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After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History

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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.

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.

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!

This is not intended as a general review because it's something more individualized. I am the artist who wrote the letter addressed in pp. 207-209, about which Professor Danto wrote, ". . . I have thought about enough to have wanted to build the last chapter of my text around it."

Imagine my surprise when, seeing a new book by Danto on the library shelf, I started sensing something that caused a sort of tremor inside, just in the wording here and there. Then I found it in Chapter 11, sure enough. What I'd like to do here is quote from the letter I sent him in response, which is too long to post here entirely.

<Dear Professor Danto,

"Painting Like Rembrandt" After the End of Art

With much appreciation I have read your recent philosophical discourse on the nature of art at the end of the 20th century, After the End of Art. It was delightful to find quotations from my June 1995 letter to you and that you thought it "a powerful communication, . . . about which [you] have thought enough to . . . build [the] last chapter of [your] text around it." (p. 209) Reading to the end, however, I realized that a misconstruing of my dilemma eventually led you to create the "the artist who learned to paint like Rembrandt [who] discovered that the world had no room for his gifts, which belonged to another period altogether," the tragic twin of Van Meegeren, the master of fake Vermeers (p. 217), and I am not entirely sure how this should be taken. Caricatures are usually reserved for public figures and not dissident artists whose work has rarely been seen so I probably should not call it that, though there is some confusion because of the close association between the ideas you seek to address and the man you describe. Upon reflection, there is no need to presume that the issue was here intentionally circumvented by converting the live artist to an easy to knock down "man of straw," that is, substituting a less than vital disputation for the real one. Happily, there is enough evident misunderstanding, and the implications seem important enough for the modalities of art possible in our period, to warrant an attempt from my end to clarify the situation, in the hope that, through dialogue, we may even find the possibilities available to the contemporary artist to have been expanded.

Of the many reasons to be grateful for your text, perhaps the greatest is the way you have succeeded in laying out clearly, logically, and readably, the development and the condition of the present "art world," at least in terms most widely circulated among its elite circles, from a philosophical perspective. Your panorama of the "Vasarian" period of representational art, followed by the Modern era dominated by "Greenbergian" abstract formalism, sets a stage whereupon the playing out of post-Modern art can be plainly viewed. We may now better reevaluate our options and constraints. You have displayed simply the governing philosophical background behind the moving forms of contemporary art. Many have picked up bits and pieces of concepts and words they repeat but are unaware of the theoretical character of artistic beliefs they take for granted, though as a painter whose motivation has been to show that serious, straight representational painting like that of the Old Masters can be done in these times, I have had to consider these questions for more than 25 years.

It is an abiding question whether, as so many have been taught, the quest for more perfect imitation of appearances, until photography came along, adequately summarizes artistic aspirations from Giotto to modernism, or indeed the thought of Vasari. He was after all not a realist but a classicist,[1, endnote] in which system nature was to be improved upon by art, which alone could add harmony, grace, and beauty. If this "first period is marked by mastering ways to get more and more reliable pictures of the external world," as you put it (p. 68), the story might as well have stopped with Van Eyck, at the beginning of the oil painting tradition, with maybe a little epilogue on linear perspective.

Of course there was a story, but since it was characterized by things other than imitation alone, it could also be debated whether the threat of photography to mimetic painting might have been more perceptual than real. That the prophecy of the smooth academician, Delaroche, that with the advent of photography painting was dead never came true may have more to do with a lack in the technology of photography than later events in the history of painting. Having perused hundreds of books and magazines on interior design over the years, one relatively rarely sees photographs in prominent positions, especially of any size, which may be at least partly attributable to the relative fragility and insubstantiality of the photographic emulsion, compared to, say, oil paint on canvas. Though some people want a mechanical look in their art, most evidently also want to see paint, and a human touch, Komar and Melamid's surveys corresponding with what we largely see on people's walls. In their first poll, 60% of Americans preferred very realistic paintings, but 53% favored seeing brushstrokes to a perfectly smooth, photographic surface.[2]

If photography never did have the power to kill mimetic painting and if, as in your thesis, abstract formalism is not sufficient as a philosophical "essence" of art, this is a serious one-two punch to the authority of those who announced the ascendancy of Modernism over all other artistic options on the basis of formalist theory. You have done another tremendous service in calling attention to the exclusionary dogmatism of much Modernist ideology, which seems at times to have been close to bigotry. Instead of being held as the one, true torch bearer of the onward progress of the human spirit in its time, Modernism can now be seen as simply another mode of art alongside the representational modes so many people love. If the theoretical "knowledge" which gave supremacy to those who claimed that abstract "purity" represented a legitimate and absolute change of cultural dynasty has turned out to be flawed and those who rose to the top by its means turn out to have been mistaken, the explanation might be found in the very scenario you, with rare honesty, laid out concerning the trends in postwar academic philosophy. An ideology became institutionalized. One couldn't get into the system without conforming to it and, once inside, only the most stalwart could openly rethink. (pp.141-143) We are now culturally in a state of things after the collapse of theoretical Modernism perhaps analogous to present day Russia. There, it was once enough to invoke the higher authority of Party doctrine, but now communists must prove that they have something workable. Here, the knowledge of Modernist theory that distinguished the expert from the ignorant masses can no longer be appealed to. Now, without a "general theory of quality," as you put it (p. 95), that can encompass all of art, the expert must redefine his or her criteria or fall into the appearance of mere subjectivity I complained of in my letter to you.

Though perhaps a mere coincidence, it seems worth considering that there were roughly as many years of the supremacy of Modern formalist theory as there were of Soviet Communism, and people at large were never deeply converted to either. It is a happy irony that it was the pioneering work of a pair of ex-Soviet dissident Modernists, the courageous artistic pollsters, Komar and Melamid, who first went to the people themselves, of every race, gender, educational level, and economic status, to finally ask them what they wanted in art. With humanity and a sense of humor they have given their report that, nearly across the spectrum, people prefer representational paintings and, to understate their findings, are largely unmoved by abstraction. You are to be thanked for bringing their watershed work into the realm of post-modern artistic philosophy.

There are many reasons to be grateful for your book, though there are also questions that arise from all you have brought out into the open, which may continue to be discussed for a long time to come. Your contributions are many and I shall continue to value your breadth of knowledge, humanity, and lively intellect. For the present, my own difficulties arise in the last chapter, which you note in the Acknowledgments "contains that part of this book for the sake of which [you] really wrote it."

The confusion in "my" chapter, Chapter 11, starts with the phrase "painting like Rembrandt," which was not a phrase I had used to characterize my endeavors, though your term could work. The thing would be to agree on what we mean by it.

Looking back to my "epiphany," I used that word to describe a kind of direct speaking, an intuitively received insight, as distinguished from wholesale acceptance of something I heard somewhere or developed through reason. One of the functions of our rational faculty is to test the validity of what comes by intuition and you are perfectly right to subject my little revelation to critique. It has two sides, corresponding exactly to the two conditions you develop as essential for a thing to be a work of art, namely (i) "a dignified noble humanity that transcends its own age and ours," i.e., content and (ii) "a rich matrix of paint applied with the utmost intelligence," i.e., the means of presentation or "embodiment." On the first condition there is evident accord. There is such a thing as timeless, humane content and it is theoretically possible "to transmit that message ourselves."

It is the second side, the means of presentation, about which you write, "Still, it does not follow that the painting itself, as painting, `transcends its own age and ours,'" and "we must find means other than those he used." You proceed to speak of Rembrandt's "heavy darks and mysterious lights," his "style," which you say "is too closely identified with him, and with his time, to be available to us to use."

Here the argument you forged earlier in the chapter about historical constraints and the distinction between "use" and "mention" finds its presumed target, but I am somewhat at a loss to grasp in practical terms what you are saying is and is not possible to use, and here may be the occasion for a brief anecdote. Our great Ice Storm of 1996 left us without electric power for some eleven days, during which time candles were our main source of light, supplemented by burning logs in the fireplace, which were our only source of heat in the constant freezing, snowy weather. As I chopped wood in the middle of the night to keep our birds alive, it seemed this was reality and that industrial civilization and media culture are the fragile veneer that insulate us from the truth. One evening, a friend came over for dinner and our conversation lasted long into the flickering darkness. We found ourselves back in the world of Rembrandt, Le Nain, and Georges de la Tour! In one sense, Caravaggio's own "transfiguration of the commonplace" merely liberated these and other artists from certain classical canons to take advantage of what was always there, and is still here, beneath the surface. I quite agree with you that the best art is rooted in reality and not mere surface imitation of the past. No one has yet said my work resembles Rembrandt's but here, since I, too, have lived by candle and fire light, would the use of pictorial devices resembling Caravaggian tenebrism to translate my own "form of life" into painterly expression be "historically circumscribed" out of my reach? Artists have always "borrowed." If you wrote this out of compassion for the many present day artists who are inspired by the Old Masters to warn them of a deadly pitfall, one wishes you were more specific. Lights and darks offer the only example to visualize the philosophically proscribed style. Here we face the basic lack of a clear boundary between historic style and eternal content. Intense chiaroscuro is implied to be a stylistic device adapted to the spiritual dynamics of the (so-called, very diverse) Baroque Age, which it is impossible for us to get back into, but it was also part of spiritual content that is still perfectly possible for us to understand, whether we agree with the theology or not. The essential, human meaning of light and dark does not change. With light we can see what things are. In darkness we cannot see where we are going. This is so elemental to the human condition that I am not sure why you used light and dark to characterize a style that we cannot "use" but only "mention" today. The illustration of successful mention that appears with the text we are discussing combines figures lifted out of Rubens and Picasso, not unlike a New Yorker cartoon (which I am not sure I get, even with the caption). How ought we to envision the unsuccessful use of Rembrandt you discredit here? If it was as like Rembrandt as Mr. Connor's image is like Rubens, I would have called that an imitation. I hope you will clarify this because it is hard to imagine you would take such pains to philosophically come after the pastiche.

In any event, here is our initial semantic, if not philosophical, rift . . . >

I'll end here for now . . . I go into a lot of detail :)

In "After the End of Art" Arthur Danto, an esteemed art critic and professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, addresses the seminal question of our era in the philosophy of Art- How can we today, when confronted with the exceptional plurality of artistic traditions and manifestos, evaluate and criticize art? Danto traces and critiques the history of art from the late 19th century Salon Art, to the "age of manifestos"(which characterized the modern art scene of cubism and futurism) unto the the ultimate dissolution of the modern art narrative through abstract expressionism and pop art. He addresses these radical changes in the last two centuries of the history of art by examining and elaborating upon the aesthetic philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel as well as the principal theoretician of modern art, Clement Greenberg. Danto discusses a number of art theories, often referring to philosophers and artists which may be unfamiliar to the general public. As a result, this book is recommended to those persons with an interest in aestheticism and some general knowledge of both the history of 19th & 20th century art as well as the philosophy of Kant and especially Hegel. The book is surprisingly comprehensive in scope and fluid to read. However this is achieved by neglecting to summarize crucial aspects, mentioned above, with which the reader is presumed to be already familiar. Danto includes some humorous anecdotes about the contemporary art scene as well as some cursory references to his own views. For those persons who are intrigued by the diversity of art works and their associated philosophies, I heartily recommend this book.

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

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.