After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History [Paperback]

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 Plato's Symposium. But he made a mistake in his meticulously accurate historical reconstruction. He includes a painting in the background which portrays Xenophon's 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 Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon and Ruben's Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, and finally ends up with "America's 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 Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity for another perspective on the postmodernist moment. Still, this is an important book, and one should pay particular attention to Danto's 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.

I'm surprised at thoughtful reviewers hearing Danto say Art Is Dead. Did they read the introduction? This text is particularly clear and articulate (a hard-to-find phenomenon in contemporary theoretical texts on art). I found it difficult to MISunderstand.

"To say that history is over is to say that there is no longer a pale of history for works of art to fall outside of. Everything is possible. Anything can be art. And, because the present situation is essentially unstructured, one can no longer fit a master narrative to it....It inaugurates the greatest era of freedom art has ever known. (p.112)"

The history of art up to this point has been a history of exclusion, legitimizing and highlighting only certain works which fall within the pale of this narrative. Danto's point is that there is no longer a pale of history.

But it is possible, I believe, to see something even larger in Danto's analysis, something that would be interesting to pursue by someone with a good grasp of history and culture. One might see further into his thesis and find that the history of art has been one of an evolution of individuation. Starting from the Egyptians, where art was an umbrella covering the entire culture, a culture in which the individual was of little value, to our present age in which art has moved to the opposite extreme, no longer controled by anything or anybody (except perhaps the art industry itself), heralding a new stage ( about 1964 by Danto's reakoning) in the idividuation of the planet.

If, as Teilhard de Chardin says, the impulse of evolution is toward greater consciousness and greater complexity, then what we are seeing at the present time is not something unstructured (as Danto posits), but rather, something of far greater structure, something much more complex than we have witnessed before. A stucture and complexity perhaps presently beyond our comprehension. (Of course, the conservative view of this will be that we are witnessing an encroaching chaos that will destroy civilization as we know it.)

From this new perspective, the present radical pluralism would be, rather than an unstructuring, a further step toward something of a far deeper order, an order we have not seen before, one which reflects an important moment in the individuation of humanity on this planet. Taking Danto's basic thesis, one might write a new history of art from the point of view of the evolution of individuation in art. But then this would be another master narrative and would undermine Danto's thesis. Or would it? For this is not a master narrative of art but of evolution itself as evidenced in art.

And who better to herald this advance than the artists!