A Companion to Arthur C. Danto - Группа авторов

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philosophers, Danto is preoccupied with defining art, confessing “the philosophical aspiration of the ages, a definition which will not be threatened by historical overthrow,” and he ingeniously seeks this by defining art in terms of its own history and then claiming that this history, in an important sense, is now over with “the end of art.” He argues that twentieth-century art, pursued as a progressive inquiry into art’s essence, has evolved into the philosophy of art and, having reached the philosophical “understanding of its own historical essence,” has reached its logical end (Danto 1986, 209 & 204). Art continues to be produced, even though its history of progressive self-definition is over. It flourishes, instead, in its posthistorical stage where radical pluralism now prevails: anything can be a work of art if it can be interpreted as such in terms of the history of the artworld and its current practices in which you can “do what you damned please” in making art (Danto 1986, 114–15).

      Danto’s definition of art as a complex socio-cultural practice essentially defined by its continuing history is an example of what I call a wrapper theory of art, and it may be the best wrapper theory we can get (Shusterman 1992). In faithfully representing our established concept of art and how art’s objects are identified, related, and collectively distinguished, it best realizes the dual goals of wrapper definitions of art: accurate coverage of art’s extension, that is, covering all and only things that have been, are, or will be called artworks and thus compartmentally differentiating them from all other things. Pragmatist aesthetics instead questions whether these goals have the great value that philosophy’s intensive efforts to achieve them seem to assume.

      In defining art as a practice defined by art-historical narrative, all substantive decisions as to what counts as art are left to the internal decisions of the artworld as recorded by art history. Philosophy of art collapses back into art history; so the actual, momentous issue of what art is or should be gets reduced to a second-hand account of what art has been up to the present. If it merely reflects how art is already understood, philosophy of art condemns itself to the same reductive definition with which Plato condemned art. It is essentially an imitation of an imitation: the representation of art history’s representation of art. What purpose does such representation serve apart from appeasing the old philosophical urge for theory to mirror or reflect the real, an aim which has outlived the transcendental metaphysics of fixity that once gave it meaning?

      The theoretical ideal of reflection originally had a point when reality was conceived in terms of fixed, necessary essences lying beyond ordinary empirical understanding. For an adequate representation of this reality would always remain valid and effective as a criterion for assessing ordinary understanding and practice. But if our realities are the empirical and changing contingencies of art’s career, the reflective model seems pointless. For here, theory’s representation neither penetrates beyond changing phenomena nor can sustain their changes. Instead, it must run a hopeless race of perpetual narrative revision, holding the mirror of reflective theory up to art’s changing nature by representing its history.

      If art history’s crucial role in framing the creation and reception of artworks is one of the key views that Danto shares with pragmatist aesthetics, then another is that this history is one of developing change whose direction can be largely determined by the creative efforts of artworld members. Danto’s long and admirable career in practical criticism, as art critic for The Nation shows his recognition that art needs more active care than mere wrapper definitions that simply reflect the status quo. Art history can be made not only by the work of artists and critics, but also through the intervention of theorists, whose views have traditionally been central to the creative and critical context in which artists, critics, and art historians function. Consider, for example, how Aristotle’s Poetics dominated centuries of dramatists and critics, or how Kantian ideas of aesthetic imagination and judgment helped shape romantic poetry and justify modernist formalism. As Danto’s philosophical theories of art pervade his art criticism, he exemplifies the pragmatic idea of putting theory into practice, while conversely using practice to guide and inspire his theorizing.

      Despite his insistence on the division of art and life and his consequent claim that art’s history evolves autonomously through “its own internal development” (Danto 1986, 204) rather than through external influences, Danto eventually seems to share pragmatism’s faith that art can make a significant difference to reality far beyond its effects in the artworld. In his book on Andy Warhol, he claims, “Revolutionary periods begin with testing artistic boundaries, and this testing then gets extended to social boundaries more central to life, until, by the end of that period, the whole of society has been transformed: think of Romanticism and the French Revolution, or of the Russian avant-garde in the years of 1905 to 1915 and of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s slogan ‘Art into life!’” (Danto 2010, 29). Many historians would argue, however, that the French Revolution is what inspired Romanticism, and that the Russian avant-garde were themselves very much influenced by social transformations that predated the 1917 Revolution. But the key point to retain here is Danto’s recognition of the strong links between art and life, even if he prefers to read the causality of these links only in one direction.

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