Art, Essence, History, and Beauty: A Reply to Carrier, a Response to Higgins

Arthur C. Danto

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 54, No. 3. (Summer, 1996), pp. 284-287.

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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

ening challenge. But the other side of this threat is a promise. Beauty promises, in Danto's phrase, to "transfigure the commonplace" of our everyday real- ity. Its reemergence could transfigure contemporary art as well.

K A T H L E E N M A R I E HIGGINS Department of Philosophy University of Texas-Austin Austin, Texas 78712-1 180

INTERNET: PLAC645@UTXVMS.CC.UTEXAS.EDU

1. Arthur C. Danto, "Beauty and Morality," in Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994), pp. 363-375.

2. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 248.

3. Immanuel Kant, Critique ofJudgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), $23, p. 98.

4. Shakespeare, "Romeo and Juliet," act I, scene 5, lines 46-49.

5. Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession, directed by Nicolas Roeg (1980).

6 . Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Por.table Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 405.

Art, Essence, History, and Beauty: A Reply to Carrier, A Response to Higgins

"The target of Danto's critical analysis is the claim that art-as-such has an essence," David Carrier writes, stating what he takes to be the obvious in view of his belief that my "definition of art" has been so much written about that "it may seem this entire sub- ject is exhausted by philosophers." I am exceedingly grateful for his essay, for it demonstrates that what- ever subject it is that has been exhausted by philoso- phers, it is not my definition of art, and that I must be my own target, inasmuch as, had anyone asked me, I would have endorsed the claim that "art-as-such" has an essence. Indeed, I would have taken the entire bur- den of my major work on the subject, The Transfigu- ration of the Commonplace, to have been to under- write essentialism in the philosophy of art. The dif- ficulty with the great figures in the canon, from Plato through Heidegger, is not that they were essentialists, but that they got the essence wrong, although I admit that in the polemical order of the contemporary world, calling someone an essentialist is considered a

crushing criticism. In the light of that order I have al- ways considered myself as vulnerable as Saint Sebas- tian, and here it turns out that I have been misper- ceived as one of the archers. Hence, I am grateful to Carrier for exposing the misperception. It is time I faced my martyrdom like a-well, in for a penny, in for a pound-like a man.

It was never an inference of mine that "If Fountain and Brillo Box can be artworks, then no longer is there some distinctive sort of thing constituting art." No: if they can be artworks, then pretty much all the attempted definitions of the essence of art have got it wrong, not that those who made the attempts were wrong in making them. There are two ways to think of essence: extensionally and intensionally, to use the old terms in which the meaning of terms was often given; hence, with reference to the class of things de- noted by the terms, and the set of attributes the term connotes. One is functioning extensionally when, by induction, one endeavors to elicit the attributes com- mon and peculiar to the items which form the term's extension. The extreme heterogeneity of the term art- work's extension, especially in modern times, has at times formed the basis of the denial that the class of artworks has a defining set of attributes, and hence the affirmation, commonplace when I began my in- vestigations into the philosophy of art, that art must, like games, be a family-resemblance class. If my sur- mise is right, Gombrich's original intention in saying "There really is no such thing as Art" was just such a response, though my overall sense is that Gombrich was not among those who took Ducharnp serious1y.l My contribution, if it was one, was precisely not to be misled by the heterogeneity in the term's extension that Duchamp and Warhol now made radical.

They made it radical because from their work being classed as art, it immediately followed that you could no longer tell which were the artworks by ob- servation nor, in consequence, could you hope to ar- rive at a definition by induction over cases. My con- tribution was to say that a definition must be found which is not only consistent with the radical disjunc- tiveness of the class of artworks, but even explains how that disjunctiveness is possible. But, like all def- initions, mine (which was probably only partial) was entirely essentialist. By "essentialist" I mean that it set out to be a definition through necessary and suffi- cient conditions, in the canonical philosophical man- ner. So, incidentally, did Dickie's Institutional Theory set out to be essentialist in that way. Both of us set ourselves resolutely against the Wittgensteinian tides of the time.

The only figure in the history of aesthetics I found to have grasped the complexities of the concept of art-and who had almost an a priori explanation of the heterogeneity of the class of artworks, since un- like most philosophers he had an historical rather

Discussion

than an eternalist view of the subject, was Hegel. Symbolic art, on his scheme, had to look different from classical art as well as romantic art, and it was clear in consequence that any definition of art he might give had to be consistent with that degree of perceptual disorder and inductive impotency. In the marvelous passage where Hegel sets out his ideas on the end of art, he writes:

What is now aroused in us by works of art is not just imme- diate enjoyment but our judgment also, since we subject to our intellectual consideration (i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art's means of presentation, and the appropri- ateness or inappropriateness of both to one another?

It recently occurred to me that we need little more than (i) and (ii) to map the anatomy of criticism. There is, to be sure, the matter of sensuousness, through which stigma Hegel assigns to art a lower station in the realm of Absolute Spirit than philoso- phy, which is pure intellection unsullied by the senses, though he may have had sensuousness built into his idea of "means of presentation." But it also occurred to me that with all its pyrotechnics of imag- inary examples and its methodology of indiscernible counterparts, The Transfiguration of the Common- place, in its effort to lay down a definition, and hence chart the essence of art, did little better than come up with conditions (i) and (ii) as necessary for some- thing to have the status of art. To be a work of art is to be (i) about something and (ii) to embody its mean- in?. Embodiment goes beyond, or falls outside, the distinction between intension and extension as cap- turing the dimensions of meaning, and it was not until Frege introduced his important but undeveloped no- tion of Farbung to supplement Sinn and Bedeutung that philosophers of meaning found (and quickly lost) a way of handling artistic meaning. In any case, The Transfiguration ekes out two conditions, and I was (and am) insufficiently convinced that they were jointly sufficient for me to have believed the job done. But I did not know where to go next, and so ended the book. In Carrier's terms, it seems to me that I cap- tured part of the essence of art, and so vindicated my philosophical belief that art is an essentialist concept.

The difference, philosophically, between Dickie and myself was not that I was essentialist and he was not, but that I felt that the decisions of the artworld in constituting something a work of art required a class of reasons to keep the decisions from being merely fiats of arbitrary will. And in truth, I felt that accord- ing the status of art to Brillo Box and to Fountain was less a matter of declaration than of discovery. The ex- perts really were experts in the same way in which as- tronomers are experts on whether something is a star. They saw that these works had meanings which their indiscernible counterparts lacked, and they saw as

well the way these works embodied those meanings. These were works simply made for the end of art inasmuch as there was very little to them in terms of sensuous presentation and a sufficient degree of what Hegel terms "judgment" to license the admittedly somewhat reckless claim I sometimes made that art had nearly turned into philosophy.

There is a further consideration bearing on the In- stitutional account, one which has played a consider- able role in my thinking about art, namely that an ob- ject precisely (or precisely enough) like one accorded the status of artwork in 1965 could not have been ac- corded that status in 1865 or 1765. The concept of art, as essentialist, is timeless. But the extension of the term is historically indexed-it really is as if the essence reveals itself through history, which is part of what Wolfflin may be taken to have implied in say- ing, "Not everything is possible at all times, and cer- tain thoughts can only be thought at certain stages of the development."3 History belongs to the extension rather than the intension of the concept of art, and, again with the notable exception of Hegel, virtually no philosophers have taken seriously the historical di- mension of art. Gombrich, on the other hand, has, and it is to his great credit that he specified that the pur- pose of his epochal text, Art and Illusion, "was to ex- plain why art has a history."4 He really explained why pictorial representation has a history, not why art has a history, which is why he had such difficulty in fit- ting Duchamp into his account, since, after all, Foun-tain has nothing to do with making and matching.

Had he not taken over his colleague Popper's scorn for Hegel, Gombrich might have seen that both con- tent and means of presentation are themselves histor- ical concepts, though the faculty of the mind to which they answer is not perception, but, once again, "judg- ment." And in view of the historical constraints on the two, let us call them Hegelian, conditions, Foun-tain (which in any case was epicyclical on the history of plumbing) and Brillo Box (which alludes to the his- tory of manufacture, not to mention the history of standards of domestic cleanliness) could not have been works of art at any earlier moment. (We might define their historical moment as any time in which they could have been works of art.)

The term "essentialist" has become epithetical in the postmodern world primarily in contexts of gender and secondarily in political contexts. Certain views of the essence of womanhood have been felt (rightly) to be oppressive to women at certain stages in the his- tory of humankind; and the idea of participating in a single essence of Arabism has, in a celebrated polemic of Edward Said, obscured the differences among Arabs to Western eyes (let us overlook the es- sentialism of "Western"). So it has been morally and politically better to deny the existence of a female essence (for example) than to undertake the search

for one. Or to say, of human beings generally, that our existence is our essence, following Sartre's subver- sion of the medieval distinction. Now, I am uncertain what value it would be to try to fix essentialist defi- nitions of women, Arabs, or human beings generally, but if we see the advantage of doing so in the case of art, we may see that there are certain built-in safe- guards against the kinds of abuses the polemicization of essentialism was intended to identify.

Given that the extension of the term artwork is his- torical, so that works at different stages do not obvi- ously resemble one another, or at least do not have to resemble one another, it is clear that the definition of art must be consistent with all of them, as all must ex- emplify the identical essence. And as much may be said of the extension of artwork across the various cultures which have had a practice of making art: the concept of art must be consistent with everything that is art. It immediately follows that the definition en- tails no stylistic imperatives whatever, irresistible as it has been, at moments of artistic revolution, to say that what has been left behind "is not really art." Those who have relished denying the status of art to certain works have tended to elevate an historically contingent feature of art into part of the essence of art, which is a philosophical error it has evidently been difficult to avoid, especially when there has been lacking a robust historicism to go with the essential- ism. In brief, essentialism in art entails pluralism, whether pluralism in fact is historically realized or not. I mean that I can imagine circumstances in which, by means of political or religious enforce- ment, works of art are forced to comply with certain external standards. We see this happening with at- tempts at legislating the National Endowment for the Arts into socially acceptable grooves.

The application of my account of essentialism in art to other concepts with historical extensions is im- mediate and clear. The concept of womankind, for example, has a very complex history, so that what counts as fitting for women varies sharply from pe- riod to period and place to place. This does not, any more than with the concept of art, entail that there is no such thing as an essence all and only women exemplify. It means, rather, that the essence cannot contain anything that is historically or culturally con- tingent. Essentialism here, as elsewhere, entails a plu- ralism of gender traits, male and female, leaving it a matter of social and moral policy which if any traits to incorporate into the ideals that go with gender. These will not be part of the essence for obvious rea- sons, for what belongs to essences, in art or in gender, has nothing to do with social or moral policy.

Gombrich's often quoted view that "There is really no such thing as Art. There are only artists" is too un- developed to offer an interesting alternative to my view, as Carrier appears to think it does, and I am not

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

certain how valuable the recent gloss reported by Carrier is. There is certainly a use of the term "art," as in "the art of memory" or "the art of poaching eggs" or "the art of the fugue." These arts, once mas- tered, enable us to memorize, poach eggs, compose fugues. At various stages in the history of the visual arts, there have been "arts" of this sort, such as the art of perspective, or of foreshortening, or whatever: techniques for achieving certain desired results. In this sense there really is, as I gather Gombrich wants to say, no such thing as "the art of art." But you need both senses of the term to say this at all: the sense of method and the sense of that kind of object the essence of which I have found it philosophically cen- tral to seek. There may be something in the essence of art that excludes the possibility of there being an art in the methodological sense, but that would have to be found out. My sense is that it is inconsistent with the pluralism subtended by the concept that there should be an art of art, though there can be an art of portrai- ture, of landscapes, etc. But this is probably not the important thing to say that Carrier has taken it to be.

One achievement of Duchamp's readymades, and to a lesser degree of pop, was to bump beauty from a pro- jected set of attributes making up the essence of art, to a merely local attribute of art in certain historical periods. And this in turn served to drive a wedge be- tween aesthetics and the philosophy of art. European artists in the sixties first learned about pop from black-and-white photographs in art magazines, but they were unprepared, I was told by Katya Melamid, the wife of the Russian conceptual artist, Alexander Melamid, for the handsomeness of the paintings when they at last saw them on exhibition. "Our jaws dropped," she said, but if the paintings of Roy Lich- tenstein or Andy Warhol were indeed beautiful, their aesthetic impact seemed incidental to their concep- tual meaning. The revolution started by Duchamp and pop tended to marginalize beauty, in large part because, in the late sixties and through the seventies, it marginalized painting, to the point where the con- ference organized in Austin, Texas by the art histo- rian Richard Schiff under the provocative title "Whatever Happened to Beauty?" might as appropri- ately have been titled "Whatever Happened to Paint- ing?" The essay on which Kathleen Marie Higgins comments was presented as a lecture there, as was an early version of her comments. My own sense then was that beauty in art had become part of the mean- ing of the works in which it was present, and that, in responding to the beauty through an aesthetic re- flex, one is connected to the further meaning of the work through just the kind of transformation Katya

Discussion

Melamid refers to in terms of dropped Russian jaws. My paradigms, as Higgins makes clear, were Mother- well's Spanish Elegies, where the beauty achieved the elegaic effect of treating the fall of the Spanish Re- public philosophically, seeing it, so to speak, sub specie aeternitatus. I thought that Motherwell had found a way of connecting beauty with political real- ity internally, and in "Beauty and Morality" I ad- vanced a notion of "internal beauty," where the beauty in the work relates the subject of the work to the work's mood, and ultimately the mood of those who experience the work. Higgins is right in saying that this is altogether too quietistic, that beauty does not only reconcile us to loss by causing us to view what has been lost philosophically: beauty is erotic, and assures us that what has been lost can be found again, that there is always room for hope, and indeed for love. I remember a novel by Margaret Atwood in which a woman weeps when she sees some simple prints in which Chinese men and women, wearing Maoist garments, are harvesting vegetables: it is so simple, and so morally beautiful next to the mess and complexity of her own life, that hers are tears of hope. That would exemplify an internal beauty which makes Higgins's point.

Motherwellian beauty came in for a fair amount of criticism on the grounds that the needs of the world were so intense and aggravated that beauty was more than a distraction: it diverted energy which ought by moral right to have gone to mitigation of the urgencies. All but the saintly have endured the accusatory ques- tion "How, at a time like this, can you ..." where what one is doing is criticized morally for not working im- mediately and directly for the elimination of hunger, of AIDS, of savagery in the Balkans, or whatever. Higgins has a remarkable idea, that beauty may exactly serve the goals from which it seems to distract. If she can work this out she will have made an immense contri- bution to moral theory and, more important, to moral life. It is up to her to show that what she calls beauty re- ally is that and not something more like wisdom.

ARTHUR C . D A N T O Department of Philosophy Columbia University New York, New York 10027

1. "There are horribly many books, which I do not read, about Marcel Duchamp, and all this business when he sent a urinal to an exhibition and people said he had 'redefined art' ... what triviality!" E. H. Gombrich, A Lifelong Interest: Conversations on Art and Science with Didier Eribon (Lon-don: Thames & Hudson, 1993), p. 72. I think what he meant to say was "many horrible books," and that, speaking in the Nabokovian mode to which Carrier and I are addicted, he was letting me know that he had not read The Transfigura-

tion of the Commonplace. Or had read it enough to consider it trivial.

2. G. W. F.Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. I, p. l I.

3. Heinrich Wolfflin, "Preface to the Sixth Edition," in Principles of Art History; The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, n.d.), p. ix.

4. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psy- chology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 388.

Another Look at the "Multiple Viewpoint" Theory: A Reply to Richardson In a recent article, John Adkins Richardson argues that the "multiple viewpoint theory" of early modern art is a perennial cliche, which unaccountably persists despite being demonstrably false.' Since I think at least one version of the multiple viewpoint theory has more interest than he claims, I would like here to take another look at it, in particular, the part of Richard- son's argument that concerns CCzanne. As I see it, his account does not clarify the role of multiple view- points in CCzanne's work and misrepresents the painter's attitude toward a rational basis for painting.

As Richardson describes it, the multiple viewpoint theory concerns a method of painting. He asks whether CCzanne (and following him, the cubists) composed their paintings by considering a visual sub- ject from a succession of viewpoints that were then synthesized into a composite image. He answers that neither CCzanne nor the better cubists did so. That is undoubtedly true, but I do not think this account gets to the heart of the "multiple viewpoint theory." In the interpretation I propose, the issue is not whether CCzanne was a proto-cubist with a formula for ma- nipulating traditional space; rather the issue is whether some version of the multiple viewpoint the- ory helps to explain the distinctive character of the space in CCzanne's paintings and especially, its rela- tion to traditional representations of space. While I agree that CCzanne did not cut up and recombine pieces of traditional space, I argue here that he was, nonetheless, working with an idea of pictorial space, which originated with Manet, that rejects single viewpoint perspective as the basis for painting com- position. In this new understanding of space, multiple viewpoints were tolerated in a way they were not in traditional pictorial representation. Furthermore, I argue that CCzanne was, in his painting, seeking to understand the rational constraints that governed the new visual space, rather than, as Richardson claims, distorting objects in space to express resistance to "Cartesian rationalism."