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Numero 5/2005-2006

ART IN THE AGE OF VISUAL CULTURE AND THE IMAGE

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ISSN 1720-3716 Published in Led on Line - Electronic Archive by LED - Edizioni Universitarie di Lettere Economia Diritto - Milano http://www.ledonline.it/leitmotiv/ Febbraio 2006

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Comitato Scientifico Elio Franzini (Università di Milano)

Gabriele Scaramuzza (Università di Milano) † Paolo Bagni (Università di Bologna)

Redattore capo

Andrea Pinotti (Università di Milano)

Redazione Chiara Cappelletto (Università di Milano)

Valentina Flak (Università di Milano) Micla Petrelli (Università di Bologna) Laura Scarpat (Università di Milano)

E-mail [email protected]



Numero 5 / 2005-2006

ART IN THE AGE OF VISUAL CULTURE AND THE IMAGE

Andrea Pinotti 7Introduction

1. Hubert Locher 11Talking or not talking about ‘Art with a capital A’:Gombrich – Schlosser – Warburg

2. Antonio Somaini 25On the ‘Scopic Regime’

3. Matthew Rampley 39Visual Culture: a Post-colonial Concept

4. Peter J. Schneemann 51Critical Constellations. When Art Questions the Image

5. Itay Sapir 67The Destruction of Painting:an Art History for Art that resists History

6. Michael Lafferty 77The End of Art: Intentionality and Intensionality

Leitmotiv - 5 / 2005-2006http://www.ledonline.it/leitmotiv/

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LED Edizioni Universitarie - www.ledonline.it

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7. Anders Michelsen 89Nothing has Meaning outside Discourse? On the Creative Dimension of Visuality

8. Dan Karlholm 115Reality Art: the Case of Oda Projesi

9. Eliane Escoubas 125Iconology and Ontology of the Image

10. Claudia Cieri Via 135L’immagine e la soglia del silenzio.Dall’opera d’arte alla processualità formativa

Contents


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6.

Michael Lafferty

The End of Art:Intentionality and Intensionality

[email protected]

This paper is based on my response to the writings of Arthur Danto who isperhaps best known for his theory of the end of art. I develop my own theo-ry of the end of art, quite different from Danto’s, but it is based on a critiqueof his philosophy of art. The paper is in four sections.

Section I explains the difference between Danto’s philosophy of art andhis philosophy of the history of art and examines how the latter relies on theformer.

Section II looks at his philosophy of art.Section III is a critique of that philosophy and I explain my concept of

the spectrum of artistic presence.Section IV examines the question of circularity in definitions of art and

provides a summary of my position.

1. DANTO’S PHILOSOPHY OF ART AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE HISTORY OF ART

Arthur Danto’s writings on art can be usefully placed in two categories: first,philosophy of art, and second, philosophy of the history of art; I shall verybriefly explain why I believe the former underlies the latter. The second cate-gory, Danto’s philosophy of the history of art, encompasses three majorthemes: first, his loosely Hegelian view of art history and its related conceptof the end of art, second, a theory of the philosophical disenfranchisementof art (Danto’s historical survey of the relationship between philosophy and


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art), and finally, his recent writings on the abuse of beauty: a development ofthe disenfranchisement theme. Danto, as I shall explain shortly, uses his theo-ry of the end of art, part of his philosophy of the history of art, to supporthis philosophy of art. I therefore need to comment on the relationship be-tween his philosophy of art and his concept of the end of art.

Two questions arise: firstly, does his theory of the end of art depend onthe philosophy of art, and, vice versa, does the philosophy of art depend onhis theory of the end of art? I believe the answer to the first question is yes,and the answer to the second is no; I shall explain briefly why in the remain-der of this section. These answers, I believe, justify my view of Danto’s phi-losophy of art as the underlying category of his writings on art and explainmy focus on a criticism of his philosophy of art.

How does Danto link his philosophy of art with his philosophy of thehistory of art? The former is an attempt to define art in terms of necessaryand sufficient conditions. If any condition a applies to all art, then a is a nec-essary condition of art. Danto believes a major problem with this approach ishow can we be sure that in the future there will not be some new type of artwhich fails to satisfy condition a? Our condition a would cease to be a neces-sary or, obviously, a sufficient condition of art. This is where Danto invokeshis philosophy of the history of art; his bold claim is that the history of arthas ended: that pop art marked the end of the modernist narrative of art andindeed the end of the whole of the history of art as a narrative.

I will briefly outline Danto’s philosophy of the history of art. He tracestwo narratives : first, the search for verisimilitude in art: the search for the cor-rect depiction of the visual world by artistic imitation, particularly in painting.Danto calls this the Vasarian narrative, and its era runs from the Renaissancethrough to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He sees this eraending with the invention of photography, particularly cinematic photographyand the realisation that imitation could not be, in fact never had been, themain aim of art. Danto believes that, towards the end of the Vasarian era,painting had largely achieved its goal of mimesis and that, coincidentally, thisrole had been taken over by photography. Art had to find a new narrative, andthe one which gradually emerged was Modernism: this emerging narrative in-volved the reflexive questioning of the nature of art from within art itself.

So Danto’s second narrative is the development of Modernism seen asan increasing move towards self-reflection in art. Danto labels this the Green-bergian era – again after another writer on art: Clement Greenberg – a foun-dationalist approach where each individual form of art was seen as striving

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for a purity of expression through a process of self-examination of its owntechniques and materials. Greenberg traces this through the development ofmodernism culminating in Abstract Expressionism. Danto believes this sec-ond narrative ends with pop art and the realisation that anything can becomeart, and this realisation becomes apparent when the question of the nature ofart is couched in terms of indiscernibility: when the difference between awork of art and an everyday object cannot be identified as a visual difference.I am sure you are familiar with some of the examples he uses. A theory of artis needed which addresses the non-discernible or non-manifest featureswhich must therefore distinguish art from non-art.

This is where the link between Danto’s philosophy of art and his philos-ophy of the history of art lies: if anything can become art, his theory of theend of art provides a way of indemnifying his philosophy of art, with its nec-essary and sufficient conditions, against any future counter-examples. If thehistory of art is over, although new works of art will continue to be produced,none will have the ability to nullify Danto’s essentialist definition. He says:

Having reached this point [the end of art ...] art has exhausted its conceptualmission. It has brought us to a stage of thought essentially outside history, whereat last we can contemplate the possibility of a universal definition of art andvindicate therewith the philosophical aspiration of the ages, a definition whichwill not be threatened by historical overthrow. 1

In other words, no new developments in art can possibly emerge in the futurewhich would derail Danto’s definition: we have all the evidence we require toproduce a real (essentialist) definition of art because the narrative history ofart is at an end. Note here that Danto’s stated need to indemnify his philoso-phy of art against future counter-examples is a result of his strong essentialistposition in relation to defining art. Later in the paper I suggest that other ap-proaches to defining art avoid Danto’s concern. I do not intend to explain thedevelopment of Danto’s philosophy of the history of art in detail here, but acrucial point is that it arises out of and relies on the technique of comparingindiscernible counterparts. We have reached ‘the end of art’, Danto believes,because pop art has raised the question of what art is in terms of indis-cernibles. The lesson of pop art is that anything can become art, and if any-thing can become art, art’s developmental history is complete. In other

The End of Art: Intentionality and Intensionality


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1 A.C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, New York 1986, p. 209.

words, no matter how many new works of art are produced in the future,they will not alter what it means to be a work of art; art as a concept will notcome to be anything new. Art will still be produced in its post-historical peri-od, but it will have no over-arching narrative structure.

So, Danto’s philosophy of the history of art relies on the comparison ofindiscernibles, but his philosophy of art, as we shall see shortly, relies on thevery same technique. Therefore his invocation of his philosophy of the histo-ry of art to support his philosophy of art is circular. I believe the techniqueof comparing indiscernibles is philosophically redundant: telling us nothingthat we do not already know about the artistic status of the objects underconsideration. In other words, in using the technique of comparing artworkswith indiscernible everyday objects, the decision about what is an artworkmust already have been made before the thought experiment can take place. As amethod, comparing indiscernibles in this way is inextricably linked to an es-sentialist distinction about what art is Noel Carroll sums this argument up:

To invoke indiscernibility in a characterization of a philosophy of art historythat is meant to defend the possibility of essentialist theory is circular; for itsupposes the viability of essentialist theory – by dint of its assumptions aboutindiscernibility – in the course of an argument whose very conclusion is osten-sibly that essentialist theory is viable. 2

I return to the two questions which I posed at the beginning of this section:does Danto’s theory of the end of art depend on his philosophy of art, and,vice versa, does his philosophy of art depend on his theory of the end of art?The answer to the first is yes. Danto’s concept of the end of art relies on thetechnique of comparing indiscernible counterparts, but invoking this tech-nique presupposes an essentialist definition of art. Therefore the concept ofthe end of art relies on Danto’s definition of art. Both rely on comparing in-discernibles, but the crucial point is that Danto’s use of indiscernibles presup-poses a definition of art which is part of his philosophy of art. The answer tothe second question is therefore no: the philosophy of art and its methodolo-gy underpins his concept of the end of art upon which his philosophy of thehistory of art rests. I believe Danto’s philosophy of art cannot, contrary to hisown view, rely on his philosophy of the history of art for support and that theformer must be addressed, and stand or fall, on its own merits.

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2 In M. Rollins (ed.), Danto and His Critics, Oxford 1993, p. 98.

2. DANTO’S PHILOSOPHY OF ART

I propose another theory of the end of art which emerges from a differentsource: from a critique of Danto’s philosophy of art. Recall I mentioned thathis philosophy of art is based on comparing indiscernible counterparts; it is atechnique which, as I have previously explained, I reject. The technique dom-inates his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, which is subtitled A Phi-losophy of Art: in six out of seven chapters the discussion focuses on twentythree sets of indiscernibles. However, as I shall go on to explain, I believeDanto’s philosophy of art divested of its reliance on indiscernibles is validand extremely powerful. It is summed up in the terms intentionality (with a t)and intensionality (with an s) and is an attempted definition of art embodyingsix principles: (1) art is the result of human endeavour by an artist, (2) art-works acquire a history and a provenance, (3) artworks embody meaning(they are expressive), which meaning is a result of the artist’s intention, and(4) that meaning requires a subject about which the artist projects a point ofview by means of rhetorical ellipsis, (5) artworks require interpretation and fi-nally, (6) they are produced and interpreted within a historical context.

It is clear that intentionality (with a t) is involved here; I need to explainhow intensionality (with an s) is manifest: I need to expand on principle 4)that artworks embody rhetorical ellipsis. I will make four points.

First, artworks cannot be paraphrased, they have complex internal cog-nitive relationships and contextualism is involved in interpreting them. Sec-ond, artworks include reference to a representation and have similar featuresto metaphors: they are intensional (with an s) in structure. Third, a work ofart expresses what it is a metaphor for by the way it depicts its subject;metaphoric transfer takes artworks beyond the literal. Fourth, artworks areexpressive: they embody style which is innate, unlike manner which can beacquired. Style is a feature of the artistic process: it enables the artist, un-knowingly, to allow us to see their way of viewing the world: it is transparentto the artist but opaque to the viewer. Finally Danto adds a speculative codato his definition: he suggests that intensional structures (with an s) and sen-tential states play a role in how we see and interpret the world. We act asthough the world is a reflection of our beliefs, and that how we representthings is style, and style is particularly evident in art.

This is a complex, powerful definition of art, but the problem is thatthese six principles can apply to what is normally thought of as non-art: forexample artistic manifestos or racist tirades. Therefore Danto’s attempt to de-



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marcate art fails. I have already pointed out it relies on circular arguments;now I maintain it is overinclusive. In place of this demarcation however, Isuggest another approach: that there is an element of artistic presence in allhuman activity (whether it is usually thought to belong to the sphere of art ornon-art). I argue that the characteristics Danto attributes to art are better un-derstood as characterising this artistic element in all human activity.

3. THE SPECTRUM OF ARTISTIC PRESENCE

The primary issue I address in this section is the assumption by Danto thatart can be identified as a separate category. He believes that there are two dis-tinct categories: that artworks can be distinguished from non-artworks eventhough in many cases they may be visually indiscernible, and this positionruns through the whole of his writings. In 1981 in The Transfiguration of theCommonplace he asks why «Warhol’s Brillo boxes were works of art while theircommonplace counterparts, in the back rooms of supermarkets throughoutChristendom, were not» 3. In 2003 in The Abuse of Beauty, he distinguishes be-tween Brillo Boxes as sculpture and Brillo boxes as graphic design: «As withthe Brillo boxes of Andy Warhol and James Harvey [the designer of the Bril-lo package], aesthetics could not explain why one was a work of fine art andthe other not, since for all practical purposes they were aesthetically indis-cernible» 4. How does this assumption of a clear distinction between art andnonart affect the search for a definition of art? The distinction suggests that,if we can separate artworks from non-artworks, there must be some featureof art which enables us to do this: some quality or attribute which we find inart but is missing from non-art. The search for a definition of art, given Dan-to’s view of art, is to identify this essential feature which applies only to worksof art. I suggest that this search for essential features of art is chimerical: Ipropose instead that an element of art is present, to a greater or lesser de-gree, in all human activity, and I will explore this idea in more detail. I suggestthat all human activity or the products of human activity can be situated on aspectrum ranging from art at one end to non-art at the other , and I call thisthe spectrum of artistic presence. Whatever human artefact or action we are con-

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3 A.C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. A Philosophy of Art, Cambridge1981, p VI.

4 A.C. Danto, The Abuse of Beauty. Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, Chicago 2003, pp. 6-7.

sidering can be placed somewhere on this continuum; it could be extremelyclose to one end by virtue of having little artistic content, say, a brick, or itcould be extremely close to the other end, say, a monochrome painting byMalevich. But, of course, both of these objects could be placed at either endof the spectrum: the brick could be part of a gallery installation and themonochrome square, a colour sample. Danto’s contextualism explains howand why this can happen. My point is that although objects may approach ei-ther end of the spectrum, they cannot wholly belong to one end or the other.There is no ‘pure’ art and there is no human action or artefact without someartistic element however marginal, cursory or minimal it might be. The diffi-culty with my concept of the spectrum is that it leaves us with the questionof how to distinguish one end of the spectrum from another and how to dis-tinguish artistic presence itself. How do you recognise and place objects andactions at the art end of the spectrum? Surely this way of approaching a def-inition of art is merely re-construing the problem: we are simply moving theproblem from seeking a definition of ‘art’ to a definition of ‘artistic pres-ence’; However, I believe that there is a significant difference and advantage ifwe adopt the latter approach. A definition of art, accepting there is no clearboundary between art and non-art, will attempt to identify this ‘artistic pres-ence’ across the whole range of human activity and artefacts: there is no needto identify the conditions which relate specifically and uniquely to a separateclass of artworks. I believe that this fundamentally changes the type of defi-nition we should expect; it goes beyond a re-construal of the problem: itchanges its nature in a significant way. Instead of seeking defining featureswhich will enable us to sort artefacts into two classes, art and non-art, we arelooking for some aspect or aspects of all human activity which, to a greateror lesser degree, endow it with what I call artistic presence. Danto believesanything can become art; in doing so it takes on a new character which non-artdoes not possess. I share the view that anything can become art, but, by con-trast, I believe it does so simply by moving up the spectrum of artistic pres-ence. There is no threshold between art and non-art; objects acquire a newposition on the spectrum, and we have seen how this can happen without anydiscernible change in the object: it can happen simply by virtue of where orhow an object is displayed. It does not mean taking on a completely newcharacter, but rather in displaying more openly certain features that all humanartefacts possess.

Danto in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace discusses William Ken-nick’s warehouse thought experiment: Kennick imagines someone asked to



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sort the contents of a warehouse into art and non-art objects 5. He believesthat anyone could quite successfully complete this task; Danto believes thatwith the advent of pop art, and particularly with works of art like Warhol’sBrillo Box sculpture, this task would be impossible. On my view, accepting theartistic spectrum concept, the thought experiment would be ungrounded andunnecessary: everything in the warehouse would have some artistic compo-nent. We could ask for the objects to be sorted into their relative position onmy proposed spectrum: into greater and lesser degrees of artistic make-up.Of course, mistakes could be made; we could mistake Brillo Boxes the sculp-ture for everyday Brillo boxes (Warhol for Harvey) unless the former wasidentifiable in some way: perhaps a label or a receipt from Sotheby’s for sev-eral hundred thousand dollars! Mistakes such as this would not trouble myview of art. With the spectrum approach, the type of definition I am seekingis dependent on how we understand art being constituted in relation to allhuman activity or artefacts. The approach overcomes one of my major objec-tions to Danto’s theory: that it is too inclusive. If we accept that all humanactivity has an artistic element, overinclusiveness ceases to be a problem: thefact that anything can be art, or manifest artistic features, will come as no sur-prise.

This move, I argue, allows Danto’s powerful concepts of intentionalityand intensionality in art to apply to all human endeavour. Intentionality (witha t) entails expression, representation and interpretation within a historicalcontext. Intensionality (with an s) suggests that art (artistic presence on myview) embodies rhetorical ellipsis and shares certain structural features withmetaphor. The major criticism of Danto’s theory of art that it is over-inclu-sive is addressed, but what about the other criticism I have mentioned: thathis philosophy of art relies on circular arguments.

4. ART AS AN INFLECTED CONCEPT

You will recall my previous mention of metaphor; I believe there is a parallelhere with the concept of artistic presence. I believe that the basis of all lan-guage is metaphorical and that no literal reading is possible. This view of lan-guage as metaphor owes much to Paul Ricoeur who says «that discourse onmetaphor is itself infected by the universal metaphoricity of philosophical

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5 A.C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, loc. cit., p. 60.

discourse» 6. I believe there can be no non-circular account of metaphor be-cause the language of that account would be metaphoric. Similarly there canbe no non-circular description of artistic activity because human endeavour isinfected with artistic presence; both metaphor and artistic presence share animportant feature: they both embody intensionality (with an s). Derrida high-lights what he calls the ‘tropic’ nature of all human discourse in ‘WhiteMythology’: he views metaphor as the unavoidable basis of all discourse;there is no way of moving beyond the rubric of metaphor. He believes thatthe only way to overlook this, in philosophical discourse for example, is to as-sume that «the sense aimed at through these figures is an essence rigorouslyindependent of that which transports it, which is an already philosophicalthesis, one might even say philosophy’s unique thesis, the thesis which consti-tutes the concept of metaphor» 7.

If we can have no non-circular account of metaphor and therefore ofart, we must account for this in our definition or surely accept that it makesthe search for a definition of art untenable. I shall address this issue by men-tioning an idea from George Dickie. Dickie develops the idea of ‘inflected’concepts; he identifies art as an example. In passing, we should point out thatDickie’s term is quite distinct from Danto’s much later use of the term ‘in-flectors’ which is concerned with how we interpret artworks as representa-tional entities. Dickie’s idea of ‘inflected’ concepts involves a turning back ofthe concepts on themselves in a circular manner; this is because the conceptsthemselves are situated in a cultural context which is itself partly responsiblefor defining them. Dickie accepts the circularity required in defining inflectedconcepts as an unavoidable, in fact as a necessary, part of their constitution.He believes that in creating, appreciating and thinking about works of art westart from a position of knowledge through our cultural embeddedness:

The task of defining ‘work of art’ is a matter of organising and systematizingwhat we already know and have known from early childhood. Many other cul-tural concepts will involve the same kind of circularity: for example, the con-cepts of statute law and legislature. 8

I accept Dickie’s view of art as an inflected concept and that some level ofcircularity is inevitable in any definition of art.



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6 P. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, London, New York 2003, p. 338.7 J. Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, Chicago 1982, p. 229.8 In D.E. Cooper (ed.), A Companion to Aesthetics, Oxford 1992, p. 113.

I now summarise my attempted definition of art. There are three claims:(1) an element of art is present to a greater or lesser degree in all human ac-tivity and the products of human activity – this is what I have termed thespectrum of artistic presence. (2) This element of artistic presence is the pro-duction or presentation of artefacts or performances by humans for humaninterpretation. It is characterised by intentionality (with a t) and intensionality(with an s). It is the former (with a t) because it embodies meaning, and in do-ing so expresses a point of view. Artistic presence is subject to interpretationwhich takes place within a historical context. It is also intensional (with an s):through a process of representation its structure embodies rhetorical ellipsisand style, and its results or products cannot be replaced or paraphrased with-out altering their meaning. Finally, my last claim, (3) art is an inflected con-cept: there can be no wholly non-circular account of art.

I end with a final comment on this last point. Does this render thesearch for a definition of art untenable or futile? I believe not: I take a prag-matic view of definitions. They serve to help us understand and appreciateart; there is no reason why a ‘real’ definition couched only in terms of neces-sary and sufficient conditions should apply to art. The first two claims in ourdefinition, although they explain and help us to understand art, must alwaysbe considered in the light of the third: that art is an inflected concept and, assuch, is a cultural construct. Oswald Hanfling puts this into perspective verywell saying:

It may be that sooner or later, and perhaps due to the innovatory pressures oftoday’s art and the institutional forces behind it, the conceptual geography willhave changed to such an extent that the word ‘art’ will no longer mean what itmeans now. Such a change would not, of course, be ‘merely verbal’. It wouldinclude fundamental changes in the practice and appreciation of art, which inturn would entail a different conception of human culture and civilisation. 9

This view implies criticism of Danto’s philosophy of the history of art: histheory of the end of art. Whilst a full discussion of this is outside the scopeof this paper, I do disagree with Danto’s historical thesis. I accept the end ofthe Vasarian and Greenbergian narratives, but I agree with Hanfling’s viewthat there could be fundamental changes in our conception of art in the fu-ture. Perhaps these changes could relate to new non-manifest aims or proper-

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9 O. Hanfling (ed.), Philosophical Aesthetics, an Introduction, Oxford 1992, p. 39.

ties that lie beyond Danto’s theory. I adopt a Peircian, pragmatic approach,based on the logic of abduction, which denies the possibility of an end to thehistory of art in the manner envisaged by Danto. The end of art, on my view,is the end of the concept of fine art, and I suggest the removal of this falseart/non-art duality re-enfranchises art. It re-enfranchises the ineliminableartistic element of all human endeavour enabling it to flourish within a broadculture of pluralism and creativity.



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