(from the
Is This Art Or What?
Review by
The Madonna
of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World
Arthur C. Danto
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
432 pp. $28.00
In a wonderful early poem entitled "The
Artist," Kenneth Koch gives us excerpts from the journal of an artist
whose career has included such works as Play
("an open field with a few boards in it"), Bee ("a sixty-yards-long covering for the elevator shaft
opening in the foundry sub-basement / Near my home"), Campaign ("a tremendous piece of charcoal. / Its shape is
difficult to describe; but it is extremely large and would reach to the sixth
floor of the Empire State Building"), Summer
Night ("that practically infinite number of white stone slabs
stretching into the blue secrecy of ink"), and The Magician of Cincinnati ("twenty-five tremendous stone
staircases, each over six hundred feet high, which will be placed in the Ohio
River between Cincinnati and Louisville, Kentucky. All the boats coming down the
Koch's
poem, of course, exaggerates, at least in terms of scale; but surely we have
all encountered, in some gallery or other, something resembling Play.
And probably most of us--the first couple of times, at least--wondered
what to make of it. Reactions to such
encounters vary widely, ranging from calm acceptance ("It's in a gallery:
okay, it's art") to outright rejection and scorn
("Don't tell me that's art--it's just not,") with the majority,
perhaps, lying somewhere in the middle ("Surely that's not art--is it?").
Well,
is it? A hundred years ago, a few boards scattered
in a field (or a gallery or museum) would not have been accepted as art. Moreover, according to Arthur C. Danto, art
critic for The Nation and author of
several previous books on art and philosophy, we can in fact say something
stronger than this: a hundred years ago, the boards would not have been art. It
would have been impossible, at that point in the history of art, for a field
with a few boards in it--or a snow shovel, or a preserved and bisected pig--to
constitute a work of art; whereas now, in our present situation, it is
perfectly possible. This change--according
to Danto--is the result of a profound and drastic conceptual shift, the
culmination of an immensely long (and for the most part slow) process during
which our understanding of the nature of art jettisoned one constraint after
another (on form, material, subject matter, and so on), leaving us ultimately
with the understanding that any
material object--so long as it is about
something, that is, embodies an idea of some sort--can be a work of art.
The
climactic moment comes with Duchamp, the star of Danto's pantheon (with Warhol
ranking only slightly beneath him).
Duchamp's invention of the ready-made--manufactured objects such as snow
shovels and urinals, displayed and regarded as works of art--was, for Danto, a
philosophical triumph. Objects such as
shovels and urinals were chosen precisely because they were dull and mundane:
the shovel is not beautiful, not sublime, not visually rich or complex;
therefore its status as an artwork, contra
traditional accounts, cannot rest on such characteristics. Moreover, since the shovel which happens to
be an artwork is identical in every visual and indeed physical respect with the
shovel which is not an artwork--the one which is still on sale down at the
hardware store, or hung on a nail in somebody's basement--the dividing line
between the two cannot hinge on any visual (or otherwise aesthetic) or even
physical property. So what is the
difference? According to Danto, the
difference is this: the art shovel is about something--indeed, as it happens,
part of what it is about is art; that is, it embodies certain ideas (Duchamp's
ideas) about what art is. The hardware
store or basement shovel, on the other hand, is just a thing: it's not about anything.
It
would be impossible to overstate the significance which Danto attributes to
this gesture of Duchamp's: he is utterly fascinated by it, and returns to it
again and again. For Danto, all
contemporary art is about art: Duchamp has made that unavoidable. Every piece of post-Duchamp art is telling us
essentially the same thing: Look at
me. This is also something art can be. One might think that after a certain number
of exposures to the same message, one's interest in art would begin to
wane. But Danto's enthusiasm is
remarkably unflagging; he seems impervious to boredom or irritation; he rarely
utters a negative breath; in fact, he seems to like everything.
I
wonder, though, whether this is something Danto ought to be admired for. He writes in his preface that "I deplore
the waspishness of critics, who must take extreme pleasure in savaging work in
which so much time and hope, thought and effort is invested that it ought
instead to enjoin a high degree of respect." The only time he will allow himself to
criticize art, he writes, is when he finds it to be morally deficient--when it violates, as he puts it, "the
respect due human subjects." But
this seems to me to severely limit Danto's usefulness as a critic. There are many very bad, even dismal, works
of art that are not moral failures, but simply plain old failures; and at the
present moment we need, and lack, critics who are willing to say so. The willingness to pass a negative judgment,
where appropriate, is not waspishness; a critic may very well regret having to
put down bad art. (Randall Jarrell often
did--which didn't at all prevent him from being extremely witty about it). The alternative--enjoying everything as a
matter of policy--is not properly regarded as a critical attitude at all.
I'm
not convinced, anyway, that all of these artworks show as much "thought
and effort" as Danto thinks they do.
He often seems to assume, because he is able to drag a startling amount
of meaning out of a work, that the artist must have put a startling amount of
meaning into it. Thus, of Damien Hirst's shark suspended in formaldehyde, he writes:
Putting a huge fish in a large
tank of formaldehyde sounds easy enough for even a city official to do. But imagining
doing it requires a degree of artistic intuition of a very rare order, since
one would have to anticipate what it would look like and what effect it would
have on the viewer.
I simply don't buy this. That's not to say that seeing the shark would
not have been fun; I bet it looked pretty cool.
(Better, at any rate, than the urinal or the shovel.) But Danto seems to me to err in two
ways. First, by suggesting that the
experience of looking at the shark is the same in kind as the experience of
looking at, say, a painting by Rembrandt, Picasso, or Rothko, Danto seems not
only to overestimate but indeed to misclassify it. And second, Danto surely errs by suggesting
that the idea of the shark in the
formaldehyde is more exciting and impressive than the actual shark. This, I suspect, is the opposite of the
truth.
Nor
is this an isolated error. Danto--an
analytic philosopher by profession--almost always gets more excited about the
idea than about the actual thing. His
reviews are oddly disembodied; one sometimes gets the impression he didn't
actually go to see the works, but was simply told about them. Perhaps this should not surprise us. After all, if a work's significance is
exhausted by its role in one's personal web of meaning, it hardly matters what
the work looks like; all we need to know is, what does
it stand for? Oddly enough, Danto, by
removing the emphasis from what an art object is in itself to what the work
embodies or represents, thereby places art in precisely the sort of secondary
and subsidiary role that so many of its progressive practitioners--the Abstract
Expressionists, the Minimalists, even (I think) Duchamp himself--were trying to
overcome. They, of course, were
typically more concerned with the demand that art depict; but it seems to me that the claim that art must embody is no less constraining in its
effects.
Ultimately
I suppose there are two deep differences between Danto and myself. The first is that he thinks there is a deep
difference between art and non-art, and I do not. (I would prefer that we abandon the
ontological inquiry and focus instead on the practical question, should we
treat this object as if it were art?) The second is that Danto, unlike myself, does not seem to think that there is a deep
difference between good art and bad art.
As a result, his critical responses are flattened out; there is no
discernible difference in excitement or enthusiasm from one review to the
next--which makes one wonder to what degree he is really responding to the art,
and how much he is simply spinning out an essentially private web of
fascinations and correspondences. As an
artist, critic, curator, collector, or simply an enjoyer of art, the question
of how to tell art from non-art plays, or ought to play, almost no role, while
the question of distinguishing the good from the bad should be treated as
compelling and crucial. Until we begin
again to seriously engage with that question, our museums will be full of
sharks and shovels. But let me end on a
conciliatory note: I acknowledge that a shovel can be a work of art. Point taken. Now--please--can
we move on?
July/August 2000