Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002
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Danto, Arthur C. The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001. 480 pages, ISBN 0-520-23002-7, $18.95, £13.95 (Pbk)
Reviewed by
Arthur Danto’s work has dominated American philosophy of art for years. I was in graduate school aiming at earning an M.F.A. in painting when I first encountered The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Danto’s book felt like a revelation. Not only was it therapeutic in that it was clearly written and less jargon-filled than the French Philosophy that I had been fed in my undergraduate art education, but also it was clearly informed and engaged in the intricacies of the New York art world. This was unique in my experience – here was an analytic philosopher who not only took issues in aesthetics seriously; he also showed a deep knowledge of the history of art and the work of current artists. This by itself gave his analysis credibility in my eyes. But more importantly for me at the time, Danto’s theory helped explain the crucial significance of Duchamp’s body of work in the context of later American art movements such as, for example Pop. Standard narratives of modernism and even postmodern histories of art were unanimous in placing Duchamp into the canon of major artists, but the explanations offered within standard art history narratives always seemed forced or overly simplistic. Danto’s story gave a philosophical rationale for the art-historical importance of Duchamp’s readymades (industrial objects Duchamp found elsewhere and merely placed into a gallery to function as artwork). The influence of his book has been profound in my professional life. It was a major factor in my decision to combine a Ph.D. in philosophy with my M.F.A. in fine arts. After all – if art really finds its significance in the philosophical or conceptual issues it elucidates (the main point that I, rightly or wrongly, took from Transfiguration), then to be a well-educated artist it would seem desirable to be philosophically informed. At least this is what I thought at the time.
Reading The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World gave me a chance to revisit these issues from a distance of years and a position within academic philosophy. Madonna is composed largely of art review pieces published in The Nation from 1993 to 1999. These review essays are combined with two philosophical pieces that develop Danto’s position in a more systematic fashion. The first, “Art and Meaning,” serves as a succinct summary and advancement of the argument previously developed in Transfiguration. In this essay he outlines the main philosophical problem animating his analysis by giving the example of Brillo cartons offered by, respectively, Steve Harvey and Andy Warhol. Steve Harvey designed the box used to contain Brillo pads when they are shipped. So, in effect, every Brillo box produced is a Steve Harvey industrial design. Andy Warhol appropriated Harvey’s boxes and offered them as an example of fine art in the context of a gallery show. The philosophical problem shown here is that aesthetically, in the sense of sense impressions, the respective boxes are identical. So where is the difference between the industrial product and the work of fine art? Further, if a Brillo box can be art, then it seems anything can be art. This is significant to a philosophy of art that purports to understand the aesthetic and conceptual significance of art. As Danto asks, “What does it mean to live in a world in which anything could be a work of art (xxix)?” Danto concludes that this really brings about “the re-enchantment of the world” in that “Contemporary art replaces beauty, everywhere threatened, with meaning (xxx).” So Duchamp’s readymades, the art world’s precursors to Warhol’s appropriations, show that an artist works in the realm of meaning, not essentially in the realm of appearances.
This point is reinforced in the other philosophical essay that concludes Madonna, “The Work of Art and the Historical Future.” Danto’s title for this essay is borrowed from a story written by Henry James and published in 1873. In James’s story an artist, “Theobald,” aims at painting a Madonna that would be the equal of Raphael’s Madonna della Seggiola. He finds a proper young-mother model and sets out upon a study of the paintings of the masters. By the time Theobald is ready to paint, though, the model has aged. We see the painter through the eyes of James ultimately as a failed artist, sitting in front of a blank canvas, unable to create the masterpiece that was his goal. Danto then tries what he calls a “historical experiment (422).” In this experiment a curator from 1973 travels back to Theobald’s studio and hails the blank canvas (referred to as “The Madonna of the Future”) as the first in a long line of important all-white paintings. Mentioned are painters of significant all-white artworks such as Malevich, Rodchenko, Rauschenberg and Ryman. But we know that the blank canvas is not an artwork, even though it, like the Brillo box, is observationally identical to the actual artworks. Further, to Theobald the blank canvas is just that – a canvas that lacks the identity of being an artwork. So the problem of differentiating art from non-art is, once again, one of conceptual, not of perceptual difference. The conclusion offered by Danto: “anything is subject to having its identity transformed by someone who sees how to use it in a work (430).” In other words, an artist with enough imagination will transfigure a common object into artwork by finding an artistic use, a meaningful use, for it. All this combines to bring about a post-historical art world. Art will continue to be made but, according to Danto, it will not progress to a more critical awareness because “so far as self-understanding is concerned, I do not believe it can take us further (428).” Duchamp’s artwork, therefore, brought us to the point where we have arrived at the “transhistorical” or the knowledge of the “invariant condition for something being art in every world in which there is art at all (425).”
As can be seen, Danto draws some pretty powerful conclusions from his analysis. It is interesting to contrast these two philosophical essays with their universal conclusions and overarching narrative to the analysis of artworks contained in Madonna’s review essays. The review essays encompass the largest part of the writings offered in the book. Here often the impetus for writing was less the philosophical issues than the specific works viewed. This has a very salutary influence on Danto’s writing. The review essays are clearly engaged with the art works and sensitive to artistic nuance. For instance, an essay on Edward Kienholz explores the relationship between contemporary art, moral commentary and beauty. Kienholz is known for ugly and yet haunting works that, while ambiguous, seem to elicit a strong moral response. Danto carefully describes aspects of works like Back Seat Dodge ’38 and helps the reader understand the legitimate risks that a work resting upon moral aims must run. In the same essay he also states the “critical commonplace” that “art that has as its moral mission to change the world has no business being beautiful (208).” While I am not convinced by this commonplace thought, and in fact think that beautiful works have great potential to change the world, Danto’ essay is a wonderful tool with which to understand Kienholz’s work. Another essay on Robert Rauschenberg is equally informative in helping a viewer to find meaning in works such as Bed. In fact contemporary art has few critics that can bring out so elegantly the meanings involved in such diverse works as paintings by Cy Twombly or Richard Diebenkorn to the collaborations of Arakawa and Gins.
Other essays offer important commentary upon social aspects of the contemporary art world. In “The Whitney Biennial, 1995” Danto draws attention to the art selection process for a show traditionally thought to represent the state of art in America. In a break with tradition an individual curator selected the show’s artists. Previously a committee or “curatorial team” had selected the works. Danto draws out the implications of this change beautifully. While the group process could legitimately be seen as a first move in a dialogue that might actually bring about a somewhat representative show of American art, the selection by an individual loses this claim. He sees this as a symptom of the ascendancy of the curator and the artistic show over the artist. But, as he also notes, this might just be a symptom of the power of the museum director who chooses the curator with full knowledge of the kind of show this will entail.
Even where it is easy to disagree with Danto he makes points that help expand one’s understanding of contemporary art. For instance, in “TV and Video” Danto champions the work of Bill Viola. The experience of Viola’s pieces is described as powerful and “something of great power and beauty (165).” I must admit that I have viewed works by Viola and found them predicable and anything but the masterpieces that Danto sees them as. I have no doubt Viola’s work is important, but see it as important more because he has extended the use of an important new medium. But, more importantly, in the same essay he makes an informative distinction between “TV art” and “video art.” As he defines it TV art refers to the television as an artefact and a form of life whereas video art is art that uses video technology to further the artist’s aims. This distinction is very helpful as an interpretive tool with which to experience quite disparate art works that otherwise might be easily conflated.
In “Clement Greenberg” Danto writes that because of the power and influence of Greenberg’s theories, and because they became the art world’s orthodoxy, “it was inevitable that he should have been villainized (67).” What might be most intriguing is to speculate upon what the equally unavoidable countervailing responses to will be to Danto’s philosophical claims. As found in The Madonna of the Future, Arthur Danto makes strong claims about the end of art history, the universality and timelessness of his conception of art, and the ultimate inability to separate fine art from other objects on aesthetic grounds. His writings are engaging and his analysis very convincing. The claims have found fertile ground in the philosophy of art and could be thought of as the contemporary art world’s own accepted conceptual orthodoxy. So, what will Danto the villain look like? Here are a few speculations. First, it might be argued that while Danto all too happily relegates art to a happy pluralism, he inconsistently sees philosophy in more essentialist terms. Could not his type of philosophical analysis really just be one style of artmaking, as a specific type of literature? This critique is related to the second possibility – which is that Danto is wrapped up in a historically specific philosophic enterprise thought somewhat questionable today. It is generally held today that claims to universal and timeless conceptual truths, or analytic truths, are controversial at best and that often such arguments tend to confuse claims that work within a specific language with those that work within all languages. But a third type of vilification might be even more important. Danto’s theories might be considered a source of much of what could be labelled a lamentable “Duchampification” of contemporary art. The story told in Transfiguration and Madonna sees Duchamp’s work, particularly the readymades, as the culmination of the exploration of the limits of art and, further, as still subversive and challenging. Picasso is seen, on the other hand, as an artist who has been completely digested. It is arguably largely the opposite. A stroll through contemporary art galleries would find the viewer moving between a seeming infinite number of footnotes to Duchamp. It seems Duchamp-like moves are all too easily multiplied. On the other hand who has been able to make Picasso’s moves his or her own? Finally, it might be thought that Danto seems to unduly dismiss the physicality of creation in favor of a type of armchair artist, thereby hinting at a strange similarity between Cartesian metaphysics and Duchampian art.
But it will be hard to make such criticisms stick. Danto is a powerful mind to grapple with and well worth reading. It is safe to say that whatever the content of the inevitable vilification, The Madonna of the Future is and will remain an essential and rewarding read. It is full of truly important insights into both specifics and general truths of contemporary art.