In my immediately preceding posts I presented David Summers’s account of the spatial arts, and adopted it with qualifications for my own account of the visual arts. One virtue of Summers’s account, so I argued, is that it treats (in my terminology, not Summers’s) artistic status and artistic meaning as internally connected. Any instance of the spatial arts, conceptualized as a real metaphor, admits of an indefinite range of elaborations whereby its conditions and characteristics—its spatial and temporal environment, its placement, its material features, and further figurative and decorative markings –-can be recruited into its artistic meaningfulness. This leaves us with the further tasks of exploring the great contours of such elaborations in human artistic life, in general aspects of meaningfulness such as ornamentation, representation, and expression, as well as the great types of visual arts, the artforms of bodily ornamentation (especially tattooing), masking, drawing, painting, and sculpture. Prior to undertaking those further tasks, I’d like for a final time to consider the question of artistic status, and indicate again how insuperable quandaries arise for accounts that treat the question of artistic status and the question of artistic meaning as conceptually separate and admitting of independent treatment. An additional point, and indeed the one that motivated me to consider Danto’s account encore une fois, is to consider an alternate way of understanding the most basic kind of internal complexity within visual artworks: whereas Michael Podro suggests recognition + (means and mechanisms of) sustaining recognition, and Summers conceptualizes it as real metaphor + elaboration, Danto fundamentally conceives of the complexity as ‘aboutness’ + embodiment (of aboutness). So I turn again to the most elaborated and intellectually sophisticated of the accounts that separate artistic status from artistic meaning, that offered by Arthur Danto in the past half-century, and try to give a full account of his views and the aporias that arise.
I’ll begin in an unusual though straight-forward manner by sketching Danto’s most general conceptions of philosophy and its proper method, and of his philosophical anthropology under his austere conception of philosophy. Around 1990 I heard Danto give a three-hour seminar as part of the summer art writing program at the San Francisco Art Institute (towards the end of its glory days, and prior to its terrible decline into inter alia the only art school in the world actively promoting animal abuse in art and harassing and slandering those who criticized it). At that time Danto was known to me as the author of the fundamental contribution to the philosophy of contemporary art, his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, as well as his several years of writing art criticism for the magazine The Nation, and a puzzling lecture-essay wherein he proclaimed ‘the end of art’ (though for reasons very different from the superficially related claim made by Hegel in the 1820’s that art as a serious activity had come to an end). My memory of that afternoon thirty-five years ago is not detailed, and as I recall Danto talked pretty much continuously in rehearsing his not-yet familiar (to me) talking points about Andy Warhol and his own initial conceptualization of the ‘art world’. One point struck me and has lived on in memory: in passing Danto said something like ‘of course philosophy is the activity giving the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of concepts’. If for no other reason, I was struck because I had thought that in Anglo-American academic philosophy such a conception had been consigned to the dustbin of history by the example and prestige of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
What, then, are for Danto the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of art to an artifact?
Seventeen years after his initial encounter with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, and first in Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and then repeatedly for the few decades, Danto asserts that there are two necessary conditions for something being a work of art: (i) that it possess ‘aboutness’, i.e. being about something (Danto will also say that ‘being about something’ and ‘having a meaning’ are synonymous (see, among many instances, his late statement at Danto (2013a), p. 46); and (ii) that it ‘embody’ its aboutness. Danto initially derives these conditions from the famous thought experiment of multiple red squares of cloth: one is asked to imagine a number of identical, visually indiscernible red swathes, some of which are artworks (e.g. an all-red painting called ‘Kierkegaard’s Mood’, a minimalist work called ‘Red Square’, and a Conceptual piece called ‘Untitled’), and one of which isn’t (a piece of canvas painted red). Artworks possess aboutness, a mere piece of red canvas, which is just a material thing, doesn’t. Plainly both the concept of aboutness and the idea of embodying aboutness cry out for explication. How does Danto do these?
Part of the inspiration for this particular and peculiar thought experiment lies proximally in G. E. M. Anscombe’s book Intention, and more distantly in some remarks in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, both of which raise the question of the difference between my arm going up (say, pulled up, or raised as a reflex reaction) and me raising my arm, on the assumption that the two events are perceptually indiscernible. Anscombe would say that the latter, but not the former, is intentional; others, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, will stress that the latter admits of causal explanation, and the former explanations in terms of reasons. Danto had addressed the issue in one of his earliest publications in terms of the idea that the latter is a ‘basic action’, and that anything that is caused by a basic action is (unsurprisingly) a non-basic action. Danto is clear that non-basic actions admit of causal explanation (almost by definition), but never (unlike Anscombe or MacIntyre) provides a sustained account of basic actions in terms of intention or as something made intelligible by reasons. Danto comes to think that action is not an explanatorily primitive item, but rather itself can be analyzed in terms of the more basic concepts of representation, explanation, and truth (Danto (1979), p. 479). In particular, any action has two components: “a representation and a bodily movement; and the relationships are given through the fact that the representation causes the bodily movement, and the bodily movement satisfies the representation” (p. 484). In his mature conception, all action admits of causal explanation, and a basic action is only distinctive among actions in that it is basic when ‘directly’ caused by a representation (pp. 484-85). In his fullest statement of his general philosophy, Connections to the World, he presents an austere conception of philosophy and its proper method appropriate to his mature conception of action and representation: “philosophy is just the effort to understand the relationships between subjects, representations, and reality. Of course this means that the picture philosophy present of selves, representations, and reality will be exceedingly thin and abstract, for in truth the philosopher is to be concerned with these components only insofar as they impinge on one another in terms of the essential philosophical relationships” (Danto (1997), p. 40). With Danto adhering to this basic framework, one readily sees why, upon seeing Andy Warhol’s ‘Brillo Boxes’, he would have been struck with the thought that Warhol has raised the question of what makes the artwork an artwork, and why the (allegedly) visibly indiscernible box in the supermarket not one; further, one sees that on Danto’s austere conception, it must be that the former but not the latter possesses a semantic relation of ‘aboutness’ (or, more generally, ‘representation’): there is nothing it could have under such a parsimonious ontology.
So, further, how do artworks ‘embody’ aboutness? In the final chapter of Transfiguration Danto seemingly offers a straightforward account of embodiment of aboutness. Roughly reconstructed, his main line of argument goes like this: There are three major aspects of embodiment in the relevant sense: rhetoric, style, and expression, and Danto conjectures that “the concept of expression is the most pertinent to the concept of art” (Danto (1981), p. 165). The characteristic effect of rhetoric is “to cause the audience of a discourse to take a certain attitude toward the subject of that discourse: to be caused to see that subject in a certain light” (ibid); style is “an overall quality” (p. 189, quoting Meyer Schapiro) which is ascribed to how the subject is presented and which conveys something of the character of that which makes that quality, i.e. the artist and her character (p. 197); expression oddly is given almost no explicit discussion, but Danto seems to indicate his agreement with Nelson Goodman’s characterization of expression as ‘metaphorical exemplification’ (p. 189), according to which x metaphorically exemplifies y indicates, for example, that to say ‘this landscape painting expresses sadness’ is analyzable as ‘this landscape painting denotes/refers to such-and-such landscape, it exemplifies the work of the Barbizon school, and it metaphorically exemplifies a particular quality or character of sadness via such reference. Danto devotes much of the chapter not to those three aspects of embodiment, but rather to metaphor, which he treats as the most basic and pervasive aspect of embodiment, and one that seems to underly the other characteristics. The key features of metaphor is that it is something made (p. 175), that it provokes its recipients to participation in meaning-making (p. 171), and that the meaning of a metaphor cannot be fully paraphrased, and so no other figuration can substitute for a metaphor without changing the meaning of the utterance (p. 179). Danto seems (to me) to discuss metaphor here in a variety of ways, and I have never been able to work out a reasonably consistent reconstruction of his views on this topic, but his central points seem to be that all artworks embody metaphors, that understanding an artwork is grasping the metaphor that it embodies, and that in the greatest instances the artwork itself becomes a metaphor of the viewer. My lack of full confidence in Danto’s account is perhaps endorsed by Danto himself, as in later writings he seems to acknowledge that he can give no satisfactory general or philosophical account of embodiment, and that to see what he means by the term one should just read his art criticism and treat his analyses as showing, if not saying, what embodiment is (see, for example, Danto (2013a), p. 46).
If my reconstruction, or something close to it, of Danto’s characterization of art as something (an artifact?) possessing aboutness and embodying its aboutness is right, then one reasonable response would be to state that Danto’s account fails and/or is incomplete on its own terms, as he has not been able to state in a clear and coherent manner the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept of art to an object. It seems to me that in the last phase of his work, starting around the year 2000, Danto himself came to recognize this through consideration of the work of the commercial designer James Harvey (mistakenly referred to as ‘Steve Harvey’ in Danto’s first discussion of him), who had designed the original Brillo Box carton that Warhol had appropriated for his Brillo Box.
Danto noted that Harvey’s original cartons also ‘expressed’ their meanings: the original boxes are “a visual celebration of Brillo” wherein “meaning and embodiment are connected” (Danto (2000), p. xxv). If so, this immediately suggests the need for a third mark of the concept of art so as to distinguish categorically Warhol’s artistic boxes from Harvey’s artisanal-commercial ones. In his late book What Art Is Danto acknowledges that Harvey’s box “is art, but it is commercial art”. He distinguishes Harvey’s and Warhol’s work by saying “Harvey’s box belongs to visual culture, as that is understood, but Andy’s boxes belong to high culture” (Danto (2013b), p. 44) So Danto seemingly defuses the prima facie objection to his definition of art that Harvey’s work presents by classifying it as art, albeit of a commercial kind. But Danto is plainly uneasy with this (pseudo-?) solution, and says that “I have decided to enrich my earlier definition of art—embodied meaning—with another condition that captures the skill of the artist . . . I will define art as “wakeful dreams”” (p. 48). The point of adding this third condition is to emphasis that (a) just as there is (allegedly) no internal mark of the distinction between dream-experience and waking experience, there is no visually discernible mark of the distinction between artworks and other artifacts; and (b) ‘wakeful’ dreams, unlike the usual private dreams, are shareable and made to be perceived by others. I am sorry to say that I cannot see how this proposed third condition adds anything to Danto’s earlier discussions (both (a) and (b) are explicitly noted in Transfiguration), nor a fortiori can I see how it throws any light on the distinction between Harvey’s commercial manner of embodying meanings and Warhol’s high-art manner.
This post on Danto is mostly a digression, the explicit point of which is to suggest that Danto’s austere manner of philosophizing, as if ignorant of human history and philosophical anthropology, is utterly unpromising as the basis of a serious contemporary philosophy of art. The implicit point is again to motivate my own attempt to build an account of artistic meaning in the visual arts upon a basis that starts from basic features of human embodiment, perception, and language, and one that also treats as basic the dictum that ‘all art is historical’. In my following post I’ll return to the main line of my account with an exploration of the basic internal complexity of artworks through a consideration of some works by the Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim and the philosopher of perception John B. Brown.
References and Works Consulted:
G. E. M Anscombe, Intention (1959)
Rudolf Arnheim, Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order (1971)
--The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982)
John H. Brown, ‘Seeing Things in Pictures’, in Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction (2010), ed. Abell and Bantinaki
Arthur Danto, ‘Basic Actions’, in American Philosophical Quarterly (1965)
--‘Action, Knowledge, and Representation’, and ‘Basic Actions and Basic Concepts’, in The Body/Body Problem (1999)
--The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981)
--Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy (1997)
--‘Art and Meaning’, in The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World (2000)
--‘My Life as a Philosopher’, in The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto (2013a), ed. Auxier and Hahn
--What Art Is, (2013b)
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (1968)
Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The Antecedents of Action’, in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971)
Michael Podro, Depiction (1998)
Meyer Schapiro, ‘Style’, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (1994)
David Summers, Real Spaces (2003)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)