Good Morning Andrew

Arthur Danto: The Future of Aesthetics

The lecture given by Arthur Danto on April 13, 2006 was titled simply “The Future of Aesthetics”.  As titled, the speech that was given attempted to look at what Danto believed to be the future of aesthetics and the roles that contemporary artists were assigning to aesthetics with their work.  Looking back at my notes, I have to say that there is an eerie sense of a really traditional idea – aesthetics as a means to communicate a concept – being heralded as a new development, a new form for art to take.  Further more, Danto pointed out a number of distinctions, regarding interest in aesthetics.  I would categorize these fields that are concerned with aesthetics as divided between art, philosophy, art history and art theory.

The first topic to be brought up in the lecture was the matter of questioning whether philosophy has taken any care to address the subject of aesthetics.  My impression was that Danto did not think that current modes of philosophical understanding looked at aesthetics as any sort of a serious subject matter.  This is something that I both agree and disagree with.  Certainly the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty took into consideration the effect of aesthetics and sought to take aim at resolving greater philosophical issues that implicated aesthetics – Danto, specifically, used phenomenology’s focus on the logical structures of existence as evidence of the neutrality philosophy.  If I am to understand this correctly, then, in philosophy we first see a rejection of aesthetics in favor of “pure theory” or at least focused philosophy—something that would spread to art theory.

A solid example of this, which Danto pointed out, was the infiltration of theory into the mainstream art making model in the 1960s.  The theory of the period involved both revolutionary criticism of the means and purposes of making art as well as analysis of the aesthetics of the objects that resulted (or the insignificance of the aesthetics – I am reminded of Sol Lewitt’s writings).  I have to say that I agree with this point – as looking at the survey of art theory that I have read this year alone, only the earliest readings (from about 1967-1973) deal directly with and/or address issues of aesthetic practices.  If one were to approach art from a purely conceptual point of view, to ground oneself purely in the theory of art making, then the art produced would have no aesthetic value (or a nominal aesthetic value, if something were to be aesthetically pleasing it would, perhaps, only be by chance).  

Danto provided us with certain art historical examples to provide a sense of a timeline – Marcel Duchamp’s assertion of the readymade and, of course, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box.  For Danto, Duchamp represented (and I agree with this postulation) an artist working within our current de-aestheticized mode of making art.  Only against this historical context does it make sense, then, for Andy Warhol to present his Brillo Box and, in turn, provide for the world an example of an artwork that details appropriation and pronounced lack of aesthetics (from the art world with the capital “A”).  

It is this particular piece, Brillo Box, that comes up so often in the writings of Danto – and it is within this piece that one of Danto’s main points comes up:  the idea of the “end of art”.  Specifically this piece represents the idea that the real world object can be easily mistaken for the art world object – that is to say that the art object has no aesthetics that are special to it, yet we still accept it as art.  Thus, art, at this point, can evolve no further without repeating the past – there are no new developments, according to Danto, and therefore art is over.  In his written work he goes on to state that this is not the literal truth – art will still continue to be made, but we have exhausted the developments of the narrative – nothing new can come next that follows along the same trajectory.  

I wonder if anyone will be brave enough to look back at Danto’s lecture and say that the upswing of artists dealing directly with aesthetics could be seen as the “end of theory”. I highly doubt this, however, as theory and conceptualization from contemporary theory plays such a role now in many artists’ practice.  And it is true, new theory will continue to be produced – the next Foucault or Deleuze is out there somewhere – but can we really continue making art based on theory that wants to have nothing to do with an aesthetic practices?  I keep coming back to this question as I continue to try figure out on what side(s) of the fence of concept/theory vs. aesthetics my art falls. 

To conclude this look back at the issues that Danto raised during his lecture about aesthetics and aesthetics future I have to say that I walked out of the auditorium with a greater sense of ambivalence.  What I generally sensed was that if, really, theory and aesthetics are going to continue to operate as equally dominant impetuses of art making, the theorists need to return to the issues of addressing the issues of aesthetics directly.  Until then, perhaps, both systems continue to carry equal degrees of plurality and equal degrees of exclusivity.  

*However, I would have to add the question – is Duchamp really de-aesthetic, or merely anti-aesthetic?  I see Duchamp as deriding aesthetics and attempting to remove himself from aesthetic art work only to establish the school of anti-aesthetic artworks.