After the End of Art Paperback – November 9, 1998

A beauty! When art history feels stale, trust linguists to take it to the next level!

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

Good info.

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.

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.