Ouphilpo

Arthur Danto justifies art within an autonomously maintained sphere of influence and historical relationships. This sphere, ‘the artworld,’ consists of and is created by individuals, who participate in the art process, or the: buying, selling, trading, making, critiquing, etc. of art. Their opinions, implicit or explicit, their actions, their past choices intertwine into a sphere of social influence with a history and a great deal of people invested in it. Within this sphere lie the answers for what will pass as art, what will be exalted as great art, and what will have no place at all in the art realm, for each nomination or declaration of a work as art has a historical backing or reasoning for it. Even the unprecedented work of art needs a precedence to negate. When one creates a work of art, the work is created in such a way that the artworld will recognize it as art, so long as ones intent is to create art. In this way, the artworld acts back on the work, through the artist. By examining the works of art within the historical contexts they are within, then the art becomes self-reflexive, and thus philosophy. Danto claims that this shift, influenced by the thought of Hegel, is the ‘end of art.’ To understand this, first we must understand the way in which individuals manufacture the artworld.
To illustrate the way in which this is done, Danto parallels artwork to primary sources—historical artifacts, linking us to the past. What the Rosetta Stone did for hieroglyphics, so too may a work of art translate into an interpretation of not only the concept of art at the time of the prevalent artworld, but perhaps also a look into the emotion of the era—the desparation or delight felt in the times on a deeply primordial level. “Suppose one thinks of a whole new class of artworks as something analogous to the discovery of a whole new class of facts anywhere, viz., as something for theoreticians to explain” (Danto 572). And in the same way new sets of facts in science will contribute to the overall edifice of scientific truth, so too will the new works of art work in their own way to act as examples of or attempts at creating a work of art, and thus symbols of one’s interpretation of the artworld. The artworld acts back on the artist, changing how they sculpt or paint, as well as their opinions of other pieces (works) of the overall whole. As with scientific facts and empiricism, all artwork agrees to the artworld insofar as it is, in and within the sphere of the objects privileged enough to be designated as art, as some are/were not. Danto examines the way in which the post-impressionist painters, “in terms of the prevailing artistic theory (IT), it was impossible to accept [them] as art unless inept art: otherwise they could be discounted as hoaxes, self-advertisements, or the visual counterparts of madmen’s ravings” (Danto 573). Within this category lie some of the most famous paintings of all time, and in order for them to gain acceptance, a major shift in opinion occurred the same way in which a scientific discovery changes the basis for judgment—namely, the discovery of a round earth. However, Danto notes that without this justification, they still retain the status of ‘madmen’s ravings,’ still emphasizing the creation’s place in and contribution to the overall ‘artworld,’ or at least their existing as historical documents. Danto’s notion is unique in that he focuses on the secular movement, or the worldly unfolding of the events happening to art, rather than aspiring to a higher transcendental source of inspiration for the creation of great art.
It is in this way that Hegel investigates the unfolding of absolute Spirit as the historical unfolding of art, religion, and philosophy as a whole. He examines the Greek tragedians as an example of the three frameworks combining into a single procedure or manifestation. In Greek tragedy, the society that inspired the work could reflect upon the work once created. In the investigation and interpretation of a work of art, one is simply investigating and interpreting themselves as a contributor in the artworld. The investigation of art becomes an investigation of Spirit. Hegel investigated art within the categories of epics, tragedies, and comedies. These three methods all served as ways of uniting a group of people within the universal understanding, the absolute Spirit. “This self-consciousness knows what the validity of the abstract person amounts to in reality and equally in pure thought” (Hegel 454). By using these three forms, one is able to evaluate the work of art as a subject within a framework—evaluation, accreditation. “Through the religion of Art, Spirit has advanced from the form of Substance to assume that of Subject, for it produces its [outer] shape, thus making it explicit in the act…” (Hegel 453). By producing its ‘outer shape,’ or form, the piece categorizes itself within its own niche of absolute Spirit, or for Danto, the artworld. However, by doing so, the artist reflects into the work certain criteria of art, shaping or molding the piece as influenced by those understandings. This process of a self-reflexive creation of art is very similar to the way in which a consciousness becomes self-consciousness for Hegel. Artness, for consciousness, has presented itself as an object outside of consciousness. However, “the Notion of this truth vanishes in the experience of it,” for the experience renders the object into the object-for-consciousness, rather than the thing-in-itself (§166). The experience or movement towards the Notion of art renders itself at best symbolic. The truth vanishes upon this rendering, leaving an interpretation in its lieu, and “this in-itself turns out to be a mode in which the object is only for an other” (§166). The mode of in-itself is understood as a comprehension, similar to the Kantian ding-an-sich¬. This comprehension is because “the Notion of the object is superseded in the actual object, or the first, immediate presentation of the object is superseded in experience: certainty gives place to truth” (§166). Hegel understands our certainty to falsely affirm our comprehension or mode, which although seems to be the objects as they are in-themselves¬, actually appears as the object for another. Hegel refers to “a certainty, which is identical with its truth; for the certainty is to itself its own object, and consciousness is itself the truth,” however, “an otherness” persists in so far as consciousness is able to make a distinction between itself and an object” (§166). The identical pair of certainty and truth comes solely from this otherness through consciousness making distinctions. Because a consciousness is conscious of being certain, certainty itself is rendered as something other than consciousness; additionally, consciousness’ certainty of itself would be Truth, and the process in which this movement occurs is the work of Hegel’s Phenomenology as a whole. Artistic credibility follows much of the same path as certainty, and unfolds with the help of the same processes.
The shift from consciousness, aware of the artwork as a distinct unity in the world, to self-consciousness, aware of artwork as an interpreting and self-creating Notion, occurs through the mutual self-recognition of two self-consciousnesses. However, this mutual self-recognition is impossible, for the Notion of the other shifts from an exterior object for consciousness, to self-consciousness creating or interpreting the other from within its own self-consciousness, and thus creating its own truth of the other, rather than apprehending the truth within the other-for-itself. Additionally, this other that seeks to be recognized by self-consciousness is self-consciousness itself. This mutual self-recognition between two consciousnesses is an interesting point of examination in the art world as one of the consciousnesses is a representation or creation. “What it possesses, therefore, is rather only the thought of itself; or in other words, in the mode in which it immediately exists and knows itself as object, it is something that is not actual” (Hegel 454). Throughout Hegel’s work, he finds himself dealing with two consciousnesses. However, in Danto’s argument (largely influenced by Hegel), he proposes a consciousness (the artist) with an expression of this consciousness (the artwork), and illustrates the relationship between the two. Because one never experiences the whole of reality as we live, the packaging of a whole, an artwork, is an inherent pleasure or cohesion in and of life, this harmonious indulgence in the construction of beauty. However, by recognizing it as such, one has reflected upon the work and thus contributed to the overarching sphere of meaning, whether Hegel’s absolute Spirit or Danto’s artworld. In the contemporary world, because of the developments of the artworld:
Art must now, whatever else it does, come to terms with its own nature. It must discover what that nature really is. In Hegelian terms, it had reached a kind of consciousness of itself as a problem. Up to now, art had a set of problems, but it was not a problem for itself. But now, in becoming a problem for itself, it began to attain a certain philosophical dimension. (Danto 457)
Such marks the end of art qua art, and the beginning of something new—a reflexive piece of art that lends insight into the historical background of the artworld, worthy of analysis. Despite the importance of this shift, Danto recognizes art and philosophy as separate entities, even being as bold as to jokingly assert aesthetical theory as “about as low on the scale of philosophical undertakings as bugs are in the chain of being.” However, the process by which philosophy operates, this self-reflexivity, once applied to and enacted though artwork offers a peculiar shift from the Greek tragedies, with art as a self-motivated and unfolding Notion, “the chronicle of symbolic form succeeding symbolic form…there is no story to tell” (Danto 458). The idea of forms following forms is slightly different than Hegel’s notion of a single unfolding form, and Hegel’s single form more accurately complements Danto’s view of the artworld as a whole. As with the post-impressionists, this form of self-reflexive art—art aware of art—will, too, have its day of inauguration into the artworld. At a point in history, it was thought there would be no place for some of the most influential creations of art, and for these pieces to come equipped with the agency of self-reflection is not an end in art, but an improvement; the end of art is only the end of art as we knew it—as Hegel’s unifying, rallying force, offering a commonality. This art, too, will find its place in the artworld, and it must. For even if Danto is right, and art’s reflection on itself is simply worm-level philosophy, then art has not died but unfolded as such, for the creation, utility (aesthetic or meditative) aside, still exists, and the true death of art is when the process stops, and the creation (or destruction) of an object(s) ceases. Interpretation only occurs through human cognition—a painting is unable to interpret another painting—and without human cognition, the reflexivity of artwork becomes less and less applicable. Consciousness and cognition will continue to develop, with or without art. The artworld, however, needs consciousness to dialectically interpret and change itself against. As long as we create art and interpret it, we offer our cognition to the artworld, thus perpetuating it. By creating artworks that offer a reflection upon them, we thus invite all participating audiences to perpetuate the artworld in the very same way. The end of art is only the death of art as mere shapes, but the birth of art as a powerful synthesis of consciousness and history.