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Page 1: [Arthur C.danto] Artworks and Real Things

To the memory of Rudolph Wittkower

Artworks and real things

bY

A R T H U R C. DANTO

(Coluiiibia University)

The children imitating the cortnorants, Are more wonderful Than the real cormorants.

I ssa

Painting relates to both art and life . . . ( I try to work in that gap between the two).

Rauschenberg

F rom 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 on New York painting from circa 1961 t o circa 1969, and a certain wildness in the subject may explain the wildness I apologize for in its treatment. Explain but not excuse, I will be told: the proper- ties of the subject treated of need never penetrate the treatment itself; Freud’s papers on sexuality are exemplarily unarousing, papers in logic are not logical merely in consequence of their subject. But in a way the paper is part of its own subject, since it becomes an artwork a t the end. Perhaps the final creation in the period it treats of. Perhaps the Snal artwork in the history of art!

~ ~

This paper ~ i - a s rcad in an carlicr version at a confercncc on the philosophy of art at the Uni\.ersity of Illinois a t Chicago Circle. I am grateful to Professor George Dickie for having invited i t . For prodromal reflections on much the anme topic, see my paper T i c Al-t~\-orld,” in JoirrrzaE of f ’ h f b S O j J h y , \ 01. 61 (1%4), pp. 571-5S-l.

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I Rauschenberg’s self-consciously characterized activity exemplifies an ancient task imposed generically upon artists in consequence of an alienating criticism by Plato of art as such. Art allegedly stands at a certain invidious remove from reality, so that in fabricating those entities whose production defines their essen- ce, artists are contaminated at the outset 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 artlovers with shadows of shadows. Finally, speaking as a precocious thera- pist as well as a true philistine, Plato insinuates that art is a sort of perversion, a substitute, deflected, compensatory activity engaged in by those who are impotent t o be what as a pis-aller they imitate. Stunned by this triple indictment into a quest for redemption, artists have sought a way towards ontological pro- motion, which means of course collapsing the space between reality and art. That there should, by Rauschenberg’s testimony, still remain an insulating vacuity between the two which even he has failed t o drain of emptiness, stimulates a question regarding the philosophical suitability of the task.

To treat as a defect exactly what makes a certain thing or activity possible and valuable is almost a formula for generating platonic philosophy, and in the case of art an argument may be mounted t o show that its possibility and value is logically tied up with putting reality at a distance. It was, for example, an astonishing discovery that representations of barbaric rites need themselves no more be barbaric than representations of any x whatever need have the properties of x-hood. By imitating practices it was Izorri- fying t o engage in (Nietzsche), the Greeks spontaneously put such practices a t a distance and invented civilization in the pro- cess; for civilization consists in the awareness of media as media and hence of reality as reality. So just those who gave birth to tragedy defeated an insupportable reality by putting between themselves and it a spiritualizing distance it is typical of Plato t o find demeaning. I t may be granted that this achievement creates the major problem of representational art, which is sufficiently to resemble the realities it denotes that identification of i t as a

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representation of the latter is possible, while remaining sufficient- ly different that confusion of the two is difficult. Aristotle, who explains the pleasure men take in art through the pleasure they take in imitations, is clearly aware that the pleasure in question (which is intellectual) logically presupposes the knowledge that it is an imitation and not the real thing it resembles and denotes. We may take (a minor) pleasure in a man imitating a crow-call of a sort we do not commonly take in crow-calls themselves, but this pleasure is rooted in cognition: we must know enough of crow-calls to know that these are what the man is imitating (and not, say, giraffe-calls], and must know that he and not crows is the provenance of the caws. One further condition for pleasure is this, that the man is imitating and not just an unfortunate crow- boy, afflicted from birth with a crowish pharynx. These crucial asymmetries need not be purchased at the price of decreased verisimilitude, and it is not unreasonable to insist upon a perfect acoustical indiscernibility between true and sham crow-calls, so that the uninformed in matters of art might-like an overhearing crow, in fact-be deluded and adopt attitudes appropriate t o the reality of crows. The knowledge upon which artistic pleasure (in contrast with aesthetic pleasure) depends is thus external t o and at right angles to the sounds themselves, since they concern the causes and conditions of the sounds and their relation to the real world. So the option is always available t o the mimetic artist t o rub away all differences between artworks and real things pro- viding he is assured that the audience has a clear grasp of the distances.

I t was in the exercise of this option, for example, that Euripides undertook the abolition of the chorus, inasmuch as real confronta- tion, real frenzies of jealousy commonly transpire without benefit of the ubiquitous, nosy, and largely disapproving chorus inexplic- ably (to him) deemed necessary for the action to get on by his predecessors. And in a similar spirit of realism, the stony edifying heroes of the past are replaced by plain folks, and their cosmic suffering with the commonplace heartpains of such (for example) as us. So there was some basis for the wonder of his contemporary, Socrates (who may, considering his Egyptolatry in the Luzus, have

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been disapproving not so much of art as of realistic art in the Repubtic), as to what the point of drama any longer could be: if we have the real thing, of what service is an idle iteration of it? And so he created a dilemma by looking inversely a t the cognitive relations Aristotle subsequently rectified: either there is going to be a discrepancy, and mimesis fails, or art succeeds in erasing the discrepancy, in which case it just is reality, a roundabout way of getting what we already have. And, as one of his successors has elegantly phrased it: “one of the damned things is enough.” Art fails if it is indiscernible from reality, and it equally if oppositely fails if it is not.

We are all familiar enough with one attempt to escape this dilemma, which consists in locating art in whatever makes for the discrepancies between reality and imitations of it. Euripides, it is argued, went in just the wrong direction. Let us instead make objects which are insistently art by virtue of the fact that no one can mistake them for reality. So the disfiguring conventions abolished in the name of reality become reintroduced in the name of art, and one settles for perhaps a self-conscious woodenness, a deliberate archaism, an operatic falseness so marked and under- scored that it must be apparent to any audience that illusion could never have been our intent. Non-imitativeness becomes the criterion of art, the more artificial and the less imitative in consequence, the purer the art in question. But a fresh dilemma awaits at the other end of the inevitable route, namely that non- imitativeness is also the criterion of reality, so the more purely art things become, the closer they verge on reality, and pure art collapses into pure reality. Well, this may after all be the route to ontological promotion, but the other side of the dilemma asks what makes us want to call art what by common consent is reality? So in order to preserve a distinction, we reverse directions, hardly with a light heart since the same dilemma, we recall, awaits us at the other end. And there seems, on the face of it, only one available way to escape the unedifying shuttle from dilemma to dilemma, which is to make non-imitations which are radically distinct from all heretofore existing real things. Like Rauschen- berg’s stuffed goat garlanded with a tire! It is with such unen-

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trenched objects, like combines and emerubies, that the abysses between life and art are t o be filled!

There remains then only the nagging question of whether all unentrenched objects are t o be reckoned artworks, e.g., consider the first can-opener. I know of an object indiscernible from what happen t o be our routine can-openers, which is an artwork:

The single starkness of its short, ugly, o i n i n ~ u s blade-like cztrcmity, i:mbodying aggressivencss and masculinity, contrast formally as \\-ell as symbolically with t h e frivolous diminishing helix, which swings frtrcly [but upon a fixed enslaving axis!) and is pure, helpless femininity. The two motifs are symbioticaily sustained in a single, poxverful coin- position, n o less universal ailJ hopeful for its miniature scale and com- monplace material.

[Gazette des beaux arts, vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 430-431. h,Iy translaticm]

As an artwork, of course; it has the elusive defining properties of artworks, significant form compris. In virtue of its iiidiscernibility from the domestic utensil, then, one might think i t uncouth if not unintelligible t o withhold predication of significant form t o the latter, merely on grounds of conspicuous Zuhandenlzeit (one could open cans with the work the critic of the Gazette was so stirred by) or large numbers. For it woul~l be startling that two things should have the sanie shape and yet one have and the other lack significant form. Or it would be were we t o forget for an inadvertent moment the existence of a Polynesian language in which the sentence “Beans are high in protein,” indiscernible acoustically froin the English sentence “Beans are high in protein” actually means, in its own h g u a g e , lvhat “IVIotherhood is sacred” means in English. And it induces proibund filial sentiments when audited by native speakers though hardly that with us. So perhaps significant form is supervenient upon a seinantical reading, itself n weak function of language affiliation which mere inscriptional congruity 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 have pairs of indiscernible objects, one a n artwork and one not . In view of this possibility, we must avert our cyes from the ohierts

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themselves in a counter-phenomenological turn--Von den Sachen selb.st!-and see whatever i t is, which clearly does not meet the eye, which keeps art and reality from leaking hopelessly into one another’s territory. Only so can we escape the dilemtna of Socra- tes, which has generated so much art-history through the mis- understandings i t epitomizes and encourages.

I1 Borges merits credit for, amongst other things, having discovered the Pierre Menard Phenomenon: two art-objects, in this instance two fragments of the Quixotc, which though verbally indiscrimin- able have radically non-overlapping and incompatible artistic properties. The art-works in question stand t o their common physical embodiment in something like the relationship in which a set of isomers may stand t o a common molecular formula, which then underdetermines and hence fails t o explain the difTerences in their chemical reactions. The difference, of course, is given by the way the elenients recorded in the formula are put together. Of the two Quixotes, for exainple, one is “more subtle” and the other “more clumsy” than its counterpart. That of Cervantes is the more coarse: it “opposes t o the fiction of chivalry the tawdry provincial reality of his country.” Menard’s (“On the other hand . . .”!) selects for its reality “the land of Carmen during the century of Lepanto and Lope de Vega.” Menard’s work is an ob- lique condcmnation of Salamnzbij, which Cervantes’ could hardly have been. Though visibly identical, one is almost incomparably richer than the other and, Borges writes, “The contrast in style is also vivid. The archaic style of Mcnard----quite foreign, after 311-suffers from a certain affectation. Not so t h a t ofhis forerunner, who handles with ease the current Spanish of his rime.” Menard, were he t o have complcted his Quixote, \vould have had the task of creating at least one character in excess of C:ervantes’: the author of the [so-called in Menard’s but ~ z o t so-called in Cervan- tes’) “Autobiographical Fragment.” And so on. Menard’s work was Iris, not a copy nor an accidentally congrucnt achievement of the sort involved in th r discovery that the paintcrs of Jupiter

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are 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 be merely an exercise in facsimilitation, and a forgery of so well known a work would be a fiasco. I t is a precondition for the Menard phenomenon that author and audience alike know (not the original but) the other Quixote. But Menard’s is not a quota- tion either, as it were, for quotations in this sense merely resemble the expressions they denote without having a n y of the artistically relevant 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 they lack any semantical structure, which their originals seldom lack. So a quotation of the Quixote (either Quixote) would be artist- ically null though quite superimposable upon its original. Quo- tations, in fact, are striking examples of objects indiscernible from originals which are not artworks though the latter are. Copies (in general) lack the properties of the originals they de- note ar?d resemble. A copy of a cow is not a cow, a copy of an artwork is no t an artwork.

Quotations are entities difficult t o locate ontofogicaliv, !ike reflections and shadows, being neither artworks nor real things, inasmuch as they are parasitic upon reality, and have in particular that 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 the class of artworks, it raises too many special questions t o be taken as our specific example of an entity indiscernible from ;in artwork though not one. H i i t it is not difficult t o generate less intricate examples. Consider, for the moment, neckties, which have begun t o work their way into the artworld, e.,g., Jim Iline’s Unizwsnl Tie, John DUE’S Tit. Piece, etc. Suppose Picasso exhibits now a tie, painted uniform blue in order t o reject any touch of le ~ ~ c i n t u r e as decisively as the Strozzi altarpiece rejects, as an act of artistic will, giottesque perspective. One says: my child could do that. L\rell, true enough, there is nothing beyond infantile c-apabilitv here: so let a chilcl, with his sti!ti.d deliberateness,

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color one of his father’s ties an all over blue, no brush-strokes ‘to make i t nice.’ I would hesitate t o predict a magnificent future in art for this child on the basis of his having caused the exist- ence of something indistinguishable from something created by the greatest master of modern times. I would go further, and say that he has not produced an artwork. For sornetliing prevents his object froiii entering the artFvorld, as it prevents from entering t h a t world those confections by a would-be van hleegeren of Xlontmartrc who sees at once the Picasso tie as a chance for clever forgery. ‘Three such objects would give rise t o one of those marvelous Shakespearean plots, of confused twins and mistaken identities, a possibility not a joking one for Icahnwieler (or as i t Kootz?? who takes all the necessary precautions. In spite of which, let us suppose, the ties get mixed up, and the child’s tie hangs t o this very daj7 in the Museum of the Municipaiity o f Tailoir. Picasso, of course, disputes its authenticity, and refuses t o sign it (in fact he signs the forgery). The original was confiscated by the Ministry of Counterfacts. I look forward t o the time when R doctoral candidate under Professor Theodore Reff straightens oiLt the attributions by counting threads, though the status of a forgery with an authentic signature remains for philosophers of a r t t o settle. Professor Goodman has an intriELting argument t h a t sooner or later differences are bound t o turn up, that what looks identically similar today will look artistically so diverse ;omor- row that men will xvonder how the case I have described would ever have arisen. LVell, sufficient unto the day may be the similari- ties thereof tomorrow’s differentiations W O U ~ ~ appear wlziclievcr of the three ties were t o hang in tlie museum, an.d I am inclined t o feel that an>- seen differences will ultimately be used tc re- enforce the attribution, right or wrong, ~vhich is the accepted one. ELit that leaves still uisett ied the ontological questions, besidcs generating a kind of absurdit:; of connoisseurship hy bringiilg into the aesthetics of this o:der of‘ object the refined peering a p ~ r c - priate, say, t o Poussin or Morant-ii or Cezanne. None of whom, though clearly not for reasons of artistic ineptitude, ~ o u l d ha1.e been able t o make an artJsork out of a painted tie. So it isn’t iust that Picasso happens t o be an irrtist that :ndtrs d ie diff’c-

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rence in the cases at hand. But the further reasons are intcr- es ting .

For one thing, there would have been no room in the artworld of Cezanne’s time for a painted necktie. Not everything can be an artwork at every time: the artworld must be ready for it. Much ;is not every line which is zuitry in a given context can be witty in all. Pliny tells of a contest between rival painters, the first drawing a straight line; the second drawing, in a different color, a line within that line; the first drawing an ultimately fine line within this. One does not ordinariiy think of lines as having sides, but with each inscribed line, a space exists between its edges and the edges of the containing line, so that the result would be like five very thin strips of co!or. Nested lines, each making space where noEe was believed possible, shows remarkable steadiness of hand and eye, and bears witness t o the singular prow-ess of Parahesios and his rival here. And the object was a wonder in its time. But not an artwork! No more than the famous freehand circle of Giotto. But I could see exactly such an object turning up on Madison Avenue today, a synthesis, perhaps, of Barnett Newman and Frank Stella. Such an object in the time of Parahesios would have fnerely been a set-piece of dracghtsmanly control. So it is not even as though, on the Berkeleyan assuinption that only art- wcrks can anticipate artworks, Parahesios were a predecessor of the contemporary painter of fine stripes. Parahesios could not have modified his perception of art, nor that of his times, t o accommodate his t ozu de main as an artistic achievement. But

for he had made a chimpanzee out of a to)’, a bull out of a bicycle seat, a goat out of a basket, a Venus out of a gas-jet: so why not a tie OUL of a t i e ? I t had room not only in the artworld, but in the corpus of the zrtist, in a waj- in which the identical object, from the hands of CCzanne, would have had room for neither. Cezanne could only have made a mountain out of paint, in the received and traditional manner of such transformations. He did not have the option even of making paint out of paint, in the later manner of thc Abstract Expressionists.

Rut while these considerations serve t o shonr that the identical

D’ I icasso’s - artworld u-as ready t o receive, at Picasso’s hand, a necktie:

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object could, in one art-historical contest be an artwork and i n another one not, the problem remains of moving from posse n l /

esse. What, apart from the possibility, makes it actually a work oi art in the context of late Picasso? Arid what makes then the differ- ences between what Picasso did and his contemporaries, the cllilc; and the forger, did? Only when the world was ready for ”Necktie” could the comedy of mistaken identities have transpired, all‘{ while it is easy t o see how, given the sharp and exact resemblances, an artwork which was a necktie should have been confused with a necktie which was not an artwork, the task of explicating the differences remains.

One way to see the matter is this: Picasso used the necktie to make a statement, the forger employed the necktie t o copy what Picasso made a statement with, but made no statement by means of his. And this would be true even were he inspired by van Meegeren to invent, say, a rose-colored necktie to fill a gap in Picasso’s development. The child and Cezanne are simply making noise. Their objects have no location in the history of art. Part a t least of what Picasso’s statement is about is art, and art had not developed appropriately by the time of Cezanne for such a state- ment t o have been intelligible, nor can the child in question have sufficiently internalized the history and theory of art t o make a statement, much less this statement, by means of the painted necktie. At least the right relations hold between the four objects to enable a distinction structurally of a piece with that between statement, echo, and noise to be made. And though a real enough object-a hand-painted tie!-Picasso’s work stands at just the right remove from reality for it t o be a statement, indeed a state- ment in part about reality and art sufficiently penetrating to enable its own enfranchisement into the world of art. I t enters at a phase of art-history when the consciousness of the difference between reality and ar t is part of what makes the difference between art and reality.

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I11 Testamorbida is a playwright who deals in Found Drama. Disgusted with theatricality, he has run through the tiresome post-Pirandello devices 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 declares his latest play to have been everything that happened in the life of a family in Astoria between last Saturday and tonight, the family in question having been picked by throwing a dart at the map of the town. How natural are the actors! They have no need t o overcome the distance from their roles by stanislaviskyian exercise, since they are what they play. Or ‘play.’ The author ‘ends’ the play by fiat at eleven-ten (curtain), and has the after-theater party with friends at the West End Bar. No reviews, there was no audience, there was just one ‘performance.’ For all the ’actors’ know, it was an ordinary evening, pizza and television, hair put up in rollers, a wrong number and a tooth-ache. All that makes this slice of life an artwork is the declaration that it is so, plus the meta-artistic vocabulary: ’actor’, ‘dialogue,’ ’natural,’ ‘beginning,’ ’end.’ And perhaps the title, which may be as descriptive as you please, viz., “What a Family in Astoria Did . . .”.

Titles are borne by artworks, interestingly enough, though not by things indiscernable from them which are not artworks, e.g., another period in the life of that or any family in Astoria or any- where. Even ‘Untitled’ is a kind of title: non-artworks are not entitled even t o be untitled. Cezanne’s hand-painted necktie may bear a label, say at the Cezanne House, along with other memora- bilia, but ’Cezanne’s Necktie’ is not its title (‘Cezanne’s Necktie’ could be the title of Picasso’s tie if it were painted in just the color of the Louvre’s Vase Bleu). Noblemen have titles too. ‘Title’ has the ring of status, of something which can be conferred. It has, indeed, enough of the ring of legality to suggest that ’artwork’- perhaps like ‘person!’-is after ail an ascriptive term rather than a descriptive-or exclusively descriptive-one.

Ascriptivity, as I understand it, is a property of predicates when they attach t o objects in the light of certain conventions, and which apply iess on the basis of certain necessary and sufficient

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conditions than of certain defeating conditions not holding. ’Person’ is defeasible, for example, through such avenues as minor- ity, subcompetence, disenfranchisement, financial responsibility and liability, and the like. A corporation can consist of a single person, who is not identical with the corporation in question, and the distinction between that person and the corporation he be- longs t o is perhaps enough like the distinction between an artwork and the physical object it consists in but is not identical with that we 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 neckties indiscernible from the former are not. They have, again, a certain peer-group which their indiscernible but plebeian counterparts do R o t . The blue necktie which is an artwork belongs with the Cowper-Niccolini Madonna and the Cathedral of Laon, while xhe necktie just like it which is not an artwork belongs just with the collars and cufflinks of banal haberdashery, somewhat abimi by blue-paint. The blue necktie, indeed, is in the museum and in the collection, but its counterparts, though they can be geometric- ally in the museum, are there only iil the way sofas and palm-trees typically are. T h e is, in fact, a kind of In-der-Pinakothek-sein not so awfully different from the in-der- Wdt - se in which pertains to persons in contrast with things. A necktie which is an artwork differs from one which is not like a person differs from a body: metaphysically, it takes two sets of predicates amazingly similar t o the P- and M-predicates which persons take on a well-known theory of P. F. Strawson‘s: no accident, perhaps, if ‘person’ too is an ascriptive predicate. The blue necktie, thus, which is an art- work, is by Picasso, whereas its counterpart is not by Cezanne even though he put the paint on it. And so forth. So let us try this out for a moment, stressing here the defeating conditions, less t o strike a blow against Testaniorbida than to see what kind of thing it is that can be subject t o defeat of this order. I shall mention only two defeating conditions as enough for our purposes, though hardly 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 art, then thcre

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would be just exactly the same triumph in getting Stendhal t o swoon at a fake Guido Reni as causing birds to peck at painted grapes. There is, I believe, no stigma attached to painting pictures of pictures: Burliuk once told me that, since artists paint the things they love and since he loved pictures, he saw no obstacle to painting pictures of pictures, viz., of Hogarth’s Shrimp Girl . I t happens that Burliuk remained himself, his picture of the Shrimp Girl deviating from the Shrimp Girl roughly as he differed from Hogarth. He was not, on the other hand, pretending the Shrimp Girl was his any more than he was pretending that Westhampton, which he also and in the same spirit painted pictures of, was his: what was his was the painting, a statement in paint which denoted the Shrimp Girl as his seascapes denoted glimpses of Westhampton: so we are distanced as much from the one motif as from the other, admiring in both cases the vehicle. Well, a man might love his own paintings as much as he loves those of others, so what was to have prevented Burliuk from painting, say, his Portrait of Leda? This is not a case of copying the latter, so that we have two copies of the same painting: it is explicitly a painting of a painting, a different thing altogether, though it might exactly enough resemble a copy. A copy is defec- tive, for example, insofar as it deviates from the original, but the question of deviation is simply irrelevant if it is a painting of a painting: much as we do not expect the artist t o use chlorophyl in depicting trees. Now, if deviation is irrelevant, so is non- deviation. A copy is, indeed, just like a quotation, showing what we are t o respond to rather than being what we are to respond to: whereas a painting of a painting is something t o which we respond. Artists who repeat themselves, the Pierre Menard phenomenon notwithstanding, raise some remarkable questions. Schumann’s last composition was based on a theme he claimed was dictated to him by angels in his sleep, but was i n fact the slow movement of his own recently published Violin Concerto. (Is it an accident that Schumann was working on a book of quotations a t the time of his Zusammenbruch?) Robert Demos’s Dernier Poime u Youki (“J’ai tant rgvi de toi que tu perds ta rtali t i . . .”) is simply, according to Mary Ann Caws, “a retranslation into French of the rough and 2 - l’hcona 3 I-.?

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truncated translation into Czech” of his earlier and famous poem addressed to the actress Yvonne George: but was Desnos delirious when he addressed this poem, at his death, t o Youki (or did he confuse Youki and Yvonne) or think it was a new poem or what? (I mention Schumann and Desnos in case someone thinks Good- man’s distinction of one- and two-stage arts has any bearing). Repetitions are maddening,

A fake pretends t o be a statement but is not one. I t lacks the required relation to the artist. That we should mistake a fake for a real work (or vice versa) does not matter. Once we discover that it is a fake, it loses its stature as an artwork because it loses its structure as a statement. I t at best retains a certain interest as a decorative object. Insofar as being a fake is a defeating condition, i t is analytical t o the concept of an artwork that it be ”original”. Which does not entail that it need or cannot be derivative, imita- tive, influenced, ‘in the manner of,’ or whatever. We are not required t o invent a language in order t o make a statement. Being an original means that the work must in a deep sense originate with the artist we believe to have done it.

(2) Non-artistic provenance. I t is analytically true that artworks can only be by artists, so that an object, however much (or exactly) it may resemble an artwork is not by whoever is responsible for its existence, unless he is an artist. But “artist” is as ascriptive a term as “artwork,” and in fact “by” is as ascriptive as either. Since, after all, not everything whose existence we owe t o artists are by him. Consider the customs inspector who bears the stings of past and recent gaffes by 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 more makes it an artwork than someone in the same metier calling an object near of morphic kin to i t not an artwork made the latter not be one. What injustice, then, if an artist decides to exhibit the bushing 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 the status of a mere real object. Hence the logical irrelevance of the claim that a child, a chimpanzee, a forger or, d la rigueur, a customs

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inspector could do any of them. The mere object perhaps does not lie outside their powers. But as an artwork it does. Much in the way in which not everyone who can say the words “I pronounce you man and wife” can marry people, nor who can pronounce the words “Thirty days or thirty dollars” can sentence a man. So the question of whether an object is by someone, and how one is qualified to make artworks out of real things, are of a piece with the question of whether it is an artwork.

The moment something is considered an artwork, it becomes subject t o an interpretation. I t owes its existence as an artwork to this, and when its claim to art is defeated, it loses its interpreta- tion and becomes a mere thing. The interpretation is in some measure a function of the artistic context of the work: it means something different depending upon its art-historical location, its antecedents, and the like. And as an artwork, finally, it acquires a structure which an object photographically similar t o it is simply disqualified from sustaining if it is a real thing. Art exists in an atmosphere of interpretation and an artwork is thus a vehicle of interpretation. The space between art and reality is like the space between language and reality partly because art is a language of sorts, in the sense at least that an artwork says something, and so presupposes a body of sayers and interpreters who are in position, who define what being in position is, t o interpret an object. There is no art without those who speak the language of the artworld, and who know enough of the difference between artworks and real things to recognize that calling an artwork a real thing is an interpretation 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 that the defeating condi- tions for ascription of “artwork” are to be understood. If this is so, then ontological promotion of art is hardly to be looked for. It is a logical impossibility. Or nearly so: for there is one further move to reckon with.

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16 ARTHUR C . DANTO

IV Much as philosophy has come t o be increasingly its own subject, has turned reflexively inward onto itself, so art has done, having become increasingly its own (and only) subject: like the Absolute of Hegel, which finally achieved congruence with itself by be- coming self-contemplative in the respect that what it contem- plates is itself in contemplation. Rosenberg thus reads the canvas as an arena in which a real action occurs when an artist (but nota bene: only when an artist) makes a wipe of paint upon it: a stroke. To appreciate that the boundaries have been crossed, we must read the stroke as saying, in effect, about itself, that it is a stroke and not a representation of anything. Which the indiscernable strokes made by housepainters cannot begin t o say, though it is true that they are strokes and not representations. In perhaps the subtlest suite of paintings in our time, such strokes-fat, ropy, expressionist-have been read with a deadly literalness of their makers’ or the latter’s 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. And Lichtenstein’s paintings say, about themselves, at least this: that they are not but only represent brush strokes, and yet they are art. The boundaries between reality and art as much inform these works 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 when one is able to bring within oneself what seperates oneself from the 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. Not by promoting art but by demoting reality, conquering i t in the sense that when a line is engulfed, what lies on both sides of that line is engulfed as well. To incorporate ones own boundaries in an act of spiritual topology is t o transcend those boundaries, like turning oneself inside out and taking ones external environment in as now part of oneself.

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

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is that it has been a profoundly disorienting maneuver, increasing- ly felt as the categories which pertain t o art suddenly pertain t o what we always believed contrasted essentially with art. Politics becomes a form of theater, clothing a kind of costume, human relations a kind of role, life a game. We interpret ourselves and our gestures as we once interpreted artworks. We look for meanings and unities, we become players in a play.

The other consequence is more interesting. The relationship between reality and art has traditionally been the province of philosophy, since the latter 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 t had traditionally been regarded as logically apart from, art trans- forms itself into philosophy, in effect. The distinction between philosophy of art and art itself is no longer tenable, and by a curious, astounding magic we have been made over into contri- butors t o a field we had always believed it our task merely t o analyze from without.

Received on November S, 1971.