Chapter 7
A Tale of Two Artworlds
In this essay I shall first try to clear up a misunderstanding about a particular aspect of my version of the institutional theory of art that has dogged the theory from its very beginning. The most recent surfacing of this misunderstanding occurred in “The Artworld Revisited: Comedies of Similarity,” by Arthur Danto.1 After trying to clear up this misunderstanding, I shall then go on to make some comments about Danto's own conception of the artworld.
In his paper, Danto goes to some lengths to deny any responsibility for my institutional theory of art. If this denial of philosophical paternity had occurred 20 years ago, I would have been surprised, but I realized some time ago that his theory and my theory are not as closely related as I had thought they were in the beginning. My earlier mistaken belief that my theory was in direct line of philosophical descent from Danto's was the result of a misunderstanding on my part. I understood one sentence in his 1964 article “The Artworld” to mean one thing while he understood it to mean something quite different. The sentence was, “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.”2 It turns out that the things that Danto has in mind as the artworld and what I understand the artworld to be are very different sorts of things.
In his paper, Danto gives a summary account of what he takes my institutional theory of art to be and then quite correctly shows that the view he summarizes is badly wrong. It is no wonder that he wants to disclaim any paternal responsibility for this offspring.
Danto prefaces his discussion of the institutional theory of art with an account of the activities of Wendall Castle, a member of the studio furniture movement. Castle made a stool that looked like an abstract sculpture and succeeded in getting it accepted for a sculpture show. Danto then comments,
Castle, who displays philosophical acumen throughout his career, had touched what comes to be known as the Institutional Theory of Art, according to which what makes something art and something else not is something the Artworld – i.e. the “experts” –prescribes.3
I would agree that Castle's work is a work of art and that it is an artwork because, in some sense, of what the artworld prescribes. There is, however, an important question of how the prescribing takes place. It becomes clear how Danto thinks I conceived of this prescribing when he writes, “And his [Dickie's] notion of the artworld was pretty much the body of experts who confer that status [of art] on something by fiat. In a way, Dickie's theory implies a kind of empowering elite.”4 With this understanding of my theory in mind, Danto quotes the question, which, as he puts it, “Richard Wollheim slyly asks”:5 “Do the representatives [of the artworld], if they exist, pass in review all candidates for the status of art, and do they then, while conferring this status on some, deny it to others?”6 Danto then paraphrases the remainder of the passage from Wollheim: “Who keeps records of these decisions: are they announced in art magazines? Do art writers wait outside the judging chambers, desperate to phone their publications with the scoops? How literally can Dickie mean what he says?”7
Danto's refuting response to the view he attributes to me is to assert, quite rightly, that “the Art World is clearly not a body which acts as one.”8 That is, Danto quite rightly asserts that the artworld is not a deliberative body that makes decisions about whether Duchamp's Fountain is a work of art, whether the art status of the Mona Lisa is to be revoked, or the like. Fortunately for me the view that Danto refutes is not my view or even one that I ever entertained as a possibility.
From the very beginning I have been attempting to characterize what it is that painters, writers, and the like do when they create works of art; I have never intended to say that the artworld as a group creates works of art. I never intended to imply, as Danto thinks my theory implies, that someone like Charles Comfort, director of the National Gallery of Canada, could deny the status of art to Warhol's Brillo Boxes because of his status in the artworld. I never intended to claim that a gallery director such as Comfort could make it the case that something is or is not art. Gallery directors as such can only decide whether or not to display things.
There is, however, a basis for this misunderstanding of my view. At the beginning in 1969, I spoke of “an artifact upon which some society or some subgroup of society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.”9 I soon realized that this language could lead to the misunderstanding in question, and in my second and third attempts at formulating the theory, I spoke of “some person or persons acting on behalf of” the artworld.10 When I spoke here of some person acting, I had in mind the activities of a single artist, and when I spoke of persons acting, I had in mind the activities of groups of the kind that make movies, plays, and operas. In my last, and I hope final, attempt at formulating the institutional theory of art in 1984, I spoke simply of the creating of an artifact.11 But in none of these cases did I intend to say that it was the artworld as a group that created works of art. All of the many examples that I gave to illustrate what I was talking about were of individual artists or of groups of artists creating art. I spoke of the creations of such individuals as, to list them alphabetically, Brancusi, Betsy the chimpanzee from the Baltimore Zoo, Cézanne, Dali, Da Vinci, Duchamp, T.S. Eliot, Henry Moore, Grandma Moses, Rembrandt, unnamed kindergarten children, and the like. I spoke of Betsy the chimpanzee in order to indicate that I doubted that she had sufficient understanding of the role of the artist for her creations to be art. I had no such doubts about the others on this list. I spoke of the kindergarten children in order to indicate that I believed that they could have sufficient understanding of the role of the artist for their creations to be art.
Danto does not quote anything in his paper from my writings to justify the view he attributes to me. Aside from the wording in my 1969 article that I noted earlier, I do not believe that there are any passages in my writing that suggest such a view.
My basic claim is that the artworld is a structure of roles within which artists create art. I was led into this view by Danto's remarks about visually indistinguishable objects. Danto asks the following kind of question: How can Fountain be a work of art and a urinal that looks just like it not be? It occurred to me that Fountain might be a work of art or at least not insanely mistakenly thought to be art because of the set of artworld relations that Duchamp had caused it to be enmeshed in but in which other visually indistinguishable urinals are not enmeshed. It was these artworld relations – relations that I took Fountain and all other works of art to be enmeshed in – that I set out to characterize.
In his paper, after having dealt with my view of what it is that makes something art, Danto turns to giving an account of his own view, which he characterizes as an institutional one. In his paper, he outlines his conception of the artworld in several different, perhaps inconsistent, ways. He first writes, “Now I thought of the Art World as the historically ordered world of artworks, enfranchised by theories which themselves are historically ordered.”12 In this statement, it is asserted that the individuals that constitute the artworld are works of art and art theories. It is not clear but Danto may be stating what his view was in his 1964 article. Later he writes, “A member of the Art World would be one who was familiar with [the] history of [the] attenuation [of the definition of art].”13 Here it is asserted that the individuals that constitute the artworld are persons with a certain knowledge of the history of aesthetics. Finally, Danto writes that he conceives of the artworld as “a loose affiliation of individuals who have enough by way of theory and history that they are able to practice what the art historian Michael Baxandall terms ‘inferential art criticism,’ which in effect simply is historical explanations of works of art.”14 This statement identifies the artworld with a certain subset of critics. Conceived of in this last way as a subset of critics, the artworld depends on the prior existence of works of art, and, consequently, the artworld plays no role in the creating of art. That is, as Danto conceives of it in this last statement, the artworld is not concerned with what is required for something to be a work of art but with the criticism of art.
Certainly in many of his remarks Danto is not concerned with what is required for something to be a work of art, but rather just with what is required for someone to realize that a certain kind of thing can be a work of art. For example, Danto seems to be saying that Warhol's coming to realize that actual Brillo boxes are not all that different from many sculptures of the time made it possible for Warhol to realize that he could make the work of art, Brillo Boxes, and Castle's coming to realize that furniture could be made to resemble sculptures of his time made it possible for Castle to realize that he could make the work of art, Stool Sculpture. If these remarks of Danto are just about what makes it possible for Warhol and such to make unusual works of art, then his view is not at odds with my view because the two views are about different things. Our views would be at odds only if Danto is talking about what makes something a work of art. Warhol's realizing that he can make Brillo Boxes and Castle's realizing that he can make Stool Sculpture is not what makes the two works art. What makes them art is what underlies Warhol's and Castle's realizations.
On the other hand, some of Danto's remarks are concerned with what makes something art, that is, necessary conditions of being art. For example, he writes in his colloquium paper of Brillo Boxes, “The fiat was perhaps Warhol's, but enough people who participated in the history of relevant reasons were prepared to admit it into the canon of art that it was admitted.”15 Here he is clearly talking about what makes Brillo Boxes art, but what he says cannot be right. It sounds as if Danto is saying that it was not Warhol who made Brillo Boxes a work of art but a sufficient number of artworld persons including Warhol who acted as a group to make Brillo Boxes a work of art. This cannot be right because in refuting what he took to be my view, Danto denies that the artworld acts as a group to make art, and if the artworld acting as a group does not make art, it seems unlikely that a subset of the artworld acting as a group does either. This point requires clarification. On Danto's view, can a work of art be made by a single artist such a Warhol or does it require the actions of members of a larger group – a quorum of artworld persons?
Danto is also clearly concerned with a necessary condition of being art in a more specific way in the following passage from his paper:
The thesis which emerged from my book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is that works of art are symbolic expressions, in that they embody their meanings. The task of criticism is to identify the meanings and explain the mode of their embodiment. So construed, criticism just is the discourse of reasons, participation in which defines the artworld.16
The first sentence of this passage sounds like an old-fashioned claim – similar to Suzanne Langer's – that art is symbolic expression. It sounds as if Danto is saying that it is a necessary condition for being art that it be a symbolic expression and, given what he says elsewhere, I take it that for Danto this means being about something. Being about something is, of course, not sufficient for being art, and Danto does not claim that it is. In the passage quoted, Danto speaks of embodied meanings. Perhaps he means to distinguish between embodied meanings and meanings that are not embodied – with embodied meanings being unique to art. In that case, he might be maintaining that having an embodied meaning is a sufficient condition for being a work of art. It is not clear to me if Danto intends the notion of embodied meaning to play this role.
But what I want to focus on is Danto's claim that art is symbolic expression. I want to focus on the claim he seems to be making that a work of art is a symbolic expression that has a meaning. Given that for Danto being a symbolic expression means being about something, he seems to be making the claim that it is a necessary condition of being a work of art that it is about something. Consider now just works of visual art. Let it be granted that portraits refer and thus are about something. Let it be granted that representational paintings are about something. Let it be granted that abstract paintings are about something – whatever they are abstractions from. But what of non-objective paintings? What are they about? Danto is aware of the problem posed by non-objective paintings. At the beginning of his article “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” Danto addresses this question, considering a painting that is a square of primed canvas that has been exhibited with the title Untitled and of which the artist who created it has said that it is not about anything. Of this painting Danto says, “Our artist has produced something which is of the right sort to be about something, but in consequence of artistic fiat it happens only not to be about anything.”17 The point Danto is making here is that a work of art is the sort of thing that can be about something, while, say, a stone as such cannot be about anything. Danto's concession that something can be a work of art and not be about something means that his claim has to be that it is not a necessary condition of art that it be about something, but rather it is a necessary condition of being art that it be the sort of thing that can be about something. This necessary condition allows – as Danto's example of Untitled acknowledges – that a work of art need not be about something. So, works of art are the sort of thing that can be about something, but a work of art does not have to be about something. This claim is true, but it is not very satisfying. It sounded very important when Danto asserted that works of art are symbolic expressions that embody their meanings. It turns out, however, that works of art can be symbolic expressions but they need not be, and this is a considerable deflation of the claim. And, it isn't just that there is only Danto's Untitled (or a few atypical works like it), there are many, many non-objective paintings and musical pieces that are not about anything.
At the very end of his article “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” Danto writes, “As for the somewhat empty works with which I launched this discussion, I have this to say: what they are about is aboutness, and their content is the concept of art.”18 If Danto is referring to Untitled as a somewhat empty work in this passage, he may be trying to reinflate his claim to state that being about something is a necessary condition of art, although at the beginning of the article he explicitly states that Untitled is not about anything and hence would be completely empty rather than somewhat empty. In any event, works of art being about aboutness is a puzzling notion.
Finally, I want to remark on something about the artworld as Danto conceives of it that has always puzzled me. Danto states in his article “Artworks and Real Things” that tracing an object to a chimpanzee or a child defeats it as an artwork. A work of art, he asserts, lies outside the powers of chimpanzees or children, and he justifies his claim by saying, “Much in the way in which not everyone who can say the words ‘I pronounce you man and wife’ can marry people.”19 I have already indicated that I am doubtful about chimpanzees' art making capacities, but children are much smarter than chimpanzees, so why can't they make works of art? (Incidentally, I seem to remember hearing of a child evangelist marrying couples.) Even if generally children cannot marry people, kindergartens are littered with the productions of small children that they, their teachers, and their parents think of and display as works of art. No one thinks that these productions are great or perhaps even good works of art but then most works of art are not great or good. These kindergarten productions are not as sophisticated as Fountain, but most works of art are not that sophisticated. These productions are not notable for exhibiting great motor control, but then neither are many of the works one sees in art galleries. These kindergarten productions are the sort of thing that can be about something. Why can't they be works of art? Perhaps Danto thinks the children's productions cannot be works of art because the artworld, the “loose affiliation of individuals who have enough by way of theory and history that they are able to practice. . . ‘inferential art criticism,’” takes no notice of them. I do not see how this could be right because the existence of works of art seems independent of the existence of critics. On the other hand, the existence of critics certainly seems to be dependent on the existence of works of art.
Postscript
In the forthcoming Library of Living Philosophers volume devoted to him,20 Danto replies to my contribution, “Art and Ontology.” This note is directed at Danto's comments. In his reply, Danto summarizes the history of his thinking about the philosophy of art, states his view that art is about something or has a meaning, describes my attempt to produce a counterexample to his view, and concludes by saying that I disagree with him because I hold an institutional theory of art that claims an object is art because the artworld declares it to be art.
I do not disagree with Danto just because I hold an institutional view. And just for the record, I do not and have never held the institutional theory of art he attributes to me. I have explained this fact to Danto on many occasions and in print but to no avail. And, while my holding the version of the institutional view of art that I do hold would explain why I disagree with him, it would not constitute an argument against his view. So, what is the point of his discussing it? In any event, as Danto is aware, my argument against his view is that there are counterexamples to it.
In claiming that there are counterexamples to Danto's view that art is about something or has meaning, I am assuming here that being “about something” and “having meaning” have the same meaning, namely, being about something. Danto writes of what he considers my favorite counterexample to his view, namely, Malevich's suprematist work White on White. I claimed that this non-objective painting is not about anything, and Danto says this is false.
Danto's argument that White on White is about something is that Malevich said of it, “Feeling has here assumed external form.” Danto also cites as part of his argument Malevich's generalization – “Suprematism did not bring into being a new world of feeling, but rather, in [sic] an altogether new and direct form of representation of the world of feeling.”
It is worth noting that Malevich's two remarks, which Danto's argument depends on, are not even coherent. His specific remark about White on White says that the painting expresses feeling, but his generalization says that his suprematist paintings represent feelings. I am going to ignore this problem and assume that Malevich intends in both remarks to say that his paintings are about something, so that they will fit into Danto's remarks. What I want to focus on is Danto's claim that Malevich's “saying” of White on White that it is about feeling makes it about feeling, and Malevich's generalization that his suprematist paintings are about feelings makes these paintings about feelings.
There are things Malevich could have done that would have made the painting he did name White on White about feeling; for example, he could have named it Are Your Feet Cold Too? But no matter what he named the painting he did name White on White, he cannot make it about feeling by just saying it is about feeling. Ditto for Malevich's suprematist paintings.
Danto is wrong.
Notes
1. “The Artworld Revisited: Comedies of Similarity,” in Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box:The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York, 1992).
2. Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy, 61, 1964, 580.
3. “The Artworld Revisited,” p. 35.
4. Ibid., p. 38.
5. Ibid.
6. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (Princeton, 1987), p. 384.
7. “The Artworld Revisited,” p. 38.
8. Ibid., p. 37.
9. “Defining Art,” American Philosophical Quarterly, July 1969, 254.
10. Aesthetics: An Introduction (Indianapolis, 1971), p. 101; Art and the Aesthetic (Ithaca, NY, 1974), p. 34.
11. The Art Circle (New York, 1984), p. 80.
12. “The Artworld Revisited,” p. 38.
13. Ibid., p. 40.
14. Ibid., p. 42.
15. Ibid., p. 40.
16. Ibid., p. 41.
17. Danto, “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33, 1974, 139.
18. Ibid., p. 148.
19. Danto, “Artworks and Real Things,” reprinted in Aesthetics: A Critical Anthology, ed. G. Dickie and R. Sclafani (London, 1989), p. 561.
20. Arthur C. Danto, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 33, ed. Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago, 2011).