After the End of Art

In these days after the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements, a lot of people are unhappy with the historical narratives they’ve been served and are busily rewriting their own versions, some having decided that the history they consumed growing up was written by people of privilege and of little value to their lives. There is now a commonly held perception that whole chapters were written ignoring the contributions of women, blacks, people of color, and other disenfranchised minorities to the benefit of mostly elite, mostly white segments of society.

Changing perspectives have altered what we consider art to be, who is considered an artist, how art manifests in our culture, and who we consider to be authorities on the subject. Art museums and other cultural institutions have reflected these changes in their acquisitions and public programs, striving to make their exhibitions relevant to culture consumers of the 21st century.

But I believe the study of art history has much to offer us, even in these times when the state of art is pluralistic – holding many different meanings at the same time, to different audiences. And it’s worthwhile to consider how art criticism helped form and define art movements of the 20th century as a way of shedding some light on things going on in the art world today.

I asked a chatbot designed to give commonly perceived hot takes to define art history.

One of the more revered art critics of the 20th century was Clement Greenberg, who championed the work of Jackson Pollack and the Abstract Expressionism movement. Greenberg was a formalist who defined modern art and in particular easel painting in terms of its essential characteristics – texture, line, shape, color, and the nature of substrate and paint.

Clement Greenberg

Greenberg held that Manet had created the first “Modernist pictures.” and believed that the essential nature of painting had to be viewed through its existence on a flat two-dimensional plane.

Greenberg believed that true ‘pure’ Modern art was best served by abstraction, or non-representational painting, and through his analysis of the cultural roots of “all over painting” as a reaction to industrialized society, and he became an apostle of the works of Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, David Smith, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Helen Frankenthaler, Franz Kline and others.1

A day at the beach with (from left) Jackson Pollock, Clement Greenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, and Lee Krasner

Jackson Pollock, Mural, 8’ x 20’ - 1943

By the late 1960’s Greenberg had become dissatisfied with much of abstract expressionism. He thought the works of Kline and Pollock had suffered. And after a stock crash in 1962 Greenberg believed abstract expressionist art would all but go away, soon giving rise to it’s successor, Pop Art, in thanks to “middlebrow-ism,” his description of when middle class values and perceptions became predominate in the art world.

THE ‘FLIGHT FROM AESTHETIC QUALITY INTO DESPAIR’

Here’s an excerpt from a 1976 lecture where Greenberg argues that the middle class had caught up to the avant garde, resulting in ‘a decline in overall taste.’ At this point the American culture had grown weary of abstract painting and Greenberg felt that many art consumers wanted to judge art by its political relevance, which for him, changed everything. It’s an old black and white video, but I’ve added subtitles, and think it’s quite a revealing, unique glimpse at art and culture in the moments when modern art in 20th century America started to change. If you’re reading this in e-mail, you’ll be directed to the web page where you can watch the video.

Greenberg lived long enough to see the world taken over by post-modernism. And by that time, another one of our country’s great art philosophers had decided the world had reached the End Of Art.

THE POSTMODERN TURN

By the 70’s discourse in the art world had dramatically shifted, characterized by skepticism towards the grand narratives of modernism, contradicting, if not rejecting almost everything Greenberg stood for. Postmodern art, along with postmodernism would refuse to recognize the authority of any single critic, artist or style or definition of what art should be. Art could be almost anything and could contain multiple social and political messages. What he feared had come true – the distinctions that Greenberg drew between popular culture and high culture all but disappeared. Art objects were imbued with self-referentiality, pluralism, irreverence, and irony. The world was no longer binary, stable, or hierarchical. Nothing can be truly ironic if everything is relative – everything is subject to interpretation. This was the new cult of relativism.

How had all of this happened? Culture and human nature being what they are, this state of affairs did not happen overnight, in fact these cultural conundrums started popping up decades earlier.

Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase, and Fountain

Um, It’s A FOUNTAIN

Marcel Duchamp innovated the style of cubism in 1911 with his work Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and other works that evoked sensations of change, movement, distance and the fourth dimension through his use of fragmentation and synthesis adopted by the Cubists, who revolutionized the art world. By 1917 Duchamp had associated with the Dadaists and submitted one of his readymades, Fountain, a urinal, to the Society of Independent Artists exhibit, a non-juried show in 1917., so all works submitted would be displayed. This definitely caused a stir at the time, which Duchamp intended. The exhibit committee insisted that Fountain could not be art, and rejected it from the show. Duchamp resigned from the board of the Independent Artists. His readymades became about questioning the very notion of Art, which he found unnecessary.

AND THEN THERE WAS ANDY

In the mid-1960s Andy Warhol employed carpenters to construct numerous plywood boxes identical in size and shape to supermarket cartons, and they were virtually indistinguishable from their Brillo box supermarket counterparts. He invited collectors to buy them by the stack.

Andy Warhol

By a certain point in the 1980s another great philosophical mind and art critic decided that all of this talk about art history was, in a way of thinking, over, that the canon had reached its conclusion. Arthur Danto was a gifted art critic, philosopher and professor who wrote for The Nation, The Journal of Philosophy where he was an editor, and Artforum. In the co-published The Death of Art (Art and Philosophy, Vol. 2)

Danto was not trying to say that art had literally died, but rather was theorizing that since art had become self-reflective, and the meaning of art or even a discussion of what art is or isn’t had become impossible to define, that art history had ended. In the case of Duchamp’sFountainor Warhol’sBrillo Boxeshow could you intellectually discern between an art object and an every day object? With the only difference being an intent by someone or some agency to imbue the status of art upon an object?? Traditional understandings of aesthetics could no longer make sense of contemporary art. Danto later expanded on these theories in his book After the End of Art:Contemporary Art and the Pale of History.

After the End of Art addresses art history, pop art, “people’s art,” the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg, whose aesthetics-based criticism helped a previous generation make sense of modernism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist’s philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn’t until the invention of pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways in which art was produced, hinged on a narrative.

So you can see a continuum from modern art arguing for a formally pure and minimal form of art that was in large part ornamentation to the postmodern world where few aesthetic rules dominate, and most art in some way possesses some form of self-reflection or self awareness, is politically engaged or is somehow in service to the furtherance of art as a process. At this point, Danto argues, art ended because art had become philosophy. Art goes on – in the future I’ll write about how difficult it’s become to define significant art movements in the 2000’s.

Arthur Danto

“At the end is theory… art having finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself, and remaining as it were solely as the object of its own theoretical consciousness.”

If you’re taken by this discussion of art and philosophy there’s an excellent podcast on this subject, an episode of The Partially Examined Life, described by the guys as “a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it.”

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