavored o project.

By way of concession, I think that aestheticianshave had far too restrictedarange of aestheticqualitiesto deal with-the beautifuland theugly andtheplain.And have assigned to taste far too centrala role in the experienceof art.I feelthatexpandingthis rangewill itself be an exciting philosophicalproject.But it

15. TheTransfigurationf the Commonplace,1-3.


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134 ARTHUR C. DANTOfalls outside the range of defining art. Justthinkof how exciting coming into anew piece of knowledge can be-and how irrelevantcognitive excitement is tothe humdrum ask of defining knowledge. Two and a half millennia, and we stillhave not found a fourthcondition!

IV. ARTAND PHILOSOPHYHowever important o the concept of art, neitherquality nor aesthetic considera-tions appearas if they immediatelybear on the end of art as a historical thesis.They do bear on it, however, n virtueof challenging the definitionof art throughphilosophical argument.My thesis was that once art raised the question of whyone of a pairof look-alikes was artandthe othernot, it lackedthe power to riseto an answer.For that,I thought, philosophy was needed. Even were I to grantSeel's view that reference to the sensuouspropertiesof artworks s essential, itwouldbe interesting o ask whether t would be possible to represent he idea ofart's"highest reality"entirelyin sensuous terms. The "highest reality"of artisits own essence, broughtto self-awareness,and this requiresthe sort of philo-sophical argumentation f which Kudielka and Seel are masters. The pyramid,classical sculpture, the rose window give sensuous embodiment to what theEgyptians,the Greeks, and the Christiancommunityof the MiddleAges took tobe thehighestrealities.But there areinternal imitson whatartcanachieve-andphilosophicalself-understandings beyondthose limits. What marks the end ofartis not that art turns into philosophy,but thatfrom this point on, art andphi-losophy go in differentdirections.Artis liberated,on this view, fromthe need tounderstand tself philosophically,and when thatmomenthas been reached,theagendaof modernism-under which artsoughtto achieveits own philosophy-was over. The task of definitionbelonged to philosophy-and art was therebyfreeto pursuewhateverends,andby whatevermeans, seemed important o artistsor theirpatrons.Fromthatpointon therewas no internalhistoricaldirectionforart,and this is preciselywhatthe conditionof pluralismamountsto.

Michael Kelly contends thatturningthe definitionof artover to philosophersamountsto a disenfranchisement f art.I introduced he conceptof a philosoph-ical disenfanchisementof art in an eponymous essay' which arguedthat thecanonicalphilosophiesof artsoughta metaphysicaldemotion of artby assigningit to thedomainof dreamandillusion (as in Plato),orby showingit to be an infe-riorway of doing what philosophyitself does better.My explanationfor thesestrategies,whichweave art nto the structure f the universeas philosophershavevariouslyconceived of it, is that,for complex reasons, philosophershave fearedart(rathern the way in which, fearingfemale sexualpower, society has evolvedways of keepingwomen in their"place").Therehavebeen,of course, non-philo-sophicaldisenfranchisementshroughouthistory-censorship, repression, con-oclasm. I have nothing to say about these here. But is my theory any more

16. ArthurC. Danto,"ThePhilosophicalDisenfranchisement f Art," n The Philosophical Disen.-franchisementof Art (New York, 1986).


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THE END OF ART:A PHILOSOPHICALDEFENSE 135enlightened than the philosophies thatdependedon some form of artisticdisen-franchisement?

Kelly makes centralto his deconstructiona model I have frequentlyemployedfor making vivid the idea of a history which comes to an end when the subjectofthe story attainsself-knowledge-the ideaof a Bildungsroman,which, accordingto JosiahRoyce,17 Hegel's Phenomenologywas said to exemplify. Hegel's hero,Geist, goes throughan ingenious sequence of states, through which he (she?)arrivesat last at an idea of his or her own nature.It is an idea that does not haveto be true, since Geist is revealedas Geisteven (or especially) when it gets thingswrong. Goethe's WilhelmMeister'sApprenticeship s such a novel, as are femi-nist novels, in which the heroine firstunderstandsher differences from males,andthen, througha sequenceof episodes, attainsconsciousness of what it means(hence whatit is) to be a woman. I have certainlypresentedthe history of art asa kind of Bildungsroman n which artstrugglestoward a kind of philosophicalself-understanding.And now, Kelly notes, the task of such understandinghasbeen handed over to philosophy,because it lies beyondthe limits of art to carryit anyfurther.

This is an acute criticism and it is, I think,true. The questionfor me, howev-er, is whetherthis is a philosophicaldisenfranchisement f art.It is certainlynota re-enfranchisement.But the liberationof art from thephilosophicaltask it hasset itself is the liberationof art to pursue ts-or society's-individual ends.Thethesis of "ThePhilosophicalDisenfranchisement f Art"was thatartandphilos-ophywere fromthe beginning oined atthehip-that thegreat metaphysicalsys-tems designed the universe as a kind of prison for art.After the End of Art isintended o separateartfromphilosophicaloppression,and leave the task of find-ing definitionsto a practicedesignedto providethem.Thatis as muchas philos-ophy can do for art-to get it to realize its freedom. Thejoint narrativeof phi-losophy and art is then a Freiheitsroman-the story of freedom gained orregained-as in The Tempest,when Ariel is set free at last.

V. "BUTIS IT ART?"In Hegel's somewhatdisenfranchisinganalysis,underwhich artis a thingof thepast,he says suchthingsas "ithas lost for us genuinetruthandlife,"or "wesub-ject to our intellectual consideration . ." or "Art nvites us to intellectual con-sideration . ."18-and the question s to whomthis "we"refers. It is perhapsnat-ural for philosophers-and who else for the most partreadsHegel? to supposethatit is philosopherswho areaddressed.But in fact "we" could be anyonewhothinkscriticallyaboutart who ponderswhat art is about and how its aboutnessis registered n the matterof art. Hegel is talkingabout art criticismhere,and arthas attaineda sufficientdegreeof self-awarenessthat it is made with art-criticalquestions in mind. Art criticism mediates between art and philosophy, to the

17. Josiah Royce, Lectureson ModernIdealism, ed. JacobLoewenberg Cambridge,Mass., 1920).18. Hegel, Aesthetics, 11.


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136 ARTHURC. DANTOpointwheretoday artistsare their own best critics, explainingwhatthey are afterand why, as if conceding that arthas "beentransferredo our ideas."' This meansthatarthas become an objectfor its practitioners s well as forphilosophers,andthis may somewhat temper Kelly's chargeof disenfranchisement n my part. Itmeans that the practice of art is "two-tiered," o use Brigitte Hilmer's usefulphrase.There is a division of labor, n thatthe analysis, as against the ascriptionof content, is more a philosophical than an art-criticalmatter,as is the analysis,in contrastwith the identification,of modes of presentation.

Penetratedas artisticpractice is today by art-critical onsiderations,especial-ly when works of art do not wear their meaningson their faces, there is not quiteso sharpan interfacebetween art andphilosophyas my argumentshaveperhapsimplied. Hilmer is entirely correctin saying that Hegel, thinking of philosophyas the domain of thoughtand art the domainof sensation, was obliged to thinkthatart had come to anend when it becomes suffusedwith criticalthoughtaboutitself.20The sharpdivision between thoughtand sensation is pure Romanticism.The idea that the work of art can or once did convey its truths mmediatelythrough hesenses, withoutthe mediationof thought,was thinkablewhen artwasmimetic. But it is less and less thattoday,hence less and less capableof beingaddressedby sense alone.When, moreover,artbecomes its own subject,as it evi-dently has undermodernism,then the practiceof arthas gone even further ntothe philosophicaldomain through he various manifestoesin which art is said tobe this andthat:"art"has in its own rightbecome part of art'sown reflectiononitself. It is not necessary,on the other hand,for artists hemselves to have a clearidea of what is meant by art. "The discovery of art as an independenthumanactivity demanding higher intellectual capacity than mere craftsmanship" oquote Hilmer,is alreadyto havediscovereda greatdeal.

I am struck by the expression "mere craftsmanship"n this formulation,andwonderwhether or not it stipulatesa disenfranchisingboundary.However arro-gant philosophy may be, its disenfranchisements rerarelyas vehementas thosewhich arise within artisticdiscourseitself, whereartists andcriticsaredisposedto say of somethingthatit is not art when there is very little other than artthatitcan be. WhenJudy Chicagofirst showedher DinnerPartyin New York,"Butisit art?"was the question of the day. Such controversieshave unquestionablyextended and deepened the concept of art, and except with reference to suchwork as Chicago's,it is difficultto imaginehow thevaguely graspedconceptcanhave been made more explicit. We can even ask whetherthere was, in HansBelting's phrase,"artbefore the era of art,"2'o that we can identifycave paint-ings and altarpieces as arteven if those who made them hadno conceptof arttospeakof. Hilmerasks, from a feministperspective,Why not "beautifulworksofknittingor weaving or patchwork?" f "art"and "merecraftsmanship" xclude

19. Ibid.20. But Hegel also says "The artist himself is infected by the loud voice of reflection all around

him and by the opinions andjudgementson art that have become customaryeverywhere,so that he ismisled [my emphasis] into introducingmore thoughts nto his work." bid., 11.

21. Hans Belting, Likenessand Presence: The Image beforethe Era of Art (Chicago, 1994).


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THEEND OF ART:A PHILOSOPHICALDEFENSE 137one another, hen there s no hopeforcraft to become artunless ... And it is herethatthephilosophy of arthas a task.

I do not think thatadding beauty to craftsmanships the formula for transfig-uringit into art.That is like, to borrowa thoughtfrom RobertVenturi,2decorat-ing a shed to turn t into architecture.But it is a problemfor craftspersons odayto get for their productions he kind of respectthey suppose recognizingthem asart creates an impossibilityif craft automaticallyexcludes what they do fromthe domain to whichthey aspire.At the same time, in America at least, works ofcraft really are beginning to be recognized as art-the glasswork of DaleChihuly,the ceramicsof Betty Woodman,23he fiber art of Ann Hamilton,24hefurnitureof JohnCederquist.25 he "discourse"has a "He said-she said" form,when it alreadyseems to me that however impoverishedmy definition,it canhelp. Craftwork s artwhen it is about what it embodies. Woodman'svases areabout the vase, even though they also exemplify the vase to the point where herworkcan be filled with flowers,as theyare at the admissionsdesk of theMuseumof ModernArt in New Yorkwhere they arebrilliantlypresent.Retrospectively,The Dinner Partyis aboutsisterhood,presented n terms of the ritualof a spiri-tualcommunity,namely,sittingdownto a meal together. t is possible to criticizeit even so butone is alreadytreating t as art when one does so.

VI. THE "DEATHOF PAINTING"Noel Carrollasks whether the end of art historyhas not been confused by mewith the end of painting. Since my theorywas firstpublished n 1984, at a timewhen the so-called "deathof painting"was widely canvassedby artworldtheo-reticians,it was perhapsunavoidable hat the two kinds of theoriesshouldhavebeen confused. This is a good place to considerthemtogether, n orderespecial-ly to makeplain how different n fact they are from one another.The "deathofpainting,"describedhere perfectly by David Carrier, s a theoryof exhaustion.The "end of art" nsteadis a theoryof consciousness of how a developmentalsequenceof events terminates n the consciousnessof thatsequenceas a whole.It is for thatreasonthatit is not implausiblethatthe historyof art has somethinglike the form of a Bildungsroman,despite the difficulties which Michael Kellyhas shownwith that model.The "deathof painting" heoryfits anentirelydiffer-ent kind of model. It fits, indeed, a model which hauntednineteenth-centurythought n a numberof domains.

Accordingto John Keats'biographer, he poet felt at a certainmoment that"therewas now nothing originalto be writtenin poetry;thatall its riches were

22. Robert Venturi, Learningfrosi Las Vegas: The ForgottenSymbols of ArchitecturalForm(Cambridge,Mass., 1976).

23. See my text, Betty WoodmanAmsterdam,1996).24. Ann Hamilton has just been selected to represent he United States at the Venice Biennale,

1999.25. See my text, "Illusion and Comedy: The Art of John Cederquist" in The Art of John Cedertquist:

Reality of Illusion(Oakland,Calif., 1997).


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138 ARTHURC. DANTOalreadyexhausted,& all its beauties forestalled."26 comparableview regardingmusic was advancedby John StuartMill: he deducedthat all possible combina-tions of sounds would sooner ratherthan later have been made, and with thatthought the possibilities of indefinite musical creativity were closed.27Nietzsche's notorious theory of EternalRecurrencewas based upon the similarnotion that sooner or later all possible combinationsof states of affairswould beexhausted, and with this there was no choice other thanto begin all over again,with nothing to look forward to save an eternal repetition of the same. UnlikeMill and Keats,Nietzsche foundin this thoughta form of courage:we must livein the knowledgethat whateverwe do, it will be done over and over for all eter-nity. But he also felt his theory was fatal to any possibility of an enduringprogress, and thatwe must learn to live within the limits of our condition.

Now it would have come as a surprise o the paintersof the Renaissancethatpaintingwould sooner or later run out of possibilities, simplybecause the possi-ble subjects of paintingwere to begin with restricted to biblical and classicalmotifs. The demand was for annunciations,adorations,crucifixions, images ofthe saints,as well as portraitsof notablepersonages.An artistwho triedfor nov-elty in motifwould have been eccentric. Of course, patronsmayhave wantednotonly a Madonnaand Child, but a Botticelli Madonna and Child. Was there aclosed number of ways of presentingthat motif? Probably but the closurewould not have been interesting.It would be like worrying hathumancharacteris finite, that all thecharactersand personalstyles wouldall be used up. Since notwo individualshave the same character,his is a needless fear.

I knew a Chinese artist, Chiang Yee, who was proudto have opened up thecanon of Chinesepaintingby adding picturesof pandas to the bamboo,the iris,the chrysanthemum,he plum blossom, and the like. This achievementis evi-dence that he had internalizeda western idea of novelty as the concomitantoforiginality for the traditionalChinese artisthad no interest n originalityat all.The ambitionwas rather o appropriate he paradigmsof the masters.It was partof the structureof Chinese art that the same motifs could be paintedandrepaint-ed foreverwithoutthe motifsbeing addedto. In the 1980s, however,andperhapsin consequenceof the fact that artundermodernismhad come increasinglyto beabout itself, painting began to show limitations. Artists were expected to findsome unoccupiedniche in therangeof possibilitiesin orderto demonstrateorig-inality.But theseniches were getting harder o findin the 1980s, and less and lessrewarding o occupy.

But whatever the internal limitations of painting if there are any it waspaintingas a whole which was held to be deadin the 1980s (despitethe wave ofneo-expressionist igural paintings that began to be shown in the galleries); thiswas basedmainlyon certainpoliticalconclusions radicalcritics of "latecapital-ism"had reached:painting was finished because the social and economic struc-

26. AndrewMotion, Keats(New York,1998).27. John StuartMill, Autobiography, n Autobiogtraphynd Litetway, ssays, ed. J. Robsonand J.

Stillman(Toronto,1981), 148.


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THEEND OF ART:A PHILOSOPHICALDEFENSE 139tures which supported t were held no longer to be viable. As Carrierobserves,this did not mean to the death-of-painting heoriststhat art, as such, hadcome toan end. Douglas Crimp,28or example, thoughtthat painting had now given wayto photography an example of the work of artin the age of mechanicalrepro-duction, raising questionson the futureof museums, collections, and the like.

One limitation on Crimp'sidea thatphotographywas to be the central artform of the coming age is that photographywas but one disjunct n a vast dis-junctionof expressivepossibilities into which art-makingexploded,with paint-ing as anothersuch disjunct.This I have referred o as "artafter the end of art."It was no partof my thesis that the history of painting stopped deadin its tracksafterthe ascent to consciousness took place in the 1960s. It is on the other handtrue that painting after the end of arthad stopped being the mediumof art-his-toricaldevelopment hat t had been before.There was in consequence a break nhistory,and the adventof a new period of art the one in which we findand shallfind ourselves. Painting was the medium of development in traditionalartbecause there could be progress in the pictorial representationof the world,throughperspective,chiaroscuro, oreshortening,and the like. It was the medi-um of progressunder modernismbecause its task was to determinethe essenceof painting,if Greenberg s right. There is an importanthistoricalquestion ofwhy traditional rtgave way to modernism,but I do not know its answer.Perhapsthe challengecame fromphotography nd moving pictures.Perhaps t came froma complex loss of culturalfaith in Westernvalues, as we find it in the views ofthe Orientheld by GauguinandVan Gogh.In my view, however, heend of mod-ernism was the end of art n the sense thatfrom within art'shistorythereemergedat last the clearest statementof the philosophicalnatureof art. Like abstractart,as Hess recognized,the problemhad always been there,but nobodycould haveknownof its existence. Philosophical magination s limited. What would it havemeant in the eighteenth century to speak of two things, one of which wasGainsborough'sSaint James Mall and the othersomethingthatlookedjust like itbut was not a workof art at all? Not until art reacheda stage where it could putthe question by exhibitingit did the properphilosophicalproblemof art becomevisible. Afterdeliveringover this immensegift to thephilosophyof art,artcouldgo no further.But once it had done this, thepost-historicalartworldbecame rad-ically open and no longer subjectto the kind of narrative he historyof art haduntil then showed.

We live at a moment when it is clear thatartcan be made of anything,andwhere there is no markthroughwhich works of art can be perceptuallydifferentfrom the most ordinaryof objects. This is what the example of Brillo Box ismeant to show. The class of artworksis simply unlimited, as media can beadjoinedto media, andart unconstrainedby anythingsave the laws of nature none direction,and moral laws on the other.WhenI say thatthis condition is theend of art,I meanessentiallythatit is the end of the possibilityof anyparticularinternaldirection for art to take. It is the end of the possibility of progressive

28. Douglas Crimp, On theMuseum'sRuins (Cambridge,Mass., 1993).


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140 ARTHURC. DANTOdevelopment.That muchthe theory has in commonwith the end-states earedbyKeats and by Mill. In my case, however, it means the end of the tyrannyof his-tory thatin orderto achievesuccess as an artistone must drive art history or-wvard,olonizing the futurenovelty by novelty.How can I know this, Carrollasks. How can I know that there will not, out ofthe whole rangeof artisticchoices, be one performance, ay which gives riseto an entirelynew arthistory?The answeris thatI cannotknow this. Nor can Iimagine this, any morethan a medieval artistcould have imagined the spectacu-lar illusions the history of painting was to provide. One has, of course, to beopen the end of arttheory means to be an empiricaltheory.But the futureiswhat we cannotimagineuntil it is present.

VII. POSTHISTORYAND THE LIMITS OF IMAGINATIONCarrierbrings forwardthe concept of the narrative entence, which I firstpre-sentedin the pages of thisjournal nearly forty years ago.29He wonders whetherthe use of such sentencesis compatiblewith the end of arthavingbeen reached.For narrative entences make an appealto the future, f only to the future of theevents we describe, if not our own future.When the Museum of ModernArtmounteda retrospectiveexhibitionin 1950 of the paintings of Chaim Soutine(who died in 1943), Monroe Wheeler asked if Soutine was an abstractexpres-sionist?30f we say he was, then it is certainlynot something Soutinecould havesaid, since theconceptof abstract xpressionismwas not to become currentuntilafterhis death.And this is generallythe case with narrative entences.Theyreferto two time-separatedevents, describingthe earlier with reference to the later,which we can do withoutcognitive dissonance,thoughthose who were contem-porarywith the earliestof the two events cannothave done. Soutine could nothave said that he was or was not an abstractexpressionist, the idea not beingwithinhis temporalrange.

It is no partof my claim that therewill be no storiesto tell afterthe end of art,only that there will not be a single metanarrativeor the futurehistory of art.There will not in partbecause the previousmetanarratives xcluded so much inorder o get themselves told.As Carrier bserves,Greenberg xcluded surrealismfrom modernismsince he could not defendhis versionof modernism f he admit-ted it. But and this returnsme to the discussion with Noel Carroll we canexcludenothing today.This makes narrationmpossible.Within artisticpractice,artistswill influence artiststhey never heardof, since unborn.Art historianswillalways have stories to tell.

The epistemologicaldimension of narrative entences is, as noted, that theycan be knownby historiansof events but not, generally,by those contemporarywith the events. They cannot because the concepts requiredto know them are

29. Arthur C. Danto, "NarrativeSentences,"in Historn and Theory2 (1962), 146-179. Sub-stantiallyreprintedn my Analytical Philosophy of Histoty (Cambridge,Eng., 1965).

30. Monroe Wheeler, Soutine (New York, 1950), 50.


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THE END OF ART:A PHILOSOPHICALDEFENSE 141often not available. Soutine could not have understood he question whether hewas an abstract xpressionist.We understand t enoughto be able to give a qual-ified answer.This is the kind of thing I had in mind in saying that the future is(often) "unimaginable."Quite possibly, there was in Soutine's artistic environ-ment enough material to teach him the meaning of abstractexpressionism-ifonly there could have been, like Dickens's Ghost of ChristmasFuture,a visitorfrom our present to his to explain the meaning. JakobSteinbrennerhas reserva-tions about the limits of historical magination, hinkingthat we can account foreverythingalong those lines by appealingto the concept of the genius, as in thephilosophy of Kant. One cannot anticipatewhat the genius will do next. But inmy view it would be extremely awkward to suppose that everything we areunable to imaginefrom a certainlocation in historywill be somehow the prod-uct of genius. Maybe the abstractexpressionistswere geniuses, maybe not. Buttherewas a lot Soutinecould not have imagined, dying as he did in 1943, onlyincluding the art of the future.Could he have imaginedbubble-wrap?Modems?Cloning?

In truth,I would like to be able to take advantageof Hilmer's idea of re-intro-ducing the concept of Spirit,as used by Hegel but ratheroutlawedby analyticalphilosophy.3'I think perhaps Spirit might possess some of the attributesKantrestrictsto the genius, which would accountfor the constantgenerationof nov-elty. WhatSpiritwould be unable to do is to predictits own futureproduction.But I am loath, approaching he end of my responses,to embarkon the projectof analyticalrehabilitation he concept of Spirit requiresif we are to enjoy itsphilosophical benefits.

VIII. INDISCERNIBLESI need hardly emphasizethe impacton my philosophyof art of Andy Warhol's1964 Brillo Box, which for all relevantpurposes was indiscerniblefrom theBrillo boxes of warehousesand storerooms.It encouragesme to thinkthat if Icould show in whatway the two were distinct,I would have foundwhat seemedto me central to my philosophical undertaking to distinguish artworksfromwhatI called "merereal things."It has latterlybecome clear to me that theordi-nary Brillo cartonis a poor example of the lattercategory, largely because itexemplifies the same philosophical structures hat Brillo Box itself does. It isaboutsomething-Brillo, namely and it embodiesits meaning.The differenceis only thatit is commercialart,whereasBrillo Box is fine art. And at the leastthat reveals what must have been a prejudiceof mine when I began using theexample I was unwillingto considercommercial art as art.This is a prejudicewhich has a distantancestry n the animusof Socratesagainstthe Sophists,whocould make the better ook the worse, or vice versa if they werepaida fee.

31. But see "The Realmof Spirit," n my Connectionsto the World Berkeley,1997), section 40.


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142 ARTHURC. DANTOIn fact, the design of the Brillo cartonsis exceedingly ingenious, as I have

explainedelsewhere.32t celebrates heproduct t containsthrougha certainvisu-al rhetoric, enlisting color, shape, and lettering. (It may even make the worsesoap-pads ook better than their competitors!)Warhol'sBrillo Box does not cel-ebrateBrillo. It celebrates a fragmentof daily life in the AmericanLebenswelt,definedby whatWarholcalls "all thegreatmodemthings,"33 hich would doubt-less include the Brillo cartons and their contents. It might even say somethingaboutart,which is excluded from thatreality, thoughit looks just like it. Or,ifwe may credit Warhol with a grasp of the history of aesthetics, it could haveshown thatfree and dependentart,to use Kant'sdistinction,cannotbe told apart,havingin principle all the same phenomenalproperties.34

It is, however,as free artthat art shares a metaphysicalspacewithphilosophy:the questionsWarholraises arephilosophical questions,whereas the Brillo boxas a piece of commercial artmerely strivesby rhetoricalmeans to make Brillopreferable o other soap pads. Different as the indiscerniblesmay be phenome-nally, they have differentmeanings which they embody correspondingly, nd theplain cardboard ox qualifiesas art njust the way Brillo Box does. One may takethis as a challengeto pressfor the thirdconditionin the definition.Or one mightseek a bettercandidateas anexampleof reality,and thengo on to imaginea workof art ndiscernible rom it. This, however, s less easy than t may seem. Forany-thing I choose to exemplify reality will differ from reality through having theproperty of exemplification it becomes a minimally representationalobject.Bishop Berkeley argued that the hypothesis that there are mind-independentthings is incoherent,because the moment one tries to presentan example, it isipso factoin the mind and notoutsideit.35And something ike thisargumentmusthave served as a fulcrum or Hegel to lift matter nto the realm of spirit, since wecannot thinkawaythe way we thinkabout it. (Q.E.D.)Valuableas the exercise has been, my example failed to articulate he differ-ence between art and reality,since both the objects, howeverindiscernible,areworks of artalready granted hattheydifferin ways other thanthose in whichcommercialshippingcartonsdiffer from one another(or Warhol'sdiffers fromthe various other boxes artists were using at the time for [free] artisticpurpos-es DonaldJudd,RichardArtschwager,Eva Hesse, andmany others).

IX. IMITATIONFrankAnkersmithas discovered anothervexation for the example. He offers aninterpretation f Brillo Box that makes it a "material llustration"of the theorythat art is imitation. "The fun would be,"Ankersmitwrites, "thatwith the Brillo

32. See my "ArtandMeaning,"n Modern Theoriesof Art, ed. Noel Carroll, orthcoming rom theUniversityof Wisconsin Press.

33. G. R. Swenson. "What s Pop Art?:Answers from 8 Painters,PartI, ArtNews 64 (November,1963), 26.

34. See ImmanuelKant, Critiqueof Judgment,?16; andHegel, Aesthetics, 11.35. GeorgeBerkeley,Principles of HumanKnowledge, ?23.


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THEEND OF ART:A PHILOSOPHICALDEFENSE 143box the historyof artparadoxicallycomes to an end precisely where it beganthreethousandyears ago." So much,if Ankersmit s right, for the theory that thehistory of art is progressiveanddevelopmental!The only philosophy of historyto which I would be entitled is that of a Vichian corso e ricorso-a 3000-yearcycle come full circle in 1964!

Ankersmit s correct n saying thatsince we cannot know what Warholhad inmind, we cannot rule out this interpretation,which plainly fits the facts: BrilloBox reallyis an imitationof the Brillo boxes. It would need to have been an imi-tationif Warhol'sulteriorpurpose had been to achieve "aplayful parodyof theImitationtheory." t would be a self-conscious exemplar of an imitation in theservice of philosophical parody.But it then has a kind of meaning imitations ntheirown right lack it would be about a theoryof its relationship o a thing,ratherabout the thing it imitates. So it would not be merely, or entirely, an imi-tation.It would exemplify partof its meaning thathere is an exampleof animi-tation without imitating that part of its meaning. So Ankersmit's marvelouscounterexample akes its place as amongthe foundationson which the philoso-phy of artrests.Imitationdoes not explainwhy Brillo Box is art. It only explainsthe kind of art Brillo Box is, in which imitation s a means.

X. CONCLUSIONThe papers I have respondedto here are wonderfully rich, each packed withinteresting deas I would love to havegone into further,which, though they bearon the ostensible topic of the colloquium, namely the philosophy of ArthurDanto,do not especially bear on whateveryonewas anxious to talk about thephilosophy of art history andtheend of art.I am certainthatmy resourcefulcrit-ics will findways of responding o theresponses.If so, thatwould mean that thissymposiumin Historyand Theoryprotracts he spiritof the Bielefeld colloqui-um by continuingrather hanclosing off discussion!

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