Most Art Critics and Historians Agree That in the Decade of the 1980s Modern Art Ended
In an obituary for the New York Times, Ken Johnson described Arthur Danto (1924–2013) as "one of the nearly widely read art critics of the Postmodern era." Danto, who was both a critic and a professor of philosophy, is celebrated for his accessible and affable prose. Despite this, Danto's all-time-known essay, "The End of Art," continues to be cited more it is understood. What was Danto'southward argument? Is art really over? And if so, what are the implications for art history and art-making?
Danto's twin passions were fine art and philosophy. He initially embarked on a career as an artist (much of his work is now part of the Wayne State University art collection) before pursuing an academic career in philosophy. In 1951, Danto began teaching at Columbia University, earning his doctorate the next yr. He was an art critic for The Nation betwixt 1984–2009 and was a regular correspondent to publications such equally Artforum.
In 1964, Danto visited an exhibition of Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes at the Stable Gallery, New York. The show inverse his life.
Arthur Danto and Andy Warhol
Information technology wasn't Warhol'due south bailiwick matter that shocked the philosopher, but its grade. Whereas Warhol's paintings of coke bottles and soup cans were visual representations, the creative person'due south Brillo box sculptures — silkscreened plywood facsimiles of actual Brillo boxes — were well-nigh indistinguishable from the real thing. If i placed one of Warhol'due south sculptures beside a real Brillo box, who could tell the difference? What made i of the boxes an artwork and the other an ordinary object? Danto outlined his conclusions in an essay entitled "The Artworld" (1964):
What in the end makes the deviation between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo box is a certain theory of art. It is theory that takes information technology up into the globe of fine art, and keeps it from collapsing into the existent object which it is. [Warhol's Brillo boxes] could not have been fine art l years ago. The world has to be gear up for certain things, the artworld no less than the real ane. Information technology is the function of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible.
Essentially, Warhol's Brillo boxes are art because the work has an audience which understands information technology via a sure theory (to utilise Danto's term) of what art can be. The artworld (comprised of critics, curators, collectors, dealers, etc.) plays a part in which theories are embraced or snubbed. As Danto surmises, "To encounter something as art requires something the heart cannot descry — an temper of creative theory, a noesis of the history of art: an artworld." This idea, later expanded upon by the philosopher George Dickie, is also popularly known as the institutional theory of fine art. The question lingering in the groundwork is how and why these so-called theories change and develop over time.
Danto was fascinated by historical modify. What made Warhol'southward Brillo boxes adequate as art in 1964? What would Neo-classical painter Jacques-Louis David take thought of Warhol's work? How would Leonardo da Vinci, Phidias, or a caveman react? Do the Brillo boxes stand for some sort of art historical progress? Was art history heading in a discernible management? Danto'southward investigations into history, progress, and art theory, coalesced into his best-known essay, "The End of Art."
Before tackling "The End of Art," we demand to briefly consider how the history of art is traditionally understood.
Art history is mostly thought of every bit a linear progression of 1 movement or fashion after another (Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Postal service-Impressionism, etc.), punctuated by the influence of individual geniuses (Delacroix, Courbet, Monet, Cézanne … ).
This primal approach is the visual footing of Sara Fanelli's 40-meter-long timeline of 20th-century art (which was formerly displayed on the Tate Modern's second floor). The timeline pinpoints the historical inception of particular movements, while also naming key historic artists (note how Fanelli's timeline trails off after the year 2000. We'll come back to this later).
An analogy of Sara Fanelli's Tate timeline
Fanelli's timeline is office of a long tradition of attempting to visually map historic progression, a nebulous and tricky concept. The first director of the Museum of Modernistic Art, Alfred Barr, famously designed his own timeline of 20th-century fine art, as did George Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus (Maciunas was really into diagrams; he reportedly spent five years on his incomplete 6 ten 12–foot art historical timeline). These timelines oftentimes implicitly support certain ideas most what art is, what information technology was, and where it's headed. One such concept that appears regularly throughout the history of art (admitting, in varying forms), is mimesis: the simulated and representation of reality.
Art historians have long argued that the ancient Greeks sought to imitate the man body with ever greater degrees of verisimilitude, a model that was resurrected during the Renaissance. This concept holds that artists should seek to master the imitation of reality (the story of the painting contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius typifies this ideal). A number of early on fine art historians sought to demonstrate how various artists had progressed (and in some cases, stunted) this ultimate goal, and in doing so, engineered i of the ascendant narratives of art history. The issue is a basic (and very reductive) estimation of art history. Summed upwardly crudely, information technology resembles something like this: The craftsman of the and so-called Dark Ages 'forgot' the mimetic skills and values of the ancients. Classical ideals were then resurrected during the Renaissance and were constantly reevaluated upwardly to the late nineteenth century. By the early on 20th century, art had fractured into a multitude of concurrent movements.
The story Danto tells in "The End of Fine art" follows on from this model. According to Danto, the commitment to mimesis began to falter during the nineteenth century due to the rising of photography and film. These new perceptual technologies led artists to carelessness the imitation of nature, and equally a result, 20th-century artists began to explore the question of fine art'south own identity. What was art? What should it do? How should art exist defined? In asking such questions, fine art had become self-conscious. Movements such as Cubism questioned the process of visual representation, and Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal equally an artwork. The twentieth century oversaw a rapid succession of different movements and 'isms,' all with their ain notions of what art could be. "All at that place is at the terminate," Danto wrote, "is theory, art having finally go vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought most itself, and remaining, as it were, solely every bit the object of its ain theoretical consciousness."
Marcel Duchamp
Warhol'due south Brillo boxes and Duchamp's readymades demonstrated to Danto that art had no discernible direction in which to progress. The chiliad narrative of progression — of one motion reacting to another — had concluded. Art had reached a post-historical state. All that remains is pure theory:
Of grade, at that place volition get on existence art-making. Simply art-makers, living in what I similar to call the post-historical period of fine art, will bring into beingness works which lack the historical importance or meaning we have for a long time come up to look […] The story comes to an end, only not the characters, who live on, happily ever after doing whatsoever they practice in their post-narrational insignificance […] The age of pluralism is upon us…when one management is as good as another.
In hindsight, information technology's easy to see how Danto began to arroyo this decision during the 1960s. Movements such as Pop fine art and Fluxus were actively breaking downward the barriers betwixt art and the everyday. Relativist philosophies such equally poststructuralism and existentialism were in full swing, critiquing the narratives and certainties which Western academia had previously held dear. Having diddled open the definition of what information technology could be, art had undermined its own belief in linear progression. Later on all, what movement or 'ism' could logically follow the dematerialization of the art object (conceptualism) or the pervasive skepticism of 1000 theories and ideologies (postmodernism)?
Danto believed that whatsoever subsequent movements were nonessential in that they would no longer contribute to the pursuit of fine art'south cocky-definition. "We are inbound a more stable, more happy menstruation of artistic attempt where the basic needs to which art has always been responsive may once more be met," he wrote. Although Danto claimed the end of art wasn't in itself a bad thing, he nonetheless appeared to subsequently lament its demise. In his review of the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Danto lambasted the themeless state of the artworld. "Information technology is heading in no direction to speak of," the philosopher wrote.
Whilst devising "The End of Art," Danto was "astonished" to turn to i of the unlikeliest of sources, the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).
Arthur Danto and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel's philosophy was not in vogue during the '60s, but his teleological understanding of historyserved as a useful template for Danto'south conclusions. Hegel understood progress as an overarching dialectic — a process of self-realization and understanding that culminates in pure knowledge. This state is ultimately achieved through philosophy, though it is initially preceded past an interrogation into the qualities of religion and art. As Danto summarized in a later essay entitled "The Disenfranchisement of Art" (1984):
When art internalizes its own history, when it becomes cocky-witting of its history as information technology has come to be in our time, so that its consciousness of its history forms part of its nature, it is possibly unavoidable that it should turn into philosophy at last. And when it does so, well, in an of import sense, fine art comes to an end.
Danto is non the simply philosopher to have adopted an Hegelian dialectic. Both Francis Fukuyama and Karl Marx utilized Hegelianism to attain their own historical conclusions. Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy and gratuitous market place commercialism represented the zenith of Western civilization, whilst Marx argued that communism would replace capitalism (neither of these developments have quite panned out).
Sara Fanelli'due south timeline appears to validate Danto's conclusions. Later the year 2000, there are no movements or -isms, only private artists. The movements that are listed towards the end of the century aren't really movements at all. The term "YBA" (Immature British Artists) is a useful catch-all for a diverse grouping of artists, some of whom happened to become to the same school (Goldsmiths). Likewise, "installation" is not a movement only a means of presenting art. Recent terms such equally "zombie ceremonial" (aka zombie abstraction) appear to confirm that we are living in an age of postal service-historical angst.
(Zombie) Clement Greenberg
Though widely read, Danto'southward theories are not wholly love past the art industry. Artists don't necessarily want to hear that their work has no developmental potential. Danto's work also presents a claiming for the art market which relies on perceived historic importance as a unique selling point. He predicted that the demand on the market place would crave the "illusion of unending novelty," later citing 1980s Neo-Expressionism as an example of the manufacture's need to continually recycle and repackage prior artful forms and ideas, a charge that parallels the gimmicky fence regarding zombie formalism.
Danto's critics typically challenge the philosopher's reliance on traditional fine art historical models. In Danto and His Critics (start published in 1993) Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins discuss the "fallacy of linear history," namely that our pre-dominant fine art historical narratives are largely a product of their retelling:
Every bit a person (or a culture) gets older, the story gets solidified and embellished in the retelling; and of grade, it gets longer. Early incidents and events are recast with forwards-looking pregnant they could not have possibly have had at the time.
If 1 rejects the developmental, Western art narrative that Danto describes in "The End of Fine art," and then the structure required for Danto'south Hegelian understanding of fine art collapses.
Information technology'southward important to recognize that art history is largely built upon the biases and subjective opinions of others. Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), the so-called father of art history and writer of The Lives of the Most First-class painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), famously favored Florentine artists over those working in Northern Europe. Over the course of the twentieth-century, the art historical perspectives of academics such as Ernst Gombrich, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Erwin Panofsky were rigorously reassessed. Classical scholars have since problematized the mimetic interpretation of ancient Greek art. Most gimmicky medieval scholars reject the term "Dark Ages" for example, since information technology is implicitly judgmental and ignores the fact that early Christian art had a completely different prepare of aesthetic priorities. The history of art becomes far more nuanced and complex when studied in microcosm. When one considers the wealth of methodologies bachelor to art historians (iconography, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and and then forth), Danto'south conclusions await all the more narrow and reductive.
Danto also conveniently excludes work which challenges his fine art historical thesis, namely non-Western fine art. How do Japanese printmakers — whose perspectival and mimetic priorities differed radically from Western standards — fit into Danto'due south art historical narrative? Danto does mention Japanese prints in "The Cease of Fine art," although the question of how they impact his developmental estimation of art history is completely sidestepped. "Nosotros have to determine whether [Japanese impress makers] had a different pictographic culture or simply were retarded by technological slowness in achieving solidities," Danto wrote.
Despite these criticisms, Danto'due south supporters argue that his theories are vindicated by a perceptible lack of management in the art globe. Information technology could be argued that Danto's conclusions concord up, even after ane dispenses with his Hegelian framework. Has art merely paralyzed itself past overanalyzing the form of history? How tin can nosotros ever adequately predict the future from the vantage of the present? Danto straight addresses this dilemma at the showtime of "The End of Fine art":
In 1952, the most advanced galleries were showing Pollock, De Kooning, Gottlieb, and Klein, which would have been temporally unimaginable in 1882. Nothing and so much belongs to its own time as an age'due south glimpses into the future: Buck Rogers carries the decorative idioms of the 1930s into the twenty-kickoff century … the science fiction novels of the 1950s project the sexual morality of the Eisenhower era […] The hereafter is a kind of mirror in which we can bear witness only ourselves, though information technology seems to u.s. a window through which we may run across things to come up.
Or as Danto quotes Leonardo da Vinci, ogni dipintore dipinge se ("every painter paints himself").
Source: https://hyperallergic.com/191329/an-illustrated-guide-to-arthur-dantos-the-end-of-art/
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