What Is the the Value of Art According to Danto

In an obituary for the New York Times, Ken Johnson described Arthur Danto (1924–2013) every bit "ane of the most widely read fine 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'southward all-time-known essay, "The Cease 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 fine art history and fine art-making?

Danto's twin passions were art and philosophy. He initially embarked on a career as an creative person (much of his work is at present role of the Wayne Land Academy art collection) earlier pursuing an academic career in philosophy. In 1951, Danto began pedagogy at Columbia University, earning his doctorate the next yr. He was an art critic for The Nation betwixt 1984–2009 and was a regular contributor to publications such as Artforum.

In 1964, Danto visited an exhibition of Andy Warhol'southward Brillo boxes at the Stable Gallery, New York. The show changed his life.

Arthur Danto and Andy Warhol

It wasn't Warhol's subject matter that shocked the philosopher, but its form. Whereas Warhol's paintings of coke bottles and soup cans were visual representations, the creative person's Brillo box sculptures — silkscreened plywood facsimiles of actual Brillo boxes — were virtually indistinguishable from the existent thing. If ane placed i of Warhol's sculptures beside a real Brillo box, who could tell the difference? What fabricated one 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 terminate makes the deviation between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo box is a certain theory of art. Information technology is theory that takes it up into the world of fine art, and keeps information technology from collapsing into the real object which it is. [Warhol'southward Brillo boxes] could not have been art fifty years agone. The earth has to be prepare for sure things, the artworld no less than the existent i. It is the function of artistic theories, these days as always, to brand the artworld, and art, possible.

Substantially, Warhol'due south Brillo boxes are art considering the work has an audience which understands it via a certain theory (to utilise Danto's term) of what art tin can be. The artworld (comprised of critics, curators, collectors, dealers, etc.) plays a part in which theories are embraced or snubbed. Equally Danto surmises, "To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry — an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld." This thought, later on expanded upon by the philosopher George Dickie, is also popularly known equally the institutional theory of art. The question lingering in the background is how and why these so-called theories alter and develop over fourth dimension.

Danto was fascinated by historical change. What made Warhol's Brillo boxes acceptable every bit fine art in 1964? What would Neo-classical painter Jacques-Louis David have idea of Warhol'south piece of work? How would Leonardo da Vinci, Phidias, or a caveman react? Practise the Brillo boxes represent some sort of art historical progress? Was art history heading in a discernible management? Danto's investigations into history, progress, and art theory, coalesced into his best-known essay, "The Stop of Art."

Earlier tackling "The Cease of Fine art," we need to briefly consider how the history of fine art is traditionally understood.

Art history is generally thought of as a linear progression of one movement or fashion after another (Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, etc.), punctuated by the influence of individual geniuses (Delacroix, Courbet, Monet, Cézanne … ).

This cardinal arroyo is the visual basis of Sara Fanelli'southward 40-meter-long timeline of 20th-century art (which was formerly displayed on the Tate Modernistic's second floor). The timeline pinpoints the historical inception of particular movements, while too naming key historic artists (note how Fanelli's timeline trails off after the yr 2000. We'll come back to this later).

An illustration of Sara Fanelli'south Tate timeline

Fanelli's timeline is part of a long tradition of attempting to visually map celebrated progression, a nebulous and catchy concept. The first director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, famously designed his ain timeline of 20th-century art, as did George Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus (Maciunas was really into diagrams; he reportedly spent v years on his incomplete 6 x 12–foot art historical timeline). These timelines often implicitly support certain ideas virtually what fine art is, what it was, and where it'south headed. One such concept that appears regularly throughout the history of fine art (admitting, in varying forms), is mimesis: the faux and representation of reality.

Art historians have long argued that the ancient Greeks sought to imitate the human trunk with e'er greater degrees of verisimilitude, a model that was resurrected during the Renaissance. This concept holds that artists should seek to main the imitation of reality (the story of the painting contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius typifies this platonic). A number of early art historians sought to demonstrate how various artists had progressed (and in some cases, stunted) this ultimate goal, and in doing and then, engineered one of the dominant narratives of art history. The result is a basic (and very reductive) interpretation of fine art history. Summed up crudely, it resembles something similar this: The craftsman of the so-called Night Ages 'forgot' the mimetic skills and values of the ancients. Classical ideals were then resurrected during the Renaissance and were constantly reevaluated up to the late nineteenth century. By the early 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 rise of photography and pic. These new perceptual technologies led artists to abandon the false of nature, and every bit a effect, 20th-century artists began to explore the question of art's ain identity. What was fine art? What should it do? How should fine art be defined? In asking such questions, fine art had go self-conscious. Movements such as Cubism questioned the process of visual representation, and Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal every bit an artwork. The twentieth century oversaw a rapid succession of different movements and 'isms,' all with their own notions of what art could be. "All there is at the terminate," Danto wrote, "is theory, art having finally go vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought nigh itself, and remaining, equally it were, solely every bit the object of its own theoretical consciousness."

Marcel Duchamp

Warhol's Brillo boxes and Duchamp's readymades demonstrated to Danto that art had no discernible management in which to progress. The yard narrative of progression — of one motility reacting to another — had ended. Art had reached a post-historical state. All that remains is pure theory:

Of course, there volition go on being art-making. But art-makers, living in what I like to call the mail-historical period of art, will bring into existence works which lack the historical importance or meaning we have for a long time come to wait […] The story comes to an end, merely non the characters, who live on, happily ever after doing whatever they practice in their post-narrational insignificance […] The historic period of pluralism is upon united states…when one direction is as good as another.

In retrospect, it'south easy to see how Danto began to approach this conclusion during the 1960s. Movements such every bit Popular art and Fluxus were actively breaking downwardly the barriers betwixt art and the everyday. Relativist philosophies such every bit poststructuralism and existentialism were in full swing, critiquing the narratives and certainties which Western academia had previously held dear. Having blown open the definition of what it could be, art had undermined its ain belief in linear progression. After all, what movement or 'ism' could logically follow the dematerialization of the art object (conceptualism) or the pervasive skepticism of grand theories and ideologies (postmodernism)?

Danto believed that any subsequent movements were nonessential in that they would no longer contribute to the pursuit of art's self-definition. "We are entering a more stable, more happy menstruum of artistic endeavor where the bones needs to which art has always been responsive may again be met," he wrote. Although Danto claimed the end of art wasn't in itself a bad thing, he all the same appeared to later on 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 Cease of Fine art," Danto was "astonished" to plough to one 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, merely his teleological agreement of historyserved every bit a useful template for Danto'southward conclusions. Hegel understood progress as an overarching dialectic — a process of cocky-realization and agreement that culminates in pure cognition. This state is ultimately accomplished through philosophy, though it is initially preceded by an interrogation into the qualities of religion and art. Equally Danto summarized in a later essay entitled "The Disenfranchisement of Art" (1984):

When art internalizes its own history, when information technology becomes self-conscious of its history every bit it has come to exist in our time, so that its consciousness of its history forms part of its nature, it is perhaps unavoidable that information technology should turn into philosophy at last. And when it does then, well, in an important sense, fine art comes to an end.

Danto is non the only philosopher to have adopted an Hegelian dialectic. Both Francis Fukuyama and Karl Marx utilized Hegelianism to reach their own historical conclusions. Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy and free market place capitalism represented the zenith of Western civilization, whilst Marx argued that communism would replace capitalism (neither of these developments have quite panned out).

Sara Fanelli'southward timeline appears to validate Danto's conclusions. Later on the year 2000, there are no movements or -isms, simply private artists. The movements that are listed towards the end of the century aren't really movements at all. The term "YBA" (Young British Artists) is a useful catch-all for a diverse group of artists, some of whom happened to get to the aforementioned school (Goldsmiths). Likewise, "installation" is not a movement simply a means of presenting art. Contempo terms such as "zombie ceremonial" (aka zombie brainchild) announced to ostend that we are living in an age of post-historical malaise.

(Zombie) Clement Greenberg

Though widely read, Danto's theories are not wholly beloved by the art manufacture. Artists don't necessarily want to hear that their work has no developmental potential. Danto'southward work also presents a claiming for the art marketplace which relies on perceived celebrated importance as a unique selling point. He predicted that the need on the market would crave the "illusion of unending novelty," subsequently citing 1980s Neo-Expressionism every bit an case of the industry'southward need to continually recycle and repackage prior aesthetic forms and ideas, a charge that parallels the contemporary debate regarding zombie ceremonial.

Danto'south critics typically challenge the philosopher's reliance on traditional art historical models. In Danto and His Critics (first published in 1993) Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen Thou. Higgins discuss the "fallacy of linear history," namely that our pre-ascendant art historical narratives are largely a product of their retelling:

As a person (or a culture) gets older, the story gets solidified and embellished in the retelling; and of course, information technology gets longer. Early incidents and events are recast with forward-looking meaning they could not have possibly have had at the fourth dimension.

If one rejects the developmental, Western art narrative that Danto describes in "The End of Art," then the structure required for Danto'due south Hegelian understanding of fine art collapses.

It's important to recognize that art history is largely built upon the biases and subjective opinions of others. Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), the then-chosen begetter of fine art history and writer of The Lives of the Most Excellent 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 every bit Ernst Gombrich, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Erwin Panofsky were rigorously reassessed. Classical scholars have since problematized the mimetic estimation of ancient Greek art. Virtually contemporary medieval scholars reject the term "Dark Ages" for example, since it is implicitly judgmental and ignores the fact that early Christian art had a completely different ready of aesthetic priorities. The history of art becomes far more nuanced and complex when studied in microcosm. When i considers the wealth of methodologies available to art historians (iconography, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and and so forth), Danto's conclusions look all the more narrow and reductive.

Danto also conveniently excludes work which challenges his art historical thesis, namely not-Western fine art. How do Japanese printmakers — whose perspectival and mimetic priorities differed radically from Western standards — fit into Danto's art historical narrative? Danto does mention Japanese prints in "The End of Fine art," although the question of how they impact his developmental interpretation of fine art history is completely sidestepped. "We have to decide 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'south supporters contend that his theories are vindicated by a perceptible lack of direction in the fine art world. Information technology could be argued that Danto'due south conclusions hold up, even after one dispenses with his Hegelian framework. Has art just paralyzed itself past overanalyzing the course of history? How tin nosotros ever fairly predict the time to come from the vantage of the present? Danto directly addresses this dilemma at the get-go of "The End of Art":

In 1952, the nigh advanced galleries were showing Pollock, De Kooning, Gottlieb, and Klein, which would take been temporally unimaginable in 1882. Nothing so much belongs to its own time equally an age's glimpses into the futurity: Cadet Rogers carries the decorative idioms of the 1930s into the xx-first century … the science fiction novels of the 1950s project the sexual morality of the Eisenhower era […] The future is a kind of mirror in which nosotros can show but ourselves, though it seems to us a window through which we may see things to come.

Or as Danto quotes Leonardo da Vinci, ogni dipintore dipinge se ("every painter paints himself").

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Source: https://hyperallergic.com/191329/an-illustrated-guide-to-arthur-dantos-the-end-of-art/

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