The End of Art and Beyond...

Danto: I had stopped making art by 1964, when I saw Warhol’s show. I made a kind of discovery about myself, sometime in 1962, namely that I found writing philosophy more interesting than making art. I was working on a print when that thought occurred to me, and I remember saying to myself “If that’s the way you feel, you’d better stop.” So I did stop, and dismantled my studio, and from that day to this, I have not drawn a line.

Naturally, I continued to visit the galleries. And Warhol’s show was one that everybody talked about – something one HAD to see. The Stable Gallery was on East 74th Street, just east of Madison Avenue. It was entered from the lobby of a very luxurious town house, which has since been incorporated as a part of the Whitney Museum. It is now in fact the Whitney’s side entrance. Anyway, you went up a short stairway, entered the handsome lobby, with black and white tiles – and when you entered the gallery, it was like walking into a supermarket, with all the boxes piled up. In fact, the discrepancy between the gallery and the work was like a surrealist dream. That had a great impact on me.

The show excited me enormously, but I really do not know any longer what really went through my mind. Later that same year, I was invited to give a talk on art at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. I decided to devote it to the new work I was seeing, which meant Pop mostly but also in some degree Minimalism. That talk, which I titled “The Art World,” was the first thing I ever  published on the philosophy of art, and it really changed the whole way people thought about art philosophically. If you read that paper, you will see how I turned the experience into philosophy. By the way, the designer of the ‘real’ Brillo box was James – not Steve! – Harvey. It was a careless mistake on my part.

Aita: In the preface to the French edition of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Jean-Marie Schaeffer claims that running counter to the traditional opposition between Continental (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre) and Anglo-Saxon philosophy, regarding abundant reference to most of those philosophers in TC and your books on Nietzsche and Sartre, you are “parmi les plus européens des philosophes américains”[1]. Given your outstanding achievements in analytical philosophy that inscribes you in the best of that tradition, let alone your amazing style of thought experiments, how do you consider yourself?

Danto: I think of myself primarily as a New Yorker, which itself is the most European of American cities. As a philosopher, I think of myself as pretty independent, more so than American philosophers usually do, but also more so than European philosophers. I loved analytical philosophy when I first encountered it, especially for the clarity of writing that it encouraged. I wanted to write like Quine or James, who had real styles, but were always transparent. In that respect, I am not European at all, in that most European philosophers of the twentieth century thought that it was important to write opaque and rather charmless prose. The use of imaginative thought experiments came, I think, from Wittgenstein, and especially from Elizabeth Anscombe, who thought up some pretty wild cases. From the beginning, it was interesting to take some claim that people thought true and then to try to see if one could imagine a world in which it was false – and then try to imagine what it would be to live in that world. My aim as a writer was always to give pleasure to readers, or at least readers like me. I once thought that if I were to read the kind of prose I write, I would be thrilled, and think that it was written by somebody exactly like me!  Jean-Marie’s wife, by the way – Claude Harry-Schaeffer – is my French translator. She has an amazing gift for American English. I read French fairly easily, and when I read myself in Claude-Harry’s prose, I always feel that if I wrote French fluently, it would come out reading like her. American English is really deeply different from British English. I also think that I write the way I talk – that there is a voice there that is mine. And I like colloquial usage. I like to put a lot of local reality into my writing. So it is very American – but it is not as academic as most philosophical writing is. I would like it if someone were to read my books and say – Hey! I’d really like to meet that guy! It is true that I’ve written about Nietzsche and Sartre. But I also wrote about Asian philosophers. I’ve just tried to keep myself open to a lot of things.

Aita: In describing ‘artistic identification’ as a transfigurative process, you compare it to religious or magical identification and, in a beautifully contrived analogy, approach the “return to paint as art” to a spiritual exercise of deepening into reality (“the world is not sublated in favor of a higher world, but is to be charged itself with the qualities of the higher world”, TC, p.134), as a Buddhist teaching in a passage of Ch’ing Yuan.  Do you see a sort of poetics, or inner attitude towards reality as a way of fertilizing it in religious attitude and some Buddhist conceptions?

Danto: I was deeply influenced by Zen in the Fifties. Dr. Suzuki taught his seminar at Columbia. In fact I was very “into” Eastern art in general, especially Japanese and Chinese. A few years ago, I wrote an essay called “Upper West Side Buddhism” in which I describe that period in my life. A lot of people came up to hear Suzuki – John Cage, Philip Guston, Agnes Martin. Occasionally, I see a reference to the “Cage-Suzuki-Danto” theory of art. What moved me about Zen was that it suggested that there need be no difference – as well as an immense difference – between art and reality. “The Art World” is full of Zen ideas. In fact, for years I taught in a general education course at Columbia devoted to Asiatic classics. I always worked with specialists in Japanese (like Donald Keene) or Chinese or Sanskrit. But I never learned any of the languages, though I did write a book, Mysticism and Morality, that was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1973. Someone should write a book about Zen and New York art. I think it possible that Dr. Suzuki was the force through which Pop emerged in Manhattan in the middle sixties.

Aita: According to your thesis of the end of art after Hegel’s historicism, two necessary conditions (aboutness and embodiment) for the definition of art are elicited from that passage in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. As a consequence, it seems the interpretive role of judgment (criticism) becomes increasingly decisive in order to identify artworks - building into the work itself, in that its identity is logically correlative to an artistic interpretation. Nonetheless, as you claimed in Art and Meaning [2], those two conditions still require applying the appropriate structures of art criticism. How do you see the new role of art criticism in the post historical period compared to previous ones?

Danto: I’m not quite certain I understand the question. But in general, I think, art critics these days increasingly find themselves explaining rather than judging art. What a work means is not always obvious, and one has to find that out. Identifying the meaning is what I would call an “interpretive hypothesis.” The justification for the hypothesis means: showing how the meaning is embodied. That too is a hypothesis, since others may find alternative interpretations. This is in my view the way art criticism works. There is a further set of questions whether the work was worth making, whether the embodiment was well chosen etc. But the main work of the critic is interpretive understanding.

Aita: How do you regard your previous knowledge on analytical philosophy of history, and your theory of narrative sentences (Narration and Knowledge), as influential to your historicism in art and, I would say, to a philosophy of history after Hegel (as a Bildungsroman of Spirit in the Phenomenology of Spirit) called “the end of art”?

Danto: I think the idea of narrative sentences was one of my real discoveries as an analytical philosopher of history. We use those sentences all the time, but nobody had realized how strange they are. Someone says “Erasmus was the greatest pre-Kantian moral philosopher in Europe.” But no one would have been able, in Erasmus’s time, to have said “Erasmus is our greatest pre-Kantian moralist,” since Kant was not even born then, and the sentence would be unintelligible. On the basis of narrative sentences, I established the autonomy of history, and tried to explain why history could not be replaced by social sciences. The autonomy of history supports in my view the idea that human beings are essentially historical beings.

Aita: Clement Greenberg was a bright interpreter of abstract expressionism, however his modernist and subtractive narrative not only disregards but also leaves uncovered Pop art and its popular imagery. Does it prove his narrative to be historically impertinent? How would you assess Greenberg’s Formalism as dated art criticism? 

Danto: Greenberg had no way of accommodating Pop Art into his narrative, but neither did anyone else. It was a real problem for everyone. Greenberg said it, like Duchamp, was merely “novelty art.” But after a while, is was no longer very novel, and still had to be accounted for. I took Pop to be my paradigm. I felt it had to be understood if we were going to be able to understand our times. My 1964 paper, “The Art World,” attempted to explain why it was so important, and to begin to work out a theory of art based on that importance. I have tried not to become a conservative. It think, whatever we may think of the art of our time, we have to keep open to it. In the end we will have a better understanding of ourselves and our times.

Aita: You noticed elsewhere (Art on the Edge and Over), in appreciating the unfoldings of an astonishing pluralism in art practice, that “the experience of art becomes a moral adventure rather than merely an aesthetic interlude”. That emphasizes a shift from aesthetics to meaning and, implicitly, to morality as a deeply human concern nowadays. Would you say that?

Danto: Thanks for this very fine formulation. It is something I completely endorse.

Aita: Since “anything is art” implies the total openness of the art domain, as you said in your book The Abuse of Beauty (2004), the Karlheinz Stockhausen proclamation that the terrorist attack on the world trade center in New York on September 11, 2001, was “the greatest work of art ever”, though disgraceful to his reputation could be useful to exemplify an irrevocable boundary between art and life. Do you thereby oppose many notorious attempts to merge art with life as a big mistake?

Danto: There may have been a time when the fact that something was art meant that it had an overriding value, and so could be excused for whatever it did or said. But once we moved from an aesthetic to a moral reading of art, this excusability cannot be assumed. So the terror attack could have been art, even -- because of its scale -- great art – but it should never have been done. Its being art would not be an excusing condition. Something can be art and immoral at the same time.

Aita: Turning to the question of beauty in your The Abuse of Beauty, you stated that “the spontaneous appearance of those improvised shrines everywhere in New York after the terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001, was evidence for me that the need for beauty in the extreme moments of life is deeply ingrained in the human framework”. What does it mean precisely revitalizing and redefining beauty in art and life in our time?

Danto: I think it helps explain why beauty is a value. It is not just something in “the mind of the beholder.” Providing that something is morally acceptable, its being beautiful contributes to the world being a better place. If we have a choice of worlds, the one we would spontaneously chose, our mind being what it is, is the more beautiful world. I think in a sense that beauty is a moral need, and that means that we have a moral obligation not to make the one world we live in an uglier place.

Aita: Would you say that nowadays The Intractable Avant-Garde, irredeemable disgusting and abject as it may be (as much Baroque artists as contemporary Damien Hirst and Andrea Serrano!) should live together with many other aesthetic qualities as well as beauty on equal footing, or abject art became prominent in an immoral society which incites war and trivializes human life as commodity? Or on the contrary, is it that people are so under distress, so badly in need of some consolation the kind just beauty can provide us, through something like elegies, requiem, shrines, etc., thereby transforming pain?

Danto: I tend to think that abject art is a critique of an abject society, rather than expression of it. But I would hate to think that all we can do in an abject society is create islands of aesthetic recuperation. I think we have a prior obligation to make the society better. I think that art should be closer to life, and not a place of escape.

Aita: Finally, after being a great art philosopher and an insightful art critic of luminous lucidity, could you say something about your experience as a curator in the show “The Art of 9/11” at Apex Art last September?

Danto: My hope, in curating that show, was to recreate for those that attended it, some of that powerful sense of community that emerged in New York as a sort of moral after-effect of the attacks. People really showed such concern for one another in those first days. I never experienced anything like that. I felt that what was happening at Ground Zero four years later was a disgrace, a moral opportunity lost. I was, that is to say, interested in creating a moral rather than an aesthetic effect, to restore something of the spirit of that time. People read the artists statements, they read my statement, and experienced the art accordingly. I really do feel that something of my hopes were realized. Obviously, it was a small contribution, but I am deeply grateful that I was able to do it!