After the End of Art

Rating:
Summary: Mistaken: Art is Not Dead
Review: As with many philo-critical texts written about art in the last 35 years, this text has been misread by reviewers. Arthur Danto does not say that art is dead. He says that reduction, narrow-mindedness, and the quest for singular RIGHT meaning is a pursuit of the past. He postulates a world where intellectual inquiry and object-making have more options for rigorous investigation because they are not limited by the strict parameters of historical precedents. This is not a call for a free-for all, but a formulation of the kind of flux-oriented, context-based practice that is particularly relevant in a techocratic, post-modern culture. This type of practice necessarily requires considerably more responsibility, as the practictioner must engage in defining the parameters of his or her practice and constantly pay attention to the way in which decisions affect decisions and so on and so on and so on.

I'm surprised at thoughtful reviewers hearing Danto say Art Is Dead. Did they read the introduction? This text is particularly clear and articulate (a hard-to-find phenomenon in contemporary theoretical texts on art). I found it difficult to MISunderstand.

Rating:
Summary: Mistaken: Art is Not Dead
Review: As with many philo-critical texts written about art in the last 35 years, this text has been misread by reviewers. Arthur Danto does not say that art is dead. He says that reduction, narrow-mindedness, and the quest for singular RIGHT meaning is a pursuit of the past. He postulates a world where intellectual inquiry and object-making have more options for rigorous investigation because they are not limited by the strict parameters of historical precedents. This is not a call for a free-for all, but a formulation of the kind of flux-oriented, context-based practice that is particularly relevant in a techocratic, post-modern culture. This type of practice necessarily requires considerably more responsibility, as the practictioner must engage in defining the parameters of his or her practice and constantly pay attention to the way in which decisions affect decisions and so on and so on and so on.

I'm surprised at thoughtful reviewers hearing Danto say Art Is Dead. Did they read the introduction? This text is particularly clear and articulate (a hard-to-find phenomenon in contemporary theoretical texts on art). I found it difficult to MISunderstand.

Rating:
Summary: Danto clearing misinterpretations!!
Review: Danto is one of the most influential but at the same time misconceived philosophers of art today. People have widely misunderstood two of his major thesis. Danto's notion of the "Artworld" has been mixed up with George Dickie's institutional theory of art and the end of art has been taken to mean the death of art. Both of these misconceptions are quite severe. In this book Danto tries to clarify his thoughts and express what he doesn't mean by these notions. For him the end of art means that a certain historical development has come to an end and that pluralism reigns in the artworld. There are no a priori conditions for being an artwork and basically any item in the world can also be an artwork. Danto doesn't see the end of art as a bad thing but he even seems to think that a new golden age of art can begin. But there are also threats if artists aren't ingenious enough. The end of art has also many consequences. Art criticism becomes much harder because all basic guidelines of appreciation and evaluation have disappeared. Every artwork has to be taken as an individual. The philosophical consequence is that the philosophy of art has to change. If anything can be an artwork then no definition of art can be founded on perceptual properties. Danto sees the history of aesthetics as relevantly barren, because philosophers like Kant have considered beauty to be an essential feature of art.

Danto also discusses his notion of the "artworld". In this book he says that he means by this concept that when an object is transfigured into the artworld, this object is set in to a relation with every other artwork in the world and therefore it can posses meanings that mere real things lack. He also takes up an old and neglected idea of the style matrix, which he introduced already in his classic article "The Artworld" that appeared in 1964. I truly find Danto's ideas of the artworld extremely interesting and it is shame that people have misunderstood him so badly. The last article in the book "Modalities of History" is one of the best Danto has ever written and it shows how important the history of art is for him. In the article he tries to show with the help of some examples what he means by the phrase that he inherited from Wöllflin "not everything is possible at every time."

Like always Danto's writing style is very fluent and eloquent. His knowledge on the history of art is just astounding. Many of Danto's books that have appeared after The Transfiguration of the Commonplace haven't been that important for his general theory but this book is absolutely vital if you want to understand his philosophy of art.

Rating:
Summary: Art and Individuation
Review: In this valuable book, Danto is not speaking of the death of art as one might speak of the death of God. When he speaks of 'the end of art', he is speaking about the end of art history as we know it and have thought of it; the way of viewing art history that we were taught in 'The History of Western Art 101'.

"To say that history is over is to say that there is no longer a pale of history for works of art to fall outside of. Everything is possible. Anything can be art. And, because the present situation is essentially unstructured, one can no longer fit a master narrative to it....It inaugurates the greatest era of freedom art has ever known. (p.112)"

The history of art up to this point has been a history of exclusion, legitimizing and highlighting only certain works which fall within the pale of this narrative. Danto's point is that there is no longer a pale of history.

But it is possible, I believe, to see something even larger in Danto's analysis, something that would be interesting to pursue by someone with a good grasp of history and culture. One might see further into his thesis and find that the history of art has been one of an evolution of individuation. Starting from the Egyptians, where art was an umbrella covering the entire culture, a culture in which the individual was of little value, to our present age in which art has moved to the opposite extreme, no longer controled by anything or anybody (except perhaps the art industry itself), heralding a new stage ( about 1964 by Danto's reakoning) in the idividuation of the planet.

If, as Teilhard de Chardin says, the impulse of evolution is toward greater consciousness and greater complexity, then what we are seeing at the present time is not something unstructured (as Danto posits), but rather, something of far greater structure, something much more complex than we have witnessed before. A stucture and complexity perhaps presently beyond our comprehension. (Of course, the conservative view of this will be that we are witnessing an encroaching chaos that will destroy civilization as we know it.)

From this new perspective, the present radical pluralism would be, rather than an unstructuring, a further step toward something of a far deeper order, an order we have not seen before, one which reflects an important moment in the individuation of humanity on this planet. Taking Danto's basic thesis, one might write a new history of art from the point of view of the evolution of individuation in art. But then this would be another master narrative and would undermine Danto's thesis. Or would it? For this is not a master narrative of art but of evolution itself as evidenced in art.

And who better to herald this advance than the artists!

Rating:
Summary: Art and Individuation
Review: In this valuable book, Danto is not speaking of the death of art as one might speak of the death of God. When he speaks of 'the end of art', he is speaking about the end of art history as we know it and have thought of it; the way of viewing art history that we were taught in 'The History of Western Art 101'.

"To say that history is over is to say that there is no longer a pale of history for works of art to fall outside of. Everything is possible. Anything can be art. And, because the present situation is essentially unstructured, one can no longer fit a master narrative to it....It inaugurates the greatest era of freedom art has ever known. (p.112)"

The history of art up to this point has been a history of exclusion, legitimizing and highlighting only certain works which fall within the pale of this narrative. Danto's point is that there is no longer a pale of history.

But it is possible, I believe, to see something even larger in Danto's analysis, something that would be interesting to pursue by someone with a good grasp of history and culture. One might see further into his thesis and find that the history of art has been one of an evolution of individuation. Starting from the Egyptians, where art was an umbrella covering the entire culture, a culture in which the individual was of little value, to our present age in which art has moved to the opposite extreme, no longer controled by anything or anybody (except perhaps the art industry itself), heralding a new stage ( about 1964 by Danto's reakoning) in the idividuation of the planet.

If, as Teilhard de Chardin says, the impulse of evolution is toward greater consciousness and greater complexity, then what we are seeing at the present time is not something unstructured (as Danto posits), but rather, something of far greater structure, something much more complex than we have witnessed before. A stucture and complexity perhaps presently beyond our comprehension. (Of course, the conservative view of this will be that we are witnessing an encroaching chaos that will destroy civilization as we know it.)

From this new perspective, the present radical pluralism would be, rather than an unstructuring, a further step toward something of a far deeper order, an order we have not seen before, one which reflects an important moment in the individuation of humanity on this planet. Taking Danto's basic thesis, one might write a new history of art from the point of view of the evolution of individuation in art. But then this would be another master narrative and would undermine Danto's thesis. Or would it? For this is not a master narrative of art but of evolution itself as evidenced in art.

And who better to herald this advance than the artists!

Rating:
Summary: The End of the Book
Review: It was a chore getting through this book, but was ultimately rewarding at the end. The mention of Komar and Melamid and their Most Wanted Series, at the books finale was interesting and fufilling, and spoke more to the books purpose then the remaining hundred plus pages. There were a few other bright points, but really the rest of the book was more chest pounding and weak attempts at journal-like academia. Danto became famous for a single point, and it seems he intends to beat that point to death. If that is his intention he has done an excellent job.

Rating:
Summary: A pale book about the pale of history in art
Review: This is an essential book but definitely passé. It is hard to follow and it is hard to get clear ideas from it because it is extremely digressive. His concept of « the end of art » is based on the idea that « art » is a concept that appeared around 1400 and died around 1963. The very idea of this concept is absurd, and he knows it, because artistic practices existed before 1400 and still exist, after 1963. We have to get rid of this concept of « art » to go back to concrete artistic practices. Arts, but also philosophy, religion or science are representations of the world, of man, of the relations between the two. And these representations are contradictory, coming from a person who is itself contradictory in a world that is contradictory. In other words all human representations are a bunch of hierarchised end intertwined contradictions. Art is reduced by Danto to « painting ». This is in itself absurd because painting cannot be cut from all other artistic practices, from all other media that convey human representations. Art must be all inclusive. Art is part of a whole, of a multimedia vision, expression, representation. Danto does not take into account the great « moments » of history when a change in one technical field transformed the world of « art » (multimedia, multiart, multigenre artistic practices). First the invention of writing that enabled an easy conservation and transmission of written representations : philosophy, literature, religion, etc. Second the invention of the printing press that killed the art of illuminations, created the art of prints, etc, and spread the possibility for individuals to appropriate a work of art. Third the invention of theaters, hence of plays, operas,and the development of concerts. Note theaters were invented by the Greeks a long time ago and reappeared in the Western world only with the Renaissance. Arts shifted from churches (open to all) to the chateaus (open to a few) and then to the theaters (open to those who could afford it). This will ultimately lead to the museum and the teaching of arts (fine arts, music, literature, poetry, etc) in the schools. Danto never takes into account this institutionalization of art that shifted from a religious pedagogical representation (in the Middle Ages or in Africa and some other countries and continents) to institutions that had the mission to preserve and teach what artistic productions they considered as acceptable. Fourth photography and the cinema (plus the radio and television) : the emergence of a communicational society, and Danto seems to ignore that Marshall MacLuhan is THE master analyzer of this communicational society. Fifth the computer and the Internet that produce today the all-inclusive communicational society. Sixth the evolution of commercial practices in a consumer's society where packaging, advertising and all kinds of applied arts become the commercial necessity for corporations of any type to be competitive on the market. This might have led Danto to understanding that over the last five centuries a new society has emerged : an all-inclusive multi-you-name-it-you-have-it communicational society in which anything static is becoming dead. Hence we have to move, we are moving towards a dynamic performing artistic life in which all arts have to mix because they all mix in everyday life (music, visual and dramatic shows, films, and so on, visual environment and universal packaging). Art is then going back to what it was but on a new universal scale : mixed arts in public places like churches or market places, but without any limitation and without the obvious ideological pedagogical objective of the old days. Have we entered an era of universal artistic practices for everyone ? We may think so, and we have to study in details the obstacles and the limitations on that road, as well as the opposition between consuming and creating, between professional creation and amateur practices, between works that open up doors and have a future and works that are just following a trend - if not a fashion - or even going back to an old practice.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Rating:
Summary: A pale book about the pale of history in art
Review: This is an essential book but definitely passé. It is hard to follow and it is hard to get clear ideas from it because it is extremely digressive. His concept of « the end of art » is based on the idea that « art » is a concept that appeared around 1400 and died around 1963. The very idea of this concept is absurd, and he knows it, because artistic practices existed before 1400 and still exist, after 1963. We have to get rid of this concept of « art » to go back to concrete artistic practices. Arts, but also philosophy, religion or science are representations of the world, of man, of the relations between the two. And these representations are contradictory, coming from a person who is itself contradictory in a world that is contradictory. In other words all human representations are a bunch of hierarchised end intertwined contradictions. Art is reduced by Danto to « painting ». This is in itself absurd because painting cannot be cut from all other artistic practices, from all other media that convey human representations. Art must be all inclusive. Art is part of a whole, of a multimedia vision, expression, representation. Danto does not take into account the great « moments » of history when a change in one technical field transformed the world of « art » (multimedia, multiart, multigenre artistic practices). First the invention of writing that enabled an easy conservation and transmission of written representations : philosophy, literature, religion, etc. Second the invention of the printing press that killed the art of illuminations, created the art of prints, etc, and spread the possibility for individuals to appropriate a work of art. Third the invention of theaters, hence of plays, operas,and the development of concerts. Note theaters were invented by the Greeks a long time ago and reappeared in the Western world only with the Renaissance. Arts shifted from churches (open to all) to the chateaus (open to a few) and then to the theaters (open to those who could afford it). This will ultimately lead to the museum and the teaching of arts (fine arts, music, literature, poetry, etc) in the schools. Danto never takes into account this institutionalization of art that shifted from a religious pedagogical representation (in the Middle Ages or in Africa and some other countries and continents) to institutions that had the mission to preserve and teach what artistic productions they considered as acceptable. Fourth photography and the cinema (plus the radio and television) : the emergence of a communicational society, and Danto seems to ignore that Marshall MacLuhan is THE master analyzer of this communicational society. Fifth the computer and the Internet that produce today the all-inclusive communicational society. Sixth the evolution of commercial practices in a consumer's society where packaging, advertising and all kinds of applied arts become the commercial necessity for corporations of any type to be competitive on the market. This might have led Danto to understanding that over the last five centuries a new society has emerged : an all-inclusive multi-you-name-it-you-have-it communicational society in which anything static is becoming dead. Hence we have to move, we are moving towards a dynamic performing artistic life in which all arts have to mix because they all mix in everyday life (music, visual and dramatic shows, films, and so on, visual environment and universal packaging). Art is then going back to what it was but on a new universal scale : mixed arts in public places like churches or market places, but without any limitation and without the obvious ideological pedagogical objective of the old days. Have we entered an era of universal artistic practices for everyone ? We may think so, and we have to study in details the obstacles and the limitations on that road, as well as the opposition between consuming and creating, between professional creation and amateur practices, between works that open up doors and have a future and works that are just following a trend - if not a fashion - or even going back to an old practice.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Rating:
Summary: Stimulating
Review: What does Arthur Danto mean by his title "After the End of Art"? He starts off his stimulating, if rather repetitive book, by discussing the German art historian Hans Belting's book The Image Before the End of Art. That book discusses the history of devotional images and icons before 1400 AD, and how they were produced primarily as icons, and not as art per se. It was only with the beginning of the renaissance that images became part of what could be described as an aesthetic ideology. In the opinion of Vasari and others art, in particular painting, can be seen as a progressive narrative which progresses towards mimesis, or imitation. After the invention of the photograph, accurate imitation became less of a value, and the progressive virtue of this narrative became one of "shape, surface, pigment, and the like as defining painting in its purity." The climax of this ideology came in the great, flawed, critic Clement Greenberg's championing of the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock. But as abstract expressionism exhausted itself in the early sixties, one could no longer define art as a progressive narrative. To use Danto's example, one could no longer produce a theory of art which would disqualify Andy Warhol's Brillo Box as a work of art. Therefore, everything could be a work of art. "Art" or the old "artistic ideology" was dead. There is such a thing as art, says Danto, and there is an inherent essence in it, but it is vastly wider than the progressive development ideology that had previously existed.

At the same time, says Danto, one must take a historicist approach. Very simply, "Manyof the artworks (cave paintings, fetishes, altar pieces) were made in times and places when people had no concept of art to speak of, since they interpreted art in terms of their other beliefs." Danto goes on to discuss how much art of the present day would not have been considered art in the past. He provides some interesting aspects of this historical anomaly. For example there is the 19th century artist Anselm Feuerbach who painted a grand, academically precise picture, the sort that would soon by overtaken by impressionism, of a scene from Plato's Symposium. But he made a mistake in his meticulously accurate historical reconstruction. He includes a painting in the background which portrays Xenophon's variation on the same events. The problem is that the painting is not in the style of a fifth century BC Greek painting. Danto goes on to discuss the inevitable failure of the Vermeer forger Hans Van Meegeren, how Russell Connor combined Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon and Ruben's Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, and finally ends up with "America's Most Wanted" the painting the Russian artists Komar and Melamid painted after conducting an elaborate opinion poll.

One should be aware of the many criticisms that have been made of this thesis. For example, there is the ironyof having a narrative which amounts to the end of narrative. And as Terry Eagleton sourly puts it "if art these days is a realm without rules, it is so, among other reasons, because there is not really that much at stake. If art mattered socially and politically, rather than just economically, it is unlikely that we would be quite so nonchalant about what qualified for the title." One should also read Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity for another perspective on the postmodernist moment. Still, this is an important book, and one should pay particular attention to Danto's chapter on the nature of monochrome art. There is also a nuanced chapter on museums and the conflict between them as purveyors of the beautiful and the artistic and the possibilities of anti-museum based community art. There are also discussions of Kant, Heidegger and particularly Hegel; amusingly enough, the last thing in the book is a caricature of Danto showing a Brillo Box to a disconcerted Hegel.

Rating:
Summary: Stimulating
Review: What does Arthur Danto mean by his title "After the End of Art"? He starts off his stimulating, if rather repetitive book, by discussing the German art historian Hans Belting's book The Image Before the End of Art. That book discusses the history of devotional images and icons before 1400 AD, and how they were produced primarily as icons, and not as art per se. It was only with the beginning of the renaissance that images became part of what could be described as an aesthetic ideology. In the opinion of Vasari and others art, in particular painting, can be seen as a progressive narrative which progresses towards mimesis, or imitation. After the invention of the photograph, accurate imitation became less of a value, and the progressive virtue of this narrative became one of "shape, surface, pigment, and the like as defining painting in its purity." The climax of this ideology came in the great, flawed, critic Clement Greenberg's championing of the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock. But as abstract expressionism exhausted itself in the early sixties, one could no longer define art as a progressive narrative. To use Danto's example, one could no longer produce a theory of art which would disqualify Andy Warhol's Brillo Box as a work of art. Therefore, everything could be a work of art. "Art" or the old "artistic ideology" was dead. There is such a thing as art, says Danto, and there is an inherent essence in it, but it is vastly wider than the progressive development ideology that had previously existed.

At the same time, says Danto, one must take a historicist approach. Very simply, "Manyof the artworks (cave paintings, fetishes, altar pieces) were made in times and places when people had no concept of art to speak of, since they interpreted art in terms of their other beliefs." Danto goes on to discuss how much art of the present day would not have been considered art in the past. He provides some interesting aspects of this historical anomaly. For example there is the 19th century artist Anselm Feuerbach who painted a grand, academically precise picture, the sort that would soon by overtaken by impressionism, of a scene from Plato's Symposium. But he made a mistake in his meticulously accurate historical reconstruction. He includes a painting in the background which portrays Xenophon's variation on the same events. The problem is that the painting is not in the style of a fifth century BC Greek painting. Danto goes on to discuss the inevitable failure of the Vermeer forger Hans Van Meegeren, how Russell Connor combined Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon and Ruben's Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, and finally ends up with "America's Most Wanted" the painting the Russian artists Komar and Melamid painted after conducting an elaborate opinion poll.

One should be aware of the many criticisms that have been made of this thesis. For example, there is the ironyof having a narrative which amounts to the end of narrative. And as Terry Eagleton sourly puts it "if art these days is a realm without rules, it is so, among other reasons, because there is not really that much at stake. If art mattered socially and politically, rather than just economically, it is unlikely that we would be quite so nonchalant about what qualified for the title." One should also read Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity for another perspective on the postmodernist moment. Still, this is an important book, and one should pay particular attention to Danto's chapter on the nature of monochrome art. There is also a nuanced chapter on museums and the conflict between them as purveyors of the beautiful and the artistic and the possibilities of anti-museum based community art. There are also discussions of Kant, Heidegger and particularly Hegel; amusingly enough, the last thing in the book is a caricature of Danto showing a Brillo Box to a disconcerted Hegel.