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A tour through Philadelphia's gallery district on First Friday shows a wild variety of art on display. The images provide some examples. Larry Becker shows pure, minimalist modern abstractions. The Artist's House shows traditional representational work. California shows funky pop-culture images, cute in a Disney sort of way until you get up close and see how twisted they are. The Clay Studio juxtaposes ceramic sculpture with beautifully executed pots, vases, and dinnerware. Rosenfeld Gallery exhibits both abstract and representational work. The Wexler Gallery and Snyderman/Works show fine art furniture and jewelry. Pentimenti often displays the work of environmental artists like Joe Klein. In side by side galleries, rude or obscene images rub shoulders with pretty pictures of flowers and landscapes.
Philadelphia's art scene is tiny compared with New York's; but in the New York galleries you will see the same variety. And the same pattern may be found in music. Contemporary classical music ranges from the abstract and difficult heirs of Arnold Schoenberg, like Milton Babbitt, to more melodically and harmonically accessible neo-traditional composers like Arvo Part and Hendrik Gorecki, to jazz composers, to concertos for whale song, to a thousand varieties of pop and world musics, and any number of other musics I have not mentioned. Apparently, in the arts these days, anything goes!
What is going on? Does this variety spell creative ferment? Is it actually, in the pessimistic phrase of the film maker Ingmar Bergman, the same appearance of life that you would get from "a snakeskin full of ants"? Is it the chaotic preface to a new stage in the history of the arts? And was it always like this?
The last question, at least, has an answer. No, it was not always like this. Fifty or sixty years ago, "high" art and music were much more uniform. Or rather, they aspired to uniformity, in the sense that every movment within them took itself to be the leading movement on a path of progress, and behaved in a dismissive or totalizing way toward other movements. Anyone not on board with the most current trend was not truly modern. This is still a very powerful idea in culture generally, as you can tell from the cliched phrase "cutting edge" . But something has changed. Here's Arthur Danto's take on how the story goes in the arts:
...the master narrative of the history of art--in the West but by the end not in the West alone--is that there is an era of imitation, followed by an era of ideology, followed by our post-historical era in which, with qualification, anything goes.
...In our narrative, at first only mimesis [imitation] was art, then several things were art but each tried to extinguish its competitiors, and then, finally, it became apparent that there were no stylisitic or philsophical constraints. There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story" (Art after the End of Art, p. 47).
When there is no special way works of art have to be, anything can be art, and anyone can be an artist. This contrasts with the sensibility of 20th century modernist painters like Picasso, who criticized the French painter Bonnard to his mistress Francoise Gilot:
Don't talk to me about Bonnard. That's not painting, what he does. He never goes beyond his own sensibility....He's not really a modern painter: he obeys nature, he doesn't transcend it....Bonnard is just another neo-impressionist, another decadent; the end of an old idea, not the beginning of a new one.
Vasily Kandinsky, too, thought of the artist as a visionary, who would lead a reluctant and ignorant, even hostile society upward to its future.
Thinking about where we are and where we have come from in the arts means thinking about art history. Art history is never just a list of who painted or sculpted what. The history of the arts is a story, full of assumptions and choices of what to put in and leave out, determined by a vision of what art is, what it could be, what should count and what is irrelevant. The readings for this section include three philosophers and one artist thinking about art history. The first philosopher is Hegel. Hegel was almost the first western philosopher to take history seriously. He thought history developed by a series of oppositions and reconciliations: there would be a thesis, followed by an anthithesis, followed by a synthesis mediating the two, and this in turn would become a new thesis and the pattern would repeat. As you can tell from this little bit, Hegel thought that history was above all rational; it was the story of reason developing in the world. Hegel also thought of this as the history of spirit in the world. The arts, for Hegel, are an attempt to represent the spiritual, the transcendent, in material form. They go through three stages: the symbolic, the classical, and the romantic. In the first of these, the Idea is not itself well realized, and the material does not match it well, either. The result is either arbitrary associations of matter with content (a lion stands for courage); or distortions of parts of the material vehicle to represent the ideal (huge jaws and eyes for demonic ferocity, exagerated sexual characteristics for fertility, etc.) The classical stage integrates the Ideal and the material (viz. classic Greek sculpture). But it does so at the expense of inwardness; a peaceful, idealized human form represents the materialized ideal. Finally, the romantic stage brings back the imperfection of the first stage, to show the inwardness of the human spirit within the human form (real people with real thoughts and emotions).
But there is a limit on the ability of a physical medium to express spiritual content, or so Hegel thinks. So in the end, art reaches its limit and becomes philosophy, and that is the end of art. This is not the death of art, and it is not a pessimistic idea. It is just that art has completed its history. People continue to make art, but no longer in order to fulfill an historical mandate. Art takes up more the character of play.
The second philosopher we are reading who talks about art history is Arthur Danto. See the entry about Danto under Philosophers, Artists and Critics on Art for more about his views. Danto is strongly influenced by Hegel. He makes several points about art history. One is that art history is tied to cultural history, and that the time in which you live determines, to some extent, the work you can make. Much modern and contemporary art could not have been seen as art in the Renaissance. For Hans Van Meegeren to invent a new Vermeer was not the same accomplishment as for Vermeer to make real Vermeers. Even if Van Meegeren's Christ on the Road to Emaus were as good as real Vermeers (most now think it's not, though at the time it fooled major Vermeer critics), Van Meegeren was an early twentieth century man, not a 17th century one. To make Vermeer's work in Vermeer's time was a major contribution; to make it in the twentieth century is more of a trick. The times call for something different.
A second point Danto makes about art history is the one for which he is most famous. Like Hegel, he says that art history has come to an end. By this he does not mean that no art is made any more, but rather that art has a narrative arc, and that that narrative has reached its climax. His sketch of this history is that first, art was imitation; then (in the modern period) there were several competing definitions of art, while art sought its own meaning by exploring its possibilities and limits. Finally, in recent times, it has become obvious that anything can be art. In the process it has become clear how art should be defined. Art, says Danto, is embodied meaning. Because art's quest for its own meaning is at an end, he says, there is no longer any one way that art must be, and as a result, in a way, anything goes. Pluralism reigns.
Suzi Gablik is the third thinker who is assigned for this section of the course. In her book Has Modernism Failed? she too looks at the history of art (especially the history of modern art) in order to understand the present. The story she tells is a different and in some ways a more pessimistic one than that told by Danto or Hegel. For her, modern art in particular set out to achieve grand things. But it has lost touch with tradition and with its spiritual roots, as well as with its connection with life. It may not have ended, but it is dying and needs to be revived.
How does one decide what story to tell about the history of art, or indeed about the history of anything? What examples count? What narrative strings them together best?
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