Chapter 16
Looking Beyond the Visible
The Case of Arthur Dantwo
Picture Arthur C. Danto, that splendid and humane philosopher known to wander between his Columbia University office and Riverside Drive home with the distracted air characteristic of thinkers in his discipline. He wears a floppy hat at times, flamboyantly closer to an eighteenth-century Gainsborough than a scholar's mortarboard, that recalls the nineteenth-century impressionists he loves – it allows some wispy white hair to peek out from under. On encountering an acquaintance, he often smiles beguilingly, in keeping with his reputation for geniality and warmth.
Fellow philosophers of art feel that they know this Danto. One familiar with him over the years describes him as “noticeably hospitable to Hegelian and broadly phenomenological currents.”1 Another describes him as “avowedly Hegelian” in the spirit of his recent work, though an “analytic aesthetician” in method – a thinker still eager for a definition of art that, in Danto's own words, “will not be threatened by historical overthrow.”2 In bold analytical style, he declared in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace that “if anything I write fails to apply throughout the world of art, I shall consider that a refutation.”3 Later, in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, he expressed the view that “philosophy wants to be more than universal: it wants necessity as well: truth for all the worlds that are possible.”4 Indeed, while this Danto has recently referred to himself in Beyond the Brillo Box as a “born-again Hegelian,” he does it in quotation marks, admitting that he is “uncertain” how much of the larger body of Hegel's thought he is “capable of accepting.”5
This Danto is seen, after his own invitation, as a realist about objects though an idealist about artworks (it's a mark of his Hegelianism that he doesn't mind accepting a distinct ontological realm for artworks, so long as it's not taken to be a rigid set of objects in the world). He believes in systematic philosophy, a philosophy that tries to answer all the questions instead of fudging them or throwing its hands up. He's Hegelian enough to assert that the history of art, if not all history, must be “an ordered history” with “an internal structure and even a kind of necessity” that gives it one direction rather than another. This Danto has written a number of books, including the three efforts in the philosophy of art mentioned above, said to corroborate the “part-Hegelian, part-Analyst” view of him.
In addition to all his philosophical work, this Danto is a superb, hardworking, engage art critic for The Nation – though it's not clear how that relates to his Hegelianism. What is clear is that this Danto, despite hailing from the Columbia department dominated for many years by John Dewey and his strain of American pragmatism, rarely utters the “P” word, and seems disaffected from those who utter the “N” word – “Neo-pragmatism,” the updated version most associated with Richard Rorty. Indeed, one fellow philosopher of art, David Novitz, thinks this Danto so intent on keeping art apart from life, contra the pragmatist inclination, that he ascribes to him “the view that art which attempts to disturb the boundaries between art and life is futile,” and that “art should not be seen as deeply integrated into everyday life.”6
This view, alas, squares very poorly with a passage written by Danto himself in Transfiguration: “I have inveighed against the isolation of artworks from the historical and generally causal matrices from which they derive their identities and structures. The ‘work itself’ thus presupposes so many causal connections with its artistic environment that an ahistorical theory of art can have no philosophical defense.”7
Or was this passage written by this Danto?
You see, there's another figure, also sighted regularly around Morningside Heights, who is often confused with this Danto. Even the best Morningside Heights experts find it impossible to discern any visible difference between this second figure, locally known as Danto II, and the Danto described above – usually dubbed Danto I when uncertainty of reference threatens. Danto II also favors a floppy hat at times, betrays wispy curls below the hat, and shows a degree of good cheer indistinguishable from that of Danto I. His bibliography mirrors Danto I's: the books bear the same titles, even the same words in the same order. One should not be surprised at the startling congruity, since both men have written that it's “not at all difficult to imagine two quite sustained pieces of writing which belong to relevantly distinct genres, without there being so much difference as a semi-colon.”8
But this Danto, according to observers, is no Hegelian. He's a full-blooded pragmatist who might well have signed on to many of the classical articulations of that flexible creed. There are moments, for instance, when his artworld reminds one of Peirce's ideal community of minds, whose views are likely to converge in the long run. There are times that his vigorous notion of interpretation, with its required skills of the historian, critic, and journalist, reminds one of Dewey's experimentalism. A Hegelian onlooker might say a spirit of pragmatism – an opposition to eternally fixed criteria for art, an appreciation of the importance of cultural contexts in assessing beliefs, a concern with the consequences of applying concepts, and the link of those concepts to human purposes – moves throughout his work. His entire philosophy of art, in fact, rises from the sort of real-world problem – indiscernibility between an artwork and a non-artwork perceptually just like it – that pragmatists prefer as a source of philosophical perplexity.
Some of the same philosophers terribly chummy with Danto I occasionally show familiarity with Danto II. Even Richard Shusterman, who writes in Pragmatist Aesthetics that Danto's attempt at a social and historical understanding of art is, like that of other analytic aestheticians, “very narrow, internalistic, and rarified compared to Dewey's,” finds that in some respects, Danto II “converges promisingly with pragmatist aesthetics.”9 Of course, he also holds this of Danto I – it's a difficulty for all concerned that the pragmatist passages in the work of Danto II also appear in Danto I, just as the Hegelian passages of Danto I permeate Danto II. One might expect that just as Peirce and Dewey acknowledged their debts to Hegel while turning on him, Danto II might overtly note some links between his pragmatism and Hegelianism, but he is as silent on this point as Danto I. Not everything is possible at every time.
Both Danto I and Danto II patronize a number of the same shops along Broadway. One might think that the owners, eager to keep separate accounts separate, could provide a clue on how to tell the two Dantos apart. After asking, however, one intuits that they prefer to tease inquirers on this subject. When asked “How do you tell the two Dantos apart?”, five separate owners – who look suspiciously alike, but no matter – answer in exactly the same words: “It's easy – but you can't do it just by looking.” At which point, they smile inscrutably, and return to their discernibly different tasks.
The shop-owners may be in cahoots with at least one of the Dantos, and possibly both, because one thing well known about both Dantos is that they're obsessed with pairs of visually indiscernible objects. Inspection of their identical texts over the years shows them dealing with Warhol's Brillo Boxes and its grocery store inspiration; Duchamp's Fountain and a non-anointed urinal; a can-opener and its artwork counterpart; a tie painted blue by Picasso and an identical one painted by a child; identical red paintings; Lichtenstein's brushstroke painting of 1965 and an imagined counterpart in 1865; the 1980 Manhattan telephone directory and a novel with the same content; a Leonardo Last Judgment and a perceptually indiscernible wall of stains; Duchamp's In Advance of a Broken Arm and a snow shovel, and so on.
The immediate aim of the examples in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is to help persuade us of a theory of artworks, of art history and its relation to philosophy, and incidentally of particular notions of expression, interpretation, rhetoric, and metaphor. Indirectly, however, it also forces us to ask questions about what it means to look beyond the visible in trying to tell visually identical things apart. What do we see when we “look beyond the visible”? Do we “see” anything at all? Is use of an ocular verb for anything beyond visual perception a metaphor that confuses whatever it touches – or rather doesn't touch? Consider any situation in which a person, visually experiencing an object or event, acts to acquire more information than the person believes is obtainable through pure visual experience of the object or event. Would we be better off saying that the person is “ranging beyond the visible,” “investigating beyond the visible,” “gathering information beyond the visible,” “researching beyond the visible,” or “interpreting beyond the visible”?
One of the oddities of the views expounded by Danto I and Danto II in their four major books in the philosophy of art – the two separate books called The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and the two separate books called The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (Danto II uses the same titles, having agreed to forgo his Roman numeral in homage to his better-known colleague) – is that they tell us very little about the concrete philosophical, critical, or journalistic obligations of the philosopher/critic who tries to look beyond the visible in determining artworks from non-artworks. Both men make it clear that such a thinker needs to do something – interpretation – but provide no guide to technique. Yet one needs some working technique. Do people looking beyond the visible have a free hand, so to speak, in regard to how to do it? Or are their possible actions constrained by assumptions we have about what it means to look beyond the visible in order to better understand the visible?
How one looks beyond the visible assumes particular importance because, according to both Dantos, it amounts to what philosophers do if they're going to be more than reporters. After all, philosophical problems, according to both Dantos, can be seen as developing from the recognition that two things that appear to be identical are not, then finding what it is that makes them different: the problems arise “whenever we have indiscernibles belonging as it were to different philosophical kinds.” Good reporters, presumably, can handle the purely descriptive task of telling us that two things are perceptually different, or perceptually indiscernible. It's the philosopher who needs to perform beyond that. At one time, Danto I took the issue of “What Philosophy Is” quite seriously. Indeed, in a now superseded book of that title, he called the discipline's “self-querying” question “crucial.” (It is not clear whether Danto II has also published a book on this subject.)
For a long time, clearing up exactly what it means to look beyond the visible hasn't been an urgent matter for Morningside Heights types who deal with the dual Dantos. The two of them seem to keep out of each other's way, and the shop-owners seem to know some difference that allows them to make a distinction. But trouble has been brewing recently because a new Encyclopedia of Aesthetics looms on the horizon. An editorial battle has been taking place. Some of the editors think Danto I should be given a separate entry, and that Danto II should be ignored. The others think Danto II, on the contrary, is the major figure, in tune with his times and certainly more likely to last. (“If we really need an entry on a Hegelian,” says a helpful graduate student, “can't we drum up a quick one on J. Glenn Gray?”)
The dispute has triggered the usual near-riot among civilized scholars, which is how this bystander got involved. “Needed!” read the advertisement on the Copying Center bulletin board. “Doppelganger expert to go through the four key works of the Dantos on philosophy of art. You should pay careful attention to any language that suggests Hegelian or pragmatic leanings. You should go beyond the visible in figuring out what's up, and come back with a report that tells us, in a Danto-like spirit, which of the Dantos is a work of art as a philosopher – the kind that should adorn a reference book – and which is just an object in the set of all objects who are philosophers.”
Nothing was mentioned about pay. But it seemed more interesting than copying things for a living.
In fact, the exercise proved confusing because, as noted above, Danto I writes many things that sound pragmatist, and Danto II writes many things that sound Hegelian. One also has to reckon with the widely held view among insiders that they've secretly collaborated on the texts. But a synopsis of the report follows. Since the texts of the two thinkers are identical, I quote from one thinker or the other as my purpose varies. For the sake of efficiency and tradition, I eschew the recent trendy device of referring to them, in the singular, as “Dantwo.” The reader should simply keep in mind that one is always, in the nature of the case, quoting both members of our visually indiscernible pair. My own practice is to refer simply to “Danto” except in cases where – being an aficionado of the collaborationist theory myself – I suspect that Danto I or Danto II actually wrote the lines in question. In such cases, I honor one or the other with his Roman numeral.
It's not clear how Danto II ever got involved in the writing of the Danto books. Observers have wondered why a pragmatist would want to write books that contain only some sentences a pragmatist would be proud of, but many others that violate pragmatist beliefs. Some say that Danto II suffers certain philosophical incapacities, and that it was only through Danto I's generosity that he got into print in the first place. Others claim that his occasional frequenting of the top floor of Philosophy Hall made him determined to introduce pragmatist thoughts into contemporary texts produced by Columbia philosophers, and Danto I simply seemed the most compatible faculty member. There is a third theory – that Danto II believes the Danto books on philosophy of art are artworks themselves, huge pragmatist interventions into the body cultural, and their cognitive content hardly matters. A fourth, cynical view, floated by graduate students, is that Danto II gets to write all The Nation criticism, and go to all the art openings (Danto I, these insiders say, would only leave the house for a personal appearance by the Absolute). The mystery about motivations remains. What can be said is that Danto II plays more than a mere cameo role in Transfiguration and Disenfranchisement. At the same time, no one could say he directly co-opts the books. In fact, one sometimes perceives him suffering between the lines. Thanks to breakthrough videotape equipment generously lent by the School of the Arts, it is possible for us to observe him during the period these texts were being created with, it appears, his collaboration or sufferance.
Danto introduced the singular approach to art elaborated in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace in his 1964 article, “The Artworld.” There he dwelled upon Warhol's puzzling effigies of Brillo cartons. Why, he enquired, were Warhol's objects “art” when ordinary Brillo cartons weren't? The answer, he suggested in a much-quoted phrase, depended on “something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” It was his first working answer to what one encounters when one looks beyond the visible.
Longer explanations and firmer commitments came in Transfiguration, where he argues that works of art are best regarded as objects requiring interpretation. Adapting one of Wittgenstein's famous questions to art, he imagines a square red painting entitled “Red Square,” and asks, “What is left over when we subtract the red square of canvas from ‘Red Square’?” Answering such a question, Danto maintains, is essential to answering another: “Why is something a work of art when something exactly like it is not?” His own response arises from the conviction that artworks make points about the presentation of their content not offered by identical objects, which simply present that content. The special points made by art invite interpretation.
The outside observer, combing the text for evidence of pragmatist sympathies amid Hegelian and analytic agendas, might immediately take pleasure from the thought that the firm link between the action of interpretation and status of an object as an artwork mirrors the powerful pragmatist concern for the intimate connection between thought and action. The set-up seems to disfavor not just the mimetic theory of art, but the traditional scenario opposed by pragmatism of a subject knowing whether an object is a work of art, regardless of any action in regard to it, the way a distant spectator at the racetrack knows that those are horses trotting on to the field.
In fact, the outside observer soon learns that he should no more exult in stray pragmatist scenery than a Republican candidate should cheer up because one voter in Soho offers her support. The encouragement for pragmatists, as we shall see, lies elsewhere. Pragmatist flora pop up throughout the text, but often like flowers between rocks. For instance, in asking us, at the beginning of Transfiguration, to consider that the difference between an artwork and an indistinguishable real thing “could not consist in what the artwork and the indistinguishable real thing had in common – which could be everything that was material and open to immediate comparative observations,” Danto also indicates a more traditional, objectivist desire to cover the waterfront – to take account of data that must be covered. Believing that “any definition of art must compass the Brillo boxes,” he considers it “plain that no such definition can be based upon an examination of art works.”10
Danto calls this the insight that equipped him with the method of the book, but it also reveals the paramount influence of Danto I, whose belief that the definition of art has to cover the Brillo boxes can be seen as the commitment that either (1) it must cover them because, as a matter of historical fact, they have been considered artworks; or (2) it must cover them because Danto himself considers them artworks, though he might allow his definition not to cover some other object, recognized by some as a work of art, but not by Danto.
Plainly, Danto II, if he chose to join battle early on and oppose the kind of notion that Dewey might consider premature and certainly “pre-inquiry” – that there are artworks already lying around to be covered – he could object that a definition of art need not compass the Warhol boxes. Mary Mothersill, for example, has suggested that Danto begs a key question here by assuming rather than proving that objects like Warhol's Brillo Boxes are works of art, and that Duchamp's readymades were breakthroughs rather than marginalia. Caligula, she observes, also sought to make a statement by declaring his horse a senator, “but suppose he had replaced the entire senate. . . . Wouldn't the joke have begun to wear thin?”11
Yet Danto II keeps mum, for reasons that will ultimately become clear. Still, the inevitability of the issue early in Transfiguration moves one to attend to a question: if candidacy for interpretation is the criterion by which Danto determines the subset of all objects that must be compassed as artworks – even granting that the subset occupies a distinct ontological level, and perhaps is best not considered a set once the contents become artworks – what does that interpretation amount to concretely? Is one artist or gallery owner with the will to exhibit, or one critic with the desire to interpret, enough to leverage the object out of the world of real things into the realm of artworks? Another question might also arise for Danto II: Does the status of artwork cling to an object once bestowed, or can an object move in and out of the status of artwork? The question locates a possible entry point into Danto's pragmatist temper – if such exists – for he suggests at several points that the right organizational concept for artworks is perhaps not a set, but a “community.” And if that metaphor is in order, so may be notions of immigration and emigration.
Danto's remark in the preface that traditional, well-intentioned definitions of art after Warhol might, in the face of artistic revolutions, be “without any purchase” on “brave new artworks,” also signals a non-static, pragmatic sense of what might turn out to be an artwork, since art, like much else in life, must adapt to changing human purposes. In Danto's view, a definition of art after Warhol must accommodate almost anything that might be presented, since no physical state of affairs is excluded. But this must be weighed against his earlier suggestion that there is a set of artworks that must be accommodated by the theory, and his declaration noted above that he believes a single counterexample suffices to refute his theory. Such views cut against Danto II's hope that the “group” of artworks in his theory may be as flexible as a community.
At this point, Danto offers one of his first observations on the Hegelian notion that will become paramount in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art: the codependency of philosophy and art, which, after Warhol, “were ready for one another. Suddenly, indeed, they needed one another to tell themselves apart.”12 The first chapter of Transfiguration also informs us further about Danto's commitments. Artworks, unlike things, “are typically about something,” and that relational linkage to definition communicates a pragmatist flavor. In speaking of a bare red expanse created by one of his invented artists, Danto says it is “a stranger to the community of artworks,” his first use of “community” as the organizing concept for artworks as a group, a concept that suggests greater flexibility of membership than the static “set.” The School of the Arts videotape reveals that Danto II typed in this phrase while Danto I was taking a call.
The tug of war between Danto I and II – apparent in their revisions on the computer when one or the other is away speaking – expresses itself here in the tension between a pragmatist appreciation for the convention-bound nature of the judgment that some objects are also artworks, and a more traditionalist need to depict the situation in an ontological vocabulary. Danto I states that “indiscernible counterparts” may have “radically distinct ontological affiliations,” and that a definition of art must account for why Duchamp's particular urinal, the Fountain, sustains its promotion to the category of artwork, “while other urinals, like it in every obvious respect, should remain in an ontologically degraded category.” Danto I believes an artwork has an evaluationally higher ontological status, not just a different one, than an object. Danto II doesn't much like ontological talk at all.
Danto I also rejects the possibility of distinguishing art from reality by the criterion of an aesthetic attitude, but he finds himself drawn back toward the “institutional framework” as a standard for determining the essence of art: drawn back, that is, toward a “conventional” theory of art. He acknowledges that the play of examples can lead one to think that “the difference between art and reality is just a matter of those conventions, and that whatever convention allows to be an artwork is an artwork.”13
Danto II grants the “element of truth in this theory,” but Danto I finds it “shallow.” The latter wants the “honorific predicate” of work of art to be “earned,” and as he says, “the question is what entitles something to this honor is: there not something which must first be present before the honor relevantly descends?”14
Danto I appears to be looking for what Danto best describes much later in “The Art World Revisited,” an essay in Beyond the Brillo Box, as “the discourse of reasons” in the artworld.15 Back in the early part of Transfiguration, he is clearly finding the institutional theory to be inadequate to his examples, for if “all there is to the matter is the honorific bestowed by discriminating citizens of the artworld, that something is an artwork just because it is declared to be that then how are we to account for the profound differences between these two indiscernible artworks?”16
Yet in “Content and Causation,” that book's second chapter, where Danto I develops his notion that the mark of art lies both outside perception and pragmatist convention, one encounters a move we see frequently on the part of Danto I when he sets up an example of “indiscernibles”: the appeal to conventional attitudes about artworks in order to establish what counts as art or not-art, coupled with a refusal to vest authority in conventional attitudes in regard to the full scope of the problem.
Danto I notes, for example, that while “one can burn a copy of the book in which a poem is printed,” it is far from clear that one has burned the poem. He adds, “Often enough poets and philosophers have thought of artworks as thus only tenuously connected with their embodiments.”17 Yet this point of view would more likely be voiced by a member of the philosophical or critical elite than a layman. Still, Danto continues to invent examples in which the response he wishes from us – that A is an artwork and B is not – is the conventional judgment a sophisticate would offer. So, in the example of the child who paints a blue tie just like one painted by Picasso, “something prevents it from entering the confederation of franchised artworks into which Picasso's tie is accepted.” That something would almost certainly be a sophisticated gatekeeper rather than another child, or an adult innocent of aesthetic theory, to whom both ties may seem the same.
In this chapter, as Danto I continues to push the idea that a property that makes two seemingly indiscernible objects discernible need not be perceptual, and that the difference between artworks and non-artworks is an “ontological difference,” he also begins to suggest that the “history” of an object (he makes the point in regard to forgery) may be key to its being called an artwork, at least in the negative sense that some histories must be denied to it – an approach that both Danto I and Danto II can find palatable. We begin to hear of the importance of “context” in determining whether an object becomes a work of art, just as context can turn “words to wit.” It is important to have “the right causal history,” and to be “of” something. One sees Danto II frequently smiling in these video frames. Of course, Danto I notes that some of these contextual features and histories may need to be “internalized” for an observer to judge art, and it may be that an artwork must have the property of “aboutness.”
All of these passages demonstrate Danto II exerting some early influence in the book, perhaps by dropping mentions of “history” as a kind of mantra that throws the analyst part of Danto I off his guard. Much of what is said here pleases Danto II, for whom real-world institutional factors loom large. Yet when Danto I gives examples of how certain objects from later periods in the history of art could not have been regarded as works of art in earlier periods – without suggesting that objects from earlier periods might face the same problem of losing the cachet of artwork in later periods – it becomes clear that Danto I has not conceded very much, for the ruling thought still seems less a deference to constitutive conventions, and more a directional, Hegelian notion of art broadening its wingspan as it comes to consciousness. Danto II seems glad to know, as the text later puts it, that “there are certain ways in which nobody can be ahead of his time.”18 But he also believes that in a pluralistic artworld, ancient artists and artworks can end up behind the times.
Chapter 3, “Philosophy and Art,” begins with a personal swipe at Danto II: Danto I remarks that “there can be no other kind” of philosopher than “the serious and systematic philosopher.” Danto I is feeling his oats as he issues another drumroll announcement of the Hegelian tête-à-tête of art and philosophy. Art has evolved in a way “that the philosophical question of its status has almost become the very essence of art itself, so that the philosophy of art, instead of standing outside the subject and addressing it from an alien and eternal perspective,” has become “instead the articulation of the internal energies of the subject. It would today require a special kind of effort at times to distinguish art from its own philosophy.”
One imagines Danto II sulking. The view does not fit conventional judgment, does not seem extracted from a Deweyean inquiry, a Peircean convergence of thought, or even a Jamesian analysis of usefulness to purpose. Although Danto I asks “what in fact distinguishes art from its own philosophy,” and then presciently “raises the question of what distinguishes the present book, an exercise in the philosophy of art, from being an artwork in its own right,” the questions are not, truth be told, urgent in the artworld. To be sure, some artworks may make the question seem urgent to a critic or philosopher – one might call it the standard “New Criterion” criticism of Danto that he tends to extrapolate from his own fascination with artworks that raise philosophical questions to the notion that art in general does.
That issue may be postponed – it is not unrelated to a final judgment on the relative clout of Danto I and Danto II. But it can certainly be said that as Danto I gets into the spirit of these Hegelian declarations, Danto II has reason to be glum. His shared text is saying that “the definition of art has become part of the nature of art in a very explicit way,” yet he wants to deny that art has a nature. Alarmed, he readily agrees that “we had better turn self-consciously to the enterprise of giving a definition of art,” because “boundaries between it and philosophy have come into danger of erasure.” He remarks that there is no “set of conditions necessary and sufficient to works of art” and happily sees the notion go into the text. But Danto II relaxes too soon. For just as he hears a most welcome notion in the air – Wittgenstein's suggestion, adapted to artworks, that we might be dealing with “a different sort of set altogether, structured in a way philosophers have not grasped” – a notion that pragmatist Danto II likes to express in the word “community” – it becomes clear that the idea has been invited to a hanging.
Danto II at this point looks depressed on the tape. His pragmatism leans in the direction of Dewey's in Art as Experience, who wants his philosophy of art to be inquiry, analysis, a healthy hesitancy in the face of what is new in art and art history. That is why he never seems happier than when he's getting to emphasize the role of the interpreter, who must roll up his sleeves to work in the quarry of new art. And that's why he never seems more despondent than when Danto I seems too quick on the draw, as in the love-at-mature-sight Danto perceives between art and philosophy in our time. To Danto II, it seems more like infatuation, a quickie, and not enough like inquiry.
An example of Danto I's fast judgment is the comparison of the Kennick warehouse (filled with a mix of artworks and non-artworks) with its counter-warehouse. Danto I elevates what is the case to what must be the case. He writes that “it will be easy to imagine a warehouse exactly like the warehouse described by Kennick, but such that for whatever is an artwork in his warehouse, its counterpart in our warehouse is not one, and whatever is not a work of art in his warehouse has a counterpart in our warehouse which is one.”19 But while it is easy to imagine someone claiming this, it's just as easy to imagine someone rejecting it, and then standing for the view that once one of a pair of indiscernible objects has been anointed as art, the other gets the designation too. One might see it as the Immigration and Naturalization theory of art – once one gets in, everybody's in.
Danto I quickly draws the conclusion that “we have now enough clarity on the matter to be able to say that no perceptual criterion can be given, that whatever is involved in knowing which are the artworks, it can only contingently be a matter of recognitional capacities.”20 But it seems clear that one could give a perceptual criterion – say, “like the artwork in Kennick's warehouse” – and then the question would be whether one had the authority to back it, or whether one's judgment ultimately exercised influence. Here, as elsewhere, Danto I doesn't directly articulate the independent standard that allows us to correct the person who refuses him the answer he seeks vis-à-vis the counter-warehouse. But then, he says, oddly, that we have grasped that a definition of art “cannot be expected to give us a ‘touchstone’ for recognizing artworks,” even though the Kennick counter-warehouse has hypothetically got us to recognize as artworks objects we've been assuming are not artworks. In other words, if there's something out there that allows us to posit artworks so quickly, as is done in the example of the counter-warehouse – impliedly the criterion of conventional judgment – why can't it empower a definition? Danto I says the counter-warehouse destroys the idea that “we can come to pick out artworks by performing inductions, or by emulating someone who knows which the artworks are.” A recalcitrant reader might deduce instead that one can pick out all artworks by agreeing to whatever Danto I thinks is an artwork. What would Danto I's argument be against that method? There is a ghost in the machine constructed from these passages: the ghost of an independent criterion of artwork.
Danto II, both co-composer and auditor of the text, often seems to grimace on the videotape, like a concert-goer who plainly likes some notes he's hearing, but who can't pick up a consistently pleasing melody. He thinks it good to recognize that it's always possible “art will be revolutionized at the boundaries,” invalidating any accidental inductive generalization of artworks of the moment, but a bit frightening to contemplate that opening the definition to relational properties may leave us with “an astonishing homogeneity in the class of objects.” He's heartened to hear it declared that “something like the conditions of production” do “figure in the identity of something as an artwork,” yet alienated when he hears that artworks are none the less about to slip away from materiality a bit more, since they're “logically of the right sort to be bracketed with words, even though they have counterparts that are mere real things.” While he doesn't like David Novitz's attack on the work of Arthur Danto, which alleges that Danto places a divide between life and art, he understands the misimpression when he hears Danto I saying that “Artworks as a class contrast with real things in just the way in which words do,”21 and that “art differs from reality in much the same way that language does when language is employed descriptively.”22
Chapter 4 continues the back and forth between Danto I and Danto II. Aesthetic considerations do not belong to the definition of art, Danto I says – they are simply “among the things which go with the concept without pertaining to its logic.” The concept, however, does have a logic. Danto II offers that “it is plausible to suppose that it is after all a matter of fact whether something is a work of art or not.” And he is happy to get in the point that “in the philosophy of art there is no appreciation without interpretation.”
In Chapter 5, Danto I appears to leave the room briefly, and Danto II makes the best of the opportunity:
In art as in life it is easy enough to overlook things that do not fit the spontaneous hypotheses that guide perception. In life, where perception is geared to survival and guided by experience, we structure the visual field in such a way as to relegate to inessential background whatever does not fit our schemata, and such habits of looking are carried over into the gallery.23
Here, indeed, Danto II seems to dust off the Deweyean critic, bringing his values and interest to the exhibition. Ever sensitive to the real-world problematic situation, he agrees that a title “is a direction for interpretation” that can't be ignored as data. At the same time, if something is an artwork, “there is no neutral way of seeing it; or, to see it neutrally is not to see it as an artwork.” The pragmatist philosopher of art/critic knows his power: “To interpret a work is to offer a theory as to what the work is about, what its subject is.”24 And to “seek a neutral description is to see the work as a thing and hence not as an artwork; it is analytical to the concept of an artwork that there has to be an interpretation.”25
Danto II seems to get giddy here. Perhaps Danto I has got stuck at the drycleaners. The musty air of Hegelian necessity, of analytic cataloging, seems very far away: “In art, every new interpretation is a Copernican revolution, in the sense that each new interpretation constitutes a new work.”26 The pragmatist philosopher of art/critic assumes almost religious stature: “As a transformative procedure, interpretation is something like baptism, not in the sense of giving a name but a new identity, participation in the community of the elect.”27
Danto II is exhilarated. He knows that Danto I might not like him spouting off as though a single interpreter exercises this power, but he thinks this as a pragmatist, and says it. Indeed, one of his gripes with Danto is how rarely Danto I focuses on the agents of interpretation – the interpreters – preferring to speak of interpretations themselves, and leaving it to the reader to deduce whether it is an individual, a whole culture, an elite, or an artworld, that is doing the job.
Danto II hears the door open. Danto I is back. Danto II starts downing the falafel Danto I has brought him, and quickly realizes his mistake. Danto II's mouth may be full, but Danto I's is not, except of more statements typical of Danto I: “You can call a painting anything you choose, but you cannot interpret it any way you choose, not if the argument holds that the limits of knowledge are the limits of interpretation.”28 Yet as Danto II listens and eats, he's thinking he can live with some of this, since the real battle involves who will do the interpreting, and the degree of freedom permitted. That is potentially an enormous amount of freedom. For the freedom to interpret includes the freedom not to interpret, or to withdraw from interpretation that seems fruitless. So Danto II listens calmly to Danto I's programmatic utterances.
“To see something as art demands nothing less than this,” Danto I booms, “an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art. Art is the kind of thing that depends for its existence upon theories; without theories of art, black paint is just black paint and nothing more.” There's some wiggle room there on the degree of knowledge, Danto II muses. Danto I says “there could not be an artworld without theory, for the artworld is logically dependent on theory,” and “nothing is an artwork without an interpretation.”29 Nothing destructive there, Danto II thinks.
As Chapter 6 takes on “Works of Art and Mere Representations,” Danto II is thinking that the book's pragmatist spine, obscured at times, is discernible. Certainly the growing focus on the artwork's rhetorical activity is a model of Deweyean attention to the real situation that exists between artwork and interpreter, though Dewey might have said that a purpose, and not just a point, is what is “not exhausted by what is being represented.” It is helpful that the text declares that “we cannot characterize works of art without in the same breath evaluating them. The language of aesthetic description and the language of aesthetic appreciation are of a piece.” We're almost at the end, Danto II thinks, and the “community” metaphor is still alive. In fact, he gets to speak of “members of the language community one may refer to as the artworld,” even if the text also observes, in regard to aesthetic predicates (and in a manner unconvincing to Danto II), that these members “not merely tend to share the values these words express, but would seldom disagree among themselves as to whether a given term applies to a given work.”
Danto II grumbles most of the way through Chapter 7. Again, his Deweyean weakness for inquiry in the face of a problematic situation finds the analysis of metaphor too cut and dried. He is not at all sure that the metaphor's “provocation to participation is powerless against or merely puzzling to a person with insufficient knowledge,” for in his experience people, for better or worse, interpret metaphor quickly. He also does not think that “To understand the artwork is to grasp the metaphor” that “is always there,” because he does not think metaphors are the sort of things that can be grasped in toto. Danto II doubts that they come in precise measure and with enumerable resemblances, and thinks metaphors may indeed have “wider connotations than can be specified.” Nor does he like the idea being expressed this late in the game by Danto I that “Art is something in connection with which the possibility of being a master is an analytical component.” It implies too much certainty, too much effortless control, on the part of the artist.
On the other hand, Danto II agrees that responding to any painting means “considerably more than being able to identify it. Exactly this complexity of responsive understanding must, in many cases explicitly, be abetted by the mediation of criticism.” Could the Dewey of “Criticism and Perception” ask for any more?
It is said by denizens of Morningside Heights that Danto II, content but not ecstatic about Transfiguration, went into a tailspin when Disenfranchisement first came out. It's not hard to see why. Transfiguration ends with the philosopher/critic having a clearly determined role as interpreter, if not an intricately defined one. Disenfranchisement, for all its rapture about the love affair between philosophy and art, often leaves us thinking of the philosopher/critic as a supporting actor in a Cecil B. DeMille film, doomed to watch great happenings from just off center-stage.
At the beginning of Disenfranchisement, Danto I sees the current state of philosophy and art as “almost an illustration of what Hegel thought of as stages in the history of Spirit, which culminates in the advent of Spirit attaining to a philosophical understanding of its own nature.” Because Danto I had thought in the 1980s that neo-expressionism “was not the way things were supposed to go next,” he concluded that “art must after all have an ordered history, a way in which things have to go rather than some other way. Art history must have an internal structure and even a kind of necessity.” Danto I realized he was fed up with randomness. “When one direction is as good as another direction,” he puts it later in the book, “there is no concept of direction any longer to apply.”30
Danto II – we have him up on the monitor now – can be seen reeling at this. But he likes the way Danto I is opposing the two great disenfranchising moves in Plato: the dismissal of art as fit only for mere pleasure and the treatment of art as just philosophy in an alienated form. So he is up for participating in the “reenfranchisement.” But why, he keeps wondering, all this Hegelian business from Danto I about how we've entered a period of “post-historical art, where the need for constant self-revolutionization of art is now past”? Why the belief that there “can and should never again be anything like the astonishing sequence of convulsions that have defined the art history of our century”?31
The whole rhetorical attitude strikes Danto II as odd. He looks at his calendar and can't find a mention of this period of post-historical art. He scans all the newspapers, with the same result. Feeling disloyal, he even calls up some of those artworld interpreters he and Danto I apotheosized in Transfiguration. Several, contrary to Danto I, think a few more revolutions would be fine. Hilton Kramer even predicts a counter-revolution, and promises it will be bloody. Danto II returns from his research unhappy, a mood heightened by Danto I's remark that the art market may make it look as though the artworld will continue its business as usual, but only because it “thrives on the illusion of unending novelty.” To Danto II, the art market is part of the real-world problematic situation that creates works of art. Indeed, some collectors tell him authentic artistic novelty is coming down the road, abetted by rapid technological developments, and that he should tell his apocalyptic friend Danto I to “cool out.”
Danto II, however, rarely attempts to steer Danto I – he tends to act deferential, considering it an expedient policy in book collaboration. Besides, some of Danto I's lines in Disenfranchisement pack a pragmatic edge almost despite themselves: Peirce would surely give Danto I a pragmaticist ribbon for his devoted attention to real-world consequences (especially that crucial consequence: the loss of progress as a possibility after art stops trying for mimetic perfection). Granted, as a pragmatist, Danto II doesn't believe you can talk about philosophy as the Fach Danto I thinks it is, as something that could launch a “massive collaborative effort to neutralize an activity” like art. He doesn't mind Danto I saying that philosophy “continues to aim at truth,” but gags when his partner asserts, “It is the aim of philosophy to prove rather than to merely persuade,”32 as if logical positivism were back in the saddle.
Danto II knows by now that he's going to have to deal with Danto I's persistent objectivism like an atavism. For instance, Danto I's belief that the concept of art gives rise to such mistakes as interpreting “something which is not in candidacy for art,” and giving “the wrong interpretation of the right sort of thing.” Or his beliefs that “there is meaning to the notion of being wrong” (which Danto II doesn't mind if it invokes only conventionalist criteria), that “the question of correctness can arise,” and that “works are misconstituted when interpretation is wrong.” Danto II understands that the instinct is so strong in Danto I that the latter really believes he can grab an Archimedean point outside history and pull off that “universal definition of art” that would fulfill the “philosophical aspiration of the ages.”
Danto II realizes that Danto I sometimes acts like a biblical prophet, able to declare authoritatively that a phenomenon such as “disturbatory art” actually “goes against the historical grain.” (It's but a short step, Danto II thinks to himself, from witnessing Hegelian Spirit to bossing it around.) But as a pragmatist with purposes – especially the purpose of maintaining belief in a future arts scene that is lively and influential – he is all for Danto I turning up the heat on aesthetics as an enemy of art that sought to “emasculate” or “supersede” it. Indeed, lines like “The power to classify is the power to dominate” seem like Danto II's own. Sure, the art turning into philosophy stuff seems like bombastic hocus-pocus – why isn't anyone installing philosophy texts in museums, Danto II wonders – but it is a small price to pay, and Danto I admits whenever you ask him that artworks will “still be produced post-historically,” even if “in the aftershock of a vanished vitality.”33
Danto II knows that, in the long run, you have to focus on a lifetime partner's good points. He's pleased that interpretation, in Disenfranchisement, is still “the lever with which an object is lifted out of the real world and into the artworld.”34 Anyway, after working with Danto I for so long, Danto II increasingly finds him a terribly human chap, quite capable of Whitmanesque contradictions. He likes the way Danto I, soon after emphasizing how it is possible to be wrong in interpretation, can write, “I believe we cannot be wrong if we suppose that the correct interpretation of object-as-artwork is the one which coincides most closely with the artist's own interpretation.” He finds it charming that Danto I can be apocalyptic about post-historical art while admitting that “We know too little of man, really, to pretend that no new or fresh insights into art may not open up in the human sciences of the future.”35
Indeed, Danto II has begun to feel that Danto I, enjoying his magisterial years, delights in exaggerating his chief points in Nietzschean register, declaring that “the concept of art is internally exhausted,” that the artworld today has “lost any historical direction,” that these days art's “existence carries no historical significance whatsoever,” that “there is no logical room for the concept of progress.”36 Isn't he just being oracular and playfully Marxian when he opines that “The institutions of the art-world – galleries, collectors, exhibitions, journalism – which are predicated upon history, and hence marking what is new, will bit by bit wither away”?37 Isn't he just having a good time when he closes the book by saying, about the philosophers that art has now prepared us for, “I am but their prophet”? Danto II suspects that when Danto I says there is nothing much to do in the age of pluralistic, post-historical art but “hang out,” the idea makes him feel positively young.
After all, Danto II thinks: Isn't Danto I – or someone – still covering those non-withered exhibition openings?
Danto II is a bit pale of complexion, but he's no dummy, and he reads his royalty forms. Challenged by intimates about his relations with Danto I, he reportedly tells them to forget about the content of Transfiguration and Disenfranchisement. The Danto books, he explains, are literary artworks, semi-opaque objects that do more than present their content. They rhetorically express an attitude about their content and representation, and they embody ideas. Divining their rhetorical points and embodied ideas, Danto II says, requires people to look beyond the visible, to understand the intentions of the authors of the Danto books, the roles they play as activists in a cultural matrix, the whole living context of their careers and books. Looking beyond the visible “Dantwo,” he says (intimates relate that Danto II always pronounces that name with enormous self-satisfaction) requires attention to the prize-winning critic in action, his impact on other critics and thinkers, the fact that his post-historical procedure in regard to art is no different than it was before the apocalypse (even if Danto I writes that “one could no longer think of art as one had thought of it before,” and “neither could one practice it as one had practiced it before”).38
Danto II knows that the impact of the Danto books as artworks exceeds their impact as presentations of content. And the idea they embody is pragmatism. A courageous inquiry into the world of art, balancing the authors' own values and erudition against the complexities of the artworld, by two men who both believe “the philosophy of art is the heart of philosophy” – two men who quite shrewdly allow the content to be weighted toward the Hegelian and analytic to balance the overpowering pragmatist power of its activity as artwork. The role “Dantwo” assigns to the philosopher/critic/interpreter makes that figure indiscernible from the investigative, pragmatist philosopher, and rather distant from the aloof Hegelian, more a part of the process than an influence upon it.
So my recommendation on the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics entry is “Arthur C. Dantwo,” or if that's too confusing, “Arthur Danto II,” or failing that “Arthur Danto,” so long as you editors make clear he's not just “Arthur Danto I.” It may take a bit of explaining, but Arthur Dantwo is a special kind of thinker, and as the man (or men) write, who “would want a Utrillo that looked like Mondrian, or a Marie Laurencin that looked like Grace Hartigan, or a Modigliani like Franz Kline?”39
As William James might say, choose the philosopher that makes a difference.
Notes
1. Joseph Margolis, “The Eclipse and Recovery of Analytic Aesthetics,” in Analytic Aesthetics, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford, 1989), p. 179.
2. Richard Shusterman, “Introduction: Analyzing Aesthetics,” in Analytic Aesthetics, ed. Richard Shusterman (Oxford, 1989), pp. 2, 11.
3. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p. viii.
4. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York, 1986), p. 154.
5. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York, 1992), p. 9.
6. David Novitz, The Boundaries of Art (Philadelphia, 1992), p. 249, n. 5.
7. Danto, Transfiguration, p. 175.
8. Danto, Philosophical Disenfranchisement, p. 152.
9. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics (Oxford, 1992), pp. 22, 271, n. 22.
10. Danto, Transfiguration, p. viii.
11. Mary Mothersill, Beauty Restored (Oxford, 1984), p. 62.
12. Danto, Transfiguration, p. vii.
13. Ibid., p. 31.
14. Ibid.
15. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box, p. 33.
16. Danto, Transfiguration, p. 32.
17. Ibid., p. 33.
18. Ibid., p. 112.
19. Ibid., p. 61.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid., p. 82.
22. Ibid., p. 83.
23. Ibid., p. 115.
24. Ibid., p. 119.
25. Ibid., p. 124.
26. Ibid., p. 125.
27. Ibid., p. 126.
28. Ibid., p. 131.
29. Ibid., p. 132.
30. Danto, Philosophical Disenfranchisement, p. 115.
31. Ibid., p. xv.
32. Ibid., p. 21.
33. Ibid., p. 83.
34. Ibid., p. 39.
35. Ibid., p. 45.
36. Ibid., p. 99.
37. Ibid., p. 115.
38. Ibid., p. 205.
39. Ibid., p. 109.