Champions of the status quo are two a penny in art criticism. And yet, they are as nothing compared with the patrons of past values who regard the status quo with alarm. The forces of conservatism and reaction are pervasive in the professional world of art journalism because they are insidious. Consequently, they do not present themselves in convenient forms for critique. Simply, if we expect all conservative art critics to write with a plum in their wordprocessors then we will be outfoxed by those who don't. What do contemporary forms of conservative art criticism look like, and how can we attend to them? The Wake of Art: criticism, philosophy, and the end of taste is an opportunity to find out.

 

Arthur C. Danto, a prestigious and influential American analytic philosopher and art critic widely read by artist, critics, art historians and philosophers or art, was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1924, and grew up in Detroit. After spending two years in the Army, Danto studied art and history at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) and then at Columbia University. Since 1984, he has been art critic for The Nation, and in addition to his many books on philosophical subjects, he has published several collections of art criticism. Danto has served as Vice-President and President of the American Philosophical Association, as well as President of the American Society for Aesthetics. In addition, he is an editor of the Journal of Philosophy and consulting editor for various other publications. On top of developing a distinctive theory of art he has brokered a settlement between Continental philosophy and the analytical tradition, by taking major figures from the history the Modern European tradition, particularly Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, and treating them as if they were Anglo-American analytic philosophers. He lives in New York City.

'The Wake of Art' is of serious interest as an exploration of some key issues of current debate of the philosophy of art and it is also of historical interest, as a collection of the key texts by which Danto has established his intellectual reputation and through which he has constructed his chief arguments. The editors' introduction is somewhat eager to impress, and is occasionally obtuse as a result, but it manages to identify what is at stake in Danto's philosophy while also indicating a few misgivings. It could not be said that the introduction puts Danto's writing in its intellectual milieu or social context; the editors, Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn, concentrate on technical and formal argument to the neglect of historical contingencies and intellectual rivalries. This means that their little attempts at analytical jousting are never more than local cases of what T.S. Kuhn, writing about 'normal science', called 'mopping up operations'. The impression is that Danto's position is not a position at all but something more like the best account we have of the condition of art. It is a false impression but Danto is understandably grateful for it. In his afterword he writes, touchingly, of his sense of being rescued from a certain kind of darkness (p. 195) by their knowledge and understanding of his work. The softness of their light is flattering. A brighter, sharper light would have been more instructive.

Danto is a conservative in the guise of a liberal, a libertarian, even. This alone is enough to cause him to be placed on every Marxist reading list. Like other neo-conservatives, Danto's prose has the style of a pleasant and considerate personality, even when he shuts another epistemological door on the struggle for a deeper freedom than the moderate American brand that is his ideological horizon. Danto's two main theses, the 'end of art' and the defense of 'pluralism', certainly are more than soundalikes of more familiar neo-conservative doctrines (namely, the triumphalist post-Cold War assertion of the end of history and the license for inequity known as the deregulation of markets). His neo-conservatism is not well concealed but it is neo enough to immunise him from standard leftist complaints about cultural conservatism. Danto is not a typical reactionary art lover. His arguments do not advocate traditionalism, elitism, exclusion, standards and taste. Danto is a conservative who does without the staples of conservative art criticism. Perhaps his theory of the end of art is, at the same time, the end of a recognizable cultural conservatism and, therefore, of standard Leftist critique. How might such endings be conceived?

Endings are troublesome. Divorce, death, defeat and New Year's Eve are common enough for the experience of endings to be familiar, and yet postulating endings with any amount of theoretical seriousness inevitably leads to questions about how such narratives are constructed and validated. Danto is a reputable philosopher and art critic who is aware of some of the difficulties of taking endings seriously. Writers have made him aware of them because they do not share his conviction that art's history is at an end. In 'The Wake of Art: criticism, philosophy, and the end of taste', Danto's 'end of art' thesis is spelled out philosophically and fleshed out critically in a collection of essays and articles that are more readable than most writing on art today. That such clarity does not automatically wreck Danto's counter-intuitive position is to his credit. The doubts that remain, I want to argue, ought to sound the death knell of Danto's argument for the end of art. But endings rarely arrive on cue.

Danto feels misunderstood by philosophers and art writers alike. Art writers in general have too weak a grip on philosophical analysis, he complains, and philosophers, again in general, have too little interest in art or too scant knowledge of it (p. 193). Adding that anyone without a close relationship to New York City would also have trouble dealing with his texts (where, after all, so much of that history has unfurled … From the late forties, when I moved to New York, until this very moment, it would have been impossible for me merely to philosophize with the canonical aestheticians, from Plato through Kant to Nietzsche and Heidegger, who for all their conceptual muscularity lacked the privilege of living with the art of the late twentieth century(p.193-4)) Danto does his utmost to disqualify the vast majority of his readers from asking difficult and serious questions. This is an unlikely pose for a philosopher of art who defends pluralism as necessary and precious. What's more, it rules me out.

The logic of Danto's forlorn plight follows the contours of Marx's Foreword to 'The Poverty of Philosophy' in which the young Hegelian economist makes a joke at the expense of the author of 'The Poverty of Philosophy': M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Danto turns the joke inside out and takes it seriously as a badge of distinction that both art writers and philosophers misunderstand him. It would be unfair to suggest that Danto buys his right to be a bad philosopher with his reputation as a critic and is actually a bad critic who survives on his fame as a philosopher. Danto's writing is flawed in its detail and controversial in its overall scheme, but he is worth reading.

The poverty of Danto's philosophy and the limitations of his art criticism do add up to a sort of Proudhonian double whammy, nonetheless. He conspires to suffer the inadequacies of both philosophy and an art criticism despite being acutely aware of what those inadequacies are. This is because he responds to cognitive difficulties by swapping hats. Philosophy doesn't strengthen Danto's art criticism; it stands beside it, like a bodyguard protecting it in case intellectual bullies try to rough it up. And art criticism doesn't transform Danto's philosophy - conferring on it sensitivity to contingency, particularity and so on - but begins where philosophy fails and falls silent. In this way, Danto preserves the shortcomings of philosophy and art criticism with an apartheid of disciplines. While neither discipline can trespass on the other's 'proper' concerns, one cannot rectify the difficulties faced by its accomplice. Danto is, therefore, an unphilosophical art critic and an indiscriminate philosopher of art. Mopping up will not suffice.

A philosophy of art, in Danto's understanding, must be true of all art, without exception, without favoritism and without historical and local bias. The difference between philosophy and criticism comes across as merely a matter of scale, where philosophy is monumental without detail, and criticism is narrow and temperamental. What makes a statement about art philosophical, he argues, is that it is worked out at a level of abstraction so general that you cannot deduce from it the form of any specific style of art (p. 94). All previous philosophy of art, Danto takes pleasure in announcing, has been nothing other than art criticism because it restricted itself to the art of the philosopher's own time. This is typical of Danto's witty violence: he uses logic as a form of entertainment at just the moment when he is laying down the law.

I want to argue that Danto's thinking resorts to a series of false dichotomies in order to instate a neo-conservative agenda. First I need to make two preliminary observations.

One. It does no harm to Danto if we question whether his philosophy of art is, in fact, a response to the art of his time. For one thing, to do so would be to adopt Danto's own conceptual schema. But for another, Danto would agree. Danto accepts that this is the case. The difference, for him, is that the art of our time (art under the 'end-of-art condition') allows the philosopher to understand art as such.

Two. We need to be cautious with Danto's corollary that for a philosophy of art to be philosophical no art better exemplifies it than any other (p. 94). The inability of a philosophy of art to discriminate between one kind of art and another is a measure of its abstract scale. It is also, neatly enough, a philosophically generated guarantee against what Danto regards as the blight of modernist criticism, that it was yoked to a form of advocacy, in the respect that to endorse a certain piece of art was to advocate the kind of art it exemplified (p. 196).

If my first preliminary observation warns against hasty attempts to dump Danto's central contention of the end of art, my second observation warns against cheap shots against Danto's other central contention, pluralism. These two rogues have to be tackled, but they are not easy pickings.

In another collection, Danto, having been quizzed on the matter, deploys two defenses of his claim that art history has come to an end. To pour cold water on the narrative of an ending on the basis that all narratives are constructions is, he says, a bit of metaphysical overkill. Danto is trying to open up some theoretical space for the possibility that art has been following a narrative logic but has now reached its climax, and so it is philosophically pointless to argue that all such narratives are fallacious. He follows this line of defense with the assertion that his argument is an empirical one and therefore cannot be refuted on a priori grounds. What it would take to show me wrong is to show that the story goes on. Notice, here, that Danto does not say that to show that art goes on would destroy his argument; it is the story that matters. He readily accepts that art goes on - hence the title of his Artforum article of 1993 (included in 'The Wake of Art'), 'Art After the End of Art' - but it goes on, he insists, without the benefit of having a story to tell or to develop. So, Danto has to fashion a theory that can yield a story that is good for the entire history of art but which is, ultimately, expendable. It is the strain of this twin requirement that undoes Danto's project.

The end of art, or the end of art's historical development, is compulsory in Danto's meta-narrative of art because his conception of history is teleological: art history is the process by which art discovers its truth. Once that truth is discovered, according to Danto, there is nothing left for art, or artists, to do. The result is not the death of art but the continuation of art in the wake of its developmental history. In the wake, that is, of Greenberg's account of modernism's development in which all roads led to the same place. Greenberg haunts Danto. If the relationship between Danto and Greenberg is scrutinized, Danto has serious difficulties (see below), but taken at face value, Danto's post-Greenbergianism slots nicely into the millennial mood. Understood in this way, Danto's end of art thesis can strike a chord today among those who are similarly convinced both of the developmental trajectory of modernist and premodernist art history and the absence of a developmental force in contemporary art and culture. Such empirical coincidences are largely circumstantial. Danto does not seek merely to describe a familiar sense of 'anything goes' or 'everything has already been done'. His argument extends beyond such observations and also provides a theory. It is his theory that is under question here.

Although there are serious errors in the logic Danto uses to bind the narrative and its ending to art (he uses off-the-peg Hegel that confines itself to a positive dialectic); the test of his theory of art is in the validity of the story that the theory requires. Danto is mistaken when he says that the only way to disprove his theory is to show that the story goes on; Danto would also be wrong if the story was false from the outset.

The narrative that Danto adopts is, roughly, Greenberg plus Hegel. A rough Greenberg provides the aesthetic content while a rough Hegel provides the philosophical form. Greenberg's theory of modernist art's programme of self-definition is, first, isolated from a network of arguments about art's autonomy and its modes of attention - which Danto simplifies as the obsolete notion of purification and calls 'aesthetic Serbianism' (p. 121) - before it is slotted into a teleological development of art's realization of its concept or truth. The Hegelianism is thin. However, philosophical point scoring is unnecessary because Danto's sub-Greenbergian story of art's self-definition doesn't hold. How could it?

Following Greenberg's example, Danto lifts himself above the petty disputes of recent and contemporary art by rooting his artistic commitments in an historical framework. What's more, Danto's historical schema leads inevitably to an end-of-art condition that is unavoidably pluralist. So, and here's the rub, it doesn't matter a jot that his rivals disagree with him. By disagreeing with him, they (or we) confirm his (pluralist) theory. This may sound obscure. How does the fact that people disagree with him confirm his theory? And what is the relationship between his theory and his narrative? His narrative is of the coming to self-knowledge of art, which, when complete, results in the end of art (of art having nothing more to discover about what art is). The theory is that the history and practice of art is structured by such a narrative and that, at the end of this narrative, the result is pluralism. It is pluralism - the necessary and actual co-presence of opposing positions - that is confirmed if we disagree with him.

Danto's argument is, in this way, inoculated against Greenberg's more conspicuous sins (exclusion, formalism, opticality), without giving Greenberg the boot. Danto usurps Greenberg by recruiting him in a kind of Hegelian ruse. He miscalculates, though, and renders the sublation of Greenberg too preservative and not sufficiently negating. Greenberg, in effect, becomes necessary for Danto instead of Danto's sublation of Greenberg becoming necessary for Greenberg. So, the theory of the end of the history of art does not dislodge the modernist theory but is vitally dependent on the (historically local) validity of a Greenbergian project for art. Of course, when Danto gets his hands on it, the Greenbergian project is not recognizably Greenberg's; it is, nonetheless, a classic, linear narrative of art's incremental contribution to its own self-definition.

Like all classic, linear narratives, Danto's story of art is preceded and structured by its ending. The narrative makes no sense without its ending. And, led by the ending, the author is careful to arrange the characters and plot in such a way as to anticipate or 'cause' the given ending. Consequently, Danto's ending (which is different from Greenberg's ending), generates a narrative of art historical events that confirms a given account of art's self-definition. If there are rival and competing accounts of art's self-definition (Danto and Greenberg's being just this, among a relatively broad range), then the story of art's historical development is not a story at all but an object of hegemonic struggle. To pass off a particular narrative of art history as the story of art's development is to engage in hegemonic struggle while at the same time denying through omission the animosity and division implied by that struggle (all the better, of course, to have an advantage over competing theories). As such, Danto's theory does not stand or fall on whether we can disprove it on a priori grounds, or whether we can show that the story goes on, but rather on whether it can legitimately fend off rival accounts of art history or the argument that art has no history.

The fact that Danto's historical narrative does not derive from historical method (and remains blithely untroubled by its lack of methodological self-consciousness), means that instead of grounding his philosophy of art on an empirical argument that other philosophers can only dream of, Danto leaves himself vulnerable to the most basic art historical scrutiny. The end of art thesis is tied to an historical narrative that has not so much been superseded as discredited. Art history has never enjoyed uncorrupted scholarly achievement that was free from internal disputes, but any untroubled false universalizations suggesting otherwise were taken to task in two waves of art history's politicization in the 1970s and 1980s. The very idea of a single, uncontested, homogenous history of art has withered under the strain of several politicizing assaults on art history as a discipline and as an object of study. As a result, there can be no single and uncontested narrative of art history. In the absence of such a narrative, it follows that there is nothing to end, no conclusion to a self-defining development, and therefore no means of establishing the validity of a switch from (modernist) art history to contemporary pluralism. As such, Danto's theory homogenizes the narrative of art history in clear denial of the politicizing of art and its history over the past 30 years and more, which has proved time and again that the given history of art is a particular story with its own distinctive exclusions and prejudices. Danto's depoliticization is an act of historical violence, but it is also, because of this, scholastically poor.

Pluralism is the name Danto gives to the condition of art after the unifying power of art's historical mission has gone. This argument is objectionable and falsifying. Secure in his philosophical account of art's historical becoming, Danto makes a case for pluralism that results in the counter-intuitive statement that I can like it all (p. 95) on the prior argument that art can no longer be defined in terms of specific artistic qualities. He makes at least two versions of this prior argument, but either way, the conclusion is not yielded by the account. One of his arguments is that art has reconciled with non-art (he refers not to Conceptualism but to Duchamp and Pop), thus precluding any conceptual or institutional differentiation of art from everything else, and therefore pulling the philosophical rug from under the feet of personal preference. One of his other arguments is that, even before avantgarde artists 'redeemed the everyday', a philosophy of art could not favour any one kind of art, and therefore, it seems to follow, there can be no philosophically established preference for some art against others.

The error, in both cases, is to circumscribe judgement on the back of a categorical inclusion. Simply, Danto is obliged to 'like it all' because it is all art. He is perfectly capable of making judgements, such as his dislike of the 80s painter David Salle (p. 164), but he has no way of saying that the works he doesn't like are not art and concludes that, on principle, he likes it all. Or, in his own words, all that pluralism excludes is that I should dislike something on grounds of stylistic advocacy (p. 201). Would it not be more precise to say that what pluralism excludes is that I should like or dislike something on grounds of stylistic advocacy? If so, then the conclusion cannot be to like it all. If we take away liking and disliking something on grounds of stylistic advocacy we are not left with 'liking it all'. Possibly we are left with liking or disliking it on other grounds, or else of not liking or disliking it at all.

What animates Danto's false dichotomy between 'advocacy' and 'liking it all'? It has a political dimension, of course, underwriting such statements as like astronauts, we walk free from the pull of cultural space (p. 199). Pluralism, for Danto, is living freely. In the land of opportunity, art critics are not obliged to monitor their judgments and artists can do as they please. His is a primitively individualist utopia. There [are] no movements, really, Danto preaches, except what individuals [are] doing (p. 90). The assertion that 'there is no history' is thus a cousin of the politically objectionable statement 'there is no society'. Stock neo-conservative positions mark out Danto's territory, but they do not, I think, animate his argument. For this we need to understand not only the values underpinning the either-or rationale of universal truth or no truth at all; we need to discover the primary assumption of the unsafe syllogism that results in the declaration that if something is art then the philosopher-critic is obliged to like it. Is there any way that this assumption cannot be a culturally obedient and socially compliant deference to art as an institution? Surely, the obligation to like all art is not founded on a philosophy that excludes advocacy alone, but is built into the argument through stealth. It is only by borrowing the accrued value of art and forgetting to mention it that Danto's argument can make sense at all. As soon as we question the implicit cultural superiority of art, however, Danto's obligation to 'like it all' turns to dust.

Danto's pluralism is weakly argued. Inevitably, Danto states, Pluralism falls out of as a consequence of a good philosophy of art (p. 94) because there is no truth or falsity in art, which means that Pluralism is finally unavoidable (p. 95). Time and again the neo-conservative philosopher-critic proposes false dichotomies that offer, on the one hand, a risible restriction, and on the other, his own homespun freedom. He considers only two possible states: a stable, dependable, universal, authoritative truth, or, if not that, no truth at all. In other words, what Danto overlooks in the absence of a shared, universal truth is the very precondition of politicization: rivalry, dispute, controversy, debate, power, suasion. Where there is no universal truth, or when what is passed off as such is in fact a false universalism, the result is not (inevitably) pluralism; the result depends on the conditions that prevent universalism from flourishing. If division and dispute are the forces that thwart universalism then the inevitable result is not pluralism but struggle. Which is why Raymond Williams said all criticism now is social criticism. It is, perhaps, too much to ask that Danto agree with the political left's longstanding commitment to struggle as the labour of universalism, but a consideration of the social processes that might bring about universalism certainly puts a question mark over Danto's sanguine binary opposition of universalism and pluralism.

It is not enough, however, to index Danto's philosophy of art to the familiar moves of neo-conservative philosophy, politics and social theory. The kernel of Danto's argument is protected by long-standing and widely held assumptions about art. Omitting struggle and debate from the fields of art and aesthetics has almost always seen as a sign of being on the side of art and aesthetics. This is why, when Feminist art historians challenged the pleasures of looking in and at art through the concept of the gaze, they were quizzed not so much on a case by case basis, but on the fundamental question of whether they were in fact capable of attending to art and not merely recruiting art for other, political, ends. If, for the academic art historian, feminist art history is like playing a violin with a spanner, this is not because they have introduced violence into the arena of art but because they attend to the violence already present. In the same way, the very lack of any trace of violation and struggle in Danto's philosophy of art is prima facie evidence that his thinking is an agent for violence and division. As such, perhaps, Danto does not distort art in order to confirm his neo-conservative values; he fails to challenge the inherited value of art and builds a neo-conservative philosophy out of what he can salvage from art's injured reputation. Hence, Duchamp and Pop, according to Danto, completed art's self-definition, they did not, for instance, engage in an antagonistic relationship with art. If I disagree with Danto on these and other points, it is not because I am at last convinced of the validity of his pluralist philosophy but because I have read his book with a spanner.