(Notes on) The End of Art

From Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 1986 Columbia University Press.

Question is:

"Whether art has a future?"

Answer

1. Depends on Philosophical Visions of History

2. Must be distinguished from merely art of the future or art

The question is NOT one about the future “look” of art objects.

“We may be certain that were Robida to have depicted an underwater art museum, its mostadvanced works would be Impressionist paintings; Buck Rogers carries the decorative idioms of the 1930s into the twenty-first century, and now looks at home with Rockefeller Center.”

"The future is a kind of mirror in which we can show only yourselves, though it seems to us a window through which we may see things to come. A

Leonardo's saying, that ogni dipintore dipinge se,

Danto wished to speculate on the future of art without committing to what the artworks of the future are to be like.

Question: Is it possible to suppose that art itself has no future (though artworks may still be produced post-historically “in the aftershock of a vanished vitality”).

Note: This is similar to Hegel: art’s highest vocation is finished as a historical moment. Hegel's thought was that for a period of time the energies of history coincided with the energies of art (?), but now history and art must go in different directions. Its (Art’s) existence carries no historical significance whatever. Art=s history is coincident with the history of History itself.

“Joachim did not claim that those whose historical fulfillment lay in the Age of the Father will become extinct or that their forms of life will abruptly disappear in the Age of the Son: they may continue to exist past the moment of their historical mission, historical fossils.”

Answer: This makes sense within a framework of a philosophy of history. (where art is seen to have a completible task)

However, Danto maintains that this is not merely needless Philosophical Speculation. Rather, the question is raised from within the Artworld itself, which can be seen today as having lost any historical direction.

Perhaps whatever comes next will not (does not) matter (in any historical sense) because the concept of art is internally exhausted. Any (historical) work that art had to do, any historical development that art had to undergo, has been accomplished. The Story of “Art,” as it were, is over, if there ever was one, and were living in an endless epilogue.

Note: There may well be commercial interest in what is to come (who are “important practitioners,” what are the most recent movements, etc.) but that is not historical significance. There can be change without development. (combine and recombine known forms) The Age of Art is internally worn out.

Danto’s Purpose: to sketch a model of the history of art in which something like it may even be said to make sense.

Outline of the Approach:

1. First model has application primarily to mimetic art.

2. Second model will include more of art-

3. Third model accounts for the fact that the boundaries between painting and the other arts, poetry and performance, music and dance, have become radically unstable. (Goodman suggests that the very instability of contemporary art is evidence for the final historically model.)

Danto concludes by claiming that art really is over with, having become transmuted into philosophy.

1. Mimetic Theory (sort of):

Art can be seen as historical (linear) if the history of art construed in terms of representational progress.

· The measure of development and progress is greater perceptual equivalence.

· This is achieved by better technology. (Visionaries could say such things as "Someday pictures will move.")

· When for every perceptual range R, an equivalent could be technically generated, then art would be over with.

· Thus, on this view “Art” has a history and there is a (theoretical) end point the relative position to which any two historical art periods can be judged.

Danto admits this is an abandoned this model in art, since the production of perceptual equivalence no longer much dazzles us.

He notes an important and telling development with Aristotle who widens the notion of imitation to include the imitation of an action, in order to bring narrative drama into the scope of that concept. Here Mimesis parts company with the concept of perceptual equivalences.

(Fiction is the description of an action, not behavior.)

Note: when we think of mimesis as description (or representation), there is no progress. We can describe/represent as much an as well as ever we could. Granted, there are descriptive limits to language. (Important things which language alone cannot express.) But given the inter-translatability of all human languages, there is no expansion of representational possibilities, say by introducing new terms into the language which can overcome these inherent limitations. These are limitations of descriptivity itself against which no historical progress can be made.

Therefore, nothing is going to count as progress in art id art is conceived of as description or representation. (Despite greater liberties- this is not artistic advance.)

The linear or progressive model of the history of art (as perceptual equivalence) thus finds it best examples in painting and sculpture, then in movies and talkies and, if you wish, feelies.

Confirmation of Danto’s historical thesis, he claims, is the fact that the task of art to produce equivalences to perceptual experiences has passed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from the activities of painting and sculpture to those of cinematography.

Note: Painters and sculptors began conspicuously to abandon this goal at just about the same time that all the basic strategies for narrative cinema were in place.

“The torch had, as it were, been taken up by other technologies”

Historical Significance of the painting “The Green Stripe” by Matisse

· It stands as a counter example to the theory which claims that the history of art is the history of the production of perceptual equivalences.

The green stripe in “The Green Stripe” is not best understood as an attempt at perceptual equivalence (not even if there happened to be a greenish shadow along his subject's nose).

· Need for New Theory Growing Apparent at this time (age of photography).

· Rationalizations of objects, which began to appear in epidemic quantity. (These objects were unquestionably paintings but so fell short of perceptual equivalence that some explanation of their existence seemed imperative. –rising prominence of theory).

· In science, ideally at least, we don't blame the world when our theories don't work; we change the theories until they do work.

· A new theory was urgently required

Expressive Theory

Suppose then that The Green Stripe tries to get us to see how Matisse felt about the subject shown, his own wife.

Note: this called for a complex act of interpretation on the part of the viewer. The centrality of theory necessary to understand the painting is markedly different from that necessary to understand a still life.

So far so good, but it won’t last long. Because...

· The New Theory (Expressive Theory) presupposes discrepancies, which it then explains as due to feelings.

· Acknowledges and utilizes the intensional (object directed) character of emotional states. (The work is “about” something.)

· Art is a kind of language, and language a form of communication. The communication of feeling will succeed to just the extent that the work can show what object it is toward which the feeling is expressed.

· The viewer must hypothesize the object is shown in the way it is because the artist feels about the object the way he do. But this requires deciding to what degree the discrepancies with an ideal perceptual equivalence are a matter accident and to what degree a matter of expression.

(Keep in mind that Picaso claimed that the art of the 20^th Century was collage.)

But...

As a matter of fact objects became less and less recognizable until they disappeared altogether in Abstract Expressionism.

With the advent of “Abstract Expressionism”

· Now interpretation was even freer and no less essential.

· Purely expressive and hence not explicitly representational at all.

· Now the History of Art acquires a totally different structure.

On an Expressive Theorist’s Model there is no longer any reason to think of art as having a progressive history.

· The history of art has no future of the sort that yields any notion of progress because it sunders into a sequence of individual acts, one after another.

· Once art becomes construed as expression, the work of art must send us ultimately to the state of mind of its maker, if we are to interpret it.

· Realistically speaking, artists of a given period share a certain expressive vocabulary, but it is possible to conceive a radically discontinuous view of the history of art, in which one style of art follows another, as in an archipelago, and we might in principle imagine any sequence we choose.

Philosophical Implications

1. Internal connection between the way we define art and the way we think of the history of art.

2. We have been seeking a single theory which yields

a. necessary feature required or a satisfying view of art (broadly encompassing) and

b. required for a theory of art in which it makes sense to say that art has a (progressive) history (task at which artists improve over time).

Perceptual Equivalence Theory fails “a.”

Representation Theory and Expressive Theory fail “b.”

Let’s Look at Hegel (Yea, that will clear things up.)

Hegel's theory meets both “a” and “b.”

Hegel

1. Claims that history reveals genuine continuity progress of human thought/culture. Likewise with the imaginative product of culture. Art plays(ed) an indispensable role in the advance of “Mind.” (Absolute Spirit)

2. History is a kind of cognitive progress, where consciousness/culture and their objectifications (art) progressively approach a kind of awareness. The nearer/fuller art come to this awareness the more progress is marked. And when the cognition is achieved, there really is no longer any point to or need for art.

For Hegel, Art (like History itself) ends with the advent of self-consciousness, or better, self-knowledge.

Note: Here’s the curious Dialectic Danto’s foreshadowed. The success of the Expressive Theory of art is also the failure of the Expressive Theory of art. Art ends with the advent of its own philosophy.

Expressive Theory’s success consisted in the fact that it was able to explain all of art in a uniform way, but , as art developed, the history of art simply seems to be the history of discontinuities (theories replacing theories).

Expressive Theory’s failure consisted in the fact that it has only one way of explaining all of art. Discontinuities first appeared as puzzling phenomena, but after about 1906, the history of art simply seemed to be the history of discontinuities.

Note: Each new movement, from Fauvism down, seems to require some kind of theoretical understanding to which the language and the psychology of emotions seemed less and less adequate.

Creativity at that time seemed more to consist in making a period than in making a work.

· (If you were successful, you had the monopoly on producing works no one else could, since no one else had made the period with which you and perhaps a few collaborators were from now on to be identified. )

· With this went a certain financial security, inasmuch as museums, wedded to historical structure and the kind of completeness which went with having examples from each period, would want an ex- ample from you if you were a suitable period.

· Individual artists not allowed to evolve since they became labled and identified (and financially dependent) of being the lone practitioners of the period they initiated and whose lifetime they embodied.

Note Bene (His BIG point): Each period required a certain amount of quite complex theory in order that the often very minimal objects could be transacted onto the plane of art.

The Expression Theory became too thin to account for this plurality.

What is Art? The question became urgent with every new work. Indeed that seems the point of every new work. Each movement raised the question afresh, offering itself as a possible final answer.

Thus, the whole main point of art in our century was to pursue the question of its own identity while rejecting all available answers as insufficiently general.

It was as though, to paraphrase a famous formula of Kant, art were something conceptuable without satisfying any specific concept.

Third Model of Art History:

A model narratively exemplified by the Bildungsroman, the novel of self-education which climaxes in the self's recognition of the self.

In Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit the “hero” is the spirit of the world (Geist) and history is the stages of the development of Geist toward self-knowledge, toward self-realization through self-knowledge. (Hegel’s Dialectic)

Art is one of these stages, indeed, one of the nearly final stages of spirit's return to spirit through spirit, but it is a stage which must be gone through in the painful ascent toward the final redeeming cognition.

The culmination of Geist's quest and destiny is philosophy largely because philosophy is essentially reflexive. The history of philosophy may be read as the story of philosophy's mistaken identities, and of its failures in seeing through and to itself.

Art's philosophical history consists in its being absorbed ultimately into its own philosophy, demonstrating then that self-theoretization is a genuine possibility and guarantee that there is (at least) something whose identity consists in self-understanding.

With or Without the Cumbersome Hegelian Metaphysics

In contemporary art we see is something which depends more and more upon theory for its existence as art, so that theory is not something external to a world it seeks to understand, rather in understanding its object it has to understand itself. It is constitutive of the world it seeks to understand.

Further (spooky echoes of Hegel)

“...the objects approach zero as their theory approaches infinity, so that virtually all there is at the end is theory, art having finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself, and remaining, as it were, solely as the object of its own theoretical consciousness.”

The historical stage of art is done with when it is known what art is and means. For these thinkers (19^th Century Philosophers of History), history was some kind of necessary agony through which the end of history was somehow to be earned, and the end of history then meant the end of that agony.

The End of Art

History (including the history of art) comes to an end, but not mankind, as the story comes to an end, but not the characters, who live on happily ever after, doing whatever they do in their post-narrational insignificance. Whatever they do and whatever now happens to them is not part of The Story

Practically, this means the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions. And also the disappearance of Philosophy, for since Man no longer changes essentially, there is no reason to change the (true) principles which are at the basis of his understanding of the world and himself. But all the rest can be preserved indefinitely: art, love, play, etc.: in short, everything that makes man happy.

Man is deposited on the promised shores of Utopia, a paradise of nonalienation and nonspecialization.

There is nothing left for us to do but, in the phrase of our adolescents, hang out.

From Plato’s Republic Odysseus chooses

“the simple dumb existence of the sitcom, village life, domestic life, the kind of life lamented, in painful episode, by Achilles in the underworld.”

The End of History coincides, and is indeed identical, with what Hegel speaks of as the advent of Absolute Knowledge. Knowledge is absolute when there is no gap between knowledge and its object, or knowledge is its own object, hence subject and object at once.

"consists in perfectly knowing itself, in knowing what it is."

(Given that this is fanciful speculation... still there is some support for this in close attention to the history of art.)

“But if anything comes close to exemplifying it, art in our times does, for the object in which the artwork consists is so irradiated by theoretical consciousness that the division between object and subject is all but overcome, and it little matters whether art is philosophy in action or philosophy is art in thought.”

Art’s Quest to be Free

Subservient Art does/will exist (entertainment, expressive, decorative).

But...

· Art subservient to other purposes is not free according to Hegel

· Art is truly free when it is the mode more and form through which the spiritual truths are brought home to consciousness. But when art has revealed this highest truth to us, as it has, then Free Art is over.

· "Art is and remains for us a thing of the past."

And some parting considerations:

"On the side of its highest possibilities [art] has lost its genuine truth and life, and is rather transported to our world of ideas than is able to maintain its former necessity and its superior place in reality."

"We are invited by art to contemplate it reflectively ... in order to ascertain scientifically its nature."

As Marx might say, you can be an abstraction'ist in the morning, a photorealist in the afternoon a minimal minimalist in the evening. Or you car cut out paper dolls or do what you damn well please. The age of pluralism is upon us. It does not matter any longer what you do, which is what pluralism means.

No concept of direction any longer to apply.

Decoration, self-expression, entertainment are, of course, abiding human needs. There will always be a service for art to perform, if artists are content with that.

A subservient art has always been with us. But freedom ends in its own fulfillment.

Art world will, bit by bit, wither away.