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

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. "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 form

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.

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!

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.