9 Works of Art and Mere Real Things

Arthur C. Danto

Excerpted from The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art by Arthur C. Danto, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 1981 by Arthur C. Danto. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Let us consider a painting once described by the Danish wit, Sören Kierkegaard. It was a painting of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. Looking at it, one would have seen something very different from what a painting with that subject would have led one to expect, were one to imagine, for example, what an artist like Poussin or Altdoerfer would have painted: troops of people, in various postures of panic, bearing the burdens of their dislocated lives, and in the distance the horsed might of the Egyptian forces bearing down. Here, instead, was a square of red paint, the artist explaining that “The Israelites had already crossed over, and the Egyptians were drowned.” Kierkegaard comments that the result of his life is like that painting. All the spiritual turmoil, the father cursing God on the heath, the rupture with Regina Olsen, the inner search for Christian meaning, the sustained polemics of an agonized soul, meld in the end, as in the echoes of the Marabar Caves, into “a mood, a single color.”

So next to Kierkegaard’s described painting let us place another, exactly like it, this one, let us suppose, by a Danish portraitist who, with immense psychological penetration, has produced a work called Kierkegaard’s Mood. And let us, in this vein, imagine a whole set of red rectangles, one next to the other. Beside these two, and resembling each as much as they resemble one another (exactly), we shall place Red Square, a clever bit of Moscow landscape. Our next work is a minimalist exemplar of geometrical art which, as it happens, has the same title, Red Square. Now comes Nirvana. It is a metaphysical painting based on the artist’s knowledge that the Nirvanic and Samsara orders are identical, and that the Samsara world is fondly called the Red Dust by its deprecators. Now we must have a still-life executed by an embittered disciple of Matisse, called Red Table Cloth; we may allow the paint to be somewhat more thinly applied in this case. Our next object is not really an artwork, merely a canvas grounded in red lead, upon which, had he lived to execute it, Giorgione would have painted his unrealized masterwork Conversazione Sacra. It is a red surface which, though hardly an artwork, is not without art-historical interest, since Giorgione himself laid the ground on it. Finally, I shall place a surface painted, though not grounded, in red lead: a mere artifact I exhibit as something whose philosophical interest consists solely in the fact that it is not a work of art, and that its only art-historical interest is the fact that we are considering it at all: It is just a thing, with paint upon it.

This completes my exhibition. The catalogue for it, which is in full color, would be monotonous, since everything illustrated looks the same as everything else, even though the reproductions are of paintings that belong to such diverse genres as historical painting, psychological portraiture, landscape, geometrical abstraction, religious art, and still-life. It also contains pictures of something from the workshop of Giorgione, as well as of something that is a mere thing, with no pretense whatsoever to the exalted status of art.

It is what he terms the “rank injustice” in according the classy term work of art to most of the displayed items in my exhibit, while withholding it from an object that resembles them in every visible particular, which outrages a visitor, a sullen young artist with egalitarian attitudes, whom I shall call J. Seething with a kind of political rage, J paints up a work that resembles my mere rectangle of red paint and, insisting that his is a work of art, demands that I include it in my show, which I am happy enough to do. It is not one of J’s major efforts, but I hang it nevertheless. It is, I tell him, rather empty, as indeed it is, compared with the narrative richness of The Israelites Crossing the Red Sea or the impressive depth of Nirvana, not to mention The Legend of the True Cross by Piero della Francesca or Giorgione’s La Tempesta. Much the same epithet would characterize another of J’s works, what he regards as a piece of sculpture and which consists, as I recall it, in a box of undistinguished carpentry, coated with beige latex paint applied casually with a roller. Yet the painting is not empty in anything like the way that mere expanse of red-painted canvas is, which is not even empty as a blank page might be, for it is not plain that it awaits an inscription, any more than a wall of mine might were I to paint it red. Nor is his sculpture empty in the way a crate would be, after its cargo is taken out or unloaded. For “empty” as applied to his works represents an aesthetic judgment and a critical appraisal, and presupposes that what it applies to is an artwork already, however inscrutable may be the differences between it and mere objects that are logically unsusceptible to such predications as a class. His works are literally empty, as are the works in the rest of my show: But literalness is not what I have in mind in saying, in effect, that J’s achievements lack richness.

I ask J what is the title of his new work, and predictably he tells me that Untitled will serve as well as anything. This is a title of sorts rather than a mere statement of fact, as it sometimes is when an artist neglects to give his work a title or if we happen not to know what title he gave it or would have given it. I may observe that the mere thing in whose political cause J created his work also lacks a title, but this is by dint of an ontological classification: Mere things are unentitled to titles. A title is more than a name; frequently it is a direction for interpretation or reading, which may not always be helpful, as when someone perversely gives the title The Annunciation to a painting of some apples. J is somewhat less fantastic than this: His title is directive in at least the sense that the thing to which it is given is meant not to be interpreted. So predictably too, when I ask J what his work is about, I am told that it is about nothing. I am certain this is not a description of its content (chapter two of Being and Nothingness is about nothing, about absence). For that matter, Nirvana may be said to be about nothing in the sense that nothing is what it is about, a picture of the void. His work, J points out, is void of picture, less a case of the mimesis of vacuity than the vacuity of mimesis: So he repeats, about nothing. But neither, I point out, is that red expanse in defense of which he painted Untitled about anything, but that is because it is a thing, and things, as a class, lack aboutness just because they are things. Untitled, by contrast, is an artwork, and artworks are, as the description of my exhibition shows, typically about something. So the absence of content appears to be something rather willed in J’s instance.

Meanwhile, I can only observe that though he has produced a (pretty minimal) artwork, not to be told by naked inspection from a bare red expanse of paint, he has not yet made an artwork out of that bare red expanse. It remains what it always was, a stranger to the community of artworks, even though that community contains so many members indiscernible from it. So it was a nice but pointless gesture on J’s part: He has augmented my little collection of artworks while leaving unbreached the boundaries between them and the world of just things. This puzzles J as it puzzles me. It cannot be simply because J is an artist, for not everything touched by an artist turns to art. Witness Giorgione’s primed canvas, supposing the paint to have been laid on by him: A fence painted by J is only a painted fence. This leaves then only the option, now realized by J, of declaring that contested red expanse a work of art. Why not? Duchamp declared a snowshovel to be one, and it was one; a bottlerack to be one, and it was one. I allow that J has much the same right, whereupon he declares the red expanse a work of art, carrying it triumphantly across the boundary as if he had rescued something rare. Now everything in my collection is a work of art, but nothing has been clarified as to what has been achieved. The nature of the boundary is philosophically dark, despite the success of J’s raid. …

There are doubtless works of art, even great works of art, which have material counterparts that are beautiful, and they are beautiful in ways in which certain natural objects would be counted as beautiful—gemstones, birds, sunsets—things to which persons of any degree of aesthetic sensitivity might spontaneously respond. Perhaps this is dangerous to suppose: Sailors might respond to sunsets only in terms of what they foretell of coming weather; farmers might be indifferent to the flowers they tramp on; there may be no objects to which everyone must respond that can be offered as paradigm cases. Nevertheless, let us suppose a group of people who do in fact respond to just the things we would in fact offer as paradigms: to fields of daffodils, to minerals, to peacocks, to glowing iridescent things that appear to house their own light and elicit from these people, as they might from us, the almost involuntary expression “How beautiful!” They would partition off beautiful things just as we would. Except these people happen to be “barbarians,” lacking a concept of art. Now we may suppose these barbarians would respond to certain works of art as well as to natural objects just as we would—but they would do so only to those works of art whose material counterparts are beautiful, simply because they see works of art as we would see those material counterparts, as beautiful things: such as the rose-windows of Chartres, or thirteenth-century stained glass generally; certain works in enamel; confections wrought by grecian goldsmiths; the saltcellar of Cellini; the sorts of things collected by the Medici and the later Habsburgs—cameos, ornaments, precious and semiprecious stones, things in lace and filagree; things luminous and airy, possession of which would be like possessing a piece of the moon when that was thought to be a pure radiance rather than a ranch of rocks. There is some deep reason, I am certain, why these things attract, but I shall forgo any Jungian rhapsodizing. …

Imagine now our sensitive barbarians sweeping across the civilized world, conquering and destroying like Huns. As barbarians reserve the fairest maidens for their violent beds, we may imagine these sparing for their curious delectation just those works of art which happen to have beautiful material counterparts. Some paintings, certainly, will survive. Those with lots of goldleaf will certainly do so, and certain icons with highly ornamented frames. Or paintings where the colors have a kind of hard mineral brilliance, as in Crivelli or perhaps Mantegna. But how many Rembrandts would make it through under this criterion, how many Watteaus or Chardins or Picassos? Appreciation of these require them to be perceived first as artworks, and hence presupposes availability of the concept we are disallowing the subjects of this Gedankenexperiment. It is not that aesthetics is irrelevant to art, but that the relationship between the artwork and its material counterpart must be gotten right for aesthetics to have any bearing, and though there may be an innate aesthetic sense, the cognitive apparatus required for it to come into play cannot itself be considered innate. …

There was a certain sense of unfairness felt at the time when [Andy] Warhol piled the Stable Gallery full of his Brillo boxes; for the commonplace Brillo container was actually designed by an artist, an Abstract Expressionist driven by need into commercial art; and the question was why Warhol’s boxes should have been worth $200 when that man’s products were not worth a dime. Whatever explains this explains, as well, why the primed canvas of Giorgione, in our first example, fails to be an artwork though resembling in every respect the red expanses which are such.

In part, the answer to the question has to be historical. Not everything is possible at every time, as Heinrich Wölflin has written, meaning that certain artworks simply could not be inserted as artworks into certain periods of art history, though it is possible that objects identical to artworks could have been made at that period. …

Duchamp’s snowshovel was pretty banal in the early twentieth century, simply because chosen from the set of indiscernible industrial products from a shovel factory, with its peers to be found in garages throughout the bourgeois world. But the identical object—a curved sheet of metal attached to a wooden stick at the other terminus of which was a shape like today’s snowshovel handle—would have been, I should think, a deeply mysterious object in the thirteenth century; but it is doubtful that it could have been absorbed into the artworld of that period and place. And it is not difficult to conceive of objects which, though they would not have been works of art at the time they were made, can have in a later period objects precisely like them which are works of art. …

To see something as art at all demands nothing less than this, an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art. Art is the kind of thing that depends for its existence upon theories; without theories of art, black paint is just black paint and nothing more. Perhaps one can speak of what the world is like independently of any theories we may have regarding the world, though I am not sure that it is even meaningful to raise such a question, since our divisions and articulations of things into orbits and constellations presupposes a theory of some sort. But it is plain that there could not be an artworld without theory, for the artworld is logically dependent upon theory. So it is essential to our study that we understand the nature of an art theory, which is so powerful a thing as to detach objects from the real world and make them part of a different world, an art world, a world of interpreted things. What these considerations show is that there is an internal connection between the status of an artwork and the language with which artworks are identified as such, inasmuch as nothing is an artwork without an interpretation that constitutes it as such.