A Companion to Arthur C. Danto. Группа авторов
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clamor of the “Crossroads of the World.” Once you caught on, it was impossible to tune out its mood and mind-altering presence.
The installation, titled Times Square, had been designed for that spot by an experimental composer and percussionist named Max Neuhaus (1939–2009). The sound sculpture, as the artist called it, had been running more or less continuously since 1977, under the care of the Dia Art Foundation. Together with a fellow student, I set about documenting it. We interviewed a homeless man who lived on top of the work, seemingly oblivious to its presence. We met a woman who came there often to meditate. We asked tourists what they thought about the sound as a form of public art. We filmed pedestrians from rooftops. When we were done, we presented our work at a visual-anthropology conference in Amsterdam, in a documentary film titled Sound from the Ground.1
It was armed with a videocassette copy of Sound from the Ground that I entered Arthur Danto’s office for the first time, in 1991. I had since transferred to Columbia University, where I was working on a dissertation about art galleries and the transformation of the visual-art world into a modern cultural industry. The only hitch was, few of my professors in the sociology department knew much about art or its institutions and markets. It made sense to walk over to Philosophy Hall to seek out the advice of Arthur C. Danto. He was, after all, the man who coined the term artworld. And he was part of that world. At the peak of his powers as a teacher, theoretician, and critic, Danto was an intellectual rock star. A frequent presence in Manhattan’s glittering art scene, he had achieved an aura of public fame that is rarely attached to academics. As a 27-year-old student at the time, it took some nerve to knock on his door.
Arthur had just published an essay about Neuhaus in The Nation, where he famously held the art-critic post formerly occupied by Clement Greenberg. In a characteristic switching of gears from “mere” criticism to something deeper and more profound, he described Neuhaus’s sound sculpture as “a portable tabernacle, a bubble of sacral space encapsulated in midtown life, which flows unheedingly around it, save for those attracted as a momentary congregation” (Danto 1991). I was confident that my documentary would claim his interest. Not only was it about an artist he cared about, but it directly probed the categorical distinction between art and the ordinary world – Arthur’s driving preoccupation in the field of aesthetics. What better example of his “transfiguration of the commonplace” could one find than an artistic intervention that elevated Times Square, in all its grime and decrepitude, to a sacramental shrine?
Times Square was precisely the kind of art Arthur relished thinking about. It was about boundaries: between the traditional and the modern, the familiar and the transcendent, the aesthetic and the everyday. Such boundaries were for him always both philosophical and political, and he demonstrated exceptional skill in pinpointing them and explaining why they were relevant. He was, in this sense, a virtuoso of scrutinizing boundaries. As a person, he was fond of stepping over them.
2 Opening Doors
I became, as far as I know, Arthur’s last graduate student. He helped guide me into the art world conceptually, and also by opening doors in a practical sense, using his connections. Arthur approached his duties as a dissertation adviser with a light touch and in a spirit of avuncular generosity. He steered clear of the confrontational approach that some feel compelled to adopt in such circumstances. I got the feeling that he was somewhat bemused by sociology, a young discipline that operated on a more mundane plane than his own. But he was more than willing to come along for the ride.
In a way, I set out to pick up where Arthur had left off, to drill into the layers that his theoretical inquiry left untouched. For me, the art world was not a mental construct, but a living-breathing site of human and organizational interactions. As a sociologist, it behooved me to ask how, as an empirical matter, the transfiguration of the commonplace actually happened – as a product of the daily functioning of real-world institutions. It was clear to me that a key site of this organizational alchemy was the art gallery, where values were nurtured in a dual sense. It was in galleries that the first rough version of art history was written, much as newspapers have been said to have drafted the first version of our collective history. And it was in galleries that art, for better or for worse, intertwined with commerce. The value of each work would now be reflected in a sometimes exceptionally high price, which in turn denoted the artwork – in the currency of the marketplace – as belonging to a class apart from ordinary things. Arthur encouraged this investigation and took evident pleasure in crossing over to another discipline to see a world that fascinated him from a different point of view.
Approaching the art world as a social scientist rather than as a philosopher led me to different conclusions than Arthur’s, which, I believe, were complementary rather than contradictory to his. For example: from where did contemporary art’s limitless pluralism derive? In Arthur’s view, the relevant dynamics, here as elsewhere, were lodged in ideas. They were philosophical. At the risk of oversimplifying his position, he argued that a series of erasures over the course of the twentieth century had removed all previously necessary conditions placed upon art and led, step by step, to a final reckoning in Andy Warhol’s 1964 Brillo Box installation – the first work to directly, and at the right time in the flow of history, tackle the question of what distinguishes a work of art from an ordinary thing. The defining question of art having been reached, any compelling reason to move in any particular direction was rendered moot, according to Arthur’s theory. Discourse fractured in a thousand equally legitimate directions, “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” (Danto 1997, 31). Art had dissolved into a sea of open possibility. The show would go on, unshackled from historical prerogatives, but without a binding narrative. This was Danto’s so-called “end of art.”
But could ideas by themselves wreak such havoc? For me, puncturing the boundary of what Arthur termed the “post-historical” era in art was a sociological event as much as a philosophical one. It had to do with the shattering of the tradition-bound confines of the art world, which for all sorts of complicated reasons had been trapped, like a fly frozen in amber, in a latticework of premodern sociological relations. The 1960s seem quaint in our eyes now, but this was the time when the art world was beginning to turn into a much larger and culturally and economically integrated, national and international entity. Growth and commercialism went hand in hand. The shared discourse that had hitherto bonded the small, informal community of art-world denizens, and provided a matrix of common understandings and a relatively clear sense of historical direction, was starting to evaporate.
Big, complex, market-driven systems are pluralistic by nature. They splinter into niches and sub-niches – so many lagoons in the wider ocean. Think of a dinner table. Eight people can easily maintain a shared conversation. Once you have a dozen or more, they pair off and cluster. Different conversations sprout up at each end of the table. Something similar was going on in the art world. Art galleries exacerbated this fracturing. The gallery system responded to growth by multiplying in numbers, rather than by scaling in size. Big fish didn’t eat the little fish. The little fish multiplied. By the 1980s, what had been a handful of Manhattan galleries had given way to hundreds, each one a microcosm of its own. Countless more were taking part in a burgeoning global art conversation. This metastatic complexity, and the resulting discursive opacity, was an evolving sociological condition that was catalytic to the onset of aesthetic pluralism. Or so I argued.
In short, for me, the story of the art world was, above all, a parable of modernization: of the agony and ecstasy, the losses and gains, of what it means to grow into a mature, highly organized, transactional industry. I think Arthur saw this as an interesting subplot on the margins of his deeper and wider macro-narrative. We spent many hours as well talking about the art world’s micro-dynamics. Here, too, Arthur was inclined to leave the details to others. He was famously reticent about being linked to an institutional theory of art. Nonetheless, as a former artist, he took a keen interest in the day-to-day functioning of galleries and the art market. Galleries, after all, did the work of filtering the universe of artists and artworks, elevating some to wider attention and, if all went well, inscribing the lucky few into the permanent art-historical record. Arthur