Since October 24, 1984, I have served as art critic of The Nation, where my practice has been to write critical essays, rather than reviews of some of the main exhibitions to come along, and to harvest these every four or five years as collections. Unnatural Wonders is the fifth of these books, and, typical of their format, the essays are buttressed front and back with philosophical essays, which reflect on the conceptual changes that have emerged in the period covered by the critical pieces. So the books move on two planes: the plane of direct critical engagement with bodies of art and the plane of conceptual analysis that traces a kind of philosophical map of how art has evolved. Taken together, the collections represent a fairly vast change, one in which, only for example, aesthetic considerations have come to play a decreasing importance in how art is experienced and how it is judged. To the degree that art expresses the internal evolution of contemporary culture, someone who has followed these writings from their beginning will have a sense of how our world has changed from within, based on what we have come to expect from artists. My own view is that the period of art history to which this work belongs began sometime in the early 1960s and has been marked by the way in which the definition of art with which it began has been systematically disassembled to the point that what we might call the discourse of art has changed almost beyond recognition.
These collections are concrete corollaries to a philosophy of art that I have been developing almost from the time I became an art critic. That philosophy, as it has evolved thus far, is mainly set forth in three books,
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981),
After the End of Art (1997), and
The Abuse of Beauty (2004). Taken together, they are responses to the developments partially surveyed in the art critical essays. It is thus a history that I was privileged to live through and react to both as a philosopher and an art critic, feeling that the period of modernism was over and that a new and revolutionary period had opened up in the way in which art was being made and experienced, particularly in New York City but fanning out to other centers in England, Germany, Italy, and Japan, which ultimately transformed the traditions and institutions of art making everywhere on the globe. Certain countries, like Russia and China, were, for political reasons, unable at first to enter the global art system and so did not experience the earlier phases of this history. I’ll describe each of the three philosophy books, which may then serve as background to the five volumes of my critical corpus thus far, including, of course, the present volume,
Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life, which was published in 2005 (and a finalist in the category of criticism for the National Book Critics Circle Prize of that year).
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace was an attempt to frame a definition of art that was made urgent, I believed, by the effort, on the part of avant-garde artists in the early sixties, to overcome two boundaries—the boundary between high art and popular art, on the one hand; and the boundary between objects that were works of art and ordinary objects that were parts of daily culture but had not, until then, ordinarily been thought of in terms of art. Both these revolutions, the roots of which go back to the Dada movement at the time of and in response to World War I, were efforts, undertaken—initially for political reasons—to diminish the aura of high art and to attack as myth the idea of the Great Artist.
The artist Andy Warhol contributed to both these revolutions, though I don’t think Warhol, though a Democrat, was himself driven by political ideology. In 1961 he displayed, in the windows of a fashionable New York clothing store for women, several paintings that were enlargements of two kinds of vernacular images—panels from widely familiar comic strips, like Popeye and Superman; and crude black and white advertisements of the kind that appear in the back pages of cheap magazines and tabloid newspapers. The advertisements typically promoted products that promised help in achieving clear complexions, in combating baldness, and in developing the kind of muscular physique deemed attractive to women. In 1961 no one would have seriously considered either the comic strip images or the pictures used in the advertisements as art, but the Pop movement assigned artistic value to the images of everyday life. In 1964, this time in an important art gallery, Warhol exhibited stacks of boxes that resembled industrial cartons used for shipping consumer goods—canned food, like tomato soup; cereal, like Kellogg’s Corn Flakes; and cleaning supplies, like Brillo Pads—from factories to warehouses to supermarkets. The gallery looked like the stock room of a supermarket.
The deep philosophical question raised by these cartons was how they could be works of art while outwardly indistinguishable from the utilitarian cartons that were not works of art at all. Warhol’s boxes sold for several hundred dollars in 1964 and may sell at auction for over a hundred thousand dollars today. But the commercial cartons they resembled were of no value whatever, once they were emptied of the goods they protected. It is true that Warhol’s boxes were made of plywood, stenciled by hand by Warhol and his assistants, and the commercial cartons were made of printed cardboard on huge industrial presses. But that, surely, could not explain the difference between art and reality. I saw that exhibition in 1964, and it made an immense impact on me. I felt that Warhol had raised the problem of the nature of art in a new way, since the differences between the boxes that were art and the boxes that were not was not something that could meet the eye. But this kind of difference was turning up everywhere in the New York art world in those years. Art was being made out of ordinary florescent bulbs, mounted on the wall; of firebricks, arranged in a line; of wall sections of prefabricated buildings. It was happening in avant-garde dance, where dance movements, outwardly indistinguishable from simple bodily movements, began to be performed. What was the difference between walking and performing a dance movement that consisted in walking? Between sitting in a chair and doing the same thing as a dance performance? The composer John Cage, as early as 1952, composed a work consisting of all the sounds that were made during an interval lasting four minutes and thirty-three seconds, from the moment that a pianist closed the keyboard of a piano until he opened it again. The composition was titled
4’33”. Cage was interested in enlarging the range of musical sounds to include the sounds of ordinary life. The writer Jorge Borges imagined two texts, one by the Spanish master Cervantes, written in the sixteenth century, and one by a late nineteenth-century Symbolist poet, which were word for word identical—yet, Borges argues, they differed profoundly in style.
These were real examples that arose from within the worlds of art, music, dance, and literature. They could be treated as jokes. Or they could, as the artists intended, be taken seriously, as raising in a radical way the fundamental question of the nature of art. In 1964 I took this question up in a philosophical paper called “The Art World,” which I presented before the American Philosophical Association. But not until the late seventies was I prepared to treat the question in a systematic way, which I did in
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. In that work I laid down a few conditions I proposed were necessary for something to be a work of art. One was that an object be
about something, the other was that it embody its meaning. These conditions I believed were universal, true of works of art at any moment in history and everywhere in the world that art exists. Naturally, they left out a great deal that belongs to art, but that is how it is with necessary conditions. As a definition, mine could have been thought of at any time. But, mostly, philosophers who thought about art at all thought about what made art important to people—its beauty, its expressiveness, its ability to make people laugh or cry. All these qualities are important. But they didn’t have much to do with the art that engaged me in the 1960s. As a philosopher, I was concerned to find something that these minimal uninflected works had in common with the humanly far more engaging things that people had responded to as art in earlier periods—comedies, tragedies, novels, symphonies, opera, ballets, frescoes, sculptures of heroes and gods. I felt I was fortunate to have lived when I did and where I did, at a moment when almost nothing about the art being made was philosophically interesting except the question why it was art at all.
The sixties saw a number of artistic movements emerge—Pop Art, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art, for example. Each made possible works that were, to say the least, philosophically puzzling. Pop consisted of works that looked very like images that occurred in popular culture. Minimalism consisted of work that often looked like industrial objects—a hole in the ground could be a work of conceptual art. In truth, it began to seem that anything could be a work of art, as long as some theory was invoked under which its status as art could be explained, so that one might not be able to tell by looking at something whether it was a work of art or not. Meanings, after all, are invisible. One could not tell, by looking, if something had a meaning or what meaning it had. The German artist Josef Beuys made art out of fat and felt, of old printing presses, of trees. A pile of coal, a tableful of books, a stack of newspapers, a piece of plumbing, a woman’s dress could all be works of art. A crude video showing a man doing nothing could be a work of art. Works of art no longer required much skill to make. They no longer even needed artists—anyone could “do” them. Painting and sculpture, as traditionally understood, became less and less central. It was as if art had entered not just a new period, but a new kind of period, in which anything was possible. In the early 1980s there was a sudden flourishing of what was called Neo-Expressionist painting, but, by the middle of the decade, that subsided. All at once movements no longer seemed to occur. The early part of the twentieth century had seen hundreds of movements—Cubism, Fauvism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Expressionism, Abstraction—each with its own manifesto. All this had vanished. The history of art no longer seemed driven by some inner necessity. One lost the sense of any narrative direction.
In 1984 I published an essay called “The End of Art.” It was as if, in the art world at least, something like the vision Marx and Engels had of the “end of history” was becoming actual. Artists could really do anything, and it seemed as if anyone could be an artist. At first this rather depressed me. I though nostalgically of how exciting history had been, when one looked forward to each new season for fresh revelations. For a time one and only one sort of art seem historically correct. In America there was Abstract Expressionism. One thought that was going to last as long as the Renaissance had lasted, but by 1962 it was over with. Some critics believed it would be replaced by Color Field painting. But, as I have already noted, some deep change had begun in the art world with Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual art. And it now seemed as if the time for deep changes was definitively over. When one can do anything, there does not seem any longer to be much reason to do one thing rather than another. We had really entered a period of pluralism. There was no one correct way to make art.
As I say, I found this situation dispiriting at first. I wrote: “It has been an immense privilege to live in history.” But bit by bit I began to feel that it was intoxicating to be free of the tyranny of art history: that, again to paraphrase Marx, we no longer are what we are because of history, but history instead is made by us. There is no internally determined end state toward which history is moving—we have already reached and passed beyond any end state. When I began to lecture on the end of art, my audiences, often made up of artists, were initially hostile but quickly sensed the feeling of liberation I had begun to have. There was no longer the interminable disputes over which is the correct way to make art. The kinds of arguments that took place at the Cedar Bar in New York in the 1940s, or at the Artists’ club on Tenth Street in the 1950s, belonged to a stage of things art had moved beyond. When I was invited to deliver the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington in 1995, I decided to devote them to this new philosophy of art history. After the End of Art was the result of those lectures.
The institutions of the art world began to change radically in response to the radical pluralism that overtook it in what I spoke of in the “posthistorical” period we had entered. In art schools, for example, skills were no longer taught. The student was treated from the beginning as an artist, and the faculty existed to help the students realize their ideas. The attitude was that the student would learn whatever he or she needed in order to make what he or she wanted. Everyone used everything and anything—audio, video, photography, performance, installation. Students could be painters or sculptors if they liked, but the main thing was to find the means to embody the meanings they were interested in conveying. The atmosphere of the art school was no longer a group of students, standing in front of their easels painting a model or a still life, with the “master” going from canvas to canvas, making suggestions. In the advanced art school students had their own studios, and the professors—artists themselves—made periodic visits to see what was happening and to give advice.
Art became something that in a way belonged to everyone. Thousands of new museums were built, but, instead of showing treasures that had “passed the test of time,” they showed what was happening now. Audiences were interested in the art of their time, rather than in learning to appreciate the masterpieces of the past. And this was taking place not just in America and Europe but everywhere. Artists traveled. They became internationalized. As of today, I have been told, there are two hundred international art events every month—biennials, triennials, art fairs. The art world itself has no center. The center, one might say, is everywhere. And everywhere the institutions are changing to meet the new demands.
I am deeply grateful that, as more and more nations enter the global community, though my own books in the philosophy of art have evolved out of the art history I have witnessed, the ideas they convey have found a wide reception. My books are addressed to artists everywhere who hope to get some larger philosophical picture of the art world that has emerged around them. But they are also intended to be read by those who are uncertain how to experience the kind of art they are increasingly likely to encounter in attending exhibitions in various parts of the world.
Are the experiences supposed to be aesthetic? Once this was taken for granted. Works of art were believed to be objects primarily made to give pleasure to those who contemplated them. This can still happen, but it is not universal and, in truth, it is not typical any longer. My most recent systematic book,
The Abuse of Beauty, attempts to explain how, and why, beauty ceased being a central occupation of artists—and it attempts as well to redefine our relationship to art that does not address us aesthetically at all. There is, of course, a wide range of aesthetic qualities other than beauty—but beauty is the only aesthetic quality that is also a
value. It is a value like truth and goodness are values. These are of great importance in life—but, in a way, truth in art is probably more important than beauty. It is more important because meaning is important. Artists have been intent upon disclosing meaning through works of art that are examples of visual thought. Art criticism today is more concerned with whether these meanings are also true than with the traditional consideration of pleasing the eye. Artists have become what philosophers used to be, guiding us to think about what their works express. With this, art is really about those who experience it. It is about who we are and how we live.
This means that the task of the art critic has itself changed since the days when the critic was able to depend upon the eye alone to determine whether something was good or not. Critics used to pride themselves on their “good eye,” upon the basis of which they could judge whether something was great or good. Today the critic’s task is to interpret and to explain the work, to help viewers understand what artists are trying to say. Interpretation consists in relating the meaning of the work to the object that conveys it. In helping viewers understand the work, the critic helps them understand themselves and their world with reference to what the artist is attempting to say. Art today is not for connoisseurs or collectors alone. Nor is it only for the people who share the artist’s culture and nationality. The globalization of the art world means that art addresses us in our humanity, as men and women who seek in art for meanings that neither of art’s peers—philosophy and religion—in what Hegel spoke of as the realm of Absolute Spirit, are able to provide.
Such, in broad outline, is the philosophy of art that informs the critical essays that compose the body of this work. I am profoundly grateful to Columbia University Press, and especially to its philosophy editor, Wendy Lochner, for making this edition possible.
It is my hope that reader will find in it some guidance in dealing with some of the more difficult artists of out time—I think of John Curran and Jeff Koons—but also find it a critical paradigm for dealing with contemporary and even, on occasion, traditional art, without the usual biases and in the spirit of openness with which these essays were written.
New York City 2006
Portions of this introduction have appeared in Chinese translation in a preface to the Chinese editions of After the End of Art and The Abuse of Beauty.