Here are some parts of some of the essays, however, that I found thought-provoking.
Does Art Create or Reflect Reality?
Did jazz in any sense cause or only emblemize the moral transformations of the Jazz Age? Did the Beatles cause or only prefigure the political perturbations of the sixties -- or had politics simply become a form of art in that period, at least the politics responsive to music, the real political history of the world taking place on a different level of causation?
This seems like one of Danto’s central questions about art. Is it a force the society reacts to, or is it a result acted on by the force we call society. I’m not sure where Danto lands on the question, but my gut says that the choice is a false dichotomy. Art is and can be both -- it is one of the ways society comes to understand its force -- as exemplified in this amusing vignette:
In any case, as we know, even works intended to prick consciousness to political concern have tended by and large to provoke at best an admiration for themselves and a moral self-admiration for those who admired them. The cynical bombing of the Basque village of Guernica on April 26, 1937, made Guernica happen -- so it was not merely wit when Picasso responded to the German officer’s question, having handed him a postcard of the painting, “Did you do that?” with “No, you did.” Everyone knew who did what and why: it was an atrocity meant to be perceived as an atrocity by perpetrators who meant to be perceived as prepared to stop at nothing. The painting was used as a fundraiser for Spanish war relief, but those who paid money for the privilege of filing past it only used it as a mirror to reflect attitudes already in place, and in later years it required art-historical knowledge to know what was going on: it stood as a handsome backdrop for pickups at the Museum of Modern Art, or a place to meet a date, like the clock at the Biltmore Hotel, and it was sufficiently handsome in its grey and black harmonies to have ornamented the kitchen cupboard in a sophisticated apartment I once saw written up, where souffles were concocted for bright and brittle guests who, no more than the hostess, realized that gutted animals and screaming mothers agonized above the formica: it was painted at about the same time as Night Fishing at Antibes, after all, as Anita Silvers has observed, and uses the same sorts of forms as that lyrical work. So in the end it did about as much for the ravaged villagers as Auden’s poem did for dead Yeats or as Yeats’ poem did for his slaughtered patriots, making nothing relevant happen, simply memorializing, enshrining, spiritualizing, constituting a kind of cenotaph to house the fading memories, about at the level of a religious ceremony whose function is to confess the extreme limitation of our powers to make anything happen.
He ends on a rather dark note, but I think he makes my essential point. The bombing Guernica made the painting Guernica happen, but, for a time, the painting Guernica helped expose the bombing Guernica for the propaganda it was intended to be. Art helping society understand the mechanisms and outcomes of its own force.
Danto is a philosopher, so he has a philosopher’s understanding of art and is well schooled in the ways past philosophers have dealt with the subject. Plato, it seems, strongly felt that art was powerless, a reflection of power but not a power of itself. So, evidently, did Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer had a considerably higher regard for art than any Plato shows in his philosophy, but in an important sense he agrees with his great predecessors in agreeing that art makes nothing happen in the causal order of the world. Its importance rather consists in its power to life us out of that order and to put us in a state of contemplation of eternal things.
But Schopenhauer raises an important point nonetheless -- at least in my mind. This power that art does have, this power not to cause things to happen but to lift us into a state of transcendental contemplation, is exactly why it has been oppressed by tyrants throughout the ages.
Art Is In the Mind of the Beholder
Schopenhauer also seems to support one of my own pet theories about art.
Genius, according to Schopenhauer, is the capacity for knowing the Ideas of things -- in the platonic sense of Ideas -- and for revealing these Ideas in works of art for the benefit of the remainder of mankind who, borrowing as it were the eyes of genius, may behold through these works what the genius beholds directly. “The work of art is only a means for facilitating this knowledge,” Schopenhauer writes, treating art as a cognitive prosthetic, a metaphysical window through which we may view the deeper realities, but which in no further sense has any cognitive contribution of its own to make at all: it is to be seen through, but not itself to be seen -- so the more transparent the better.
This, to me, is a pretty clear statement that art, contrary to a lot of the remaining discussion in Danto’s work, is neither a collection of physical media (paint on canvas, clay shaped and formed, etc.), nor a social construct that relies on cultural cues and taboos to be made manifest. Art, in its purest sense, is revealed knowledge in the mind of the observer. It happens neither in the gallery nor in the social conversation that surrounds it, but always and only in the space between the ears of the spectator.
But even Schopenhauer is not quite there. His apparent insistence on the “genius” intent of the artist, that there is an Idea that is being communicated through his work, is only part of the story. Yes, that can happen. The artist can have an Idea and the observer can recreate that Idea when viewing the artist’s work, but that isn’t required in order for art to occur. The revealed knowledge, whatever it is and whether or not it conforms to the intent of the artist, is what art is. This is why, in the anecdote related above, the painting Guernica continues to be art even after people forget the bombing Guernica that inspired it.
This is what I think. But I don’t think Danto agrees -- or at least doesn’t traditionally think about art in this context.
I believe we cannot be deeply wrong if we suppose that the correct interpretation of object-as-artwork is the one which coincides most closely with the artist’s own interpretation. Coinciding interpretations put us in different posture with regard to artists than undertaking to discover what their intentions may have been, nor is it as a thesis subject to the sorts of objections Susan Sontag raises against interpretation generally. For the interpretations she impugns only begin or can begin when the work of art is in place, established as such, and the interpreter begins to ponder what the artist is “really” doing or what the work “really” means. Hers is against a notion of interpretation which makes the artwork as an explanandum -- as a symptom, for example. My theory of interpretation is instead constitutive, for an object is an artwork at all only in relation to an interpretation.
From this excerpt it appears that Danto and Sontag have two different understandings about a “correct” interpretation of a work of art and, at least for Danto, that interpretation is necessary for an object (a painting, a sculpture, etc.) to be considered a work of art.
I say they’re both wrong. An object doesn’t need an interpretation to be art. Objects aren’t art. Art is the interpretation itself.
And speaking of philosophers, here’s at least one that seems to agree with me:
By displaying what is subjective, the work, in its whole presentation, reveals its purpose as existing for the subject, for the spectator, and not on its own account. The spectator is, as it were, in it from the beginning, is counted in with it, and the work exists only for this point, i.e., for the individual apprehending it.
-- G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
