Chapter 14
Danto's Aesthetic
Is It Truly General As He Claims?
Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the whole range of man-made things, including all tools and writing in addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic things of the world. By this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the history of art.
George Kubler1
Philosophers traditionally have believed that their arguments have absolutely general validity. When describing action, history, or knowledge, they think that their analysis applies to every period of Western society and to everyone, male or female, gay or straight, of any religion in every culture. When Descartes gave his cogito argument, he thought that he identified the nature of every rational person in every society. And when his successors – Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Quine – rejected many of his claims, they too claimed to offer universally valid arguments. Technologies and social institutions have changed dramatically. Unlike the ancients, we believe in feminism, gay rights, and inclusive democracy. And thanks to Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and their successors, our knowledge of astronomy, biology, physics, and psychology has advanced dramatically. When Plato describes justice and the nature of things, he depends upon a worldview that has long been obsolete. Imagine him to meet with a professor of philosophy with air conditioning, a powerbook and printer, and a telephone in her office. It might take him a long time to understand these technologies. But he would, with some brief coaching in the history of post-Platonic philosophy, be able be able to understand her arguments. Within the humanities, many recently influential scholars are radical historicists and relativists. Once you see how rapidly the entire society has changed, how can you preserve ahistorical ways of thinking? And once you note how diverse are cultures, how can you hold onto European styles of thinking? Philosophy stands out in the present-day academic world because it rejects historicism and relativism.
Cultures outside of Europe have languages, political institutions, and religions radically different from ours. Hindus are polytheists; Muslims traditionally practiced polygamy; some Buddhists were atheists. And China, India, and the Islamic world have histories very unlike Europe's. But philosophers believe that their styles of analysis are valid for all cultures. Translating Chinese nature philosophies, Hindu metaphysics, and Islamic ethical theories we find variations on familiar Western ways of thinking. Philosophers have grand confidence in the universality of their arguments because they rely upon reason, which they think a universal human power. Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, and Islam have strikingly different beliefs about the origin of our world, and the role of divinity in its history. But when Buddhists, Christians, Daoists, Hindus, and Muslims reason, they speak in terms that we can recognize. Subtracting out merely parochial differences, which are due to the diverse languages and traditions of these cultures, we find shared ways of thinking. Scientific theories change when new discoveries are made. And empirical studies of human culture need modification as our culture changes and when we encounter others. Philosophy, by contrast, develops only when better arguments are discovered.
Before there is sustained intimate contact with other cultures, people tend to assume that their ways of reflecting are natural, and so universally valid. And so it is usually shocking to discover that others think in quite different ways. The long story of the often-troubled relationships between Christianity and Islam and, also, the history of European discoveries of exotic cultures frequently revealed radical misunderstandings. When the Portuguese sailors led by Vasco da Gama got to India, the Indians
were shown an altarpiece that represented Our Lady at the foot of the cross. . . . When the Indians saw the picture they threw themselves on the deck and uttered extended prayers. . . . Later [they] . . . shouted words the Portuguese heard as “Christ! Christ!”The reality was very different from what Vasco and his men perceived. The image . . . bore a close resemblance to one that Hindus in their region worshipped . . . The words they shouted were actually “Krishna! Krishna!”2
The Portuguese took the Indians to be Christians, “reasoning that they could not be Muslims because the Hindu temples contained images of gods in human form.”3 Once they discovered erotic Hindu temple art, they were outraged. The Muslim view of Hindu culture was no more sympathetic. On his visit to India in the eleventh century the central Asian astronomer al'Biruni was scandalized by “Hindu religious beliefs, sexual habits, and social customs. Taken together, they demonstrated to his satisfaction the ‘essential foulness’ of Indian culture as against the manifest superiority of Islamic institutions.”4
Understanding an exotic culture on its own terms initially is hard.
Looking at the history of cultural encounters, it is natural to wonder if philosophers' belief in the universality of their ways of thinking is not extremely overconfident. Once we observe that our own culture has changed, and discover how different other cultures are, then it is natural to wonder whether an ahistorical, universal point of view is conceivable. And so we have reason to be skeptical about the validity of philosophy's claims. Western moral philosophers seek to provide general theories. But once we look at the beliefs of exotic cultures, we may wonder if that is possible. According to John Rawls' influential theory of justice, our natural talents are undeserved. That may seem an obvious claim, but unlike secular Westerners and some Christians, not everyone thinks this way. “For the Hindus, the Buddhists, the Jains and others, they are the product of the agent's meritorious deeds in his or her past life, and hence amply deserved.”5 If we take seriously their ways of thinking, then it is not obvious that a general theory of justice is possible.
This, then, is the case for historicism and relativism. But it is not the whole story. Although Western institutions have changed dramatically since Plato's time, and other cultures from outside of Europe have diverse, very different worldviews, in fact our essential physical qualities as human beings have not changed. Plato's Greece was a patriarchal culture depending upon slavery; Buddha's India knew nothing of democracy or empirical science; and ancient China had art and nature philosophies very unlike ours. But although on the surface these seem very different cultures from those of our early twenty-first century West, in fact the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese were to a biologist's eye essentially indistinguishable from us. Following Noam Chomsky, linguists have discussed the ways in which all knowable languages have similar deep structures. The same point could be made, more generally, about human cultures. In developing new technologies unimagined by the ancients, in the West or the East, we have not changed our essential physical qualities, which are biologically determined. And so we can stage challenging arguments between Plato, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Quine without worrying too much about developments in Western science and technology from Plato's time to the present. And we are confident that as their Chinese, Indian, and Muslim peers become accessible in translation, these Western philosophers will speak to the same concerns as their colleagues from very different cultures.
Arthur Danto has always worked within this mainline Western tradition. When he writes about the theory of action, historiography, or knowledge he offers arguments describing the nature of action, historical explanation, and knowledge as they occur in all cultures. He has published books about two figures, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, who are outside of this tradition. But his Nietzsche and his Sartre offer arguments, written, admittedly in an unfamiliar language, which engage the concerns of this tradition. At the end of Nietzsche as Philosopher, for example, Danto argues that Nietzsche thought of wills roughly in the way in which Berkeley understood spirits:
Berkeley's ontology consisted in spirits and ideas, and he maintained that ideas were inert, were caused by spirits, and owed their entire existence to being entertained by spirits, so that without spirits, they would not exist, and hence nothing would exist. Nietzsche similarly holds that there are wills and interpretations, that interpretations have no validity except in relationship to a will, that in a special sense wills cause interpretations, and that without wills there would be nothing.6
And in Jean-Paul Sartre, the table of contents translates that philosopher's exotic vocabulary into Danto's analytic idiom. What Sartre calls “absurdity” is “language and existence”; “nothingness” is “consciousness and ontology”; “engagement” becomes “knowledge, action, and the world”; “shame” is “the problem of other minds”; and “anguish” the study of “factual beliefs and moral attitudes.”
This system of bitularity may be taken in the spirit of a translational dictionary. . . . The meanings of terms in the existentialist and nonexistentialist vocabularies are no more radically untranslatable into one another than those, say, in English and French.7
Danto's Sartre then speaks to our concerns.
Starting with Arthur Schopenhauer, Western philosophers started to look seriously at other philosophical traditions. But doing this did not change their faith in their ability to offer universally valid arguments. Schopenhauer learned from Indian philosophy how to extend Plato's metaphysics in a way that challenged Hegel's. Danto himself argues, in his book on Eastern philosophy, that philosophy was invited twice, in ancient Greece and in India. These cultures had very different religious beliefs, but they developed rather similar philosophical arguments, which thus are of general interest. The Indians, he argues, “have appreciated (knowledge) in thoroughly practical terms. In this they were like the Greeks.”8 As for the classical Chinese philosophers, their view “that misperception, especially in moral matters, rested upon misdescription” is linked to familiar recent Western concerns:
Knowledge of the way is a matter of performance and execution: of doing something rather than believing something that is true: it is knowing how, in Gilbert Ryle's influential (and unwittingly Taoist) disjunction, in contrast with knowing that (something is the case).9
With proper translations, we can understand the arguments of the Indian and Chinese philosophers, subtracting out the merely parochial ways in which they depend upon specifically Indian and Chinese culture and history
This, then, is Danto's style of analytic analysis, which is the dominant way of thinking amongst present-day American academic philosophers. There is, however, another opposed Western tradition, less influential until recently. When Vico and Herder pointed to the ways in which a culture's worldview depended upon parochial beliefs; and when Nietzsche and, following him, Foucault, talked about perspectivism: then they took historicism very seriously. In the eighteenth century,
Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human. . . . Before the late eighteenth century, no one thought that the differences between human beings had this kind of moral significance. There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else's life.10
According to Herder, so Isaiah Berlin says,
[we] can, by the force of imaginative insight, understand . . . the values, the ideals, the forms of life of another culture or society, even those remote in time or space. . . . if they open their minds sufficiently they can grasp how one might . . . live in the light of values widely different from one's own.11
There are many diverse social systems. Since each has real value, we try to understand every other culture on its own terms. “All genuine expressions of experience are valid.”12 Once we note how much ways of thinking vary from one culture to another, then such pluralism may be plausible.
Descartes and his successors worked within Western Christian culture, and so it is natural to wonder whether their ways of thinking have general validity. Danto, not himself religious, describes his philosophical system as essentially Cartesian. But if you look at the body of Descartes' writings, then the idea that he is a philosopher whose arguments can be detached from his theology, his physics, his optics, and his rudimentary neurology may seem problematic. His Meditations, I grant, look more like modern philosophy publications, though without the footnotes. But since Descartes' aim is to establish the eternal existence of the soul and the Christian God, clearly Danto's philosophy moves in different directions. He detaches Descartes' epistemology from this theology, which does not interest him, and from his science, which is obsolete. In some obvious ways, Descartes was a man of his own times. He thought that human beings had eternal souls and that it was thanks to an omniscient God that we had knowledge. He knew nothing of evolution, modern astronomy, or neurology. Nevertheless, Danto thinks that Descartes' philosophy remains of living interest. An atheist can use Descartes' ways of thinking by abstracting them from their cultural context.
Perhaps the generality of philosophers' claims is compatible with historicism. Our ways of understanding of human nature have changed dramatically, but still, it may be, there is some significant overlap in how we moderns and Descartes understand persons. What we learn from Freud, Marx, and the cognitive psychologists may complement the older ways of thinking. This, it could be argued, is why we are able, still, to understand the literature and art of older European cultures. And it is why, after we learn the languages and study the local traditions, we Westerners can understand the books and art of other societies. When we read of the ancient Greeks, or the histories of China, India, and the Islamic world, we find recognizable patterns of behavior. These peoples have religious worldviews very unlike ours, but we can understand their actions. Could earlier Western culture or other cultures have totally different ways of thinking from ours? Human nature, it might be argued, has not changed that dramatically, because our biology has not.
This discussion raises questions of great general interest, which are very difficult to resolve. My present concern, however, is merely with one special part of Danto's philosophical system, his account of visual art. He claims to offer a general aesthetic, and so gives a definition describing all art forms – literature, music, performance, and also visual art. But in practice, most of Danto's attention is devoted to the visual arts. As we will see, historicism, relativism, and multiculturalism have special significance for the philosopher dealing with visual art. Danto has always said that his aesthetic, like his account of action, history, and knowledge, is absolutely general. His definition of art describes works of art in all cultures. In making that claim, he goes against the dominant ways of thinking of his fellow art critics, and also, I believe, of most art historians.
In the early 1980s, Danto made an important transition, moving from philosophy to art criticism. Having published his treatise on aesthetics, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, he turned to reviewing. This was an amazing transition. Few men of almost sixty are supple enough to change careers so dramatically. But it meant that Danto's audience was then divided. Few philosophers interested in his aesthetic theory know much about criticism, and most readers of his art criticism knew very little about philosophy. In America, during the 1980s critics were too often nourished on an unhealthy diet of secondhand Derrida and Foucault. And so few within the art world were able to evaluate Danto's philosophical claims.
The central concern of philosophical aesthetics is to define art. Until we know what art is, we cannot properly describe its history, interpret it, or explain why it is significant. Following Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and also Danto have identified the necessary and sufficient conditions required for something to be a work of art. In looking at the history of these definitions of art, the questions posed by historicism, relativism, and multiculturalism, are especially pressing. Within the West the forms of art have changed dramatically over time. Some philosophers thought that art was representation. But then abstract art was created. Other aestheticians said that art was expression. But then works of art that were not expressive were created. No one in 1850 could have imagined cubism; and in 1910, who could have imagined conceptual art? This is why the older general definitions of art are no longer acceptable. Given that such radically new forms of art have been developed relatively recently, why should that process not continue? Video art is a popular novel artform, and so now we find art employing the web and other computer-based approaches. As other novel technologies are developed, artists may also employ them. When we look to China, India, and the Islamic world we find very different forms of art. Chinese use scroll paintings; Indians sculpt Hindu gods; Muslims make calligraphy and decoration. Many of these works of art look very different from ours. And because the Chinese, Indians, and Muslims have exotic customs, political institutions, and religions, we can reasonably expect that their art will be unlike ours. And so it is natural to ask if Western-style definitions will accommodate this art.
Consider some problems with the account of the philosopher of art most admired by Danto. Hegel's lectures on aesthetics given in Berlin in the 1820s construct a timeline running from Egypt to contemporary Romanticism. In Egypt “building works whether below or above ground are linked with a realm of the dead, as in general a realm of the invisible makes its home and occurs in Egypt for the first time.”13 Amongst the Greeks, the artist “can set the empirical detail of particular incidents in complete and . . . individual harmony with the general forms of the human figure . . . the universal element of the content . . . is given to him by mythology and tradition.”14 In the Renaissance the situation was different, for “painting proceeded more and more to associate life in the external world with religious subjects. The cheerful and powerful self-reliance of the citizens with their industriousness, their trade and commerce, their freedom . . . all this is what entered artistic treatment and portrayal and asserted itself there.”15 And, finally, in the Golden Age of Holland, painters “link supreme freedom of artistic composition, fine feeling for incidentals, and perfect carefulness in execution, with freedom and fidelity of treatment, love for what is evidently momentary and trifling, the freshness of open vision, and the undivided concentration of the whole soul on the tiniest and most limited things.”16
Hegel's greatest precursor, Giorgio Vasari, offered an account covering the relatively short period from Cimabue to his own time, from 1280 to 1550. Focusing his attention on art made by Tuscans, Vasari provides some discussion of painting in Venice, and a few notes on Flemish painting. Compared with Vasari, Hegel offers an extremely ambitious account which looks back to ancient Egypt and forward to his own time. The methodology of these two art writers differs in an instructive way. Vasari treats Cimabue and Michelangelo as having the same goals. “I know not what would have been said of” Giotto, he notes, “if he had lived in the time of (Michelangelo) Buonarroti.”17 Hegel, by contrast, is a historicist. The Dutch masters did not seek to rival their Italian precursors:
The poetical fundamental trait permeating most of the Dutch painters . . . consists of this treatment of man's inner nature and its external and living forms and its modes of appearance, this naïve delight and artistic freedom, this freshness and cheerfulness of imagination, and this assured boldness of execution.18
Artists in a Protestant mercantile culture have different goals from Italian Catholics. “Hegel regards objects as sending forth echoes of the spirit.”19 As Spirit evolves, artists' concerns change.
Hegel thought that Africa had no history and that China and India created no art of real significance. Developing an idea that has much influenced Danto, he argued that the history of art ended in his own day, in the 1820s. And so he could not have anticipated impressionism, cubism, futurism, dada, surrealism, abstract expressionism, arte povera, and other more recent movements. No philosopher could reasonably be expected to predict such developments of the distant future. The problem, however, is that Hegel argued that there could be no such future developments. Once we discover these limitations of his analysis, why should we think that any such general philosophical definition of art could be satisfactory? If the past is any guide, art shall continue to change in unexpected ways, requiring new criteria for its interpretation. And then our great-great-grandchildren may think of Danto as we think of Hegel, as a magnificently original thinker who, presenting the aesthetic of his day, could not have anticipated their artworld.
A definition of art must deal with changes in European art and it must also cover exotic art. For the philosopher, art seems to have a different status from action, history, and knowledge. People in all cultures act and know; and they have a history, though perhaps some take less interest than we do in recording their history. A culture that knew nothing of action, history, or knowledge seems impossible. But art seems, by comparison, a relatively superficial feature of a society. China and Europe share a fascination with fine cooking, but other cultures are too puritanical, too poor, or simply too little interested in food to develop elevated culinary standards. It is not hard, similarly, to imagine a culture that had no art.
Although Danto the art critic has very wide-ranging interests, the examples of Danto the aesthetician almost always come from Western art. Were a sociologist of religion to offer a general theory based solely upon Christianity and Judaism, it would be natural to wonder whether his analysis applied also to Buddhism, Daoism, and Hinduism. Danto's working procedure raises similar problems. But the philosopher, of course, is not a mere sociologist, who gathers examples and then offers a description, which may need to be revised when further examples are gathered. After describing the nature of knowledge and our relationship to the world the philosopher offers a very general account of the identity of art. Just as Descartes' epistemology derives from an abstract argument which, if correct, must be general, so the same is true of an adequate philosophical definition of art.
China, India, and the Islamic world have histories and worldviews unlike ours. But noting these dramatic differences is compatible with a general theory of action, historiography, and knowledge. How someone acts depends upon their beliefs, and so to understand the actions of Muslims, Hindus, and Chinese we need to know their beliefs. As Danto says: “The civilizations of the East are defined through sets of factual and moral propositions pragmatically connected in the minds of their members since it is with reference to certain factual beliefs that these members would judge and act as moralists.”20
We understand how someone acts by putting ourselves in his shoes, temporarily, as a philosopher says, “taking on for the purpose of the exercise . . . his outlook and preconceptions.”21 Historians do this to bring alive historically distant political actors:
It was the young Zhu Yuanzhang's nature to be serious; he pondered life's choices carefully and took action cautiously. At a time when a dozen upstarts like himself were claiming the title of emperor or were being pushed into it by their ambitious handlers, he began quite early on to examine the options.22
This narrative presents the exotic world of fourteenth-century China, assimilating it to the terms of a familiar psychology. We know people like Zhu Yuanzhang, and so are prepared to understand his actions. In his canonical account of interpretation, Donald Davidson writes:
Kurt utters the words “Es regnet” and under the right conditions we know that he has said that it is raining. Having identified his utterance as intentional and linguistic, we are able to go on to interpret his words: we can say what his words, on that occasion meant.23
To understand Zhu Yuanzhang, we need to identify the relationship between his beliefs and actions. In that way, he is like a Western politician.
Davidson describes language, not works of art, but his analysis is suggestive for our purposes. In interpreting artifacts from exotic cultures, art history also aspires to understand what the artist intended. We understand Chinese landscapes by learning about Buddhist and Daoist theories of nature. And we comprehend Islamic decorative art by studying Islamic views of God and beauty. Knowing the cultural contexts, we identify the artists' intentions. Danto's Analytic Philosophy of History provides a general account of historical explanation. Although the examples are drawn from Europe's history, his analysis applies to all cultures. India was colonized first by Muslims and then by Europeans. China, unlike India, always maintained its independence but was for a time ruled by native Marxists. Islam, unlike either China or India, remains at war with Europe and America, now as during the Renaissance. China, Europe, India, and the Islamic world thus have very different histories. But the stories of all these cultures can be told using Danto's narrative sentences to link events, explaining what happens.
Let us go back to a discussion of Danto's definition of art by considering the account given by Richard Wollheim, who in the English-speaking world is Danto's only serious late twentieth-century rival as aesthetician. Because Wollheim offers a historical definition, identifying the problems with such an analysis will help highlight the way that Danto motivates his claims. Wollheim's Art and Its Objects begins by asking: “What is art?”24 He considers a variety of arts – architecture, dance, literature, music, and also paintings. It is not easy to find their common features. Suppose, then, that we consider just visual art. What are the common features of paintings and sculptures by Giotto, Michelangelo, and Cézanne? European visual art has changed so radically that answering this answer is difficult.
Defining art, Wollheim suggests, requires a historical analysis: “We should, first, pick out certain objects as original or primary works of art; and . . . then set up some rules which, successively applied to the original works of art, will give us . . . all subsequent or derivative works of art.”25 If we identify the original works of art, then we can derive from them all other later art. In his fine phrase: “Art is essentially historical.”26 And so in order to pick out those representations and expressive things that are works of art we need a historical analysis. We might start with a Renaissance painting, for example, and then, following the formalists, derive more recent works of art. In Velázquez's Surrender of Breda, Heinrich Wölfflin explains, the “handing over of the fortress keys with the meeting of the two main figures in profile, is in principle nothing else than is contained in the handing over of ecclesiastical keys or Christ and St Peter in [Raphael's] Feed my Lambs.”27 Once we have thus understood how Velázquez leads to Raphael, we can in further easy stages trace the history of more recent European art. We can, for example, identify the link between cubism and abstract expressionism: “Pollock's 1946–1950 manner really took up Analytical Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braque had left it when, in their collages of 1912 and 1913, they drew back from the utter abstractness for which Analytical Cubism seemed headed.”28 One need not be a formalist to find Clement Greenberg's genealogy extremely seductive.
Art and its objects defines art by using two key concepts, representation and expression. Traditional works of art, from Europe as from China and India, are expressive representations. To understand art, we need to analyze representation and expression in a suitably general way. But when Wollheim admits that his definition of art needs, rather, to focus on history, he then moves in a very different direction.29 Let us start, for example, with Giotto and, with Vasari's aid, apply rules deriving the paintings of Masaccio, Piero, and Raphael. Now, then, we are concerned not with the very general concepts of representation and expression, but with the developments within this single tradition. Wollheim thus offers what he thinks a completely general aesthetic, applicable to all cultures, only because he secularizes Western art.30 In that way, his approach contrasts to Hegel's, which treats all art, even modern Romantic art, as expressing spiritual concerns. Before the late eighteenth century, most of the most important European art served religious goals. In that way, Western art was much like that of China, India, and Islam. If it is detached from its roots in religious life, we may be tempted to think this painting and sculpture shares universal features. But if we focus on the differences in the religions of China, Europe, India, and Islam, then we are less likely to seek a general aesthetic.
Just as we understand Europe's art historically, so too with other traditions. Knowing, for example, that Li Kung'lin (1040–1106) imitated T'ang masters such as Wu Tao tzu, we can construct a history of Chinese elite painting.31 Li Kung'lin has little to do with Giotto, Masaccio, Piero, and Raphael; he belongs, rather, to a wholly parallel Chinese tradition. Indeed, the frequent concern of painters in China to rework earlier pictures makes them perfect models of Wollheim's way of defining art. Like an old master European oil painting, a tenth-century ceramic plate made in Persia has figurative elements: “The princely cycle occurs occasionally on northestern Iranian ceramics. but its hunting princes or feasting personages are strongly caricaturized in ways that suggest a general awareness of princely themes but little experience in treating them.”32 And, like European Renaissance sculpture, a dancing eleventh-century bronze from India is expressive:
Shiva . . . dances within a flaming mandorla, symbolizing the energy of the sun; in the dance he tramples on the dwarf demon Muyalaka, who represents ignorance. . . . There is a reassuring serenity radiating from the countenance of this divine image that shines within the orb of the sun.33
Developed in this way, Wollheim's historical procedure supplies definitions of European, Chinese, Indian, and Islamic art, not a general definition of art as such. If we start with these objects, we can derive from them more recent Islamic and Indian works of art. We then have one definition of European art, and other definitions for art from China, India, the Islamic world, and other cultures. This procedure, very useful for the art historians, will not satisfy the philosopher, who seeks an absolutely general definition, adequate to art in all cultures.
Danto adopts a very different procedure in his definition.34 “To be a work of art is to be (i) about something and (ii) to embody its meaning.”35 Built into this definition is Danto's very basic idea that much recent art is visually indiscernible from physically identical things that are not works of art. Brillo Box looks just like a Brillo box, but that ordinary object does not embody any theory of art. This definition thus makes implicit reference to the artist's intentions, which may, since Warhol was not a verbal person, be picked out by study of life in his artworld, the Factory. Danto's theory also works for historical examples. Nicolas Poussin's Orion is about the story of the giant's attack of the goddess Athena, and it embodies that meaning by showing blind Orion watched by her as he walks toward the seashore to restore his sight. Because Danto's definition does not allude to the representational or expressive qualities of traditional art, it is perfectly adapted to the kinds of art produced by Warhol and his contemporaries in the 1960s. But it does also include older art. Figurative paintings like Orion, as much as Brillo Box, are about the meanings they embody.
Danto's Hegelian idea is that works of art are not mere physical things because they express what speaking in suitably grand terms we might identify as a culture's worldview:
What made Pop Art popular is that the meanings its works embodied belonged to the common culture of the time, so that it was as if the boundaries of the art world and of the common culture coincided. . . . The art redeemed the signs that meant enormously much to everyone, as defining their daily lives.36
After introducing the two conditions of his definition, Danto remarks that “I was (and am) insufficiently convinced that they were jointly sufficient to have believed the job done. But I did not know where to go next, and so ended the book.”37 I have always been frustrated that he has not, to my knowledge, pursued this problem. Art critics and historians surely found the other topics of the Mellon lectures – the accounts of modernism, the museum, and the politics of post-historical art – more exciting. But to the philosopher, the definition of art is the central concern. The problem, here I speculate, is that as it stands Danto's definition threatens to be much too broad.
For a Hegelian, all sorts of artifacts are about something and embody their meaning. If someone wanted to understand how our public spaces had changed recently, we could point to the importance of cell phones, computers and the web, and to the new airport security installed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And clothing, does it not express culture? The costume historian Anne Hollander explains how,
after the First World War women's legs were supposed to show, to complete the new stripped format of female looks, which included a new look of fashionable immodesty. Decades later, when the point had been made visually, women could wear long skirts again for pleasure, for ease of movement in the newest mode, or to hide their possibly less-than-perfect legs.38
The development of clothing, she reveals, tells much about cultural history. But although she says, “dress is a form of visual art,” that really is hyperbole. Some museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art for example, display fashion, but we don't normally think of our clothes as works of art, unless we are prosperous enough to frequent famous designers.39 Normal everyday clothing is about our values and embodies that meaning, but it is not a work of art.
As it stands, then, it is not obvious that Danto's definition is narrow enough to include the art in galleries and museums, and exclude all of this apparatus and these institutions which, however, are not works of art. If the disadvantage of traditional definitions of art is that they are too narrow to include post-historical art, then the apparent difficulty with Danto's definition is that it threatens to be too broad. But here I merely point to issues that await further discussion.
Essentialists describe the timeless nature of art; historicists show how our most basic ways of thinking have changed. And so some people think that there is a conflict between these positions. But they are mistaken, for Danto is both an essentialist and, in one limited way, a historicist. Often relativism and historicism are associated, but although Danto is a historicist, he is not a relativist. What is discovered through art's development is its essence. Thanks to Warhol and some other 1960s artists, we know the nature of art. From Plato to Hegel, earlier essentialists misidentified its essence because they did not know the right examples. Some earlier philosophers thought that works of art had to be representations. But abstract paintings were counterexamples to that definition. Other philosophers thought that works of art had to be expressive. But sculptures that were not expressive were counterexamples to that definition. Because the story of art has ended, we can identify its essence.40 Unlike Wollheim, Danto has a definition of art that does not require considering how later art derives historically from what comes earlier. The problem for Wollheim, so we saw, is that once we acknowledge the existence of diverse non-Western artistic traditions, then we have not one, but many definitions of art. Danto does not face this problem, but his claim that the history of art has ended may create others.
Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man argued that modernizing industrialization leads to liberal democracy; the alternatives, fascism and communism, have failed, and so while disaster is possible, in the foreseeable future neither new forms of government nor international wars are likely. History thus has come to an end and that, Fukuyama writes, “will mean the end . . . of all art that could be considered socially useful, and hence the descent of artistic activity into the empty formalism of the traditional Japanese arts.”41 Since Danto and Fukuyama share this Hegelian perspective, we can learn from comparing their accounts. Fukuyama's political history involves the triumph of one system; Danto's art history, pluralism, the coexistence of all possible ways of art making. For Fukuyama, the end comes because one system has triumphed; for Danto, the end arrives because the practice of artists reveals the essence of art. Both men share a certain optimism: in so far as political history ends, that is fortunate, for liberal democracy is better than communism; as art's history ends, the struggles of the American abstract expressionists are replaced by happy play. Hegelians looking at different realms of culture, Fukuyama and Danto locate endings at almost the same moment. Warhol's Brillo Box could be made only in a society with Brillo boxes in its grocery stores, a industrialized liberal democracy.
Danto resists the suggestion that we can relativize talk of endings by allowing that one narrative has ended, but another story goes on. A realist about historiography, he believes in objective narrative structures in the way human events unfold. And so he identifies the ending of his story of art's history with the ending of the story, not just an ending of a particular narrative.42 For Danto, to allow that he has told the end of art's history in one way whilst permitting other narratives to tell an ongoing story, is unacceptable. Writing as an analytic philosopher of action, he spoke of identifying the same action differently under different descriptions; but he has no tolerance for pluralistic narratology. Danto's Hegelian historicism and essentialism about the nature of art are compatible only if history has ended. Only now when nothing essentially new is possible, can we survey the field of artworks, which we can characterize completely because it cannot expand.
How do Fukuyama and Danto identify the end of history, as opposed to the end of one era, or the end of history under a certain description. Further political events take place; new kinds of art are made: why are not these stories of what happens a further history? There are two kinds of unambiguous historical endings: the end of a particular tradition; endings in stasis, like chess endgames. The obvious problem for Fukuyama and Danto is that neither political history nor the history of art have simply stopped. In art comics add the balloon to represent speech and closely connected image sequences; talking movies, 3-D movies, the recent wide-screen images, and the various recent computer image technologies go further. New kinds of objects are added to the artworld. And Robert Mapplethorpe, Mark Tansey, Cindy Sherman, Saul Steinberg, Sean Scully – as written about by Danto – are doing something new. Mapplethorpe's erotic images go further than Warhol's; Scully is very different from his acknowledged precursors, Mondrian and Rothko. Against Fukuyama, analogously, it might be argued that economic warfare between the United States, Germany, and Japan and the ongoing struggles between Muslims and the West replace traditional wars.
On Danto's characterization of their activity, “historians . . . try to make true statements, or to give true descriptions, of events in their past.”43 This is what he does when writing as an art critic – so long as there are additional events which amount to something more than end game moves, further history is possible. In so far as the goal of the historian, so he taught us, is to write narrative sentences, a further history can be written. Danto the art critic keeps writing whilst Danto the aesthetician asserts that the history of art has come to an end. Can the grand philosophical history of art told by Danto end, whilst we have a history for Mapplethorpe, Scully, and the others? This conciliatory way of talking amounts to saying that the history of art continues under one description, but not under another. If the story of art is identified with the history of the discovery of its essential properties, the story told by Plato, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and also Ernst Gombrich and Greenberg, then that history ended with Brillo Box. But why must this very interesting narrative be the history of art?
Danto's ontological history ends because the field of potential art objects expands to include any kind of object; anything could be an artwork when being an artwork is not defined by a thing's visual properties; being an artwork requires being about something and embodying its meaning, as Brillo Box does. We may, if we want, privilege Danto's account by calling it the philosophical history of art. But that is merely a verbal concession. After the End of Art carries the story of art further than Gombrich and Greenberg, building upon their intuition that what art history requires is a narrative history, but outflanking them by showing how their histories of art were demonstrated by Warhol to be incomplete. Greenberg's master narrative about modernism, in which the self-criticality of Manet and his successors leads to cubism, and on to Pollock, requires leaving out salon art, Rodin, pre-Raphaelites, most of Picasso, German expressionism, futurism, dada and surrealism, photography, American realism, and much more. Danto urges in his post-historical era pluralism is possible. Already in Greenberg's era that was true. As the history of modernism is rewritten, it will become clearer that art's situation before Warhol was already post-historical.
Has not Danto the historiographer taught us that a history must be selective, setting events into a pattern as when Gombrich at the end of Art and Illusion can bring in abstract art only via an oddly ad hoc analysis of caricature? Danto overestimates the intrinsic strength of these developmental narratives – which accounts for some of the drama he creates by juxtaposing his own account of the end of art history. I have more problems treating Gombrich's Art and Illusion and Greenberg's Art and Culture as literally true, rather than great quasi-fictions, than he does – hence my problems with his realism. My aim in saying that is not to criticize Gombrich and Greenberg, but to praise them. How admirable is their will to interpret, which permitted them to construct lucid narratives from bewildering evidence. I praise Danto, and call him the logical successor of Gombrich and Greenberg, for the same reason. But in thus praising, I deny Danto's claim that he is describing history as it really is, and not merely offering one imaginative reading of the evidence.
What leaves me very dissatisfied is that because this argument relies on considerations known to Danto, it must fail to grapple with his concerns. What have I failed to understand? Danto's view seems counterintuitive because it combines the historicist's concern with change with an essentialist definition.44 In the twentieth century, many radically original forms of art were created. When art was changing so quickly and radically, then it was natural to think that it had no essence. Defining art seemed a matter of convention. Danto disagrees. Much recent art, he allows, could not have been seen as art by at earlier times. Rodin would not have understood Brillo Box and for Giacometti, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty would have been incomprehensible. But although a work of art is created within a cultural tradition, it “transcends that moment because the meaning is universal and grasped as such by audiences in all subsequent times and in all other cultures.”45
When Danto discusses Chinese art, he says: “Universal works do not tell us about the Chinese, so much as they tell us about ourselves as sharing in the same humanity the Chinese themselves possess.” His aesthetics, like philosophy in general, aspires to universality. “Philosophy's task is to say something true and essentially true of artworks as a class, however stylistically they may vary.”46 But unlike Wollheim, Danto does not develop a historical analysis in which later works of art are derived from earlier ones. Visual art in all cultures may, to speak in Danto's Hegelian idiom, be about something and embody their meaning. For example, Indian and Islamic works of art could be defined by their capacity to be about and embody the doctrines of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. “The overall effect of Hindu art,” a historian of religion writes, “is to convey in the economy of an image, gesture, or poetic phrase the often subtle, complex, and sublime truths of Hindu visionaries . . . [and the] concretization of divine models, the presentation in tangible form of ideal worlds to which Hindus strive to journey.”47 To understand an artistic tradition, these Hegelian accounts suggest, we need to study the supporting cultures.48
Danto is the only analytic philosopher who has developed a serious philosophy of contemporary art. Since the late twentieth-century American artworld is a paradise of philosophical puzzles, it is disappointing that Americans have conducted discussion of aesthetic theory in a vocabulary that mostly is obscure and jargon filled. Now, thanks to the model provided by Danto's writings that situation begins, so I hope, to change.49
Notes
1. George Kubler, The Shape of Time. Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven and London, 1962), p. 1.
2. Ronald Watkins, Unknown Seas: How Vasco da Gama Opened the West (London, 2003), p. 228.
3. Stuart Cary Welch, “Encounters with India: Land of Gold, Spices, and Matters Spiritual,” in Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. Jay A. Levenson, exhibition catalogue (Washington, 1992), p. 364.
4. Jerry H. Bentley, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York, 1993), p. 119.
5. Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 86–7.
6. Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York, 1965), p. 232.
7. Danto, Jean-Paul Sartre (New York, 1975), pp. xiv–xv.
8. Danto, Mysticism and Morality: Oriental Thought and Moral Philosophy (New York, 1987), p. 16.
9. Ibid., p. 103.
10. Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ, 1994), p. 30.
11. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (New York, 1991), pp. 10, 11. See also Michael N. Forster, “Introduction,” Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings, trans. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge, 2002); Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 67–76; Charles Taylor, “The Importance of Herder,” in Isaiah Berlin. A Celebration, eds Edna and Avishai Margalit (London, 1991); and Charles Taylor, “Language and Human Nature,” in his Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge, 1985).
12. Isaiah Berlin, “Herder and the Enlightenment” in his Three Critics of the Enlightenment:Vico, Manann, Herder, ed. Henry Tardy (Princeton and Oxford, 2000), p. 197.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1975), vol. 2, p. 650.
14. Ibid., p. 725.
15. Ibid., pp. 779–80.
16. Ibid., p. 886.
17. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gastondu C. de Vere (New York and Toronto, 1996), vol. 2, p. 1066.
18. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. 2, p. 887.
19. Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven and London, 1982), p. 20.
20. Danto, Mysticism and Morality, p. xvi.
21. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness. An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton and Oxford, 2002), p. 237.
22. F.W. Mote, Imperial China 900–1800 (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1999), p. 552.
23. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, 1984), p. 169.
24. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1980), p. 1.
25. Ibid., p. 143.
26. Ibid., p. 151.
27. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York, n.d.), p. 80.
28. Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston, 1961), p. 218.
29. Wollheim's appeal to a grammar of language, draws on Noam Chomsky's writings. Chomsky explains how native speakers know the rules permitting them to identify grammatical sentences; the art historian seeks to understand the historical transformations of art. Synchronic analysis of language is not easy to match with the diachronic art history. Every native speaker implicitly knows the grammar, but only properly informed viewers can set the paintings in proper historical sequence. Perhaps, then, this appeal to linguistics is a false friend, a product of the prestige circa 1968 of Chomsky's theorizing.
30. My argument draws on Malcolm Bull, “Philistinism and Fetishism, Art History, 17(1), March 1994, 127–31. So far as I know, Wollheim never considered this problem. In Europe, most traditional art was made to serve religious functions. But in a modern secular culture, these older works of art can be detached from their original goals and seen aesthetically. And this is also how to read the history of philosophy, which, traditionally immersed in theological concerns, can be read in a secular way. But it is important to recognize the overlap between our ways of seeing older works of art and how they were viewed in their original cultures. Otherwise we will treat this art as if it was found art, like driftwood or Chinese scholar stones.
31. James Cahill, Treasures of Asia. Chinese Painting (Lausanne, 1960), p. 92.
32. Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven and London, 1973), p. 183.
33. Stanislaw J. Czuma, “Nataraja: Siva as King of Dance,” Interpretations. Sixty-Five Works from the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, 1991), #50.
34. On their differences see Wollheim, “Danto's Gallery of Indiscernibles,” this volume, chapter 2.
35. Danto, After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, 1997), p. 197.
36. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box. The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York, 1992), p. 41.
37. Danto, After the End of Art, p. 195.
38. Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (New York, 1978), pp. 339, 311.
39. But see my “Fashion Desire: Giorgio Armani as Visual Artist,” Art US, forthcoming.
40. I do not here discuss this extremely important claim; see, however, my “Indiscernibles and the Essence of Art: The Hegelian Turn in Arthur Danto's Aesthetic Theory,” in Arthur C. Danto, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 33, eds Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago, 2011).
41. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), p. 320.
42. Danto, After the End of Art, p. 101.
43. Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York, 1985), p. 25.
44. See my “Gombrich and Danto on Defining Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 54(3), Summer 1996, 279–81, which is effectively critiqued in After the End of Art, pp. 193–5.
45. Danto, “Replies to Essays,” this volume, chapter 17, p. 296.
46. Danto, “Replies to Essays,” this volume, chapter 17, p. 301.
47. David R. Kinsley, Hinduism. A Cultural Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1993), p. 70.
48. See, however, Oliver Leaman, Islamic Aesthetics: An Introduction (Notre Dame, IN, 2004) which, without mentioning Danto, rejects such Hegelian theories.
49. This essay is for Thomas McEvilley, in thanks for what I have learned from his great book, The Shape of Ancient Thought (New York, 2002), which studies the trade in ideas between ancient Greece and Asia. Some portions are borrowed from my A World Art History and Its Objects (University Park and London, 2008). I thank Danto for reading that manuscript and, also, this essay. And I borrow parts of my unpublished “Ernst Gombrich, Clement Greenberg, Arthur C. Danto: Narratology and Its Politics,” given at Bielefeld author-conference on Arthur C. Danto, April 18, 1997.