Danto - Artworks and Real Things

7/27/2019 Danto - Artworks and Real Things

1/17

To t he memory of Rudolph Wit tkowerArtworks and r ea l things

bYA R T H U R C. D A N T O(Coluiiibia University)

T h e children imitating th e cortnorants,Are more wonderfulT h a n the real cormorants.

IssaPainting relates to both art and l i fe . . .( I t r y to work in that gap be tween the two ) .

Rauschenberg

From philosophers bred to expect a certain stylistic austerity,I beg indulgence for what may strike them as an intolerable wild-ness in the following paper. I t is a philosophical reflection onNew York painting from circa 1961 to circa 1969, and a certainwildness in the subject may explain the wildness I apologize forin its trea tment. Explain but not excuse, I will be told: the proper-ties of the subject treated of need never penet rate the treatmentitself; Freuds papers on sexuality are exemplarily unarousing,papers in logic are not logical merely in consequence of theirsubject. But in a way the paper is part of its own subject, sinceit becomes an artwork a t the end. Perhaps the final creation inthe period it treats of. Perhaps the Snal artwork in the history ofart!

~ ~

This paper ~ i - a s cad i n a n carlicr version at a c o n f e r c n c c o n the philosophyof art at t he Uni\.ersity of Illinois a t Chicago Ci rc l e . I am grateful to ProfessorGeorge Dickie for having invited i t . For prodromal reflections on much t hea nme topic, s e e my paper T i c Al-t~\-orld,n JoirrrzaE of f h f b S O j J h y , \ 01 . 61(1%4), pp . 571-5S-l.


2/17

2 ARTHUR C . DANTOI

Rauschenbergs self-consciously characterized activity exemplifiesan ancient task imposed generically upon artists in consequenceof an alienating criticism by Plato of art as such. Art allegedlystands at a certain invidious remove from reality, so that infabricating those entit ies whose production defines their essen-ce, artists are contaminated at the outse t with a kind of ontologi-cal inferiority. They bear, as well, the stigma of a moral reproba-tion, for with their productions they charm the souls of artloverswith shadows of shadows. Finally, speaking as a precocious thera-pist as well as a true philistine, Plato insinuates that art is a sortof perversion, a substitute, deflected, compensatory activityengaged in by those who are impotent to be what as a pis-allerthey imitate. Stunned by this triple indictment into a quest forredemption, artists have sought a way towards ontological pro-motion, which means of course collapsing the space betweenreality and art. That there should, by Rauschenbergs testimony,still remain an insulating vacuity between the two which evenhe has failed t o drain of emptiness, stimulates a question regardingthe philosophical suitability of the task.

To treat as a defect exactly what makes a certain thing or activitypossible and valuable is almost a formula for generating platonicphilosophy, and in the case of art an argument may be mountedt o show that its possibility and value is logically tied up withputting reality at a distance. It was, for example, an astonishingdiscovery that representations of barbaric rites need themselvesno more be barbaric than representations of any x whatever needhave th e propert ies of x-hood. By imitating practices it was Izorri-f y ing to engage in (Nietzsche), the Greeks spontaneously putsuch practices at a distance and invented civilization in the pro-cess; for civilization consists in the awareness of media as mediaand hence of reality as reality. So just those who gave birth totragedy defeated an insupportable reality by putting betweenthemselves and it a spiritualizing distance it is typical of Plato tofind demeaning. I t may be granted that this achievement createsthe major problem of representational art, which is sufficientlyto resemble the realities it denotes that identification of i t a s a


3/17

ARTWORKS AND REAL THINGS 3representation of the latter is possible, while remaining sufficient-ly different that confusion of the two is difficult. Aristotle, whoexplains the pleasure men take in art through the pleasure theytake in imitations, is clearly aware tha t the pleasure in question(which is intellectual) logically presupposes the knowledge thatit is an imitation and no t the real thing it resembles and denotes.W e may take (a minor) pleasure in a man imitating a crow-call ofa sort we do not commonly take in crow-calls themselves, butthis pleasure is rooted in cognition: we must know enough ofcrow-calls to know that these are what the man is imitating (andnot, say, giraffe-calls], and must know that he and not crows isth e provenance of the caws. One further condition for pleasure isthis, t ha t the man is imitating and not just an unfortunate crow-boy, afflicted from birth with a crowish pharynx. These crucialasymmetries need not be purchased at the price of decreasedverisimilitude, and it is no t unreasonable to insist upon a perfectacoustical indiscernibility between true and sham crow-calls, sothat the uninformed in matters of art might-like an overhearingcrow, in fact-be deluded and adopt att itudes appropriate t o thereality of crows. The knowledge upon which artist ic pleasure (incontrast with aes thet ic pleasure) depends is thus external t o andat right angles to th e sounds themselves, since they concern th ecauses and conditions of the sounds and their relation to the realworld. So the option is always available t o th e mimetic artist t orub away all differences between artworks and real things pro-viding he is assured that the audience has a clear grasp of thedistances.I t was in the exercise of this option, for example, that Euripidesundertook the abolition of the chorus, inasmuch as real confronta-tion, real frenzies of jealousy commonly transpire without benefitof the ubiquitous, nosy, and largely disapproving chorus inexplic-ably (to him) deemed necessary for the action to get on by hispredecessors. And in a similar spirit of realism, the stony edifyingheroes of the past are replaced by plain folks, and their cosmicsuffering with the commonplace heartpains of such (for example)as us . So there was some basis for the wonder of his contemporary,Socrates (who m a y , considering his Egyptolatry in the Luzus, have


4/17

4 ARTHUR C . DANTObeen disapproving not so much of art as of realistic art in theRepubtic), as to what the point of drama any longer could be: ifwe have the real thing, of what service is an idle iteration of it?And so he created a dilemma by looking inversely a t th e cognitiverelations Aristotle subsequently rectified: either there is going tobe a discrepancy, and mimesis fails, or art succeeds in erasing thediscrepancy, in which case it just is reality, a roundabout way ofgetting what we already have. And, as one of his successors haselegantly phrased it : one of the damned things is enough. Artfails if it is indiscernible from reality, and it equally if oppositelyfails if it is not.

We are all familiar enough with one attempt to escape thisdilemma, which consists in locating art in whatever makes forthe discrepancies between reality and imitations of it . Euripides,it is argued, went in just the wrong direction. Let us instead makeobjects which are insistently art by virtue of the fact that no onecan mistake them for reality. So the disfiguring conventionsabolished in the name of reality become reintroduced in the nameof art, and one settles for perhaps a self-conscious woodenness, adeliberate archaism, an operatic falseness so marked and under-scored that it must be apparent to any audience t h a t illusioncould never have been our intent. Non-imitativeness becomesthe criterion of art, the more artificial and the less imitative inconsequence, the purer the art in question. But a fresh dilemmaawaits a t the other end of the inevitable route, namely t ha t non-imitativeness is also the criterion of reality, so the more purelyart things become, the closer they verge on reality, and pureart collapses into pure reality. Well, this may after all be the routeto ontological promotion, but the other side of the dilemma askswhat makes us want to call art what by common consent is reality?So in order t o preserve a distinction, we reverse directions, hardlywith a light heart since the same dilemma, we recall, awaits us atthe other end. And there seems, on the face of it, only oneavailable way to escape the unedifying shuttle from dilemma todilemma, which is to make non-imitations which are radicallydistinct from all heretofore existing real things. Like Rauschen-bergs stuffed goat garlanded with a tire! It is with such unen-


5/17

A R T W O R K S AND R E A L THINGS 5trenched objects, like combines and emerubies, that the abyssesbetween life and art are t o be filled!

There remains then only the nagging question of whether allunentrenched objects are t o be reckoned artworks, e.g., considerthe first can-opener. I know of an object indiscernible from whathappen to be our routine can-openers, which is a n artwork:The s ingle s tarkness of i t s s h o r t , ug ly , o i n i n ~ u s la de -lik e c z t r c m i t y ,i :mbodying aggress ivencss and mascul in i ty , contras t formal ly as \\-ell assymbol ical ly wi th the f r ivolous diminishing hel ix , which swings f r t rc ly[ b u t u p o n a f ixed enslaving axis! ) and is pure , helpless feminini ty .The two mot i fs are symbiot ica i ly sus ta ined in a s ingle , poxverful coin-p o s i t io n , n o less universa l a i l J hopefu l for i t s miniature scale and com-m o n p l a c e m a t e r ia l .

[Gazette des beaux arts, vol . 14, no . 6 , pp . 430-431. h,Iy t ranslaticm]As an artwork, of course; it has the elusive defining properties ofartworks, significant form compris. In virtue of its iiidiscernibilityfrom the domestic utensil, then, one might think it uncouth ifnot unintelligible to withhold predication of significant form toth e latter, merely on grounds of conspicuous Zuhandenlzeit (onecould open cans with the work the critic of the Gaze t t e was sostirred by) or large numbers. For it woul~l e startling that twothings should have the sanie shape and yet one have and theother lack significant form. O r it would be were we t o forget foran inadvertent moment the existence of a Polynesian languagein which the sentence Beans are high in protein, indiscernibleacoustically froin the English sen tence Beans are high in proteinactually means, in its own h g u a g e , l v h a t IVIotherhood is sacredmeans in English. And it induces proibund filial sentiments whenaudited by native speakers though hardly tha t with us. So perhapssignificant form is supervenient upon a seinantical reading, itselfn weak function of language affiliation which mere inscriptionalcongruity happens t o underdetermine? The ciurstion is suitabl).rhetorical a t this point, for my concern is that the logical inter-section of d ie non-imitative and the non-entrenched may as easi1)-be peopled with art\corks as by real things, and vnciy in fact havepairs of indiscernible objects, one a n artwork and one not. Inview of this possibility, we m u s t avert our c y e s from th e ohierts


6/17

6 ARTHUR C . DANTOthemselves in a counter-phenomenological turn--Von d e n Sachenselb.st!-and see whatever i t is, which clearly does not meet theeye, which keeps art and reality from leaking hopelessly into oneanothers ter ritory . Only so can we escape the dilemtna of Socra-tes, which has generated so much art-history through the mis-understandings it epitomizes and encourages.

I1Borges merit s credit for, amongst o the r things, having discoveredthe Pierre Menard Phenomenon: two art-objects, in this instancetwo fragments of th e Quixo tc , which though verbally indiscrimin-able have radically non-overlapping and incompatible artisticproperties. The art-works in question stand to their commonphysical embodiment in something like th e relationship in whicha set of isomers may stand t o a common molecular formula, whichthen underdetermines and hence fails t o explain th e difTerencesin the ir chemical reactions. The difference, of course, is given bythe way the elenients recorded in the formula are put together.Of the two Quixotes , for exainple, one is more subtle and theother more clumsy than its counterpart. That of Cervantes isth e more coarse: it opposes t o t he fiction of chivalry t he tawdryprovincial reality of his country. Menards ( O n th e otherhand . . .!) selects for its reality the land of Carmen during th ecentury of Lepanto and Lope de Vega. Menards work is an ob-lique condcmnation of Salamnzbij, which Cervantes could hardlyhave been. Though visibly identical, one is almost incomparablyricher than the o th er and, Borges writes, The contrast in styleis also vivid. Th e archaic style of Mcnard----quite foreign, after311-suffers from a certain affectation. No t so t h a t ofhis forerunner,who handles with ease th e current Spanish of h is rime. Menard,were he t o h a v e complcted his Quixote , \vould have had the t a skof creating at least one character in excess of C:ervantes: theauthor of the [so-called in Menards bu t ~ z o t o-called in Cervan-tes) Autobiographical Fragment. And so on. Menards workwas Iris, not a copy nor an accidentally congrucnt achievement ofthe sort involved in thr discovery that the paintcrs of Jupiter


7/17

ARTWORKS AND REAL THINGS 7are making (there being no question here of cultural diffusion)flat works using the primary colors and staggeringly like hlcn-drians, but rather a fresh, in its own way remarkable creation.A mere copy would have no literary value at all, but would bemerely an exercise in facsimilitation, and a forgery of so wellknown a work would be a fiasco. I t is a precondition for theMenard phenomenon that author and audience alike know (notth e original but) th e other Quixote. But Menards is no t a quota-tion either, as it were, for quotations in this sense merely resembleth e expressions th ey denote without having a n y of th e artisticallyrelevant properties of the latter: quotations cannot be scintillating,original, profound, searching, or whatever what is quoted may be.There are, indeed, theories of quotation according t o which the ylack a n y semantical structure, which their originals seldom lack.So a quotation of th e Quixote (ei ther Quixote) would be artist-ically null though quite superimposable upon its original. Quo-tations, in fact, are striking examples of objects indiscerniblefrom originals which are not artworks though the latter are.Copies (in general) lack the properties of the originals they de-no te ar?d resemble. A copy of a cow is not a cow, a copy ofan artwork is not an artwork.

Quotat ions are enti ties difficult to locate ontofogicaliv, !ikereflections and shadows, being neither artworks nor real things,inasmuch as they are parasitic upon reality, and have in particularthat degree of derivedness assigLied by Plato t o artworks as class.So though a copy-or quotation-of an artwork is logically exclud-ed from t he class of artworks, it raises too many special questionst o be taken as our specific example of an ent ity indiscernible from;in artwork though no t one. H i i t it is no t difficult t o genera te lessintricate examples. Consider, for the moment, neckties, whichhave begun t o work their w ay into t he artworld, e.,g., Jim IlinesU n i z w s n l Tie, ohn DUESTit. Piece, etc. S uppos e Picasso exhibitsnow a tie, painted uniform blue in order t o reject any touch of le~ ~ c i n t u r es decisively as the Strozzi altarpiece rejects, as an actof artistic will, giottesque perspective. One says: my child coulddo t ha t . L\rell, true enough, there is nothing beyond infantilec-apabilitv here: so let a chilcl, with his sti!ti.d deliberateness,


8/17

8 ARTHUR C. DANTOcolor one of his fathers tie s an all over blue, no brush-strokesto make i t nice. I would hesitate t o predict a magnificent futurein art for this child on the basis of his having caused the exist-ence of something indistinguishable from something created bythe greatest master of modern times. I would go further, and saythat he has no t produced an artwork. For sornetliing prevents hisobject froiii entering the artFvorld, as it prevents from enteringt h a t world those confections by a would-be van hleegeren ofXlontmartrc who sees at once th e Picasso tie as a chance for cleverforgery. Three such objects would give rise t o one of thosemarvelous Shakespearean plots, of confused twins and mistakenidentities, a possibility not a joking one for Icahnwieler (or asit Kootz?? who takes all the necessary precautions. In spite ofwhich, let us suppose, the ties get mixed up, and the childs tiehangs t o this very daj7 in the Museum of the Municipaiity o fTailoir. Picasso, of course, disputes its authenticity , and refuses t osign it (in fact he signs the forgery). The original was confiscatedby the Ministry of Counterfacts. I look forward t o t he time whenR doctoral candidate under Professor Theodore Reff straightensoiLt the attributions by counting threads, though the status of aforgery with an authentic signature remains for philosophers ofa r t t o set tle . Professor Goodman has an intriELting argument t h a tsooner or later differences are bound t o turn up, tha t what looksidentically similar today will look artistically so diverse ;omor-row that men will xvonder how the case I have described wouldever have arisen. LVell, sufficient un to the day may be the similari-ties thereof tomorrows differentiations W O U ~ ~ppear wlziclievcrof th e three ties were t o hang in tlie museum, an.d I am inclinedto feel that an>- seen differences will ultimately be used t c re-enforce the attribution, right or wrong, ~vhichs th e accepted one.ELit t h a t leaves still ui se tt ie d the ontological questions, besidcsgenerating a kind of absurdit:; of connoisseurship hy bringiilg intothe aesthetics of this o:der of object the refined peering a p ~ r c -priate, say, t o Poussin or Morant-ii or Cezanne. N o n e of whom,though clearly not for reasons of artistic ineptitude, ~ o u l da1.ebeen able t o m a k e an artJsork out of a painted tie. So it isntius t that Picasso happens t o be an irrtist that :ndtrs die diffc-


9/17

ARTWORKS ANT) R E A L THINGS 9rence in the cases at hand. But the further reasons are intcr-es ing

For one thing, there would have been no room in the artworldof Cezannes time for a painted necktie. Not everything can bea n artwork at every time: t he artworld must be ready for it. Much;is not every line which is zuitry in a given context can be wittyin a l l . Pliny tells of a contest between rival painters, the firstdrawing a straight line; th e second drawing, in a different color, aline within that line; th e first drawing an ultimately fine line withinthis. One does not ordinariiy think of lines as having sides, butwith each inscribed line, a space exists between its edges and theedges of the containing line, so th at t he result would be like fivevery thin strips of co!or. Nested lines, each making space wherenoEe was believed possible, shows remarkable steadiness of handand eye, and bears witness t o the singular prow-ess of Parahesiosand his rival here. And the object was a wonder in its time. Butnot an artwork! N o more than the famous freehand circle ofGiotto. But I could see exactly such an object turning up onMadison Avenue today, a synthesis, perhaps, of Barnett Newmanand Frank Stella. Such an object in the time of Parahesios wouldhave fnerely been a set-piece of dracghtsmanly control. So it isnot even as though, on the Berkeleyan assuinption that only art-wcrks can anticipate artworks, Parahesios were a predecessor ofthe contemporary painter of fine stripes. Parahesios could nothave modified his perception of art, nor that of his times, t oaccommodate his t o z u de main as an artistic achievement. Butfor he had made a chimpanzee out of a to), a bull ou t of a bicycleseat, a goat out of a basket , a Venus ou t of a gas-jet: so why not atie OUL of a t i e ? I t had room not only in the artworld, but in thecorpus of t he zrtist, in a waj- in which the identical object, fromthe hands of CCzanne, would have had room for neither. Cezannecould only have made a mountain out of paint, in the received andtraditional manner of such transformations. He did no t have t heoption even of making paint out of paint, in the later manner ofthc Abstract Expressionists.

Rut while these considerations serve to shonr t h a t th e identical

D icassos artworld u-as ready t o receive, at Picassos hand, a necktie:


10/17

10 A R T H U R C. DANTOobject could, in one art-historical contest be an artwork and i nanother one not, the problem remains of moving from posse n l /esse. What , apart from the possibility, makes it actually a work oiart in the context of late Picasso? Arid what makes then the differ-ences between what Picasso did and his contemporaries, the cllilc;and th e forger, did? O n l y when the world was ready for Necktiecould the comedy of mistaken identities have transpired, all{while it is easy to see how, given the sharp and exact resemblances,an artwork which was a necktie should have been confused witha necktie which was not an artwork, the task of explicating thedifferences remains.One way t o see the matter is this: Picasso used the necktie to

make a statement, th e forger employed the necktie t o copy whatPicasso made a statement with, but made no statement by meansof his. And this would be true even were he inspired by vanMeegeren to invent, say, a rose-colored necktie to fill a gap inPicassos development. The child and Cezanne are simply makingnoise. Their objects have no location in the history of art. Parta t least of what Picassos statement is about is art, and a r t had notdeveloped appropriately by th e time of Cezanne for such a state-ment t o have been intelligible, nor can the child in question havesufficiently internalized the history and theory of a r t t o make astatement, much less this statement, by means of the paintednecktie. At least the right relations hold between t he four objectsto enable a distinction structurally of a piece with t ha t betweenstatement, echo, and noise to be made. And though a real enoughobject-a hand-painted tie!-Picassos work stands a t just th eright remove from reality for it to be a statement, indeed a state-ment in part about reality and art sufficiently penetrating toenable its own enfranchisement into the world of art . I t enters a ta phase of art-history when the consciousness of the differencebetween reality and a r t is part of what makes the differencebetween art and reality.


11/17

A R T W O R K S A N D RE.41, T H I N G S 11I11

Testamorbida is a playwright who deals in Found Drama. Disgustedwith theatricality, he has run through th e ti resome post-Pirandellodevices for washing the boundaries away between life and art,and has sickened of the contrived atmospheres of happenings.Nothing is going to be real enough save reality. So he declareshis latest play t o have been everything tha t happened in the lifeof a family in Astoria between last Saturday and tonight, thefamily in question having been picked by throwing a dart at themap of the town. How natural are the actors! They have no needt o overcome th e distance from their roles by stanislaviskyianexercise, since they are what they play. O r play.The author endsthe play by fiat at eleven-ten (curtain), and has the after-theaterparty with friends at the West End Bar. N o reviews, there wasno audience, there was just one performance. For all the actorsknow, it was an ordinary evening, pizza and television, hair putup in rollers, a wrong number and a tooth-ache. All that makesthis slice of life an artwork is the declaration that i t is so, plus themeta-artistic vocabulary: actor, dialogue, natural, beginning,end. And perhaps the title, which may be as descriptive as youplease, viz., What a Family in Astoria Did . . ..

Titles are borne by artworks, interestingly enough, though n otby things indiscernable from them which are not artworks, e.g.,another period in the life of t ha t or any family in Astoria or any-where . Even Untitled is a kind of title: non-artworks are no tentitled even t o be unt itled. Cezannes hand-painted necktie maybear a label, say at the Cezanne House, along with other memora-bilia, but Cezannes Necktie is no t its title (Cezannes Necktiecould be the tit le of Picassos tie if i t were painted in just the colorof the Louvres V a s e Bleu) . Noblemen have titles t oo . Title hasthe ring of status, of something which can be conferred. I t has,indeed, enough of the ring of legality to suggest t h a t artwork-perhaps like person!-is after ail an ascriptive term rather thana descriptive-or exclusively descriptive-one.

Ascriptivity, as I understand it , is a property of predicates whenthey attach to objects in the light of certain conventions, andwhich apply iess on the basis of certain necessary and sufficient


12/17

11 ARTHUR C. D A N r Oconditions than of certain defeating conditions not holding.Person is defeasible, for example, through such avenues as minor-ity , subcompetence, disenfranchisement, financial responsibilityand liability, and the like. A corporation can consist of a singleperson, who is not identical with the corporation in question, andthe distinction between that person and the corporation he be-longs t o is perhaps enough like the distinction between an artworkand th e physical object i t consists in but is not identical with tha twe can think of artworks in terms of privileges, exemptions,rights, and the like. Thus artworks, which happen t o contain neck-ties, are entitled t o hang in museums, in a way in which necktiesindiscernible from the former are not. They have, again, a certainpeer-group which their indiscernible but plebeian counterpartsdo R o t . The blue necktie which is an artwork belongs with theCowper-Niccolini Madonna and the Cathedral of Laon, while xhenecktie just like it which is not an artwork belongs just with thecollars and cufflinks of banal haberdashery, somewhat abimi byblue-paint. The blue necktie, indeed, is in the museum and inthe collection, but its counterparts, though they can be geometric-ally in the museum, are there only i i l the way sofas and palm-treestypically are. T h e s, in fact, a kind of In-der-Pinakothek-sein notso awfully different from the in-der - Wdt - se i n which pertains topersons in contrast with things. A necktie which is an artworkdiffers from one which is not like a person differs from a body:metaphysically, it takes two sets of predicates amazingly similarto the P- and M-predicates which persons take on a well-knowntheory of P. F. Strawsons:no accident, perhaps, if person toois an ascriptive predicate. The blue necktie, thus, which is an art-work, is by Picasso, whereas its counterpart is not by Cezanneeven though he put the paint on it. And so forth. So let us try thisout for a moment, stressing here the defeating conditions, less t ostrike a blow against Testaniorbida than t o see what kind of thingi t is that can be subject to defeat of this order. I shall mentiononly two defeating conditions as enough for our purposes, thoughhardly exhausting the list. Indeed, were art t o evolve, new defeat-ing conditions would emerge.

( I ) Fakes. If illusion were the aim after all of a r t , then thcre


13/17

A R T W O R K S AND REAL THINGS 13would be just exactly the same triumph in getting Stendhal toswoon at a fake Guido Reni as causing birds to peck at paintedgrapes. There is, I believe, no stigma attached to painting picturesof pictures: Burliuk once told me that, since artists paint thethings they love and since he loved pictures, he saw no obstacleto painting pictures of pictures, viz., of Hogarths Shrimp Gir l .I t happens that Burliuk remained himself, his picture of theShrimp Girl deviating from the Shrimp Gir l roughly as he differedfrom Hogarth. He was not, on the other hand, pretending theShrimp Girl was his any more than he was pretending thatWesthampton, which he also and in the same spirit paintedpictures of, w as his: what was his was the painting, a statement inpaint which denoted the Shrimp Girl as his seascapes denotedglimpses of Westhampton: so we are distanced as much from theone motif as from the other, admiring in both cases the vehicle.Well, a man might love his own paintings as much as he lovesthose of others, so what was to have prevented Burliuk frompainting, say, his Portrait of Leda? This is not a case of copyingthe latter, so that we have two copies of the same painting: it isexplicitly a painting of a painting, a different thing altogether,though i t might exactly enough resemble a copy. A copy is defec-tive, for example, insofar as it deviates from the original, but t hequestion of deviation is simply irrelevant if it is a painting of apainting: much as we do not expect the artist to use chlorophylin depicting trees. Now, if deviation is irrelevant, so is non-deviation. A copy is, indeed, just like a quotation, showing whatwe are t o respond t o rather than being what we are t o respond to:whereas a painting of a painting is something t o which we respond.Artists who repeat themselves, the Pierre Menard phenomenonnotwithstanding, raise some remarkable questions. Schumannslast composition was based on a theme he claimed was dictated t ohim by angels in his sleep, but was i n f a c t the s low movement ofhis own recently published Violin Concerto. (Is it an accident tha tSchumann was working on a book of quotations a t the time ofhis Zusammenbruch?) Robert Demoss Dernier Poime u Youk i(Jai ant rgvi de toi que tu perds ta r tal i t i . .) is simply, accordingto Mary Ann Caws, a retranslation into French of the rough and2 - l h c o n a 3 I-?


14/17

14 ARTHUR C . DANTOtruncated translation in to Czech of his earlier and famous poemaddressed to the actress Yvonne George: but was Desnos deliriouswhen he addressed this poem, at his death, t o Youki (or did heconfuse Youki and Yvonne) or think i t was a new poem or what?(I mention Schumann and Desnos in case someone thinks Good-mans distinction of one- and two-stage arts has any bearing).Repetitions are maddening,A fake pretends to be a statement but is not one. I t lacks the

required relation to the ar tist. That we should mistake a fake fora real work (or vice versa) does no t matter . Once we discover thatit is a fake, it loses its stature as an artwork because it loses itsstructure as a statement. I t at best retains a certain interest as adecorative object. Insofar as being a fake is a defeating condition,i t is analytical t o t he concept of an artwork that it be original.Which does no t entail that it need or cannot be derivative, imita-tive, influenced, in the manner of, or whatever. We are notrequired t o invent a language in order t o make a s tatement. Beingan original means that the work must in a deep sense originatewith the artist we believe to have done it.

(2) Non-artistic provenance. I t is analytically t rue th at artworkscan only be by artists, so that an object, however much (or exactly)it may resemble an artwork is not by whoever is responsible forits existence, unless he is an artist. But artist is as ascriptive ate rm as artwork,and in fact by is as ascriptive as ei ther. Since,after all, no t everything whose existence we owe to artists areby him. Consider the customs inspector who bears the stings ofpast and recent gaffesby his peers and decides t o take no chances:a certain piece of polished brass-in fact the bushing for a sub-marine-is declared an artwork. But his so calling it that no moremakes it an artwork than someone in the same metier calling anobject near of morphic kin to i t not an artwork made the latternot be one. What injustice, then, if an arti st decides t o exhibit thebushing as a found object.

Douaniers, children, chimpanzees, counterfeiters: tracing an ob-ject t o any of these defeats i t as an artwork, demotes it t o th estatus of a mere real object. Hence the logical irrelevance of theclaim t h a t a child, a chimpanzee, a forger or, d la rigueur, a customs


15/17

A R T W O R K S AND REAL THINGS 15inspector could do any of them. The mere object perhaps does notlie outside their powers. But as an artwork it does. Much in theway in which not everyone who can say the words I pronounceyou man and wife can marry people, nor who can pronounce thewords Thirty days or thirty dollars can sentence a man. So thequestion of whether an object is by someone, and how one isqualified to make artworks out of real things, are of a piece withthe question of whether it is an artwork.

The moment something is considered an artwork, it becomessubject t o an in terpre ta t ion . I t owes its existence as an artwork t othis, and when its claim to art is defeated, it loses its interpreta-tion and becomes a mere thing. The interpretation is in somemeasure a function of the artistic context of the work: it meanssomething different depending upon its art-historical location, itsantecedents, and the like. And as an artwork, finally, it acquiresa structure which an object photographically similar t o it is simplydisqualified from sustaining if it is a real thing. Art exists in anatmosphere of interpre tation and an artwork is thus a vehicle ofinterpretation. The space between art and reality is like the spacebetween language and reality partly because art is a language ofsorts, in the sense at least that an artwork says something, and sopresupposes a body of sayers and interpreters who are in position,who define what being in position is, to interpre t an object. Thereis no art without those who speak the language of the artworld,and who know enough of the difference between artworks andreal things to recognize t h a t calling an artwork a real thing is aninterpretation of it, and one which depends for its point and appre-ciation on the contrast between the artworld and the real-world.And it is exactly with reference to this t ha t the defeating condi-tions for ascription of artwork are to be understood. If this isso, then ontological promotion of art is hardly to be looked for.It is a logical impossibility. Or nearly so: for there is one furthermove t o reckon with.


16/17

16 ARTHUR C . DANTOIV

Much as philosophy has come to be increasingly i ts own subject,has turned reflexively inward onto itself, so art has done, havingbecome increasingly its own (and only) subject: like the Absoluteof Hegel, which finally achieved congruence with itself by be-coming self-contemplative in the respect tha t what it contem-plates is itself in contemplation. Rosenberg thus reads the canvasas an arena in which a real action occurs when an artist (but notabene: only when an artist) makes a wipe of paint upon it: a stroke.To appreciate that the boundaries have been crossed, we mustread the stroke as saying, in effect, about itself, tha t it is a strokeand not a representation of anything. Which the indiscernablestrokes made by housepainters cannot begin to say, though it istrue that they are strokes and not representations. In perhapsthe subtlest suite of paintings in our time, such strokes-fat, ropy,expressionist-have been read with a deadly literalness of theirmakers or the la tters ideologues intention as (mere) real things,and made the subject of paintings as much as if they were apples,by Roy Lichtenstein. These are paintings of brush strokes. AndLichtensteins paintings say, about themselves, at least this: t h a tthey are not but only represent brush strokes, and yet they areart . The boundaries between reality and art as much inform theseworks as they did the initial impulses of the Abstract Expressio-nists they impale. The boundaries between art and reality, indeed,become internal t o art itself. And this is a revolution. For whenone is able to bring within oneself what seperates oneself fromth e world, viz., as when Berkeley brings the brain into the mind,the distinction between mind and brain now standing as a distinc-tion within the mind itself, everything is profoundly altered.And in a curious way, the Platonic challenge has been met. Notby promoting art but by demoting reality, conquering i t in thesense that when a line is engulfed, what lies on both sides of thatline is engulfed as well. To incorporate ones own boundaries inan act of spiritual topology is to transcend those boundaries, liketurning oneself inside out and taking ones external environmentin as now part of oneself.

I would like briefly t o note two consequences of this. The first


17/17

ARTWORKS AND REAL THIh'GS 17is tha t i t has been a profoundly disorienting maneuver, increasing-ly felt as the categories which pertain t o art suddenly pertain t owhat we always believed contrasted essentially with art. Politicsbecomes a form of theater, clothing a kind of costume, humanrelations a kind of role, life a game. We interpret ourselves andour gestures as we once interpreted artworks. We look formeanings and unities, we become players in a play.

The other consequence is more interesting. The relationshipbetween reality and art has traditionally been the province ofphilosophy, since the la tter is analytically concerned with rela-tions between the world and its representations, the space be-tween representation and life. Ry bringing within itself what i thad traditionally been regarded as logically apart from, art trans-forms itself in to philosophy, in effect. The distinction betweenphilosophy of art and art itself is no longer tenable, and by acurious, astounding magic we have been made over into contri-butors to a field we had always believed it our task merely t oanalyze from without.Received on November S, 1971.

Danto - Artworks and Real Things

Documents

Transcript of Danto - Artworks and Real Things