Connections

• John Carvalho: Revenge of the Mere Things
• Mario Wenning: Transfiguration and the Illusion of the Real: Danto and Adorno on the Political Meaning of Aesthetic Semblance
• Jerome Langguth: Aesthetic Disappointment in Danto and Kant
• Francis Halsall: Danto and Luhmann: Ontological Systems of Art

Excerpts from each paper below the fold...

 

John Carvalho: Revenge of the Mere Things (click to download full pdf version)

It is an irony Arthur Danto surely appreciates still: an exhibition by an as yet unheralded artist mounted for fewer than three weeks at an upper east side gallery in Manhattan is the source for over forty years of reflection about the nature of art. In celebrating the twenty-five years The Transfiguration of the Commonplace has been in print, we also certainly celebrate the private epiphany that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes made for Danto at the Stable Gallery in late April, early May, 1964. Everything leading up to The Transfiguration and everything that has flowed from it in Danto’s contributions to philosophical aesthetics points to that event, to that intersection of two arguably different senses of art, one decidedly diachronic and art worldly, the other markedly synchronic and this worldly. What I want to explore in this short entry are the more or less specific parameters of that event, how these parameters became fixed in the main thesis of Danto’s Transfiguration and how that thesis makes an unlikely connection with a theory of art found in the writings of Jean Baudrillard.

Now, before you reach for that mouse or touch pad to click your way to something you expect to find, on the assumption it won’t include a discussion of Baudrillard, more satisfying, the connection is not far fetched or trivial. Simulacres et simulation, Baudrillard’s best known work in the U.S., also came into print twenty-five years ago (Galilee 1981). In that text, published as Simulations in Sylvére Lotringer’s Foreign Agents Series, and throughout his writings, we find that Baudrillard appreciates contemporary art more, like Danto, for what it means than for how it looks or makes him feel. More importantly, Baudrillard could be fairly described as the cause, in spite of what he has written and said, of so much art produced in the 1980s and 90s becoming, in a way, its own philosophy. And, not incidentally, Baudrillard reserves a special place in his writings for the art of Andy Warhol, holding his work to be, like Danto, the apotheosis of contemporary art. Of course, what counts as the perfection of art for Danto and Baudrillard is very, very different. And it’s this contrast that invites the comparison. What I show below, is that the devaluation of mere real things in Danto is redeemed in Baudrillard without jeopardizing the main thesis of The Transfiguration but not without a challenge to what will qualify as meaning and, so, not without questioning what can be discerned as art in what are otherwise mere real things...

Mario Wenning: Transfiguration and the Illusion of the Real: Danto and Adorno on the Political Meaning of Aesthetic Semblance (click to download full pdf version)

One if not the most important of Arthur C. Danto's contributions to recent philosophy of art has been to have shown that artistic modernism raises problems worthy of philosophical attention. In taking seriously the claims raised by modernist art, not only but especially that of the post war period, Danto introduced philosophy to our time. He continues a Hegelian legacy in taking philosophy as having the task of grasping its own time in thought, of responding to a genuine need in times of crises. While for Hegel the French Revolution and the resulting crisis of normativity called for a philosophical response, for Danto the aesthetic revolution and crisis triggered most representatively by Warhol's Brillo Boxes changed the world of art and the way we should think about the relationship between this and our world. Art is for Danto, just as for Hegel, a way of coming to grips with who and where we are as a culture. On this model art provides the semantic resources of collective self-recognition and, we could add, cultural self criticism. From The Transfiguration of the Commonplace onward Danto has interpreted works of art as convex mirrors "that tell us what we would not know about ourselves without them." They are irreplaceable "instruments of self-revelation." While Danto is not hesitant to situate himself in a Hegelian tradition when it comes to assigning art a structurally analogous role to what Hegel calls absolute spirit, it is rather surprising and ultimately unfortunate that there has not been any sustained dialogue between his philosophy of art and those of other 20^th century thinkers within the Hegelian tradition, most notably the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno.

Beneath the surface layer of different styles of thinking (analytic vs. dialectic) and vocabularies (although these are often strikingly similar) one witnesses surprising convergences and overlaps of concerns of both Adorno and Danto. It is not just the case that both view aesthetics as a central rather than peripheral philosophical discipline, but also that they develop a worked out and rather systematic philosophy of art, which situates art within the general terms of a philosophy of history. Art is seen as having in some sense exhausted its possibilities. Secondly, both Adorno and Danto interpret philosophy's relationship to art as displaying an unfortunate tendency to disenfranchise (Danto), identify and subsume (Adorno) and thus dominate its object. Thirdly, in order to circumvent this tendency to domination, both have invested much time and energy in the concrete labor of art criticism; thus paying careful attention to the stakes raised by their object of study. Finally, both attempt to reverse the pejorative connotation, predominant since Plato, of artworks as illusory images, secondary in rank to what is purported to be real. In particular modernist works of art, Adorno and Danto contend, are not images in the sense of duplicates of some external entity to which they stand secondary in rank. Rather, they are interpreted as mirroring images, Spiegelbilder, indispensable media for the purpose of self-revelation. In assigning to art the role of mirror image, both emphasize the revelatory force of what Hegel discussed under the heading of Schein, aesthetic semblance or appearance. I would like to focus on aesthetic semblance as a central category and concern that connects both positions. For the purpose of this paper I will argue that Adorno (explicitly) and Danto (implicitly) assign to aesthetic semblance the role of denaturalizing ordinary interpretations. A transfiguration of our vision through works of art takes on a genuine political meaning in calling into question what is taken to be real. After reconstructing this meaning, I will raise a question concerning the tenability of the kind of vindication of modernism as a medium of critical self revelation that both Adorno and Danto share...

Jerome Langguth: Aesthetic Disappointment in Danto and Kant (click to download full pdf version)

This paper compares and critically evaluates Danto and Kant on the theme of aesthetic disappointment. There are, of course, many ways that we could be disappointed aesthetically speaking. The sort of aesthetic disappointment I am interested in here involves the sudden and irreversible loss of aesthetic interest in and appreciation of a given object or event due to the discovery that what we had formerly admired is not the kind of thing that we had taken it to be. It is precisely the kind of disappointment that, for Danto, might occur if one were to discover that a much admired artwork had been replaced by its identical twin from the world of ordinary objects. What I hope to show is that Kant and Danto are actually much closer in their accounts of aesthetic disappointment, and thus aesthetic appreciation, than one would initially suppose. From Danto, we learn that our aesthetic response to art is deeply conceptual in ways that our aesthetic response to mere objects is not. From Kant, we learn, through his elucidation of two cases of aesthetic disappointment that full appreciation of natural beauty crucially presupposes the capacity to view natural beauty “as if it were nature’s art.” Read in light of Danto’s discussion of the crucial differences between appreciating art and appreciating beauty in Chapter 4 of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Kant’s treatment of cases of aesthetic disappointment in §42 of The Critique of the Power of Judgment yields rich insights into what it means to appreciate the beauty of nature once one is cognitively prepared to interpret something as a work of art.

Francis Halsall: Danto and Luhmann: Ontological Systems of Art (click to download full pdf version)

This paper explores the clear connections between Arthur Danto’s arguments in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) and Niklas Luhmann’s subsequent sociological account of art that received its fullest expression in Art as a Social System (2000). Luhmann was familiar with Danto’s work and makes several references to The Transfiguration of the Commonplace in Art as a Social System. However, although several commentators have made allusion to the relationship between Danto’s and Luhmann’s arguments (Sevänen; Rampley; Albertsen; Eiselein; Art & Language; et al) it has not been fully explored. Danto himself has claimed to be not deeply familiar with Luhmann’s work although has expressed an interest in the connections between it and his own ideas. This paper unpacks these connections in further detail

In particular the following areas will be discussed:

Firstly there are obvious similarities between both thinkers’ radical critique of the ontology of art. Both explore how definitions of art are relative to social systems that differentiate art from other objects.

Secondly there is direct parallel between Danto’s concept of the institutional system of the ‘Artworld’ and Luhmann’s concept of Art as a Social System.

Thirdly both Danto’s and Luhmann’s theories of art are teleological. Both describe how art, at the end of Modernism, seems to have reached not only a level of self-reflexivity but also an ‘end.’ Such arguments receive an early expression in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and are developed in Danto’s subsequent work. The similarities in both Danto’s and Luhmann’s accounts can be linked to their interpretations of Hegel.

Finally, Luhmann’s work is notoriously abstract which is explained, in part, by the fact that he rarely talks about specific works of art. Danto, on the other hand, grounds his arguments in his own personal experience with particular works (such as Warhol’s Brillo Box.) It is thus proposed that further light can be thrown on Luhmann’s arguments by re-reading them through Danto’s earlier, historically grounded work.

Comments

[davidcarrier]

I like JC's look at the actual circumstances of the making of BRILLO BOX. About Baudrillard I am less sure, having published long ago an essay on him (in ARTS) which gave me my 15 Warholian moments of fame. But maybe that's just a matter of taste. Baudrillard like Arthur entered the art world, and was much discussed; unlike Arthur he also wanted to do political analysis. JC is too rational to buy into Baudrillard's system, thank the lord.

This is one of several combinational essays today, Arthur + x. I think of Wollheim's comment at Arthur's Columbia symposium when asked a combinational question about his lecture, 'that makes me dizzy'. It's an interesting exercise, still, comparing and contrasting the influential writers.

[davidcarrier]

MW offers another essay in defamiliarization, looking at Arthur and Adorno. Since they are so different, not suprisingly one gets differences. The question then, for me, is whether the comparison is revealing. Here I am troubled by the claim that Arthur says: every object can be an art object. Not exactly!

But then I am puzzled by the political question. What exactly is the link between artistic transfiguration and political concerns? My problem, maybe just me: I don't see how Adorno helps us to understand Arthur's reviews here. No doubt Adorno is interesting for his own sake, but in this exposition I found myself inside his position, as I tend to find myself when trying to read him. When Arthur is said to see a potential revolution of mdoernism's crisis, I think: no for him there is no such crisis, though maybe for Adorno there is. Adorno obviously had weighty political concerns, as Arthur has noted he had such a different life, life as a Jew if you will, that I am in the end unsure what this tells us about Arthur: different again from what it tells us about history or Adorno!

[davidcarrier]

JL also does a comparison. Odd to deal with Kant since Arthur has said: for him Hegel is the philosopher of art, not Kant. Here as in the earlier combinational accounts, the question is what the comparison reveals, since after all Kant and Arthur such such different systems. Presumably we want to understand art, not just Arthur vs. Kant!

This essay succeeds, for the notion of aesthetic disappointment is novel and funny. I would love to hear more about these people without art- not, exactly, middle class Americans! Maybe Kant will help, but I think only if we say more about nature. Here i don't know where to go, because Arthur's thought is so centered on art is society. In the end, this may just be my problem, we learn about what Arthur teaches us about Kant, which is different from learning what he teaches us about aesthetic disappointment.

[davidcarrier]

FH presents another combinational analysis, dealing with a less familiar figure. Here I would ask the same question as earlier: is the goal to compare and contrast Arthur/Luhmann, or, rather, to use their ideas to learn about art. Both, no doubt, but of course in practice FH needs a lot of exposition, esp. since he needs to explaiin Luhmann. Reading anyone with a system, one needs to ask: is mastering it worth the effort? Life is finite, so one can only learn a certain number of systems. Baudrillard, to cite one example, is very famous, but since his account of Arthur is wrong is a straightforward way that would cause a grad student to fail the class, is his system worth attention? Luhmann is of course someone else, but by the end, well I think the most interesting part, just for me!, is the link back to Hegel. Now he has a system!

[Francis Halsall]

Something I found interesting about this combinatorial analysis was how people can arrive at similar (or at least comparable) positions having started out from different positions – as if tunnelling through the same mountain. Is it worth the effort? Well I guess for me it is! Not least other positions provide the contemporary context by which theories such as Danto’s are re-read – contrast Kojeve’s and Hippolyte’s Hegel with Brandom’s for example. Or the different takes on Danto’s work here.

In particular it seemed worth thinking about how Luhmann might provide a way of describing how the nuts and bolts of the Artworld might function in a way Danto didn’t do. Luhmann attempts this with varying degrees of success.

And, sure, the end result is certainly to find out more about art and the theories that are written about it– something which the combination has thrown up for me.

[Derek Allan]

Just a quick comment on Mario Wenning’s paper.

I often have problem with the notion of the ‘world’ or ‘reality’ when it comes to the philosophy of art.

When you say that the ‘aesthetic revolution and crisis triggered by the Brillo Boxes … changed the world of art and the way we should think about this and our world’, what do you have in mind by the phrase ‘our world?’

For example, do you mean a world conceptualised in, say, sociological, or perhaps historical terms? Or scientific terms? Or in some terms relating more closely to individual human experience? Or something else?

And does the concept of ‘world’ indicate something that is preconceived in some way (ie identifiable as a particular kind of world)? And if so how? Or does it indicate a kind of basic chaotic state – something like Shakespeare’s ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’?

I certainly don’t mean these as not nit-picking or frivolous questions. It seems to me that the answers one gives have huge consequences for one’s concept of the function of art...

[Julie Kuhlken]

Derek, I agree with you about the notion of “world,” about how it is thrown around in the philosophy of art without much theoretical analysis. However, I don’t think one can tie down the tendency by looking for some sort of “preconception,” according to a historical, scientific or anthropological standpoint. Rather, I wonder whether the significant phenomenon is the claim itself to a world. Take, for instance, Arthur’s notion of the “artworld.” When he makes the claim that there is such a thing isn’t he extending a philosophical invitation that we cross a line into a closed set of possibilities? And aren’t there real philosophical advantages to such closure? Within a world, everything can be claimed to derive from the same event or principle—in Arthur’s case, the event of transfiguration.

As for the papers, Mario’s quite right in saying that there should be more work looking at the connections between Danto and Adorno. I also find striking parallelisms. Just take for instance the fact that each of them devotes a significant amount of philosophical effort to examining the work of a single artist (Warhol and Schönberg, respectively).

As for the terms of your comparison, Mario, I was a bit confused about your characterization of out current political and economic situation. You imply that the transfiguration offered by these modernist theories is inadequate to our postmodern (admittedly my term) circumstances, because they offer glimpses of freedom that just reinforce (rather than protest) the prevailing tendency to believe that we can become anything and do anything. However, isn’t that the whole thrust of Danto and Adorno’s political understanding of art? That the glimpses of freedom offered by art lay bare the emptiness of such claims to renewal? Certainly, in Adorno’s case, the genuinely new is always presented as in a dialectical relation with the “new” (as claimed by advertising). As for Danto, the choice of Warhol, and thus the direct contrast of art and commercial culture, is perhaps even more direct.

[Derek Allan]

Julie

Thanks for your comment. My own was perhaps a bit elliptical. To be a bit more explicit, what worries me about the way terms such as ‘world’ and ‘reality’ (‘experience’ etc) are used in aesthetics is that there is so seldom any attempt to explain how they are being conceptualised. For example, there is a lot of discussion in analytic aesthetics about how art might ‘denote’ reality or the world. All kinds of elaborate theories are floated, but nowhere – repeat nowhere – in that discussion can I find any attempt to explain what is clearly a key term in the debate – the notion of world or reality. That would be fine if the meaning were clear and self-evident but it obviously isn’t.

The problem crops up in various ways in discussions of Danto. For example, the idea of ‘mere real things’ (significantly, nearly always surrounded by scare quotes.) The suggestion seems to be that there is art on the one hand and ‘real things’ on the other. But what is meant by ‘real things’ in the context of art? The same as is meant in the case of history or science, for example? Are the ‘real things’ each deals with the same? If not shouldn’t we begin by asking what ‘real things’ in the case of art might signify (or not signify) before we start building it into our theorising. I cannot recall that Danto ever discusses the matter.

As for the question of the artworld, that seems to me to raise other issues, since we are not then talking about what art is ‘about’, or stands over against, but how art is categorised as art. Personally the artworld is not an idea I have ever treated seriously. Obviously, art is, in a sense, what people who are responsive to art say it is. But that tells us nothing of value about art. Any more than knowing that the prize dogs are the ones chosen by the dog breeders’ society tells us anything about dogs.

[Brian Soucek]

Mr. Allen: I'm sure there are any number of philosophers who never stop to consider what they mean by 'world' or 'reality', but Danto is certainly not among them. A good portion of his book Connections to the World is about that very issue, and--more relevantly here--Transfiguration includes a lengthy discussion of those notions in the second half of Chapter 3. Danto opens that discussion, in fact, with the claim that "philosophy begins to arise only when the society in which it arises achieves a concept of reality."

As for the artworld, Danto didn't mean that to be something sociological or institutional--he's been arguing against that misreading for decades. The artworld, as I understand it, is more a community of artworks than of people.

[Derek Allan]

Professor Soucek

Thank you for your comments. I must confess to some surprise, however. I have read ‘Transfiguration of the Commonplace’ – not recently I must admit – and I cannot recall any significant discussion in it of the point I raise.

You quote AD as saying ‘philosophy begins to arise only when the society in which it arises achieves a concept of reality.’ I don’t know the context from which this is drawn (I don’t own a copy of TC so can’t look it up) but, as it stands, it does not address the point I raised. I was not speaking of what philosophy in general might or might not do, but specifically of what modern aesthetics has not done. And my point does not relate to whether or not society has a concept of reality but specifically whether aesthetics has analyzed what it means by the concept when it uses it in the context of art. My claim, to repeat, is that aesthetics – and I do include Danto here – though making frequent use of the concept, has rarely stopped to ask what it might mean in the context of art. This strikes me as a fundamental problem.

As for the artworld issue, I am certainly aware that there are various possible interpretations of Danto’s understanding of this idea – and yours is no doubt one of them. I personally am far from sure which is correct. The interpretation that has caught on, and exerted a widespread influence, however, (not without reason in my view if one reads Danto’s original Artworld essay) is the one I was commenting on.

[Robert Kraut]

I would like to avoid skirmishes about terminology, but Brian Soucek's remark merits a quick rejoinder. He says

"As for the artworld, Danto didn't mean that to be something sociological or institutional--he's been arguing against that misreading for decades. The artworld, as I understand it, is more a community of artworks than of people."

Here is a frequently cited quote from Danto's "The Artworld" (1964)

"To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry--an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld."

This passage suggests that "the artworld" is constituted by "an atmosphere of artistic theory" and a "knowledge of the history of art" (perhaps the syntax misleads me, and the second clause points toward the history of art, rather than a knowledge of the history of art, as constitutive.) Either way, there is more going on here than a "community of artworks": "atmospheres" and "histories" are essentially institutional, sustained in the behavior--individual and social--of people. These people might be artists, critics, viewers, concert promoters, art dealers, forgers, sound engineers, and various others: circumscribing the relevant community is a matter of considerable subtlety (and urgency). But I suspect there is more at issue here than, as Soucek suggests, "a community of artworks."

[Brian Soucek]

In talking about the artworld as "more a community of artworks than of people", I certainly didn't mean to deny that theory and history are both rooted in the behavior of people. Prof. Kraut is certainly right about that (though it's unclear to me how this makes art history "essentially institutional"). I was trying to suggest that the artworld, for Danto, isn't made up of a group of cultural insiders who have the power to annoint some objects as artworks. The latter is a perfectly valid interpretation of "The Artworld" article, but it's one which Prof. Danto has been trying to distance himself from for decades. In my earlier post, I was thinking in particular of Danto's comments in Danto and His Critics (p.203): "The expression 'artworld' sounds vaguely sociological, though at the time I had in mind something quite different, moved as I was in those years by the poetry with which writers like Wittgenstein used the word 'world.' I actually meant a world /consisting/ of works of art, a self-enriching community of ontologically complex objects, often inter-referential ... and which above all had a historical vector, so that something could be part of that world at one time but not at an earlier time."

Mr. Allan (sorry for the earlier spelling): I'm sorry if I was unclear earlier. The quotation from Transfiguration wasn't meant to answer your question--that is, to provide Danto's definition of reality--but to point you to the section of Transfiguration where Danto discusses the very subject you were wondering about (and which you say he neglects). Danto clearly agrees with you that it is crucial to ask what reality means, particularly in relation to art. This question, in fact, is what (according to Danto) makes art a proper philosophical concern.

[Derek Allan]

Brian

Thanks for your comments. I must have missed it in Danto then. I can recall no occasion in any of the Danto I’ve read (and I once set myself the task of reading about three of his books) where he answers, or even addresses, the question I refer to. Not that that is unusual in modern aesthetics, I have to say.

[Robert Linsley]

A comment to Francis Halsall's paper. Danto has perhaps a more grounded understanding of the artwork, in contrast to the high level of abstraction in Luhmann's theory, but I wonder to what extent either of them can specify how specific features of particular works act to produce the systems in question. The art system, or artworld, may well be organized according to its own laws, but don't those laws have to be derived from concrete aspects of art? Related to this, are there exemplary works that "illustrate" or describe the form of the art system? For Danto the Brillo box presumably does exactly that, but then he claims that the art world is more self-reflexive than it used to be. To me that seems like a too abstract description. We know how the ready-made acts to produce self reflection - since Duchamp's urinal we know this, so we can't learn much from that observation, and the Brillo Box then seems rather derivative, an illustration of an already understood concept. I find Luhmann more groundable. I think about the many artists of the sixties who brought forward the frame as a defining condition of art - Robert Smithson, Anthony McCall, Lynda Benglis, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, the list could go on and on - and observe that concrete developments in art force a new awareness of the system of art at the same time as they change the system itself. Is it possible that Luhmann's abstraction may have more concrete applications than Danto's artworld smarts?