After the End of Art

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Danto also discusses his notion of the "artworld". In this book he says that he means by this concept that when an object is transfigured into the artworld, this object is set in to a relation with every other artwork in the world and therefore it can posses meanings that mere real things lack. He also takes up an old and neglected idea of the style matrix, which he introduced already in his classic article "The Artworld" that appeared in 1964. I truly find Dantos ideas of the artworld extremely interesting and it is shame that people have misunderstood him so badly. The last article in the book "Modalities of History" is one of the best Danto has ever written and it shows how important the history of art is for him. In the article he tries to show with the help of some examples what he means by the phrase that he inherited from Wöllflin "not everything is possible at every time."

Like always Dantos writing style is very fluent and eloquent. His knowledge on the history of art is just astounding. Many of Dantos books that have appeared after The Transfiguration of the Commonplace havent been that important for his general theory but this book is absolutely vital if you want to understand his philosophy of art.

At the same time, says Danto, one must take a historicist approach. Very simply, "Manyof the artworks (cave paintings, fetishes, altar pieces) were made in times and places when people had no concept of art to speak of, since they interpreted art in terms of their other beliefs." Danto goes on to discuss how much art of the present day would not have been considered art in the past. He provides some interesting aspects of this historical anomaly. For example there is the 19th century artist Anselm Feuerbach who painted a grand, academically precise picture, the sort that would soon by overtaken by impressionism, of a scene from Platos Symposium. But he made a mistake in his meticulously accurate historical reconstruction. He includes a painting in the background which portrays Xenophons variation on the same events. The problem is that the painting is not in the style of a fifth century BC Greek painting. Danto goes on to discuss the inevitable failure of the Vermeer forger Hans Van Meegeren, how Russell Connor combined Picassos Les demoiselles dAvignon and Rubens Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, and finally ends up with "Americas Most Wanted" the painting the Russian artists Komar and Melamid painted after conducting an elaborate opinion poll.

One should be aware of the many criticisms that have been made of this thesis. For example, there is the ironyof having a narrative which amounts to the end of narrative. And as Terry Eagleton sourly puts it "if art these days is a realm without rules, it is so, among other reasons, because there is not really that much at stake. If art mattered socially and politically, rather than just economically, it is unlikely that we would be quite so nonchalant about what qualified for the title." One should also read Perry Andersons The Origins of Postmodernity for another perspective on the postmodernist moment. Still, this is an important book, and one should pay particular attention to Dantos chapter on the nature of monochrome art. There is also a nuanced chapter on museums and the conflict between them as purveyors of the beautiful and the artistic and the possibilities of anti-museum based community art. There are also discussions of Kant, Heidegger and particularly Hegel; amusingly enough, the last thing in the book is a caricature of Danto showing a Brillo Box to a disconcerted Hegel.