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Whatever happened to “embodiment”?
the eclipse of materiality in danto's
ontology of art
Diarmuid Costello
a
a
Department of Philosophy , University of Warwick , Coventry
CV4 7AL, UK E-mail:
Published online: 14 Dec 2007.
To cite this article: Diarmuid Costello (2007) Whatever happened to “embodiment”? the eclipse of
materiality in danto's ontology of art , Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 12:2, 83-94
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09697250701755027
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ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 12 number 2 august 2007
i introduction
n this paper I draw attention to something I
believe is underplayed in Danto’s ontology of
art – particularly in the short shrift it gives
aesthetic theory – for all its persuasiveness in other
regards. The claim I seek to defend is a modest
one: I shall argue that Danto is insufficiently
attentive to how a work of art’s materiality
impacts on questions concerning the artist’s
intention and the viewer’s interpretation. In
effect, Danto’s cognitivism in the philosophy of
art comes at too high a cost, such that, despite
regarding artworks as ‘‘embodied meanings,’’
Danto does not take their being so embodied to
constrain their meaning in any significant respect.
I want this criticism to be understood as a
corrective to the conditions Danto lays down for
something to count as art in his original ontology
of art.1 To put my claim in a nutshell: though
Danto has shown that a work of art’s material
properties never suffice to make it art, he has not
(thereby) shown that its material properties are not
necessary to make it the work that it is. But in so
far as art is a domain of particular objects, entities
or events, this is a fact that has to be taken
seriously by a satisfactory ontology of art. The first
two sections of my paper set out Danto’s argument
against aesthetic theories of art and his alternative
to such theories respectively; the third sets out
what I think is lacking in Danto’s proposed
solution. The paper concludes by asking whether
the qualified ‘‘aesthetic turn’’ in Danto’s most
recent work overcomes these worries.2
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I
ii why aesthetic theories fail: danto’s
argument from indiscernibility
By an ‘‘aesthetic’’ theory of art Danto means any
theory that claims to be able to distinguish art
from non-art in virtue of some distinctive
diarmuid costello
WHATEVER HAPPENED
TO ‘‘EMBODIMENT’’?
the eclipse of materiality
in danto’s ontology of art
response that the way art looks is supposed to
elicit. Danto’s case against such theories is
straightforward: because they are premised on
how art looks, they will be unable to tell the
difference between works of art and everything
else once the two can no longer be visually
distinguished as a matter of course. Nor, therefore, are they able to offer any reason why we
should respond differently – as we do – to two
visually indiscernible objects, only one of which
is art. As a result, Danto claims aesthetic theory
has become manifestly inadequate to the challenge of art since the 1960s, as it is no longer
possible to tell, simply by looking at much of it,
whether it is art rather than something else.
Given this, Danto argues, aesthetic theories fall
foul of the question they are supposed to answer.
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/07/020083^12 ß 2007 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of Angelaki
DOI: 10.1080/09697250701755027
83
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eclipse of materiality
They require, in the case of two indiscernible
objects, that we already know one is art before we
have any reason to respond to them differently,
when proponents of such theories typically
maintain that it is in virtue of the distinctive
response it elicits that we know only one of the
two is art.
Consider Duchamp’s Fountain. Unless we
know it is a work of art rather than, say, a
defaced or graffitied urinal, we can only admire it
on formal grounds. In this spirit, one might
appreciate its gleaming white curves and biomorphic abstraction. Of course, this kind of
admiration would be brought up short by the
cack-handed signature, but the important point is
that Fountain shares all its formal qualities as a
urinal with all identical urinals. Hence, whatever
formal qualities it may be said to possess as a
piece of curved white porcelain, these cannot be
what make Fountain art. If they were, we would
have to explain why all those other urinals from
which it is (notionally) indiscernible are not
similarly elevated from pissoir to the plinth. If
such qualities really are what make Fountain art,
it becomes difficult to explain why all similar
urinals are not. Danto maintains that aesthetic
theories of art lead to this impasse because they
focus exclusively on how works of art look, when
what makes Fountain art must, as this argument
shows, be unavailable to visual inspection.3
As Danto notoriously put it in 1964: ‘‘To see
something as art requires something the eye
cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory,
a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.’’4
By an ‘‘artworld’’ Danto has since clarified that
he meant a ‘‘discourse of reasons,’’ that is, ‘‘a
knowledge of what other works the given work
fits with, a knowledge of what other works make a
given work possible’’ (After the End of Art 165;
my emphasis).5 Only in virtue of its relation to
this invisible background of historically indexed
knowledge was it even possible for Fountain to
be put forward as art at a given historical
moment, and for it to possess, as a result, artistic
qualities of a different order altogether from
those aesthetic qualities it shares with other
urinals. As work of art, Fountain (unlike any
other urinal) may be appreciated for its conceptual daring, irreverence and wit. But we can
only appreciate it in these terms once we already
know it is a work of art, and that is something we
could not find out by contemplating it aesthetically, no matter how attentive we are. So, Danto
concludes, aesthetic theory is incapable of
isolating what makes Fountain art, because it
focuses exclusively on qualities inhering in the
object itself, when what makes a work of art a
work of art must be something that lies at ‘‘right
angles’’ to that object, namely its relation to a
historical and theoretical context that cannot be
visually intuited. An object is art, then, not in
virtue of some novel property it possesses, since it
may hold all its intrinsic properties in common
with an identical object that is not art, but in
virtue of its relation to this background. This is
true of all art for Danto, not just works like
Fountain, even if it took works like Fountain to
demonstrate as much.6
iii interpretation: danto’s alternative to
aesthetic theory
Given that what ultimately makes something art,
on Danto’s account, is its relation to a background of art history and theory, it is necessary to
possess such knowledge to realise that something
like Fountain is a possible work of art at
a particular historical moment. An interpretation
drawing on such knowledge thus functions as
what Danto calls an ‘‘enfranchising theory’’; it
enables a material object, otherwise a phenomenal
thing in a world of other such things, to be seen
as a work of art: ‘‘I [. . .] think of interpretations
as functions that transform material objects into
works of art. Interpretation is in effect the lever
with which an object is lifted out of the real world
and into the artworld’’ (Philosophical
Disenfranchisement of Art 39).
Danto’s claim is straightforward and radical:
interpretation is constitutive of works of art.
Without it there would be no works of art, only
things. To say that interpretations constitute
works of art is to say, for example, that an
interpretation ‘‘imposes’’ Fountain, a work of art,
on a urinal, a mere object. Hence, what any work
of art is taken to be about will depend ultimately
on how it is interpreted, for once interpretation is
taken to be constitutive of works of art it follows
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costello
that different interpretations will yield different
works. Danto demonstrates this with a variety of
examples, including a series of visually indistinguishable red monochromes – or what Danto
would call indiscernible counterparts – and
Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
In each case the different interpretations pivot on
different ‘‘artistic identifications’’ prompted by
different titles that Danto imagines the indiscernible objects – but not as a result indiscernible
works – might bear. Artistic identification is the
‘‘logical fulcrum’’ of interpretation, because
competing identifications of what is salient in a
work give rise to different interpretations of that
work. One consequence of this is that a work will
be wrongly interpreted if the wrong identifications are made. For all the displays of interpretative gymnastics that pepper Danto’s writing,
he is no relativist when it comes to interpretation.
There are right and wrong, better and worse
interpretations, and which is which will depend
on how well they correspond to the artist’s own
interpretation. We may not know, or be able to
find out, what that is, but this only shows that it
is not always possible to say which is the best
interpretation, and not that there isn’t one. So,
despite the fact that it may not be possible to
ascertain what an artist intended in a specific
work, what the artist could have intended, given
his or her cultural and historical location, will
always function as one constraint on legitimate
interpretation.7 That it should be how far an
interpretation corresponds to the artist’s intentions that underwrites its veracity follows for
Danto from the fact that it was the artist who
transfigured what would otherwise have remained
a mere object or set of materials into a work of art
in the first place, through his or her own artistic
identifications. What a successful interpretation
picks out is what the artist intended when he or
she did so or, more simply, what he or she has
done:
knowing the artist’s interpretation is in effect
identifying what he or she has made. The
interpretation is not something outside the
work: work and interpretation arise together in
aesthetic consciousness. As interpretation is
inseparable from the work, it is inseparable
85
from the artist if it is the artist’s work.
(Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art 45)
What the artist does, on this account, is to bring
a work of art into being by seeing an object or
configuration of materials in a certain way, that
is, under a particular interpretation. This is an
aspect of what Danto has in mind when he calls
works of art ‘‘embodied meanings,’’ that artists
intend their works’ meanings to be interpreted in
light of the way those meanings are embodied in
their works. Thus, when Duchamp conferred
a title on what would otherwise have remained
a mere object, he intended that object to be seen
in a particular light or, perhaps better, under
a particular interpretation, namely, as a fountain
– with all the tensions that seeing something with
a urinal’s function in the light of such an exalted
category of public sculpture throws up. And this
– how an artist intends his or her work’s meaning
to be understood – is what is being sought when
a viewer strives to interpret the resulting work. In
this respect titles function essentially as ‘‘directions for interpretation’’ in Danto’s account of
what is involved in appreciating works of art. As
should be apparent, this is an essentially cognitive
process of reconstruction. On this account,
Duchamp’s identification of an ordinary urinal
as a fountain is an act that enables it to be seen in
an entirely different light, and in so doing
transfigures an everyday object in light of that
identification. And what Duchamp intended
when he did so is what interpretation seeks to
recover.
iv the eclipse of materiality in danto’s
critique of aesthetics
It follows from Danto’s claim that a work of art is
an object under an interpretation (w ¼ I[o]) that
interpretation is constitutive of art and, hence,
that to fail to interpret a work of art – that is, not
to interpret it wrongly but not to interpret it at all
– is to make a category mistake of sorts; it is to
treat a work of art as though it were a mere thing.
The question I want to address here is whether
responding to a work in the cognitive manner
suggested by Danto’s account of interpretation is
sufficient for treating a work of art as a work
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eclipse of materiality
of art. I shall argue that it is not, and that what
leads Danto to think that it is, is something
wrong with his conception of how works of art
come into being, which in turn impacts on his
view of what we are doing when we respond to
works of art. In sum, I want to grant that Danto’s
use of indiscernible counterparts serves as a
powerful corrective to any attempt to found a
definition of art on the intrinsic perceptual
properties of works of art taken in isolation
from extrinsic questions of historical location,
intention and the like – by forcing the issue of
relational conditions on both something’s existence as art and its existence as the particular
work of art that it is. But I want to suggest that
the conclusions he draws from his examples
nonetheless sacrifice something necessary, if not
sufficient, for an adequate ontology of art, by
ruling all such intrinsic properties inessential
simply because they cannot serve to distinguish
art from non-art in every instance. That aesthetic
properties will not serve to distinguish art from
non-art in every instance only shows that such
properties are not sufficient to ground an
adequate definition of art, and not that they are
not necessary to such a definition, whatever else
such a definition may require (much of which
Danto has himself provided). In what follows I
want to draw attention to one such property that I
believe to be a necessary condition of art, a
property glossed over too quickly in Danto’s
account of the relation between intention and
interpretation. This is the idea of an artistic
medium, or what I shall call an artistically
worked material (mainly so as to avoid the
conservative assumptions as to what may count as
such a material that tend to be triggered by the
former term). I want to suggest that giving due
consideration to the fact that works of art are
generally made from, and so inhere in, a material
substrate invested with artistic significance
through a distinctive kind of activity, itself
embedded in a complex network of intentional
and historical relations to other such works, has
implications for how we approach questions of
intention and interpretation that Danto himself is
insufficiently attentive to.
This is contentious. Accepting that a general –
though not exceptionless – feature of artworks
constitutes a real worry for Danto may only seem
to follow if one thinks (as I do) that Richard
Wollheim’s critique of Danto’s reliance on
thought-experiments involving imagined pairs of
indiscernible counterparts meets its target.8 It
requires that one is willing to grant that the
intrinsic properties of works of art are generally
essential – i.e., necessary but not sufficient – to
their existence as art, even if examples such as
Duchamp’s readymades show that it is possible to
encounter or envisage works of art that cannot be
distinguished from everyday objects in terms of
such properties. Wollheim maintains that Danto
cannot generalise from thought-experiments
involving indiscernibles without treating problematic cases as if they were the norm, and thereby
running the risk of falsifying the concept he
claims to be analysing. This is because the
grounds for applying the concept ‘‘work of art’’
are often indeterminate; unlike clearly defined
concepts with determinate conditions of application (such as ‘‘triangle’’), the concept ‘‘work of
art’’ has at best what Wollheim calls ‘‘broad
assumptions of applicability,’’ that is, ‘‘assumptions that must hold in general if the concept is to
be applicable at all’’ (32). Wollheim suggests two
main assumptions governing the concept’s application – namely, that things intended as art can
generally be told from things not so intended,
and that things intended as different works of art
can generally be told from one another.9 ‘‘In a
world where none of this held,’’ Wollheim claims,
‘‘there could not be works of art’’ (33). Only
given these assumptions is the concept applicable
at all, even if, as assumptions rather than
conditions, they may be flouted in individual
cases without the concept failing to apply.
Duchamp’s Bottle Rack and Carl Andre’s
Equivalents series are works where the first
assumption is transgressed; Sherrie Levine’s
After Walker Evans and Mike Bidlo’s Not
Andy Warhol (Brillo Box) are works where the
second is flouted.
But what we should not conclude from such
examples, Wollheim argues, is that just because
we were able to apply the concept ‘‘work of art’’
in particular cases where the general assumptions
governing its application do not hold, they do not
hold in general. For the fact that one can point to
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costello
such counter-examples, whether real or imagined,
to these assumptions governing the concept’s
application cannot be generalised without depriving both the counter-examples themselves – the
artistic identity of which often relies on their
being understood as test cases for those very
assumptions – and the assumptions they throw
into relief of sense. Wollheim’s point, essentially,
is that one must be careful what one concludes
from exceptional cases, since what is possible in
the individual case may only be so because it is
not possible in general – that, in effect, the
exception only holds as an instance of the concept
in question given the existence of a nonexceptional background. If works could not
generally be told from other things, the concept
of art as it stands would collapse, and we would
be entirely unable to discriminate art from nonart. But this is in fact not true. While Danto may
be right that if a single work of art can be visually
indiscernible from an everyday object and still be
art, then distinguishing visual features cannot be
a necessary condition of every work of art, the
value of Wollheim’s argument is to show why this
result cannot be unproblematically generalised.
I do not intend to set out Wollheim’s criticism
in further detail here. All I want from it is the
thought that one can locate general conditions for
applying the concept art, despite the fact that
these may not hold without exception. Along
similar lines, I want to show that inhering in a
material worked in a particular way is a necessary
condition in an adequate ontology of art that
Danto elides. To do so, I now want to retrieve for
discussion what I think is glossed over in Danto’s
account of the relation between intention and
interpretation. That is, the way in which Danto’s
central metaphor of ‘‘transfiguration’’ – his claim
that works of art are mere real things transfigured by interpretation into works of art – serves
to underplay the labour involved in both making
and interpreting art. I want to argue that the
witty, but largely rhetorical, examples on which
Danto relies create a blindspot in his conception
of what an artist does when he or she makes a
work of art that impacts, in turn, on his
conception of what a viewer does when he or
she responds to one. What an artist never does in
Danto’s examples, so far as I can tell, is to derive
87
anything significant from the often laborious
process of making art that might explain his or
her motivation for doing so in the first place. For
all his elaborate examples, the process of making
art by manipulating some set of materials,
whether or not they constitute a sanctioned
artistic medium, never impacts in any meaningful
way on the kind of thing a work of art is. But this
is a feature of how art (generally) comes into
being that needs to be acknowledged by an
adequate theory of what a work of art is.
When artists make works by means other than
bare nomination (and perhaps even then) the
process by which they do so is part of the reason
they do it.
So it is not adequate, as a general characterisation of what an artist does when he or she
makes a work of art, to say that he or she intends
a work to communicate a particular point of view
about a given subject by embodying that point of
view in a work. Rather, whatever an artist is
trying to communicate emerges in part through
the process of making the work itself, by
interacting with his or her materials in noncognitive, non-goal-oriented ways. An artist’s
relation to his or her materials, whatever they
may be, is not simply instrumental or goal
oriented, even if it is governed at a higher level
by intentional, and hence necessarily cognitive,
considerations (for example, to make a work that
communicates x or represents y). But setting out
to make a work that fulfils such an aim, however
complex, leaves open numerous ways of doing so
that permit the artist’s sensuous, affective or
intuitive responses to the process of making itself
– to how the resulting work looks, sounds or
reads as it is being made – to impact upon and,
as a result, to come to be sedimented in, the thing
made. Such a responsive way of interacting with
materials, I want to suggest, has a bearing on the
nature of the kind of entities – works of art – that
result from this process.
I want to suggest that the upshot of Danto’s
lack of attention to how art generally comes into
being (i.e., by being made), is that he does not
give sufficient weight to the constraints this
imposes on how works of art function semantically. For all his emphasis on works of art as
symbolic expressions in virtue of embodying
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eclipse of materiality
their meaning, Danto is remarkably inattentive to
how material embodiment interacts with, and
constrains, possible meaning. Consider, in this
regard, the thin account of what the red squares
in Transfiguration actually look like, despite the
elaborate interpretations Danto believes it is
plausible to raise off the back of that description.
For all his stress on embodiment, works of art
tend to be rendered diaphanous by Danto’s actual
analyses of them, their semantic content
extracted from its material host in such a way
as to make whatever meaning they are held to
embody amenable to paraphrase. But what this
downplays is the way in which, when we respond
to a work of art as a work of art, we are not solely
engaged in a cognitive process of interpretative
reconstruction. It misses the more affective
dimension of our relation to the material properties of works of art. I take this to mirror the noncognitive dimensions of the artist’s productive
procedure in working his or her medium,
whatever that may be, in an analogous way to
that in which Danto takes interpretative reconstruction on the part of the viewer to mirror the
artist’s transfigurative intention. Hence I think
that Danto’s view of works of art as embodied
meanings needs to be supplemented by some
acknowledgement of the way in which the fact of
embodiment itself – the fact that a meaning is
invested in an artistic material – impacts upon the
meaning embodied in the work. That is, an
adequate account of what a work of art is has to
say something about the way this serves to enrich,
but also to occlude or complicate or resist, and
hence not simply to communicate, an artist’s
intended meaning.
Pursuing the thought that works of art are
embodied meanings provokes a question as to
what embodiment does to meaning. And what it
does, I want to suggest, is render meaning
sufficiently opaque to engage, and then sustain,
our interpretative interest in the first place. By
sinking meaning in a material substrate, embodiment precludes any simple reconstruction of what
a work of art means, while simultaneously
arousing interest in its possible meanings. Even
in cases of works such as Fountain that have not
(ostensibly) been worked on, or if so only
minimally – at least in the traditional sense of
‘‘worked by hand’’ – meaning remains far from
transparent; saying that Duchamp intended it to
be seen as a fountain seems inadequate to capture
what the work itself, that is, the mute, upended,
rotated, and ironically signed urinal staring
impudently back at us from a plinth in the
gallery might mean, even given this title. Such
‘‘opacity,’’ on my account, is a consequence of
the distinctive causal conditions operative in the
creation of works of art. Clearly, works of art are
the products of intentional acts and, as such,
made for reasons (and those reasons may be
partially specified, in turn, in terms of communicating an intended meaning). Nonetheless, a
distinguishing feature of works of art is that their
meaning tends to exceed whatever determinate
intentions motivated their creation. Works of art
that really could be reduced to their creator’s
intentions, specified in terms of meaning-intentions, would amount to a peculiarly indirect,
encumbered and obscure form of utterance rather
than works of art, properly so called. Thus, one
way of expressing my reservations with Danto’s
ontology as it stands would be to suggest that it
does not allow one to distinguish sufficiently
sharply between artworks and other forms of
utterance, and it does not because it underplays
the role of materiality – that is, the resistant
potential of the matter, whatever that may be, in
which meaning is sedimented – to render meaning opaque, resistant to interpretation, and
thereby to disturb or transform it.10 As a result,
to my mind, Danto’s conception tends to reduce
artwork’s meaning to artist’s meaning far too
quickly. Against this, I want to suggest that the
fact that works of art exceed their authors’
intentions is in part a consequence of the process
through which they come into being, through
intentional acts pursued via an intuitive, responsive procedure on the part of an artist working his
or her material which retroactively impacts on
the intentions that set that process in train.
This holds whether that material is a sanctioned
medium such as paint on canvas, novel
juxtapositions of old bicycle parts, pixels in a
computer-manipulated photograph, the creation
of large-scale environments, the arrangement of
shop-bought items on display shelves, or the bare
nomination of objects as art. There is always
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something in works that cannot be rationally
accounted for – that, so to speak, is there, though
not because the artist put it there. Were there not,
it would be difficult to explain the fascination
that art exerts, or its longevity. This is just to say
that, although intentions must govern the activity
of making art at a higher level, the resulting
object, situation or event is not exhausted by
those intentions – and, hence, that the standard
of correct interpretation cannot be exhausted
by the artist’s intention, whether actual or
hypothetical.11
So artworks do not embody their meanings in
the straightforward way that Danto’s more recent
work has tended to suggest. The mere fact of
embodiment, the fact that works of art are not
propositional utterances in any straightforward
sense, rebounds on the content thereby embodied. My claim, then, is that works of art’s
materiality – the stuff in which their meaning is
sedimented, whatever that is – invites, but also
resists, interpretation as a result of its opacity.
This is to say that works of art must do more than
simply ‘‘transmit’’ an intended meaning; given
art’s propensity to exceed intention, no one –
including the artist – will ever be in a position to
say, once and for all, what a work of art means.
This is why the weight Danto puts on the artist’s
transfigurative interpretation – the artistic identifications he supposes determine what he or she
has done, as opposed to the work that emerges, so
to speak, on the far side of his or her artistic
labour – risks falling foul of some kind of
intentional fallacy. Confronted by a work of art,
especially a contemporary work of art, a
characteristic and respectable response might
be: what might have moved someone to produce
something like that? Or, what could something
like this mean – as art? This, I take it, is
consonant with what Danto thinks. But I want to
suggest, pace Danto, that such a response cannot
be fully characterised in terms of interpretation
alone. It also has an affective dimension that is
occasioned by the work’s material form, the stuff
in which its meaning is embodied, and which
engages and sustains our interpretative interest.
Just as an artist’s intention is necessary but not
sufficient to make what he or she produces art,
so, correspondingly, interpretation is necessary
89
but not sufficient to treat what he or she has
produced as art. More is required: the work must
elicit and sustain interpretation, in virtue of the
way the material form in which its meaning is
embedded affects us.
Consider, in this regard, a work of art that
demonstrates both the persuasiveness of Danto’s
position and what I have argued is its limitation:
Lawrence Weiner’s A 3600 Square Removal to the
Lathing or Support Wall or Plaster or Wallboard
from a Wall, 1969. This ought to be a perfect
example for Danto, and in many respects it is.
The work consists of exactly what the title
describes. In the absence of an enfranchising
theory that would enable us to recognise something like this as art, we might mistake it for an
unfinished piece of decorating, say a missing
piece of plasterwork waiting to be made good. So
Danto would be right to say that nothing intrinsic
to the work tells us that what we are viewing is
art: hence, the kind of relational conditions he
has drawn attention to must be invoked. But
Danto would be wrong to conclude that conditions of this kind could in themselves do the
work of constituting this removal as the particular work that it is. Looking at the work, the
rough texture of the wall exposed by the removal
invokes the history of reductive monochrome
painting. That is, the history that makes a
‘‘negative painting’’ like this (a painting after
painting) possible at a given historical moment,
once painters started negating the conventions
supporting the activity of painting at a more
general level (such as the assumption that
paintings hang on supporting walls). All this
supports Danto’s conception of an ‘‘artworld’’ as
a body of historically indexed theories and works
that make later works possible. But this work’s
being the specific work that it is, its effectiveness
in conjuring this history and thereby securing
this identity, cannot be abstracted from its
material qualities: the texture of the wall
revealed, and the way the rough edges of the
removal operate like a kind of negative afterimage of the paint-encrusted edges of the canvas
that was once there, if only virtually – that is,
before painting was historically superseded on the
reductive, essentialist and teleological theory of
art history that this work invokes. Were the same
eclipse of materiality
work executed on a different surface, the result
would have very different resonances, in virtue of
its material affecting us in very different ways.
Hence our identification of this work as the
particular work that it is cannot be separated
from the specific perceptible qualities of the
materials in which its meaning is embodied, and
how those materials affect us.
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v conclusion: danto’s aesthetic turn?
By way of conclusion I want to consider whether
Danto’s most recent book, The Abuse of Beauty,
in many respects a surprising departure given his
antipathy towards aesthetic theory to date,
addresses the worries I have raised here. This is
a difficult question to answer. In a sense it has
displaced them and in so doing recast the issue in
a slightly different light. The Abuse of Beauty
complicates Danto’s position to date, particularly
what he has had to say about aesthetics, by
specifying that it is beauty – rather than aesthetic
qualities per se – that is not a necessary condition
of art, and by seeking to reconceive aesthetic
properties in terms of pragmatics (59). A work’s
aesthetic features, on this view, are those
‘‘pragmatic’’ or, broadly speaking, rhetorical
features of the work that dispose its viewers to
perceive its meaning in a particular way – by
inflecting it accordingly (xv, 121–22). Danto
declines to say whether such properties are a
necessary condition of art, though he holds open
this possibility.12 In one respect this attention to
art’s pragmatic dimension takes up where the
analysis of rhetoric and style in Transfiguration
left off, even if, by recasting such qualities as
aesthetic, it departs from that book’s underlying
intention to conceptually uncouple art and the
aesthetic. Moreover, even as regards what Danto
refers to as the philosophically ‘‘toxic’’ notion of
beauty itself, The Abuse of Beauty offers a more
nuanced account than Danto has previously
provided, by distinguishing between beauty that
is, and beauty that is not, relevant to a work’s
meaning as art. Beauty, on this account, is
‘‘internal’’ when it is entailed by a work’s
meaning, and ‘‘external’’ when it is not. The
beauty of Robert Motherwell’s Spanish Elegies,
as works of mourning for the ideal embodied by
the Spanish Republic, and of Maya Lin’s Vietnam
Veterans’ Memorial, as a work of remembrance,
is internal to their meaning as works of art. That
is to say, their beauty is required by, and hence
contributes to, their meaning as works of art. By
contrast, the beauty of Duchamp’s Fountain as a
contingently graceful biomorphic abstraction, or
of Warhol’s Brillo Box as a piece of eye-catching
commercial design is – according to Danto at
least – wholly external to these works’ meaning as
art. It is a property of their material substrates –
the mere real thing with which these works in
part coincide, but with which they are not
identical – rather than a property of the works
themselves. Their beauty, to the extent that they
are beautiful, has no bearing on their interpretations – unlike that of the Spanish Elegies or
Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, which does.
All this finesses Danto’s account of art’s
pragmatic dimension, his conception of aesthetics, and his idea of beauty, as a privileged
instance of the latter, and its relation to art.13
And to that extent The Abuse of Beauty does
introduce a sensuous dimension into Danto’s
theory of art for the first time. Aesthetics is
acknowledged as a domain of feeling with a
legitimate role to play in the interpretation of
some (if not all) art, and the question then
becomes how such feeling is to be tied back to
art’s essentially cognitive nature. Hence the
distinction between internal and external
beauty, between beauty that is and beauty that
is not conceptually entailed by a work’s meaning
and that is, as a result, relevant or not to its
interpretation. All this, despite continuing to
over-privilege art’s cognitive dimension, is nonetheless to be welcomed, and goes some way to
addressing the worries set out in this paper.
That said, what none of this does as yet is to
move away from an underlying conception of
aesthetic qualities as irreducibly alien to the
artistic properties with which Danto has to date
been more centrally concerned. To take the
example with which I began: Danto still holds
that the wit, daring and irreverence of Duchamp’s
Fountain are ‘‘artistic’’ properties of a sort
altogether distinct from the ‘‘aesthetic’’ qualities
– grace, serenity and arctic depths – of the object
that serves as their vehicle. Thus, despite Danto’s
90
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criticism of the tendency to conflate aesthetics
with beauty, such that aesthetic qualities (in
general) came to be rejected along with, and
instead of, beauty (in particular) as necessary to
the existence of works of art, it remains unclear as
yet whether Danto himself finally escapes the
orbit of this identification, as his tendency to
privilege this kind of quality, and indeed beauty
itself, when discussing aesthetics here attests.
Aesthetics for Danto remains the preserve of a
sensuous non-cognitive response to visual stimuli
(primarily, if not exclusively, that of beauty) as
opposed, say, to an irreducibly cognitive-affective
response to how a work as an embodied meaning,
that is, in its entirety, engages its viewer’s
faculties in intrinsically stimulating ways.
Indeed, it is because Danto continues to
conceive aesthetics as irreducibly non-cognitive,
and beauty as having a privileged relation to
aesthetics, that he continues to regard works like
Fountain as unavailable to aesthetic analysis. But
the wit of Duchamp’s readymades, and the kind
of appreciation it calls for, is a quality eminently
suited to aesthetic analysis, to the extent that it
engages the mind in discernibly aesthetic ways.
The difference between experiencing Duchamp’s
wit and merely acknowledging its existence is
akin to the difference between enjoying a joke
and having one explained. Only experiencing for
oneself – existentially as it were – the wit of using
a perfectly banal but nonetheless – and this is
important – rather sculptural piece of wasteplumbing for the purpose of artistic and moral
provocation carries the affective charge for its
recipient that makes Fountain the work that it is.
Just as it was Warhol’s Brillo Box – rather than
any of the other boxes in his Stable Gallery show
– that fired Danto’s philosophical imagination, it
was Duchamp’s Fountain – rather than any of his
other readymades – that secured his place in art
history. This is because the urinal’s aesthetic
qualities, ironically foregrounded in this way for
their viewers’ delectation ‘‘as sculpture’’ (atop a
plinth), carry an outrageously wicked and
irascible echo of the polished poise of Brancusi,
in whose works Duchamp dealt, and which can
themselves seem to run the risk of caricaturing
the aesthetic from within on occasion – by
toppling over the edge of refinement into clichés
91
of aesthetic grace and delicacy. By using precisely
this form, with its functional connotations ‘‘as a
fountain’’ and its artistic echoes and associations,
for his provocative anti-aesthetic purpose,
Duchamp effectively demonstrates the acuteness
of his own artistic and aesthetic sensibility. The
irony is that a liminal aesthetic response to the
urinal’s material properties is required to give
this work its deflationary bite, and to that extent
its aesthetic qualities are ‘‘internal’’ to Fountain’s
meaning as art. Duchamp’s artistic wit, in other
words, piggybacks on the work’s material properties and our aesthetic response to these in turn.
The two dimensions of the work are symbiotic –
as Danto’s own conception of works of art as
‘‘embodied meanings’’ would lead one to expect.
I want to suggest, in the light of this, that a
response to art may be deemed aesthetic so long
as it retains an affective dimension – the kind of
dimension I have suggested is elicited by the
embodiment of meaning in a material form, the
kind of dimension that explains why we are
moved to interpret art in the first place. The
advantage of this approach is that it makes room
for the intellectual sophistication Danto rightly
admires in the art of Duchamp and others, but
not at the expense of their work retaining an
affective claim on us in virtue of its wit’s material
embodiment. To date, Danto’s cognitivism has
come at too high a price, suggesting that an
affective response to art’s material presence could
be excised from an intellectual interest in its
meaning and thereby made redundant to understanding what works of art are. With this latest
book that has begun to change, at least as regards
those works the aesthetic properties of which
Danto does hold to be internal to their meaning.
Nonetheless, I would maintain that the class of
aesthetic qualities – that is, qualities used to
aesthetic effect – is far broader than that of the
(still) rather traditional ones Danto is prepared to
allow. To put it in Danto’s own terms: if a work’s
aesthetic properties are henceforth to be understood as those features of the work that ‘‘colour’’
our appreciation of its meaning, and a work is
by definition something that embodies its meaning in material form, then that form cannot but
impact upon our perception of the meaning
it conveys. This applies to the work of
eclipse of materiality
Duchamp and Warhol as readily as it does to that
of Matisse or Motherwell. Danto
should therefore grant that, on his
own account, the aesthetic now
counts as an irreducible feature
of art.
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notes
I would like to acknowledge the support of a
LeverhulmeTrust Research Fellowship while working on earlier drafts of this paper I would also like
to thank John Armstrong, Arthur Danto, Peter
Dews, Katrin Flikschuh, Jason Gaiger, Be¤atrice
Han, Gordon Hughes, Peter Lamarque, and the
audiences of the BSA Annual Conference and the
‘‘Danto and the End of Art’’ Colloquium in Murcia
for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
1 By Arthur Danto’s ‘‘original’’ ontology of the artwork I mean its full-blown elaboration in
Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP,1981).The most elegant summary
of this is provided by Noe«l Carroll in ‘‘Essence,
Expression and History: Arthur Danto’s
Philosophy of Art’’ in Danto and his Critics, ed.
Mark Rollins (Cambridge, MA and Oxford:
Blackwell,1993) 79^106:
something x is a work of art if and only if (a) x
has a subject (i.e., x is about something);
(b) about which x projects some attitude or
point-of-view (this may also be described as a
matter of x having a style); (c) by means of
rhetorical ellipsis (generally metaphorical
ellipsis); (d) which ellipsis, in turn, engages
audience participation in filling-in what is
missing (an operation which can also be
called interpretation); (e) where the works
in question and the interpretations thereof
require an art-historical context (which context is generally specified as a background of
historically situated theory). (80)
The complexity of this ontology, and the claims
Danto once made on its behalf, has tended to be
downplayed, subsequently, by both Danto and his
commentators, as Carroll has also pointed out in
‘‘Danto’s New Definition of Art and the Problem
of Art Theories,’’ British Journal of Aesthetics
374 (Oct. 1997): 386 ^92. In Danto’s After the End
of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), which Carroll
had in mind, it is reduced to the necessary but
not jointly sufficient conditions that artworks are
(i) about something (i.e., have a meaning) and (ii)
embody their meaning (i.e., what they are
about) (195).
2 Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the
Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court, 2003).
3 Here one might be moved to object that Alfred
Stieglitz’s infamous photograph of Fountain, still
trailing its entry label to the 1917 Society of
Independent Artists ^ from which it was refused,
despite the Society’s motto ‘‘no juries, no prizes’’ ^
was available to visual inspection, if only to a limited audience, through its dissemination in The
Blind Man, the journal anonymously put out by
Duchamp along with several others, as was (and
still is) the work’s signature. One might also point
to the fact that Fountain is today installed in various museums around the world, in several facsimiles and an edition authorised by Duchamp,
the original having been lost; and that these institutional facts about its location are also open to
view. But this would be to miss Danto’s point: it
has always been clear that Danto would be
unmoved by an objection of this kind, which to
his mind begs the deeper question: namely,
remove Fountain (or one of its facsimiles) from its
institutional setting and place it next to any
notionally indiscernible counterpart (notional,
because the signature remains) and one would
still have to explain why Fountain, but not the
other, is art. The fact that only one is signed ^
which can, of course, be seen ^ cannot be the
answer, since daubing signatures on everyday
objects does not generally suffice to make them
art. Moreover, once one supplies an adequate
answer, the fact that only one is institutionally
enfranchised falls away as uninformative in the
face of whatever deeper reasons explain why it is.
4 Danto,‘‘The Artworld,’’ Journal of Philosophy 61.19
(1964): 571^ 84 (580). For Danto’s account of the
inadequacy of aesthetic theory, when faced with
examples such as Fountain, see ‘‘Aesthetics and the
Work of Art,’’ Transfiguration of the Commonplace,
esp. 91^95.
5 For a discussion of the artworld as a ‘‘discourse
of reasons,’’ see Danto, ‘‘The Artworld Revisited:
Comedies of Similarity’’ in Beyond the Brillo Box:
The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective
(New York: Farrar,1992) 33^53.
92
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costello
6 Of course, none of this would be straightforward were one minded to question whether
Fountain is correctly identified with either the individual porcelain objects, or the set of such objects,
bearing that name today, or indeed the original in
the Stieglitz photograph. One could, for example,
see that original as but a part of the work Fountain,
which might then extend to include the gesture
of trying (and failing) to exhibit it at the
Independents, the complex machinations of
having it documented and reproduced in The Blind
Man ^ perhaps even the fact that it was eventually
lost, and the later facsimiles and multiples that
resulted, indirectly, from that loss. For an exemplary account of this complex history, see Thierry
de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA:
MIT P,1996) esp. 89^143. On this account (which is
not de Duve’s own), Fountain could be seen as a
peculiarly extended performance, largely postdating Duchamp’s nomination and signature of the
original urinal. The work would then be not so
much that originating object or event as the retroactive product, or cumulative history, of which
that event was the precipitating cause. In fact,
early on, Danto considered a not unrelated suggestion, only to reject it: Danto argues that the
fact that Duchamp authorised various facsimiles
and editions of the signed urinal itself militates
against identifying the work with the gesture of
exhibiting it, as Ted Cohen proposes. For, clearly,
this is not what gets reproduced in Duchamp’s
own editions. For Danto this suffices to
identify Fountain with that object documented in
Stieglitz’s photograph and reproduced in
subsequent facsimiles. See Danto, The Philosophical
Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia UP,
1986) 34.
7
The work-as-interpreted must be such that
the artist believed to have made it could
have intended the interpretation of it, in
terms of the concepts available to him and
the times in which he worked [. . .] It is difficult to know what could govern the concept
of a correct or incorrect interpretation if
not reference to what could and could not
have been intended. (Transfiguration of the
Commonplace 130)
See also No«el Carroll, ‘‘Danto, Style and
Intention,’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
533 (summer 1995): 251^57, for an account of the
93
contradictory role accorded intention in Danto’s
philosophy of art, consonant with the view put
forward here. Indeed, the fact that Danto understands the best interpretation to be that which
corresponds most closely to the artist’s, rather
than to the work itself, suggests Carroll is also
right to see Danto’s philosophy of art as essentially
a version of the expression theory. See Carroll,
‘‘Essence, Expression and History.’’
8 Richard Wollheim, ‘‘Danto’s Gallery
Indiscernibles,’’ Danto and his Critics 28 ^38.
of
9 Wollheim also suggests several further, subsidiary,‘‘assumptions of applicability’’ for the concept
‘‘work of art,’’ such as the fact that any object to
which the concept is applied has been made by a
competent practitioner; and he also suggests that
the set of such assumptions is itself indeterminate
and open to indefinite further refinement as a
result of art’s self-reflexive questioning of its own
nature.
10 It might be objected here that one prima facie
problem with this way of conceiving artistic materiality is that it seems to preclude non-material
artistic vehicles. One need only think of many
works of conceptual art ^ Lawrence Weiner’sTHE
ARCTICCIRCLESHATTERED, for example, or Robert
Barry’s Allthe things I knowbut of which I am not atthe
moment thinking ^ 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969, or perhaps
even Fountain itself, depending on what one takes
the work to consist in. Though I do not seek to
defend the view here, I see no reason why it
should preclude such works. One can, after all,
understand the materiality of thought itself as an
artistic vehicle in such a way that it is at least not
obvious that what has been said here would not
apply. Barry’s work, for example, does not consist
in the things of which he knew but was not thinking
at that moment, but the thought of all the things he
knew but was not thinking at that moment. And
what makes the work engaging, assuming that one
findsit so,I takeit, is theresistance or intractability
of that thought itself, the difficulty we have in nonparadoxically conceiving of the mental state the
work implicitly invites us to consider, namely thinking of those things of which we know but are not
currently thinking. Similarly, what makes Weiner’s
work mentally engaging is the intractability of the
thought of a physical action performed on a
notional entity, such as the Arctic Circle, which is
a feature of our systems of mapping physical terrain, rather than a feature of what they map. For
more on how the account here might apply to
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eclipse of materiality
works like this, see my ‘‘Kant after LeWitt:
Towards an Aesthetics of Conceptual Art’’ in
Philosophyand Conceptual Art, eds. Peter Goldie and
Elisabeth Schellekens (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007)
92^115. How this position might relate to, and
differ from, other influential conceptions ofmateriality, such as Paul de Man’s, falls beyond the scope of
this paper, but see, for example, Christopher
Prendergast, ‘‘Modernism’s Nightmare,’’ New Left
Review ns10 ( Jul.^Aug. 2001):141^56, esp. sec. I.On
this aspect of de Man’s work more generally, particularly the notion of a‘‘materiality withoutmatter’’
that Derrida finds in de Man, see Material Events:
Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, eds. Barbara
Cohen,Thomas Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej
Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000).
Guyer, ‘‘From Jupiter’s Eagle to Warhol’s
Boxes: The Concept of Art from Kant to
Danto’’ in Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in
Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005)
289^325.
11 For an overview of the recent literature on
‘‘hypothetical’’ and ‘‘actual’’ intentionalism in analytic philosophy of art, see, for example,
Noe«l Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical
Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) part
III;
Robert
Stecker,
Interpretation
and
Construction: Art, Speech and the Law (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003); and Paisley Livingston, Art and
Intention: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2005).
12
I would like to say that having some of what
I have here called pragmatic features is a
second condition [for something to count as
a work of art], but I am not sure this would
be true. I am not because I am uncertain
what role if any pragmatic properties play in
the art of today. (Abuse of Beauty xix)
13 For a fuller analysis of this book, see my
‘‘On Late Style: Arthur Danto’s The Abuse of
Beauty,’’ British Journal of Aesthetics 44.4 (Oct.
2004): 424 ^39, and the recent symposium on
Danto’s book, with contributions by Fred Rush,
Gregg Horowitz, Jonathan Gilmore and Arthur
Danto, in Inquiry 48.2 (Apr. 2005): 145^200. In
Aesthetics after Modernism (forthcoming) I draw
attention to various surprising affinities between
Danto’s theory of artworks as ‘‘embodied meanings’’ and Kant’s theory of art as the expression
of aesthetic ideas. Danto responds to this suggestion in ‘‘Embodied Meanings, Isotypes, and
Aesthetical Ideas,’’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 65.1 (winter 2007): 121^29. I respond in
‘‘Are Embodied Meanings Aesthetic Ideas?’’
(forthcoming). On these affinities see also Paul
Diarmuid Costello
Department of Philosophy
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
UK
E-mail: [email protected]