End Of The Art

Ales Erjavec

Farairan Quarterly, No.11

One
In recent decades the topic of the “end” or even the “death” of art has been a frequent subject of debates in aesthetics and art criticism. Although it was proliferated in its present form mainly in the United States, it of course has its historical roots in Hegel’s notion of the end of art as he developed it in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

It was in the eighties of the previous century that the idea of the “death of art” became popular: in 1984 appeared a book entitled The Death of Art1 in which the central contribution was the essay “The End of Art” by Arthur Danto. As Danto himself later noted, to speak of the “death of art” was “an overstatement.”2 At approximately the same time another author, the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, discussed the same idea, but with a different agenda: Vattimo’s intent was to reveal the extent in which the proliferation of Kitsch and contemporary mass media has caused the “death” and the “decline” of art. Basing his analyses on Hegel and Adorno, Vattimo came to the conclusion that “in a world of manipulated consensus authentic art speaks only by remaining silent.”3 Yet another author was Hans Belting who in his book The End of the History of Art (published in German in 1983 and then in English in 19874) argued, in the words of Arthur Danto, “that art did not seem, in the objective sense, any longer to have the possibility of a developmental progressive history. And the question for Belting then was how there could be an art history of the present if this objective condition failed?”5 Nonetheless, while admitting the “death of art” was an exaggeration, in Danto’s view, “the idea must have been in the air in the mid-eighties.”6

Even before the eighties the issue of the end of art concerned not only scholarly debates that would be exclusively limited to a discourse intrinsic to the study of Hegel and, perhaps, his commentators, or to Vattimo’s thesis that the end of art was essentially tied with that of the end of metaphysics. Instead, the thesis was frequently essentially related to, and made explicit, by the events in the western art itself, for at least some western art after Hegel behaved as if it wanted to prove his views on the future of art. Hence, according to Danto, he and Belting came to the conclusion of the end of art on the basis “of the internal state of art itself, considered more or less in isolation from wider historical and cultural determinants.”7 As Danto explained already in 1986, he furthermore wrote the essay “The End of Art” precisely as “a response to the dismal state of the artworld, for which I sought—and continue to seek—an explanation.”8

Two
While discussing the explicit or implicit philosophical source of various “the end of art” theories, i.e. Hegel’s philosophy, I cannot avoid discussing an artist who is considered to be the historical place of origin of the art that emerged after the “end of art.” This artist (who in fact never called his works “art”) is Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) whose ready-mades, presented at the very beginning of the twentieth century and then followed by their similes as found in various forms of conceptual and neoconceptual art, have in the view of many proven that Hegel’s dictum about the end of art has foretold the course of events in art of the twentieth century. It would thus appear that Hegel not only justly claimed that romantic poetry (this one, according to Hegel, stretching from the Middle Ages to his own time) represented the highest form of the Absolute Spirit as it appears in art, but that, furthermore, he also foretold the emergence of conceptual art, that is, of an art that no longer deals with the sensuous, but with ideas only—the concepts. This, then, meant that romantic art no longer carried an intrinsic spiritual value but has been transmogrified into a product or even an “idea” (concept) only, thereby losing its former prerogatives and relevance.

Why should art carry such a significance? It should be remembered that from the time of Plato the highest ideas were those of the Truth, the Good, and the Beautiful. From the Greek antiquity until modernity (the year of the discovery of America—1492—is sometimes used as its threshold) in the west these three ideas were not only the highest ones but were also the main features of the Christian God. With the advent of the French Revolution and, especially, with the emergence of romanticism, the role of God slowly diminished and his place in the new human world was appropriated by the artist: it was now the poet who “created” a “new” world from his mind and spirit. The artistic creativity began to serve as the paradigmatic example of human creativity. The same idea was also strongly present in the views of Karl Marx and in his interpretation of the role of work in society: in his view, in class society work is but labor and toil, while in a classless society work is to become equal to art, for it is to depend upon the creative potentials of each individual. This same understanding of the artist as a special human being and of art as the paramount form of creativity continued in the twentieth century. Hence modernism of the twentieth century appears in practice and in theory as an “overevaluation of art”9 and hence as a direct descendant of the nineteenth-century romanticism.10

Other features arising from such a notion of the artist are the perceptions of the latter as someone exemplified by inspiration and by the “genius” that he has to follow, and who is exempt from the usual bourgeois customs and norms and whose behavior may therefore be that of a bohemian. Another metaphor for the artist and his approach to the world and its perception is that of a “child.” A child in this sense is someone who is capable of seeing and discerning the world in ways that are closed to the ordinary members of the bourgeois society who have in their practical and worldly pursuits instrumentalized the world, its resources as well as human relationships and life itself.

A precondition for art to be regarded as something very special—with this then being equally true of its creator, the artist—is to be a creation of the free play of human faculties. Within this mental horizon which stretches almost to the present and even today still persists as the predominat perception of art among many western people, art is not only something very special, but also essentially linked to a particular human universe and community. An ensuing consequence is that the same notions carry different relevance and significations in different contexts. Hence the notion of the “end of art” may possess a different relevance in different cultures.

The same is true if we compare the notion of art within three “philosophical empires,”11 that is, the German, the French and the Anglo-American. Their number is of course not limited to these three, for one could readily find others, such as the Chinese, Indian, Japanese, etc. Half a century ago these “empires” existed side by side and had a very limited influence upon each other. Although in recent decades this gap has often been bridged due to an increased communication, it still holds true that some of the differences in the interpretration and understanding of what philosophy and art are have not completely melted away, although they may have fused to a certain extent and hence formed new and much less distinct entities, a process that is simultaneously due to the cultural interchange and processes occurring within art proper. Thus the German notion of “Kunst” includes all the arts, while the French notion of “l’art” as well as the similar English word “art” not only in much of the previous century but also today still refer mainly to the visual arts and some other artistic forms, with the visible exception being literature. The reason for a partial change in our understanding of what art or philosophy (or aesthetics, for that matter) mean in various cultural frameworks does not arise only because of an increased cultural permeability, but also because today an increasing amount of artistic creations fall under the category of visual creations or products, with these being furthermore strongly (and sometime essentially) related to (visual) culture, with this one encompassing an enormous variety of works and activities which in the recent past would be excluded form the notion of art altogether.

Due to the ensuing conceptual fluidity it usually also escapes our attention that when referring to poetry and fiction the idea of the “end of art” never cought up in the same way as it did in the visual art (to which both Danto and Vattimo refer). While it may be viable to claim that the other art forms too no longer possess that historical relevance which they may have had in the past, they nonetheless continue to have a relevant place in culture or, at least, are not a cause for the kind of dismay that Danto speaks of in connection with the visual art.

Three
It is the German idealism wherein the issue of art emerged as a central topic of modern philosophy—especially in Friedrich F.J. Schelling and in Hegel. Already in The Phenomenology of Mind from 1807 we find the idea about the passing away of art. As Benedetto Croce writes in his Estetica, “Hegel’s aim is basically anti-religious and rationalist, as well as anti-artistic. This was a strange and painful consequence for a man like him, a very lively and ardent lover of art: it was almost a repetition of the difficult step that Plato was forced to take. Like the Greek philosopher who, listening to the order of the reason that was put forth, admonished mimesis and Homeric poetry which he loved so much, in the same way the German philosopher did not want to evade the logical consequence of his system, announcing the death, or rather, the already carried out death of art. ‘If, on the one hand, we place art so high (says he) then, on the other hand, we should not forget that art is neither in its content nor its form the highest and absolute way in which the spirit becomes conscious of its real interests. For, precisely because of its form, art is limited to a certain defined content. Only a certain delimited circle and level of truth can be shown by the structure of an artwork; for something to become a real content for art, it must already contain in its proper definition the potential to pass into the sensuous and therein is adeaquate to itself as is the case, for example, in Greek gods. Contrary to this there exists also a deeper grasping of truth wherein it is no longer similar or close to the sensuous which would allow this material to accept and express it adequately. Of such kind is the Christian understanding of truth, and especially the spirit of our contemporary world or, more precisely, the spirit of our religion and of our intellectual education appears as something that stands above the level on which art must carry out the highest kind of cognition of the absolute. The artistic production and its products by themselves do not satisfy our highest needs. …The thought and reflection have superseded art.’ For this withering away of art in the modern world”—continues Croce—“usually different causes are given, especially the predominance of material and political interests, but the real reason is (says Hegel) in that art is on a lower level in relation to the pure thought. ‘For us art is and according to its highest definitions remains, a part of the past,’ and precisely because it is already a spent thing, it is possible to make a finished philosophy. Hegel’s aesthetics is therefore an obituary: in a sequence it passes forms of art which follow one after another, shows temporary stages which they represent in their inner tiredness and puts all of them into a grave with an epigraph on it, written by philosophy.

Metaphysical romanticism and idealism”—ends Benedetto Croce this discussion of Hegel—“have elevated art so high, have placed it so far into the clouds, that they necessarily had to comprehend that placed so high, it no longer can serve any purpose.”12

We can see that already Croce (1886-1952), a follower of Hegel, recognized an important feature of Hegel’s aesthetics, namely the fact that Hegel elevated art to such heights that he was bound to set historical limits to its importance.

It is in The Phenomenology of Mind from 1807 that Hegel set these limits and posits art within religion. He writes: “Later on, spirit goes beyond art in order to gain its higher manifestation, viz. that of being not merely the substance born and produced out of the self, but of being, in its manifestation as object, this very self; it seeks at that higher level not merely to bring forth itself out of its own notion, but to have its very notion as its shape, so that the notion and the work of art produced may know each other reciprocally as one and the same.”13

In Hegel’s holistic philosophy every art form and period are important because they relate to, and are consubstantial with, other parts of the totalized whole of the development of the Spirit, i.e. its history. Art gains importance because of its place in the order of the progression of the Spirit and it is because of this order of the progression that it also loses it—in the form of romantic poetry. As Luc Ferry has aptly phrased it, “poetry is therefore art at the exit of art.”14

“What does it mean, the death of art in Hegel? Something that is very simple and is not at all absurd: if art is simply a sensuous incarnation of a conceptual truth, then science is superior to it, and philosophy is superior because philosophy and science grasp that truth where it should be grasped, that is to say, in the element of the concept, of the mind. They [philosophy and science] think this truth instead of presenting it in a sensuous material and consequently, since Hegels says, ‘Art is dead,’ art is surpassed by science and by philosophy, it must always be remembered what the intended meaning of this statement is. The argument is a strong one: art has been surpassed by religion because religion presents the same idea as art, that is to say, the idea of a divine truth, but in an element which is better appropriated: the parable of Christ, for example, or the myth, and the myth is superior because it is the word, logos, and more adequate to its object. If art is therefore simply an incarnation of a conceptual truth in a sensuous material, then art is dead.”15

As Ferry rightly claims, the reason for Hegel’s conclusion that art is dead lies in his view that art is essentially related to truth; since the highest form of truth is the conceptual one, it is necessary that art is surpassed by the more conceptual incarnations of this truth. Or, as Hegel phrases it in The Phenomenology of Mind, “The work of art hence requires another element for its existence. …This higher element is that of Language—a way of existing which is directly self-conscious existence.”16

The idea that art is related to truth is of course an ancient one and in antiquity probably most thoroughly presented in Aristotle. It then reaches new heights in romanticism and then in realism and modernism. Émile Zola thus argues: “I want … a simple composition, a clear language, something like a glass house that would allow to see the ideas within.”17 The whole modernism is infatuated with truth. Although in modernism “truth” is not directly discerned in a figurative form, it is there, only hidden behind (or perhaps “within”) the abstraction, which no longer offers a truth of the equivalence of “the mind and the thing” but rather of the Heideggerian “unconcealedness.” Consider the works of Malevich, Barnett-Newman and especially of Mark Rothko. In realism—to follow Fredric Jameson—the link between the referent, the signifier and the signified is still there, while in modernism the link to the external referent has disappeared.

To ascertain the importance of truth in relation to art in the twentieth century it suffices to mention again two thinkers of completely different philosophical and political persuasions, namely Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno. While the first was a proponent of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg Trakl, the latter sided with, and promoted, the works of atonal music of Arnold Schönberg and Igor Stravinski, and theater plays by Samuel Beckett. Adorno furthermore extensively and intensely criticized Martin Heidegger’s ideas. Nonetheless, from the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, their views in many respects appear surprisingly similar, an important part of these being related to art: both see in art (again for very different reasons) something exceptional. In Heidegger’s view only art retained some of the original immediacy of human existence; otherwise the modern age is nothing but an epoch wherein Being has been forgotten to be replaced by what Theodor Adorno would call “instrumental reason”: “Ratio, having been fully instrumentalized, and therefore devoid of self-reflection and of reflection on what it has excluded, must seek that meaning that it has itself extinguished. But in the condition that necessarily gives rise to this question, no answer is possible other than nothingness, which the form of the answer already is. The historical inevitablity of this absurdity allows it to seem ontological; that is, the veil of delusion produced by history itself.”18 Under such circumstances (but analized with different terms) Heidegger claimed that as “in the whole of modernity, it may be that the distinctive character of existence, or in Heidegger’s terms the ‘meaning of being’ in our epoch, appears first and most clearly in aesthetic experience.”19

We see that both in Heidegger and in Adorno art is one of the rare venues of truth that is still available in the instrumentalized, commodified, reified and alienated capitalist world of the twentieth century. In its peculiar and unique way art offers truth—and is therefore in this respect not far removed from the role it plays in Hegel’s philosophy. True, neither in Heidegger nor in Adorno (with the exception of the criticism of consumer culture in Adorno) is there an explicit idea that art will disappear, die or end. Nonetheless, Heidegger did ask himself the important question, thereby preceding Gérard Genette:20 “The judgment that Hegel passes in these statements cannot be evaded by pointing out that since Hegel’s lectures in aesthetics were given for the last time in the winter of 1828-1829… we have seen many new art works and art movements arise. Hegel did not mean to deny this possibility. The question however remains is art still an essential and necessary way in which truth that is decisive for our historical existence happens, or is art no longer of this character?”21

In the last century and more the issue of the end of art as put forth by Hegel has occupied numerous authors. Let me end this presentation of the ideas of some of them by mentioning Peter Bürger’s views on Hegel’s idea of the end of art. He notes (as many have before him) that “Hegel historicizes art but not the concept of art. Although it has its origins in Greek art, he accords metahistorical validity to it.”22 Bürger also finds in Hegel’s lectures in aesthetics a hint concerning the post-romantic art: “Using Dutch genre painting as his example, he writes that here the interest in the object turns into interest in the skill of presentation: ‘What should enchant us is not the subject of the painting and its lifelikness, but the pure appearance … which is wholly without the sort of interest that the subject has.’ …He says expressly ‘that the artist’s subjective skill and his application of the means of artistic production are raised to the status of an objective matter in works of art’ (vol. I, p. 599). This announces the shift of the form-content dialectic in favor of form, a development that characterizes the further course of art.”23

Peter Bürger makes here two important points. The first is a well-known one, namely that Hegel’s notion (or concept) of art arises from, and is limited to, the Greek art. In other words, while in his philosophy art forms are presented as developing further, the essence of art nonetheless remains the same since the ancient Greeks. Nonetheless, Bürger discerns in Hegel a deviation from his aesthetic theory for Hegel, claims Bürger, foresaw the formalist

approach of the modernist art of the twentieth century.

It may remain questionable whether we can conclude from the quoted passage from Hegel’s lectures in aesthetics that his words therein signal the transformation of western art from realism to modernism and hence formalism, although such a possibility cannot be discarded. What is perhaps more pertinent is the link that could be established between Hegel’s views and the development of that other form of the twentieth century art, namely that of conceptual art. The argument is a persuasive one: since conceptual art is based on the idea, the concept, it represents a clear-cut case of art transcending its own confines, thereby entering the realm of conceptual truth while simultaneously retaining the prerogatives of the romantic art and of the art of previous epochs. Although this hypothesis is an attractive one, I don’t think it stands up to the facts. Let me explain why.

Four
Conceptual art has many sources but we can nonetheless say with a fair amount of certainty that its historical place of origin is Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made. Although in its most notorious emanation—The Fountain—from the Armory Show in New York in 1917 it was meant as a provocation, the ready-mades nonetheless acquired a life of their own which led to the claim that, “[t]he Duchamp invention which made the most original contribution to the development of contemporary art was the ready-made.”24 The ready-mades still serve as early examples of a whole artistic trend in the previous century which diverges from the usual course taken by modernism. To recognize the difference between the two, a difference that is an essential one, it suffices to note the reaction of the central modernist art critic Clement Greenberg to Duchamp which clearly establishes the boundaries between modernism per se and conceptual art which in my opinion falls outside the confines of modernism and represents its parallel, or in Greenberg’s words, a “mutation.”

As Curtis Carter explains, “Clement Greenberg took on the Duchampian legend in his essay, ‘Counter-Avant-Garde.’25 Greenberg,” continues Carter, “begins his attack by finding in Duchamp the origin of what Greenberg calls avant-gardism. ‘With avant-gardism,’ he says, ‘the shocking, scandalizing, startling, the mystifying and confounding, became embraced as ends in themselves and no longer regretted as initial side-effects of the new that would wear off with familiarity.’ Such side effects, according to Greenberg, were deliberately built in by the artist to achieve an immediate impact and were based on cultural habits and expectations rather than on aesthetics or taste. Greenberg charged that Duchamp’s demand for liberation from the art of the past and from all formal constraints in creating it did not evoke the heretofore typical response of condemnation or opposition. Rather, in Duchamp’s case, the innovations drew praise and welcome. This, Greenberg argues, was the polar opposite of the public and critical response toward Impressionism and to virtually every prior radical step in the development of modern art. Hence, Greenberg sees Duchamp as, in part, responsible for a radical mutation in the nature of art, a mutation after which art no longer behaves as it had. In Greenberg’s view, Duchamp has led art off-course to the point where it often presents premeditated academic forms of so-called unconventional art as genuine advancements. For instance, Greenberg contends that Duchamp’s ready-mades were not at all new except in the sense of being presented as fine art, a matter of cultural and social context rather than aesthetic or artistic value. They depend as art on how they are perceived rather than on skillful making and the aesthetic responses they call up. Such art is raw, private and unformalized, capable of feeding on anything. Such art has been freed from the usual expectations, including the giving of satisfaction. In short, Greenberg finds Duchamp’s art lacking in the fundamental qualities of aesthetics and taste that he sees as required for making significant art. In contrast to Duchamp, Greenberg would argue that superior art always emerges from tradition, which is itself a product of the interplay of expectation and satisfaction. In his view, the superior artist provides new surprises arising out of experiences informed by a rich context of tradition and by readiness to revise expectation.”26

Conceptual art, as the term implies, is created upon the idea that the concept, the idea, actually forms the artwork. The execution, the craftsmanship, or the technical skill are not essential prerequisites in conceptual art, for the aim are not the representational or expressive features which should offer what Greenberg calls “satisfaction,” Aristotle the pleasure of recognizing the familiar,27 and Ernst Gombrich the “pleasure of recognition.”28 It is the idea instead, the conceptual argument, that makes a work into a work of art—but into a work of art wherein art carries a very specific meaning, far removed from the traditional one. It is significative the way Duchamp explained the ready-mades: “[I]t is necessary to obtain things with such indifference that they do not provoke any aesthetic emotional reaction. The choice of the ready-mades is based on visual indifference, at the same time as a total absence of good or bad taste.”29 The mentioned features of the ready-mades perfectly denote the kind of works that Marcel Duchamp for the most part made, be they the early ready-mades or the Large Glass (with the potential exception of his last work, Étant donnés, with its voyeuristic intent).

Or to choose two more recent examples from artists who saw themselves as conceptual artists (something that Duchamp did not claim to be): Artist Sol LeWit defined in 1967 conceptualism in the following way: “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes art.” Another definition was offered by Joseph Kosuth: “The ‘purest’ definition of conceptual art would be that it is inquiry into the foundations of the concept ‘art’, as it has come to mean.”30

I mentioned before the hypothesis that since conceptual art is based on concepts, it could consequently represent art transcending its own confines, thereby entering the realm of conceptual truth while retaining the prerogatives of the art discussed by Hegel, that is, as it existed before its purported demise. The reason why such a thesis is problematic can be found in Greenberg: superior art arises from tradition and it is this historical context and consequently the historical passage of styles and forms that determines the relevance of a certain art form or an art work. Without historicity the Hegelian notion of art and its demise lose their significance. Without the passage of time that we call history and without the historical dialectical process which retains the past in the present which then carries it, transformed and on a higher level, into the future, there can be no superior art, for there exist no criteria for such a distinction. What is typical of conceptual art is, contrariwise, precisely its ahistorical nature: conceptual art is no longer concerned with overcoming its or some other past, but simply keeps on repeating the same gesture of exhibiting and presenting itself as art. Even for conceptual art it therefore cannot be claimed that it overcomes limitations set up by Hegel: although it demonstrates the “end of art” it doesn’t demonstrate its own passage into the realm of philosophical conceptual knowledge.

Let me return again to the Duchamp ready-made as that “place of origin” of conceptual art which emerged with the Bicycle Wheel, i.e. the first ready-made, conceived in 1913. We could perhaps say that the cubist collages (which also appeared at almost the same time) already were a step in the same direction, but this would be only partly and certainly not essentially true: the collages, in spite of containing “real” pieces of newspapers etc., as a whole nevertheless still functioned as representations. With ready-mades this was no longer the case: a bicycle wheel is nothing but a bicycle wheel—and the same is true of Duchamp’s other ready-mades: the bottle rack, the snow shovel (which at least was retitled In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915)), and so on. By introducing the ready-made Duchamp cut the umbilical cord that still tied modernist and avant-garde art to traditional art. Traditional art found its continuation in art with a symbolic content such as Malevich’s or Kandinsky’s for the works of these, in spite of being abstract, nonetheless were supposed to contain a symbolic or a metaphysical content, or possessed a purely aesthetic potential—a process carried to its extremes in the decades after 1908 when Kandinsky had, what Herbert Read called an “apocalyptic experience,” i.e. that of “a painting [that] lacked all subject, depicted no identifiable object and was entirely composed of bright colour-patches.”31 In suprematism, expressionism, surrealism and abstract expressionism the sign nonetheless still existed, in spite of the fact that the link between the referent and the signifier has been severed. In Duchamp’s ready-mades and in latter works which were consciously designated as conceptual this was no longer the case: they represented but themselves, and were neither signs nor representations. Traditional as well as modernist art was based on, or derived from, the principle of the copy and its representational character. Already in the ninth century John of Damascus developed a doctrine of images which is still valid today: An image “is of like character with its prototype, but with a certain difference. It is not like the archetype in every way.”32 But this doctrine is valid only as long as the images or similar artifacts represent something. What distinguishes the prototype and the image is precisely that infinitesimal difference between the original and the copy: if the copy is but the original, no artistic effect can be achieved. What conceptual art claims is precisely that: that it can function as art even if it is not a copy in any way but is the original only.

Let me return to Hegel. It has to be stressed that his judgment about the end of art carries weight only in the light of the developments in art since the end of the first half of the twentieth century; only from that time on did the notion of the “end of art” really become pertinent and it happened for reasons which are perhaps not directly related to the arguments that Hegel posited in his philosophy of art: the end of art occurs not because art has reached its limits and has to be transformed into a conceptual form, but loses its relevance (at least in the extent to which it still possessed it in modernism) because of the reasons offered by Vattimo, and because the social contradictions in the First World as we have known them in the past have diminished, this situation being increasingly mirrored in the art that has been produced. To assess the relevance of such a statement it suffices to observe the role of art in less developed parts of the world, such as Latin America, for example, where art still carries weight: not perhaps in the modernist sense but in the sense of social engagement, be it in the visual arts or theater and music.

Five
What is so specific of Duchamp’s works? One distinctive feature, i.e. that of not offering the pleasure of recognition, has already been mentioned: a ready-made is but what it denotes and thus carries no or very scant excess or surplus signification. Duchamp’s works therefore are not representational. Although they could sometimes be called non-objective, they could hardly be designated abstract or non-figurative: an abstract work may contain a symbolic content or may research the possibilities of the pictorial properties and possibilities offered by a plastic work, offering thus, in a transformed manner, some kind of an aesthetic “pleasure” which is, because it arises from what is considered an artwork, also an artistic pleasure. Nonetheless, in most cases the works of Duchamp could not be designated in this way, for their intent was most often patently anti-pictorial and not only countered the previous art but disregarded it altogether.

A possible answer to the question of the specific nature of Duchamp’s works may be obtained via a detour, i.e. an observation concerning another seminal artist of the twentieth century, i.e. Andy Warhol. (And it may not be a coincidence that in an important segment of his writings Danto in fact was concerned with precisely these two artists.)

No doubt, Warhol’s works offer more aesthetic pleasure than Duchamp’s, for although repetitious and serialized, they nonetheless allow for recognition, although this is of a different intensity. Still, compared to a traditional work, such as Vincent van Gogh’s famous A Pair of Boots (thoroughly and paradigmatically analyzed in Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” from 1935) they reveal an important difference: as Fredric Jameson claims, in the case of van Gogh, “the work in its inert, objectal form is taken as a clue or a symptom for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth, [while] Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes evidently no longer speaks to us with any of the immediacy of van Gogh’s footgear; indeed, I am tempted to say that it does not really speak to us at all.”33 In other words, a traditional painting “tells” us of, refers to, or defers us to a broader social, historical and perhaps even existential framework which invests the work with a meaning. In such works this framework is a part of our acquired and shared human existence, something that, following Jameson, is not true in the case of Warhol’s work. In this latter case we are left with no framework, with little or no potential or basis for an imaginary field of reference—and the same could be said of most of Duchamp’s works.

In 1964 Arthur Danto published his essay “The Artworld” with which he helped inaugurate the institutional theory of art. Therein he wrote: “To mistake an artwork for a real object is no great feat when an artwork is the real object one mistakes it for.”34 What Danto was grappling with, was the exhibition of Andy Warhol’s works at the Stable Gallery in New York in which he exhibited the famous Brillo Boxes. The materiality of these objects, in many respects resembling Duchamp’s ready-mades (although they were not really Duchampian ready-mades, but their simulacra, for they were made of wood), made Danto analyze the most recent situation in the arts and attempt to explain why such works were for all obvious reasons and practical purposes art. Danto concluded that “[w]hat in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification). Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to see it as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting.”35 Danto hence claimed that it was really the context which elevated a work into a work of art. This context could have been theoretical—Danto calls it “a certain theory of art”—or it could have been historical—such as mastery of “a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting”—but in both cases it was theoretical knowledge on which—to use a term of Etienne Souriau—the instauration of an art work was based. Again, for the most part, this observation could very well be applied to Duchamp too, except that in his case the artistic nature of a work was construed primarily in the form of a provocation of the extant artworld, but a provocation which at the very same time formed the incessant margins of what art was and is. As Greeenberg observed, Duchamp’s provocations nonetheles provoked a different response than previous artistic gestures. I could venture the hypothesis that perhaps this was due to a different cultural context, for this was now the American one, where avant-garde works and procedures found themselves in a context of mass culture and mass media: they were not viewed primarily as artistic provocations but as a marketing gestures appearing under the guise of avant-garde art. It is thus perhaps the “Armory Show” of 1917 which represents a symbolic divide between the avant-garde tradition of modernism and the mass cultural consumer-oriented context of the United States which, to follow Jameson, are the birthplace of the logic of postmodernism and its thorough commodification.

Duchamp’s provocations (as perceived in the US or Europe) moreover contained the verbal and anti-ocular features which deferred his works and their effects into the active realm thus far reserved for other social practices, such as the sciences. May we not claim that this too shows the very different nature of Duchamp’s works as compared to the traditional (as well as typically modernist) art works? A similar claim is made in the concluding chapter to Herbert Read’s Concise History of Modern Painting where Caroline Tisdall and William Feaver acutely observe that Duchamp set up the process of “the idea of art as strategy” which continued “in a fairly inevitable way” and seemed “on the face of it to change the nature of art, but from a distance it [could] be seen in spite of itself as an inevitable stage in the development of art history.”36

Another feature of this kind of art was promoted already at the first noticeable public presentation of conceptual art, i.e. at the 1966 exhibition of Mel Bochner: “The viewer became the reader, an active participant as there was no immediately obvious art on show, the readers had to make or deduce the art experience for themselves. There was also some doubt about the authorship: was this all Bochner’s work? The distinction between artist and curator was blurred.”37 It was this feature of conceptual art which also became one of the distinguishing characteristics of contemporary neo-conceptual art.

In the already quoted essay “The Artworld”—and on numerous other occasions—Danto argued that an artwork is something that an artworld construes and accepts as such—causing Zygmunt Bauman to observe that philosophers have ceased being legislators and turned into interpreters38: philosophers (or aestheticians) no longer set the rules and norms, but only interpret them. Thus a theoretician no longer proscribes what art is, but explains why a work functions and is publicly accepted as a work of art, i.e. describes it.39 A further step in this direction was later taken by Danto who discarded the issue of values altogether: “In my view, the question of what art really and essentially is—as against what it apparently, or inessentially is—was the wrong form for the philosophical question to take, and the views I advanced in various essays concerning the end of art endeavor to suggest what the real form of the question should be. As I saw it, the form of the question is: what makes the difference between a work of art and something not a work of art when there is no interesting perceptual difference between them? … Until the twentieth century it was tacitly believed that works of art were always identifiable as such. The philosophical problem now is to explain why they are works of art.”40 The answer to this question is offered a little earlier: “[T]he true philosophical discovery, I think, is that there really is no art more true than any other, and that there is no one way art has to be: all art is equally and indifferently art.”41 Danto here carries on the logic of conceptual art affirming that “art = art,” and consequently arrives at the logical result of his previous theory: there is no longer a distinction between various kinds of what is being designated as art. In the long run such a broad notion of art eliminates the need for art altogether. The process begun by Duchamp in the beginning of the twentieth century has culminated in “art equals art,” for it no longer carries a transcendental, transcendent or existential role. Art apparently ceases being important. As Bruce Nauman in the sixties remarked: “If you see yourself as an artist and you function in a studio … you sit in a chair or pace around. And then the question goes back to what is art? And art is what an artist does, just sitting around the studio.”42

The strategy commenced and developed by Duchamp was by no means limited to the kind of works he produced and especially conceptual art abounded with it. The composer and musician John Cage in the fifties raised the issue that was also troubling Danto, i.e. that of normative foundations of the more recent art. His response was: “Why do you waste your time and mine by trying to get value judgments? Don’t you see that when you get a value judgment, that’s all you have? They are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.”43 Paradoxically, this very statement contains a value judgment, for it promotes what I could designate as “semi-existential values,” such as curiosity and awareness, witnessing that the issue of values remains inherent to art. Even if the anti-visual basis of conceptual art caused Joseph Kosuth, the group Art&Language and others to regard art less as “an object for interpretation and more the focus of investigation into the phenomenon of art itself,”44 the indirect place of “art” within such a context witnesses to the relevance of value judgments, even if only per negationem.

Danto’s more recent arguments concerning the status of art are descriptive only: no distinctions are available, the philosopher has not only given up the attempt to normatively determine what art is and then attempt to impose such a normativity, the very reality of the contemporary artworlds has forced him to relinquish any distinction within the oblique formation entitled “art.”

In my opinion artworks are created contingently and are for the most part consumed in the same manner, with these being two distinct processes, although they can also be conflated: first is the act or process of creation answers the human need to express oneself (and is, to follow a theory of René Passeron, the domain of poetics and of la poétique), while the second concerns the act or process of consumption of a work which occurs within the unmediated social field and is a social and, following Passeron again, an aesthetic category.45 The work exists in a dynamic tension between the two realms, both of these existing—viewed from a historical perspective—simultaneously and undividedly as a social and individual fact.

SWhile at the outset, as in the case of Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917 or even in the case of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes from 1964 the act of placement could still provoke a response which institutionalized such works and gestures as art, their contemporary inflatory omnipresent continuation produces just the opposite effect. Still, often the role of art remains the same. Take for example a neo-conceptual project such as the Ten Characters series from 1985-1988 by the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov.46 The series contains typical conceptual elements, contains ready-made objects which are but intentionally placed within various environments. It is similar to works by other conceptual artists, but at the same time drastically different, for it is essentially dependent upon the previous knowledge of the story, the Soviet reality, and history. It expresses and explicitly reveals existential phenomena no different from those of the past art—proving, by hindsight, that a contingently produced art is reemerging incessantly simply because the human condition is reemerging incessantly, although, again, contingently.

Six
Art, like culture, fulfills our needs mostly appertaining to the Imaginary. These may vary through history, may find different phenomenal forms, but are nonetheless a constant which enables us to enjoy and understand the world, other people and ourselves. By making such a claim I am of course not saying that only art as developed throughout history and highlighted in romanticism and modernism can fulfill such a function, for it can be fulfilled also by many other human practices. Nonetheless art is something particular, if not necessarily special—or has become such in the last two centuries and probably also before that, in antiquity and the renaissance, for example.

While at the outset, as in the case of Duchamp’s Fountain from 1917 or even in the case of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes from 1964 the act of placement could still provoke a response which institutionalized such works and gestures as art, their contemporary inflatory omnipresent continuation produces just the opposite effect. Still, often the role of art remains the same. Take for example a neo-conceptual project such as the Ten Characters series from 1985-1988 by the Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov.46 The series contains typical conceptual elements, contains ready-made objects which are but intentionally placed within various environments. It is similar to works by other conceptual artists, but at the same time drastically different, for it is essentially dependent upon the previous knowledge of the story, the Soviet reality, and history. It expresses and explicitly reveals existential phenomena no different from those of the past art—proving, by hindsight, that a contingently produced art is reemerging incessantly simply because the human condition is reemerging incessantly, although, again, contingently.

Does such a contingency signify that anything can become art? The answer is of course affirmative. But it would be difficult for an arbitrary aggregate of social phenomena to attain or equal such a role. Art is furthermore an approximate notion, i.e. one stretching from a masterpiece to mass culture and beyond, meaning that the fixity of the verbal term should not hinder our awareness that in fact it denotes a dynamic phenomenon.

The issue of the end of art is related to its understanding in the contemporary society. A necessary precondition for art to posses its previous relevance is, basically, to possess an existential function in the sense that it allows for a human transcendence and some form of involvement and hence experience. The artists and theorists who defend the opposite view want to eliminate such an experience which via an artwork connects the creator and the work with its public. It is from this position that arises the view of the Austrian art critic, theorist and curator Peter Weibel who argues that “all ontology of art is the last triumph of conservative action against the division of body and message and against the emergence of theory at the expense of experience.”47 If it is the aim of theory to prevent experience—which is identified with previous and conservative art—the question then is where to draw the line between theory and art, for art then becomes theory itself or, at least, theory precedes art, making it art by the very act of theorizing about a work. In such a case the weight of proving that something is art shifts to theory, meaning that theory has to procure arguments for the dividing line between art and non-art. If art, then, is not persuasive, it is the fault of the theory—although this one is not, by proclaiming itself theory, already philosophy.

To conclude: In Hegel the demise of art was linked to his explanation of the path of the Spirit, an essential constitutive element or phase of which was art. Because art was superseded by highest forms of the Spirit, i.e. conceptual thought, art, as a dominant form of this Spirit, became a thing of the past. Although, as Peter Bürger demonstrated, we can still find in Hegel ideas about the further development of art in the direction of formalist modernism, this does not change the observation that in practice the end (or marginalization) of art has occurred in the economically most developed countries of the world, where art has largely become a part of the aestheticized environment, a part of the broader notion of culture, or a rather isolated continuation of the art from its modernist past. It may be true, on the other hand, that the current art may appear to be marginal or even “dead” precisely because art was so successful in the age of modernism.

Hegel’s idea of the end of art was also applied to an essentially different form of twentieth century art, namely conceptualism which has recently often become a predominant art form in many western countries and cultures. It appears to be incorrect to make such a connection because conceptual art actually isn’t conceptual in the sense of philosophy in Hegel. It is based on ideas but the gap between the ideas and concepts in Hegel’s sense remains enormous. The notion of the “end” or the “death” of art, although useful to describe the current diminished role of art, appears to be of limited potential—except, of course, if we understand it in purely Hegelian terms. If we do, then conceptual art cannot take the place of conceptual knowledge in Hegel’s sense, but is to be viewed only as the most visible aspect of the “end of art” situation.

It is in similar terms that Arthur Danto interpreted it in 1995: “It was not my view that there would be no more art, which ‘death’ certainly implies, but that whatever art there was to be would be made without benefit of a reasurring sort of narrative in which it was seen as the appropriate next stage in the story. What had come to an end was that narrative but not the subject of the narrative.”48 In other words, once art has lost its historical role and placement in the development of a holistic history, once the “meaning” of history exists no longer (a non-Hegelian equivalent of this would be Jean-François Lyotard’s “master narrative”), once the totality of the history is gone, its constitutive parts are essentially meaningless, when regarded as steps or progressive elements of a totalized whole. Viewed from such a perspective, art shares the fate of totalizing and totalized history. Nonetheless, this also means that such a judgment doesn’t touch upon an existential understanding of art, which is not historically determined in the same holistic sense but should be related to a reevaluation of the Imaginary as was some years ago suggested by Kaja Silverman.49 Since this latter understanding is not concerned with the end of art but only with its tentative current decline, its discussion shall not be a part of this paper.

1 Lang, Berel, ed. The Death of Art. New York, N.Y.: Haven Publishers, 1984.

2 Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 81.

3 Gianni Vattimo, La fin de la modernité, (Paris: Seuil, 1987), 60. (Original title La fine della modernit_, 1985.)

4 Belting, Hans, Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte? Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1983; The End of the History of Art, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

5 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 62.

6 Danto, 17.

7 Danto, 18.

8 Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 81.

9 Gérard Genette, L’oeuvre de l’art. La relation esthétique, (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 10 For a continuous critique of the notion of art and the artist and an attempt at their replacements by the notions of the producer and production, see the Paris-based revue Tel Quel from the sixties and early seventies, wherein authors such as Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Baudry, etc. collaborated, equating the artistic notion of creativity in bourgeois society with the divine one, all in an attempt to show the ideological nature of artistic production. It was from this source that arose the notion of the “signifying practice.”

11 Shusterman, Richard. “Aesthetics Between Nationalism and Internationalism.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51:2, Spring (1993): 161. See also Erjavec, Ale_. “Philosophy, National and International.” Metaphilosophy, 28:4, October (1997): 329-345.

12 Benedetto Croce, Estetika (Serbo-Croatian edition), (Zagreb: Globus, 1991), 262. The quotation from Hegel is from Vorlesungen über Ästhetik I, (Leipzig 1829), 13-16.

13 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, (New York: Harper, 1967), 711.

14 Luc Ferry, Homo Aestheticus, (Paris: Grasset, 1990) 191.

15 Luc Ferry, Le Sense du Beau, (Paris: Cercle d’Art, 1998) 200.

16 Hegel, 716.

17 Émile Zola, “Les romanciers naturalistes,” quoted in Philippe Hamon, “Un discours contraint,” Littérature et réalité, (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 168.

18 Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 348.

19 Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 45.

20 Genette, 11.

21 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Artwork,” Philosophies of Art and Beauty, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 701-702; quoted in Danto, After the End of Art, 32.

22 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 92.

23 Bürger, 93.

24 Juan Antonio Ramírez, Duchamp. Love and Death, even, (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 26.

25 Clement Greenberg, “Counter-Avant-Garde,” Art International, May 20, 1971, 16-19.

26 Curtis Carter, “Marcel Duchamp and the Americans,” an unpublished paper presented at the colloquium “Marcel Duchamp. Aesthetics, even,” Ljubljana,

October 2001, organized by the Slovenian Society of Aesthetics.

27 Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b.

28 Ernst H. Gombrich, The Image and the Eye, (Oxford: Phaidon, 1982), 12. See also Ale_ Erjavec, “Das fällt ins Auge …,” Medien – Welten – Wirklichkeiten, eds. Gianni Vattimo and Wolfgang Wel_sch, (Munich: Fink 1997), 39-58.

29 Quoted in Ramírez, op. cit., 27.

30 Both quotations are from Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, (London: Phaidon, 1998), 12-13.

31 Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), 190.

32 John of Damascus, On the Divine Images: Three Apologies against Those Who Attack the Divine Images, (Crestwood, N.Y.: SVS Press, 1980), 19.

33 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (London: Verso, 1991), 8.

34 Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” in Pop Art: A Critical History, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 272.

35 Danto, 276.

36 Read, 319.

37 Godfrey, 116.

38 See Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).

39 For a critique of this position see Ale_ Erjavec, “L’estetica e le filosofie,” Un nuovo corso per l’estetica nel dibattito internazionale, ed. Grazia Marchian_, (Torino: Trauben 1998), 73-88.

40 Danto, After the End of Art, 35.

41 Danto, 34.

42 Quoted in Godfrey, 127.

43 Quoted in Godfrey, 63.

44 Robert C. Morgan, Art Into Ideas. Essays on Conceptual Art, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 34.

45 See René Passeron, “La po_étique,” Recherches poétiques, vol.1 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1975).

46 Cf. for example, Boris Groys, “The Movable Cave, or Kabakov’s Self-memorials,” Ilya Kabakov, (London: Phaidon, 1998), 54-63.

47 Peter Weibel, “Experience and Space” (interview), Lier en Boog, vol. 14 (1999), 162.

48 Danto, “Modern, Postmodern, Contemporary,” in After the End of Art, 4.

49 See Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, Routledge, New York 1996. See also Ale_ Erjavec, “Visual Culture,” Symbolic Imprints, eds. Lars Keil Bertelsen et al., (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1999), 31-50.

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