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Arthur Danto
by Miles Mathis
Arthur Danto [Yes, as you can see from this picture, Danto is cross-eyed. Normally I wouldn't point something like this out, but I think that in this case it is a crucial fact for the reader to know. Given Danto's vast commentary, and the negative influence of that commentary upon art history, this feature is important, even telling, perhaps even fateful.] Arthur
Danto, now in his eighties, began writing for The Nation in 1984. At that time he already had a long career as
a philosophy professor at Columbia University (where he still teaches). He had written several books in the field of
philosophy—including one on Nietzsche—but none of them had caused much of a
ripple. Danto could have chalked this
up to the fact that he was a mediocre writer and a mediocre thinker, but he
possessed the one trait that, in the modern world, could both transcend these
limitations and save him from self-evaluation: he had ambition. Why this ambition should not have hit high
gear until his 60's is not part of my counter-critique—perhaps it was residue
from a mid-life crisis. It does not
matter. In the 1980's Danto discovered
he wanted to be famous, and said so in writing. I have not needed some Freudian analysis
to penetrate Danto's intentions or ambitions.
I have not needed to manufacture them to fit my attack. Danto has been good enough to spell them out
himself. Like Gerhard Richter and John
Currin, Danto has felt free to state his ambitions, his goals and desires, even
when they might appear to be a bit shallow or vulgar. Danto and the modern artists have no fear of shallowness or
vulgarity. If they had, they would
surely have chosen other fields. Modern
art was the perfect pool with the perfect depth. You could swim for decades without ever getting your hair
wet. Danto correctly judged that his chances
for minor fame were greater in art criticism than in philosophy. No one wanted to read extended treatises on Nietzsche
anymore (and if they did they were reading Walter Kaufmann or someone who had a
clue, anyway). Art criticism, though,
was a growing field. Especially in New
York City, the arts were everywhere.
All around him people with absolutely no talent for anything were
getting to be minor celebrities.
Everyone was toasting one another and underwriting one another and
writing about one another in a million journals. Why not be a part of all that?
For heaven's sake, he had a lot of connections. He had been in New York for 35 years. He knew publishers and artists and other
writers. He had a resume padded with a
lot of words. Besides, he was a polite
old man who seemed a threat to on one.
Nothing could be easier. And here we are, 20 years later, and
Danto is one of the first names in art criticism. He lectures, sits on panels, is invited everywhere. All this without ever saying anything
memorable or important. In two decades
of articles Danto has successfully avoided ever having a strong opinion. He would not want to be accused of
intolerance, you see. Like everyone
else, he has his likes and dislikes, but they seem about as warm as the
Grinch's socks. This is how it must
be. His fans do not want heated debates
or warm opinions. They care as much
about art as Danto does—meaning very very little. For them art criticism is a bland diversion, like a cup of
sugared coffee or a vanilla ice cream cone.
It is a gentle coddling. What
they get from a Danto article is a low drone, like the TV left on at
night. It is a soothing reminder that
other people are living uneventful lives, saying harmless and meaningless
things, and getting paid well for it.
They have just come from those nasty political arguments in The
Nation, where the writer, although reinforcing all their prejudices, still
has the effrontery to imply that people on the other side exist, and
disagree. But here, in learning about
art from uncle Arthur, we find all that dissolves like mist. Here everyone is equal. Everyone is calm. Everyone is an artist. In my
article Dante contra Danto, I have already posted a few of the most
damaging quotes from Danto's career, but I feel more quotification is in order,
if only to give some immediate proof to all my assertions here. The following quotes are not especially
memorable, even for their being extravagantly false. I choose them because they are both false and unmemorable, and
therefore highly representative of Danto's oeuvre. In an article from The Nation [June 7, 1999], Danto says
this: According
to tradition the visual and the picturable must be equivalent—a picture of an
object should ideally yield the same experience as the object itself. For that reason, illusion played a central role
in theories of visual art almost from the beginning. Modernism, for whatever
reason, separated picturability and visuality, so that a picture need no longer
look like what it was to represent. No
traditional artist that ever lived would agree that a picture of an object
should yield the same experience as the object itself. That definition of art could not be more
pointless. Even the still-life artists
who meticulously copied arrangements would not say that experiencing the
painted still life was equivalent to experiencing the objects in it. And besides, artists who have meticulously
copied life have been a very small minority.
Most have used life only as a starting point. Illusionism has never been the primary goal of any art, even the
most life-like. That this is still
misunderstood by educated people is astonishing, especially people supposedly
educated in Deconstruction by the likes of Derrida and Foucault. Illusionism as the definition of traditional
art is the most facile and reductive (and bourgeois) analysis possible. A modern lover of pyschoanalysis should be
able to find a million ways to tie the artistic impulse, in whatever age, to
myriad forms of culture, socio-politics, and individual psychology. For a modern intellectual to claim that
human beings in the past were painting just to make copies is to display the
worst sort of double standard. Danto
and contemporary critics spend thousands of pages minutely analyzing the
psychological intentions and cultural implications of every last action of
modern artists. But traditional artists
are given a sound-byte analysis.
Monkeys pushing buttons to get bananas benefit from more in-depth
analysis. Danto claims that illusionism played a
central role in theories of art from the beginning. Maybe so. Maybe he has
read ancient texts that have eluded my eyes.
But even if this is true, it would only prove that art theorists were as
clueless in the past as they are now.
No matter what critics may have written, no artist has painted a picture
primarily from an impulse to make a copy.
This should be so self-evident to an enlightened people, I will not even
stoop to expand on it here. Any small
attempt at rigor or consistency would lead a thinking person into fields much
richer than that of illusionism. I suspect that what Danto really means
by "from the beginning" is "from the beginning of Modern
criticism." From the beginning,
modern critics have facilely dismissed traditional art on the grounds of
illusionism. According to the limits
of my own reading, that noun "illusionism" was coined or perfected by
Clement Greenberg. For Greenberg,
pre-modern art could be dismissed out-of-hand as illusionist, since illusionism
was so obviously limited in its psychological complexity. More recent critics like Danto and Adam
Gopnik have simply borrowed this slander from Greenberg. They did not feel it necessary to give him a
footnote, since everyone knows that "from the beginning" traditional
art was simplistic and moronic, just a parrot mindlessly repeating the forms of
his master Nature. Modern critics have found complexity
in contemporary people and artifacts because they have sought it (or
manufactured it). They have failed to
find complexity in traditional art and artists because they have not sought
it. The attitude of modern criticism to
pre-modern art is analogous to an anthropologist who postulates that tribal
people have sexual taboos because they are frigid and are trying to avoid
it. Or a biologist who speculates that
penguins became flightless because they ate too many fish and put on too much
weight. Or an archaeologist who
theorizes that the pyramids were built as garages for slightly smaller
pyramids. The theory that traditional
art is illusionist is precisely as profound (and true) as these theories. So far
I have only failed to comment on the last sentence in Danto's quote. Why did I include it? I included it to show you those limpid and
precise words "picturability" and "visuality." Clearly we are in the presence of a master
of the language, and all his theoretical and factual fuzziness must be forgiven
in the light of this greater artistic good. Let's
find another quote to have fun with: It
[Modernism] was rather something that slowly dawned over the face of European
art, possibly having to do with the growing awareness of different
representational systems, coming from other cultures, which were free of the
optical constraints of traditional Western painting. This is
another one of the false truisms of modern criticism. That is, it is universally accepted that the influx of art from
other cultures led, at least in part, to Modernism. As stated by Danto, it is even more false, for he tells us why
these non-European influences led to non-representation: they were free of
traditional optical restraints.
Unfortunately for his argument, they weren't. Not even the most primitive influences (from tribal Africa, say)
were at all free of being representational.
None were formalist, none were abstract, none were straight politics or
propaganda. I defy anyone to show me a
work of art from any culture in the world before 1900 that is primarily
formalist, abstract or political. The
influences from around the world were doubtless enriching to art and art
history in many ways, but mainly because they widened the field of
representation. They showed a greater
variety of ways of joining a strictly physical experience to a broader
psychological or cultural experience.
If this were the claim of modernism, I would have no reason to counter
it. But this is not the claim. The claim is that this early
multiculturalism somehow led to where we are.
It does not. The art of
non-European cultures, where it was interesting to artists, was always
interesting for its content, not its lack of content. Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse and Gauguin, did not incorporate world
art into their own creations in order to distill them or conventionalize them
or minimalize their impact. Just the
opposite. World art was incorporated to
revivify European art. But this
revivification was short-lived.
Modernism is not primarily concerned with or defined by this late 19th
century and early 20th century multiculturalism. It is defined mainly by formalism, abstraction, and
politics. These categories were not
supplied by world art. They came from
within the culture—from Western sociopolitics.
They came from critics and other middlemen who wanted to coopt art for
their own purposes. A bit later in the article, Danto floats once again into that
favorite haunt of the modern critic, the grotto of art and culture: So it is a simple enough matter to distinguish Art from
Culture. The paintings are
paradigmatically Art. If audiovisual
technologies are required to show something, it belongs, roughly, to
Culture. So Tiffany lamps might be
considered Art, since we can show examples and not just photographic
reproductions of them. We can also show handsomely designed coffeepots and
vacuum cleaners, as MoMA began to do decades ago. But most of Culture is
displayable mainly through secondary means, like photographs of performances,
posters, playbills and the like. Another quote that does fine
double duty, I must say. Look at that
word "paradigmatically." I
swoon at the loveliness of its use.
Loveliness that is commensurate with the content of the paragraph as a
whole. Anything we can show a sample
of is art. If it requires a slide
presentation, it is culture. Brilliant. But the true beauty of
the definition is how it is contradicted in the following paragraphs: Once we reclassify Culture as Art, we are no longer obliged to
ask what the relationship is between objects of Art and of Culture or what
knowing about Culture helps to explain about Art. If Culture is already Art,
then it no more provides a context within which Art is to be understood than
painting provides a context within which vaudeville is to be understood. Whew, that's good to know.
So, despite its precision and usefulness, we don't have to be limited to
the definition of culture as "things that require audiovisual
technology." Culture is already
art, which means that audiovisual technology is art, and the reverse: There is another way to think of the matter. This is to treat art
as culture. That means, of course, treating high as well as low art as indexes
of and openings into the American mentalité at a given moment. Here are their
songs, their dances; this is what they wore; these were the pictures they
looked at; this is how they lived. From this perspective, there is nothing to
choose between paintings and MetroCards or $5 bills or IRS 1040 forms or
lottery tickets. These all help to open the American spirit up for cultural
analysis. Who would
have thought that Danto could continue to crescendo after defining culture and
art in terms of audiovisual technology?
But yes, he did it. There is
nothing to choose between lottery tickets and art. They may all be defined in terms of audiovisual technology, one
supposes.
Culture≡Art≡Audiovisual technology≡American
spirit≡Cultural analysis. Danto must find art criticism so
comfortable. In such a situation one
can say just about anything and readers will not complain. Everything equals everything else, all is
undifferentiated, there is nothing to choose between one thing and another, no
matter how diverse. The only problem
is not getting lost in absolute non-distinction. In remembering that ultimately a pen is not a piece of paper, a computer
screen is not a keyboard, and a noun is not a verb. Danto appears very close to achieving this final freedom, in
fact. The sentences are precariously
near to gibberish; a gentle shove and the whole lot will tilt into farcical
art, like the writings of Dubuffet.
Danto’s prepositions will pose as gerunds, his participles will switch
with his pronouns, and there will be nothing to choose between the letters of
the alphabet. If this paper was useful to you in any way, please consider donating a dollar (or more) to the SAVE THE ARTISTS FOUNDATION. This will allow me to continue writing these "unpublishable" things. Don't be confused by paying Melisa Smith--that is just one of my many noms de plume. If you are a Paypal user, there is no fee; so it might be worth your while to become one. Otherwise they will rob us 33 cents for each transaction.
"He will be read when Homer and Virgil
are forgotten, but—not till then." —Porson