Although Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment is incontestably the great Enlightenment text on the aesthetic values of that era, dealing as it does with taste and the judgment of beauty, it must for that reason seem to have little to say about art today, where good taste is optional, bad taste is artistically acceptable, and “kalliphobia”—an aversion to if not a loathing for beauty—is at least respected. Clement Greenberg claimed that Kant’s book is “the most satisfactory basis for aesthetics we yet have.” It may have been true for Modernist art—but Modernism, as a period style, more or less ended in the early 1960s, and the great movements that succeeded it—Fluxus, Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art, not to mention all the art made since what I have called the end of art—seem beyond the reach of Greenberg, let alone of Kant’s philosophy of art. What Greenberg admired in Kant, or so I believe, would have been art that possessed what Kant distinguished as “free beauty,” which is also possessed by certain natural objects, like some flowers, birds, and seashells. Kant mentions “decorative borders or wall paper, and ‘all music without words.’” Had abstract painting existed, he would doubtless have situated some of it under “free beauty.” True, Greenberg had little interest in natural beauty, but he thought one didn’t have to know anything about the history of an artwork to know what is good, and that those who know what is good are certain to agree with one another—even if no one can put what makes art good into words. All this agrees quite closely with what Kant says about free beauty.
But Kant had two conceptions of art, and his second theory of artworks cannot support his reasons for taking up judgments of beauty in the first place, namely the parallels they suggest with moral judgments, and their universality, which made beauty, he thought, the symbol of morality. Late in Critique of Judgment he introduces a new concept—the concept of spirit—which has little to do with taste, nor does it touch in any way the aesthetic of nature. Taste, he now writes, “is merely a judging and not a productive faculty.” When we speak of spirit, on the other hand, we are speaking of the creative power of the artist. Asked what we think of a painting, we might say that it lacks spirit—“though we find nothing to blame on the score of taste.” Hence a painting can even be beautiful, as far as taste is concerned, but defective through lacking spirit. Put next to Rembrandt, almost any Dutch painting will seem without spirit, however tasteful. Since taste has little to do with spirit, Kant is feeling his way out of the Enlightenment here, and edging toward what Hegel says in his Lectures of Aesthetics: “Taste is directed only to the external surface on which feelings play,” and “So-called ‘good taste’ takes fright at all the deeper effects of art and is silent when externalities and incidentals vanish.” At the beginning of his great lectures on aesthetics, Hegel sharply distinguished between natural and artistic beauty: artistic beauty is “born of the spirit and born again.” Kant, as one can tell from the examples I cited, includes both certain natural objects as well as certain kinds of art. So Kant’s second conception of art is of another order than the view of art as an aesthetic object, beautiful in the way natural objects are beautiful.
In his book Italian Hours Henry James writes that Baroque painter Domenichino is “an example of effort detached from inspiration and school merit divorced from spontaneity.” That made him, James goes on to say, “an interesting case in default of being an interesting painter.” There was nothing wrong in Domenichino’s work. He had mastered the curriculum of the art school. But spirit is not something learned, and there is no remedy for its lack. Saying that Domenichino’s work lacked spirit, accordingly, is criticism of an entirely different order from the usual art school crit. It is not Domenichino’s fault, merely his tragedy, that he does not possess what Kant calls “genius”—“the exemplary originality of the natural gifts of a subject in the free employment of his cognitive faculties.” I had better note that spirit in his view is internally connected with the cognitive faculties. It is that, I shall wish to argue, that connects Kant to contemporary art or, better, to art of every historical period, ours included as a matter of course.
But let’s stay with Domenichino for a moment. He was a Bolognese artist who followed the Carracci to Rome and helped execute the agenda of the Council of Trent, which hoped the power of images might counter the Reformation. His Saint Cecilia frescoes of 1615–17 were regarded as the apogee of painting, according to Wittkower. Poussin regarded his masterpiece, The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, as the greatest painting of its age, barring only Raphael’s Transfiguration. During the eighteenth century he was “often classed second only to Raphael.” Two of their paintings were on the short list singled out for rendition to the Louvre by Napoleon’s troops. He “created a landscape style which was to have an important influence on the early work of Claude.” His style was Classicist, and he stood out as such in contrast with the Baroque style enthusiastically adopted by his rival, Lanfranco. The decline of his reputation in the nineteenth century was due almost entirely to John Ruskin, the Hilton Kramer of his time in terms of critical vehemence who was driven to diminish the Italian School to make room for modern paintings, in the book so named. My hunch is that Henry James got his views on Domenichino from reading Modern Painters, rather than from prolonged critical contemplation. In disparaging Domenichino in the 1840s, Ruskin wrote that seventeenth century paintings lacked sincerity, and that the Bolognese school was based on eclecticism. This was a historical misunderstanding: the Bolognese prided themselves on being “eclectic,” meaning: they took the best of everything.
There was another element in the rivalry between Domenichino and Lanfranco—in effect the rivalry between Classicism and the Baroque: Lanfranco accused his rival of plagiarism, specifically in his alleged masterpiece, charging that Domenichino had stolen the idea from their teacher, Agostino Carracci. A contemporary, Luigi Lanzi, who admired Domenichino, wrote that he was not as great in invention as he was in the other parts of painting, and for that reason often took from others, even the less famous. So he was an imitator—but “not a servile one” (14). What he stole was Agostino’s idea but not the way he embodied it. The law holds that you cannot copyright an idea, so it is not theft when Domenichino paints Saint Jerome’s final communion. To cite a modern example, Saul Steinberg was frustrated that everyone ripped off his famous New Yorker cover of the New Yorker’s view of the world—a wonderful example of giving visual embodiment to a nonvisual truth. Steinberg got satisfaction, finally, when a judge ruled that the copying did not give everyone license to replicate Steinberg’s spidery letters. The embodiment was his private property, even if the idea that only he was capable of creating was in the public domain, showing how New Yorkers map the world: there’s New York, and then, secondarily, there’s everyplace else.
It is striking that we find two of the same aspects in a seventeenth century altarpiece and a twentieth century cartoon—idea and embodiment—and that both are to be found in Kant’s second but not his first view of art. It turns out, more or less, that all Kant really has to say about his second view of art in his book is packed into the few pages given over to spirit, and its presence in perhaps the greatest Enlightenment text on aesthetics is itself a sign that Enlightenment values were beginning to give way, and a new era was making itself felt. It is a tribute to Kant’s cultural sensitivity that he realized that he had to deal with Romantic values, and a whole new way to think about art, even if he was going to try to enlist them as largely cognitive. It is striking that in a very different part of Europe the same line was being argued by the artist Francisco Goya. In creating the program for the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, Goya wrote that there are no rules in art: No hay reglas in la pintura. That explains, according to Goya, why we may be less happy with a highly finished work than with one in which less care has been taken. It is the spirit in art—the presence of genius—that is really important. Like Kant, whose Critique of Judgment was published in 1790, Goya considered himself an Enlightenment figure—a Lustrado—so it is striking that both the philosopher and the painter felt that they must deal with post-Enlightenment views of art. But people were beginning to appreciate that something more was being promised by art than that it be in good taste. It was something that could transform viewers, opening them up to whole new systems of ideas. But there were no rules for achieving that, as there are for making something tasteful. It doesn’t have a lot to do with judgment, to cite Kant’s term. Imagine judging an art show the way you judge a dog show!
One feels that the Enlightenment is definitively over with when we read a work like Balzac’s Le Chef d’oeuvre inconnu, published in 1831. The story involves three artists, two of whom are historical figures—Nicholas Poussin, as a young painter just starting out; Frans Pourbus, a successful Flemish painter, about to be replaced by Rubens as the favorite of Maria de Medici, Queen of France; and a fictional painter named Frenhofer, now an old man. They are discussing a painting of Marie, the Egyptian, shown removing her clothes, about to exchange sex for her passage to Jerusalem. Frenhofer offers to buy it, which flatters Pourbus, who takes this as a sign that the master thinks the painting good. “Good?” Frenhofer asks. “Yes and no. Your lady is assembled nicely enough but she’s not alive.” And he goes on:
At first glance, she seems quite admirable, but look again and you can see she’s pasted on the canvas—you could never walk around her. She’s a flat silhouette, a cutout who could never turn round or change positions. . . . The thing’s in perfect perspective and the shading correctly observed; for all your praiseworthy efforts, I could never believe this splendid body was animated by the breath of life. . . . What’s lacking? A trifle that’s nothing at all, yet a nothing that’s everything.
Frenhofer now rolls up his sleeves and, with a few touches here and there, brings the painting to life. Frenhofer gives a natural reading of “lacks spirit” as “lacks life.” That is the difficulty of reading Kant from the Romantic perspective that one might naturally think he had opened up. In fact he has a very different and, in a way, a much deeper conception of spirit than that. Since spirit is central to the conception of art that he is advancing, we have to concentrate on the few works he actually discusses.
Kant speaks of spirit as “the animating principle of mind,” which consists in “the faculty of presenting aesthetic ideas.” This does not mean: ideas about aesthetics. What it does mean is an idea presented to and through the senses, hence an idea not abstractly grasped, but experienced through, and by means of, the senses. This would have been an audacious and almost contradictory formulation in the classical philosophical tradition, in which the senses were regarded as hopelessly confused. Ideas were grasped by the mind alone, and knowledge was attained by turning away from the senses. To today’s reader, “aesthetical idea” sounds exceedingly bland. To Kant’s readers, it had instead to have been an exciting composite of contraries. At the very least, it suggests that art is cognitive, since it presents us with ideas, and that the genius has the ability to find sensory arrays through which these ideas are conveyed to the mind of the viewer. Hegel, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, has another way of putting it. He writes that art does this in a special way, “namely by displaying even the highest reality sensuously, bringing it thereby nearer to the senses, to feeling, and to nature’s mode of appearance.” And it “generates out of itself as works of fine art the first reconciling middle term between nature and finite reality and the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking.” We can put this yet another way: the artist finds ways to embody the idea in a sensory medium.
Kant was never generous with examples, which he dismisses in the First Critique as “the go-cart of judgment,” the need for which “is a mark of stupidity.” But I think we can get what he is attempting to tell us by considering the somewhat impoverished example he does offer. Imagine that an artist is asked to convey through an image the idea of the great power of the god Jupiter, and that he presents us with the image of an eagle with bolts of lightning in its claws. The eagle was Jupiter’s bird, as the peacock was the bird of his wife, Juno, and the owl was the bird of his daughter Athena. So the artist represents Jupiter through this attribute, the way another artist represents Christ as a lamb. The notion of being able to hold bolts of lightning conveys an idea of superhuman strength. It is an “aesthetical idea” because it makes vivid the order of strength possessed by Jupiter, since being able to hold bolts of lightning is far, far beyond our capacities. Only a supremely powerful god is able to do something like that. The image does something that the mere words “Jupiter is mighty” are incapable of conveying. Kant speaks of ideas “partly because they at least strive after something which lies beyond the bounds of experience”—but they are aesthetical ideas because we have to use what does lie within experience in order to present them. Art, in his view, uses experience in this way to carry us beyond experience. In fact, this is the problem that Hegel finds with art relative to philosophy. It can’t dispense with the senses. It can present ideas of great magnitude—but it needs “aesthetical ideas” in order to do so. Hegel’s stunning thesis of the end of art is internally connected to that incurable dependence upon the senses. Philosophy’s superiority, he supposes, is that it has no such need.
Let’s consider a really great work of art, Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. There are in this tremendous painting two registers, in effect: a lower register, in which a group of soldiers, heavily armed, sleeps beside Christ’s sepulcher; and an upper register, in which Christ is shown climbing out of his tomb, holding his banner, with what I feel is a look of dazed triumph on his face. He and the soldiers belong to different perspectival systems: one has to raise one’s eyes to see Christ. The resurrection takes place in the “dawn’s early light.” It is, literally and symbolically, a new day. At the same time, it is also literally and symbolically a new era, for it is a chill day on the cusp between winter and spring. The soldiers were posted there to see to it that no one remove the dead body of Christ. The soldiers form a living alarm system, so to speak, set to go off by grave robbers. Little matter—Christ returns to life while they sleep, completely unaware. He does not even disturb the lid of the sepulcher. Though Christ is still incarnate—we can see his wounds—it is as if he were pure spirit. His language connects his extraordinary ideas with commonplace experience. The whole complex idea of death and resurrection, flesh and spirit, a new beginning for humankind, is embodied in a single compelling image. We can see the mystery enacted before our eyes. Piero has given the central doctrine of faith a local habitation. Of course, it requires interpretation to understand what we are looking at. But as the interpretation advances, different pieces of the scene fall into place, until we recognize that we are looking at something astonishing and miraculous. The gap between eye and mind has been bridged by “the middle term of art.”
Kant was writing for audiences that had little, if any, knowledge of art outside the West. Presumably based on anthropological illustrations he must have seen, Kant was aware that there are parts of the world in which men are covered with a kind of spiral tattoo: “We could adorn a figure with all kinds of spirals and light but regular lines, as the New Zealanders do with their tattooing, if only it were not the figure of a human being,” he writes in the Critique of Judgment, obviously thinking of tattooing as a form of decoration or ornamentation, as if the human body, made in the image of God, were not beautiful enough in its own right. It would have required considerable reeducation for Kant to have been able to think of the tattoo as a form of art, and hence as an aesthetic idea, connecting the person so adorned to invisible forces in the universe. Think of the popularity of the eagle as a tattoo, or a bosomy woman of Victorian dimensions.
What impresses me is that Kant’s highly compressed discussion of spirit is capable of addressing the logic of artworks invariantly as to time, place, and culture, and of explaining why Formalism is so impoverished a philosophy of art. The irony is that Kant’s Critique of Judgment is so often cited as the foundational text for Formalistic analysis. What Modernist Formalism did achieve, on the other hand—and Greenberg recognizes this—was the enfranchisement of a great deal of art that the Victorians, say, would have found “primitive,” meaning that the artists who made it would have carved or painted like nineteenth century Europeans if they only knew how. African sculpture came to be appreciated for its “expressive form” by Roger Fry, and by the severe Bloomsbury Formalist Clive Bell in his book Art. That meant that it was ornamentalized, in effect, like the tattoo, according to Kant. I often wonder if those who celebrated Kant aesthetics read as far as section forty-nine of his book, where he introduces his exceedingly condensed view of what makes art humanly important. One would have had to not so much widen one’s taste, as Greenberg expresses it, but to come to recognize that African or Oceanic art is composed around aesthetic ideas specific to those cultures. When Virginia Woolf visited the exhibition of Negro sculpture that Roger Fry discussed with such enthusiasm, she wrote her sister Vanessa that “I dimly see . . . that if I had one on the mantelpiece I should be a different sort of character—less adorable, as far as I can make out, but somebody you wouldn’t forget in a hurry.” She meant, I suppose, that if she accepted the aesthetic ideas embodied in African figures, she wouldn’t quite be the brittle Bloomsbury personage we believe her to have been, but instead would worship the fire god and dance to the beating of wild drummers (or Wall Street Occupiers) or in any case be responsive to the imperatives of a very different culture.
There is an exceedingly instructive confrontation of sensibilities in a particular unhappy episode in Fry’s life. He traveled to France in the twenties to seek help for certain stubborn pains through self-hypnotic therapy. He met a Frenchwoman, Josette Coatmellec, with whom he formed a romantic though not, it appears, a sexual relationship. In spring 1924 he showed her an African mask that he had acquired. Fry’s biographer, Frances Spalding, in Roger Fry, Art and Life, writes that “its savage expressiveness jarred on her nerves, leaving her frightened and alarmed.” She badly misinterpreted Fry’s gesture of sharing the mask with her—she thought he was taunting her. Before Fry could straighten her out, she shot herself, standing on the cliff at Le Havre, facing England. Fry designed her tombstone.
Part of the pluralism of our culture has been the widening of means available to artists to embody aesthetic ideas—to convey meanings—not easily expressed by means of Renaissance-style tableaux, which were ideal for the brilliant embodiment of ideas central to Christianity. Spirit drives them to find forms and materials quite alien to that tradition—to use, just to cite a material that is hardly to be found in art supply stores and that resulted in scandal a few years ago, elephant dung. In that same show that included Chris Ofili’s controversial work, another artist, Marc Quinn, had sculpted a self-portrait in his own frozen blood. (It was important to the artist that the blood be his own.) Some years earlier Joseph Beuys began using animal fat almost as a signature material, emblematizing nourishment and healing, as he used felt to emblematize warmth.
Today art can be made of anything, put together with anything, in the service of presenting any ideas whatsoever. Such a development puts great interpretative pressures on viewers to grasp the way the spirit of the artist undertook to present the ideas that concerned her or him. The embodiment of ideas or, I would say, of meanings is perhaps all we require as a philosophical theory of what art is. But doing the criticism that consists in finding the way the idea is embodied varies from work to work. Kirk Varnedoe, in his Mellon Lectures “Pictures of Nothing,” presented a defense of abstract art: “We are meaning-makers, not just image makers. It is not just that we recognize images . . . it is that we are constructed to make meaning out of things, and that we learn from others how to do it.” On this view, Kant’s second view of art is that it consists of making meanings, which presupposes an overall human disposition not just to see things but to find meanings in what we see, even if we sometimes get it wrong, as in the case of poor Josette Coatmellec.
If this is a defensible reading of Kant’s second theory of the art work, then, it seems to me, there is a certain affinity between Kant’s notion of the aesthetic idea as a theory of art and my own effort at a definition of the work of art as an embodied meaning. Indeed, in a recent article I linked the two concepts in a way that might seem to imply that Kant has a philosophy of art that is closer to contemporary art than the Formalist reading of Kant, due at least to Clement Greenberg, however close that reading may have been to Modernist art. Indeed, Formalism appeared to its enthusiasts—the British Formalists Clive Bell and Roger Fry, as well as to Americans Greenberg and Alfred Barnes—to capture exactly what was Modern in Modernist Art. Certainly Formalism, whether entirely what Kant meant by it, did seem to have a more obvious connection to High Modernism—Abstraction, De Stijl, Henri Matisse—than to any paradigm instance of Postmodernist or contemporary art. But this is to take Formalism as a style, alongside Postmodernism, and not at all to touch the philosophy of art as such. That is not uncharacteristic of the history of the philosophy of art. Philosophers have seized upon changes in style, and then went on to treat these as clues to what is philosophically distinctive in art—as philosophical discoveries in fact of what art really is—when what one wants and needs, philosophically, is what must be true of art irrespective of style—true of art as such, everywhere and always.
Meaning and embodiment were derived as necessary conditions for something being a work of art in my book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, which took as its task to offer a philosophical definition of art. The book is an exercise in ontology—in what it is to be a work of art. But having an aesthetic idea—embodying, as Kant uses the phrase, spirit—is neither necessary nor sufficient for being art, as Kant’s own formulation admits.
Remember what he says: “Asked what we think of a painting, we might say that it lacks spirit—though we find nothing to blame on the score of taste.” Hence the painting can even be beautiful, as far as taste is concerned, but defective through lacking spirit. There must be plenty of art lacking in spirit. Pourbus’s Marie l’Egyptienne lacked spirit in the sense that it lacked life, but, as we saw, that would not be Kant’s conception of spirit. But there must be any number of portraits and landscapes that merely show their motifs, without doing more. Whatever the case, we are talking about more than form, more than design. You have to know something about lightning in order to grasp the power of Zeus through the fact he can hold bolts of lightning in his hands. You have to know something about sacrifice to see how Christ can be portrayed as a lamb. And you have to know something about life for a novel to be considered as art. In a wonderful 1866 letter to her friend Frederic Harrison, just five years after writing her masterpiece Silas Marner, George Eliot wrote:
That is a difficult problem; its difficulties press in upon me, who have gone through again and again the severe effort of trying to make certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had revealed themselves to me first in the flesh and not in the spirit. I think aesthetic teaching the highest of all teaching because it deals with life in its highest complexity. But if it ceases to be purely aesthetic—if it lapses anywhere from the picture to the diagram—it becomes the most offensive of all teaching.
I treasure this paragraph: I feel that it is Kant speaking through the great novelist, who found, in her discovery of ideas made incarnate, the great secret of art. Eliot, of course, knew German philosophy. I am not a literary scholar, but I imagine she must have considered this a priceless find.
Some years ago I stumbled into an exhibition of David Hammons’s recent work consisting of fur coats on stands, slathered with paint. What idea was embodied in this work? “A tableau of fashion and cruelty,” wrote Okwui Enwezor in Artforum, but—referring to the fact that each ruined coat was spotlit—“their stately bearing . . . belied the strange deathly aura emanating from them.” The former editor of the same magazine, Jack Bankowsky, saw the placement of these “artfully defiled furs” in “the bluest chip of blue chip emporiums” as an act of hijacking, making “his public squirm.” Both writers listed it as among the top ten works of the year.
It would have required some doing to explain this twenty-first century work to a late eighteenth century philosopher, but let’s imagine what that would be like. The first thing would be to find a way of explaining the idea of animal rights to one of the greatest moral philosophers of history. It was not until Jeremy Bentham that the question was whether animals suffered, and whether we have any greater right to cause them suffering than we have to torture and kill one another. One would have to explain that activists on behalf of animal rights began attacking women who wore fur coats, until that point a garment of luxury. One main strategy was to spray the garment with paint, ruining it for fastidious wearers. Bankowsky says the furs are “artfully defined,” implying that the artist has turned them into paintings, which Hammons has mounted on dressmaker forms, placed in an art gallery, and individually illuminated by overhead lights. The installation embodies the idea that animals should not be hunted down and slaughtered for the vanity of pampered women. Kant was a quick study. He could see how an aesthetic idea was embodied in David Hammons’s piece, and even applaud it as an instrument of moral education. But would he thereby see it as art? It is not easy to imagine a conversation between David Hammons and Kant, but in my view Kant would regard Hammons as having won the argument. He would say, in effect, to Herr Hammons that he had found a clever counterexample—an aesthetic idea that was not a work of art. For how could a constellation of ruined ladies’ garments be a work of art?
The problem comes from thrusting a twenty-first century artwork into an eighteenth century art world—the age of the Rococo. The discontinuity between it and eighteenth century art is too great. But there were similar problems in the twentieth century. Andy Warhol attempted to give a certain Charles Lisanby a portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, but Lisanby turned it down on the ground that it was not art, and that “Andy knew in his heart that it wasn’t art.” In my first piece on the philosophy of art, I made the point that to see something as art required a quality the eye could not see—a bit of history, a bit of theory. What Kant needed, one might say, was a crash course in Modern Art 101. He would need to be brought to the point at which he could see that it could be art. That would require an education in which we would systematically remove the reasons he might give for thinking it couldn’t be art. And much the same for Mr. Charles Lisanby. A Liz could have been bought out of Andy’s first show at the Stable Gallery in 1962 for $200. It would bring $2–$4 million at auction today.
The basic philosophical point, however, is that art is always more than the few necessary conditions required for art. Let’s consider a simple case, Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans of 1962. The idea was unheard of until he did it. But he could have painted it like an Old Master, in chiaroscuro. There are endless ways of embodiment. He chose to paint the cans in an eight-by-four matrix, leaving no room for a thirty-third can. He painted the cans as if they were to be printed in a child’s coloring book, completely uninflected. Given the plenitude of choices, it must seem impossible to define art. Any choice is consistent with being art, but not necessary for it to be art. The most that can be achieved is what Kant and I have done—to have discovered some necessary conditions. I have no wish to judge between Kant’s proposal and my own. Hammons could say to Kant that his installation would be art in 2008. There are reasons why Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans would not have been art in the age of the Rococo. Someone could have painted them, of course. But what he or she would have painted could not have been paintings of commonplace objects—packages that everyone in Königsberg would be familiar with, as everyone in America was familiar with the soup cans in 1961. They would not have been Pop art in 1761. They could not, in 1761, have the meaning they were to have in 1961. Art is essentially art historical. It was destined to be preserved in art museums. It may have outgrown that destiny, but that is another story.