What is Art? An Interview with Arthur Danto, Philosopher of Art
Alan Saunders: Hello, I'm Alan Saunders and on ABC Radio National this is The Philosopher's Zone .
Well, if you were just listening to All in the Mind, you might have some idea now of what makes a 'creative brain', but what about the products of all that creativity? How do you know it when you see it, or rather, how do you know that what you are seeing is one form of creativity - let's call it art - rather than another, which we can call craft.
In other words: it's in a gallery, it's carrying a heavy price tag, but is it art? And how can we know that it's art when it looks suspiciously like a Campbell's soup can or the artist's own unmade bed?
I'm devoting the whole of this week's program to a conversation with Arthur C. Danto, Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and one of the most significant philosophers in the English-speaking world, who has evolved an elaborate theory of what art is, and how we can know it when we see it. And it all came about in the sixties when he saw some facsimile Brillo cartons, displayed as art by Andy Warhol.
Arthur C. Danto: That's right. To be a little bit more exact, there were several different kinds of commercial shipping cartons that he had facsimiles of. There were, I think, about eight different kinds of cartons: there were Kellog's cornflakes, Pine's ketchup, Campbell's tomato soup, but the Brillo box was clearly the star of the show, it's the one that everybody basically remembers. They were all piled up, so you made a turn off the lobby in a very upscale town house on the East side of Manhattan, and it was like you were walking into the stock room of a supermarket. There was nothing really except for the incongruity of the situation to let you know that you were in an art gallery. That was called the Stable Gallery.
Alan Saunders: So here we have facsimiles of commonplace objects being displayed as works of art. This is not entirely new, because of course at the beginning of the century Marcel Duchamps had used genuine commonplace objects as works of art; like a urinal, hadn't he?
Arthur C. Danto: Well, that's right. In 1917, he made an effort to - he wasn't entirely commonplace because he splashed signature on it and so forth, but basically that is right. But I think Duchamps came from a very different kind of background and movement in art than Warhol did. Duchamps was part of a Dada movement which was out in a way, to make fun of the pretensions of fine art, and Duchamp was polemical in attacking the celebrated artist's eye and the artist's hand. And so he was interested in finding objects that he was prepared to consider works of art which were manufactured, so that there was no hand involved, and pretty commonplace, so that there would be nothing aesthetically distinguished about them, and in most cases probably nobody, unless they were deeply involved with research, would know who even designed them, and so forth. Like the urinal he purchased out of a plumbing supply shop in downtown New York. Whereas Warhol came from the pop movement, which was gaining steam by 1964, and I think that they were involved in something parallel. They were involved in demoting the pretensions of high art, but they were interested in the celebration of vernacular culture you might say: advertising logos, comic strip panels, things that everybody would be entirely familiar with. But a lot of these things had a certain aesthetic distinction, whereas Duchamp was mainly interested in objects which had no aesthetic distinction whatsoever. And I think that the other thing is that in the context, in New York City, the history of art had just gone through a period in which people took high art very seriously. This was the abstract expressionist movement, the artists were quite prepared to regard themselves as shamans, as metaphysicians, in touch with the deepest currents of the universe, and the artists like Lichtenstein and to some degree, Warhol, were out to deflate those attitudes, and to think that it was probably just as difficult to draw Mickey Mouse as to draw something that, I don't know, William de Koenig or one of the other high-flying abstract expressionist painters would draw. So it was a very different set of polemics.
Duchamp was against high art because and the Dada movement thought that it was the art that was celebrated and revered by the classes that made World War I an actuality in which millions and millions of very fine people were killed. And in a way it was a punitive movement. It was out to disgrace the kind of art in which the ruling classes believed, and a decision on the artist's part to act like buffoons rather than wise persons, whereas in New York in '64 it was a very different situation. I don't think that the artists in the pop movement were out particularly to punish anybody but they certainly were involved in deflating, the ironising really, the pretensions at least of abstract expression. So that there are the outward similarities, but very different artistic impulses and very different, what one might call art historical explanations of the two bodies of work.
Alan Saunders: OK, well returning then to the Brillo pads, here we have these facsimile Brillo pad cartons, which are, as far as appearance goes, indiscernible from the real thing, and this brings us to what is known as your method of indiscernibles. Now this seems to me to be a very profitable approach, not just to art but to the history of philosophy. So can you tell us what it is?
Arthur C. Danto: Well, what I had in mind was; there was a photograph of Andy posed in front of Brillo boxes by a man named Fred McDarrah and he looked like a pasty-faced stockroom clerk in front of a box of shipping cartons. You couldn't have told from the photograph that these were anything except shipping cartons, because until 1964 nobody saw them as anything else, and what Warhol had done had been to duplicate them. Now my interest in this show, and as you said, I've been thinking about it, started thinking about it a long time ago; but you've got two objects, which are to all outward appearances, indiscernible, they look exactly alike, but one is a piece of avant-garde art, and the other one is just a utilitarian container. And I thought, Well that raises the question of what is art in a very different form than has ever been raised before. Before, people would just ask blankly, What is art? What Warhol did was to put it in a different way. How, if you have two objects which look exactly alike, are, as I put it, indiscernibles, one being a work of art and the other one not, what's the difference? And it seemed to me that the difference has to be invisible. You can't tell really the difference between one art and the ordinary object just by looking. And then somebody said, 'Well there's a difference, I mean, Warhol's boxes are made out of wood, the Brillo cartons are made out of corrugated cardboard', and I said, 'You mean to tell me that the difference art and reality is the difference between wood and cardboard and so forth? That can't be the answer.'
Philosophers have been pecking away at the question of art for 2500 years. I mean the history of philosophy basically begins with that discussion in Plato. So it's been regarded of some importance to mark the difference between art and reality, but nobody had ever come across anything where art and reality were so indiscernible that you realised that you were going to have to do some serious thinking to try and make the difference, and make the difference count. That was the method that I was working with, and I thought that it had the character of any classical philosophical question where you've got two things that can't be told apart, but they're momentously different. Like in the beginning of Descartes' Meditations, Descartes says, 'Well what better evidence can I have for what the senses provide me with?' And then he says, 'Well that would be true if only I knew I was sensing, because as a matter of fact, I dreamt that I was having certain experiences and the dreams were very vivid, and I would have had no idea that there was nothing in front of me, nothing being perceived until I woke up, and realised that I'd been dreaming'.
So, the difference between dream experience and waking experience is momentous, but there's no way of telling one from the other until something happens and you wake up, for example, and even then you've got a serious problem. So, I tried to show that all classical philosophical questions are like that; that you've got a difference which is un-empirical; you can't tell the difference, and yet the difference is momentous in a certain way, and that's what got me going. I think that my positivistic teachers felt that philosophy should be like science and it should all be a matter of observation and verification as to whether something goes this way or that. But I thought, all genuine philosophical distinctions are invisible in that kind of way.
So as a philosopher of art as I started out to be, I hadn't taken myself to be that until these very exciting days in the sixties, then I really saw this as an exciting question. But all of a sudden there was a problem and after that, I tried to say what the problem could have been. For example, when I began to look for a definition, I began to think that one way of thinking about a work of art is that it's got some kind of content; it's about something. About the Brillo box: I know what the content of a Brillo box is, it's virtually what the Brillo box contains; it's about Brillo, and you look at the outer decoration of the surfaces of the Brillo box and you discover that it really is a piece of brilliant rhetoric proclaiming the virtues of Brillo. But if I tried to say what his work was about, I might say, Well, it's about the Brillo box. The Brillo box is about Brillo, but his work was about the Brillo box, it had a different meaning. Maybe why he was doing something like making a facsimile of a Brillo box was because he was celebrating commercial culture, celebrating everyday life, celebrating the commonsense world, or just celebrating, the way a boy who came from a very poor family celebrating these delicious things that are available, like canned soups and so forth. Whatever was in Warhol's mind, and for that one would have to do a certain amount of digging.
So it doesn't wear its meaning on its face the way the Brillo carton wears its meaning on its face. That was a kind of beginning. And I poked along until I could find, as philosophers have done since Plato, a set of necessary conditions for something to be an art work. This was in a much later book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
Alan Saunders: In his book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Arthur Danto illustrates these issues by way of Pierre Menard: Author of The Quixote, a short story by the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges.
Menard is an early 20th century French writer who decides to rewrite a 16th century Spanish masterpiece, the Don Quixote of Miguel Cervantes.
Arthur C. Danto: What he actually did, nobody can quite figure out, but he produced a piece of prose that corresponded word for word to the prose that Cervantes wrote in the 16th century. But as the writer of the story says, 'His Spanish was quite affected, after all he was doing it in 16th century Spanish, whereas Cervantes handled effortlessly the common speech of his time'. And so he then begins to show how different these two indiscernible pieces of writing are, and by the time you're finished, you begin to realise what an extraordinary feat it was that Pierre Menard had done. And I began to look for those kinds of examples, not in the visual arts necessarily, but in literature.
A beautiful example I found in Nabokov's novel Pale Fire where he talks about a poem by the American poet, Robert Frost, which is called, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and it ends with two lines:
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The last two lines are a repetition of one another. And then Nabokov says, The first one is a simple autobiographical statement, "Miles to go before I sleep". And the second one is a metaphysical utterance, "I have a lot to do before I die". It's a beautiful example of showing how two lines, although they read the same, just because of their position are making very different kinds of statements. So I think that phenomenon can be found in a lot of different places and there's nothing, so to speak, typographically to distinguish the two lines, but there's a deep difference between them - as I thought there was with Warhol. And I wasn't aware of this fact when I wrote The Transfiguration of the Commonplace; it was published in 1981. But the Brillo box, the actual Brillo box, that Brillo boxes are shipped in, was designed by an abstract expressionist painter, a second generation abstract expressionist painter by the name of James Harvey. He died very young but would have been in the next generation of great American gestural painters, but as I say, he died. But there's a photograph in which Warhol is shown giving Harvey one of the boxes that Harvey actually designed. It is one of those ironies that it's almost a sort of story that Borges could have written, that Harvey designed this box, but his conception of art would have been inconsistent with even thinking of it as a work of art. For him, to be a work of art meant, in 1964, '63, whenever he designed the box, a large splashy canvas and so forth.
But I found, actually found, a photograph in which Harvey is shown kneeling in front of one of one of his expressionist paintings, holding the Brillo box up. It's a very touching, very pathetic kind of story.
Alan Saunders: Once Andy Warhol has done what he did with the Brillo box, does our relationship to actual Brillo boxes change?
Arthur C. Danto: It might. We've got to think about them in a very different kind of way. We're going to think about them as designed, and once we know they were designed by an artist we're going to say, 'Well of course it's such a marvellous piece of visual rhetoric that only an artist could have done it.' A friend of mine who did some research found an application for a grant that James Harvey made in answer to the question, 'How do you make your living?' Basically, he said, 'I'm a part-time package designer'. But it's a brilliant design: it's red, white and blue, which of course in America are the colours of patriotism. And then there's a kind of river of white that goes all the way around it, which gives you the sense of the world being cleaned and so forth. So you're connecting cleanliness with patriotism and almost making buying Brillo a patriotic duty and so forth. I mean it's an astonishing piece of work. But Warhol doesn't get any credit for that at all, it was done by Harvey. He just copied it, but in copying it he was maybe doing something philosophical paying tribute to this world of commonplace objects. After all, these products were designed to be consumed; you have to choose some kind of a soap pad or some kind of tomato juice, some kind of soup, and you might as well pick the one that's most appealingly designed, which is what design's all about, that's what commercial art is. And then all these sudden visual virtues, you look at them as if they were art, as if they were art. Maybe Andy's box inherits some of that beauty, I don't know, but most of the boxes he designed aren't particularly beautiful at all.
Alan Saunders: One of the problems here, if we take say, the example of Pierre Menard. Supposing his Don Quixote had reached publication and I picked up a copy of it, without knowing that it was the Pierre Menard Don Quixote, rather than the Cervantes one, I wouldn't realise that. Similarly, I might make a similar mistake with the Andy Warhol. So in order to admire the works in both cases, the fictional one and the actual one, I do need knowledge, in addition to what I can see in front of me.
Arthur C. Danto: Yes, I do think that's important, that when you pick it up and you start reading it you think you're reading about an adult Spanish nobleman in La Mancha etc., and all his hallucinations and fantasies and so forth, and somebody says, 'Oh no, this was written by a 19th century Frenchman, a poet, a symbolist poet, and it's really about language, it's not about Spain at all', you'd say, 'But I would never have known that', and I'd say, 'Well, no, but if you look on the copyright page, you'll see that it's copyrighted 1897' - and so forth, and you'd have to give it a very different interpretation. And suddenly you realise, Well if that's true, we never know whether we're in the presence of art or not. And that really is kind of amazing when you think about it.
I began to have these experiences, I remember once I was out in California, I was invited to give a talk for some of our history students, and I walked past a classroom that was being redone, and I thought to myself, How do I know that that's not just an installation? How do I know that's not a work of art that happens to consist of ladders and paint buckets and so forth? I could do some digging; I'd have to check it out. I mean if I went into the office of somebody and said, 'Is that a work of art or are you just redecorating the room or something?' they'd think I was nuts, but that's the situation. And I love the idea that you might be in the presence of art at any moment, and not know it and then say, 'Suppose I were in the presence of art, how different would it be?' Well in terms of appearance, not different at all, but in terms of meaning it would be pretty different, and would be, as I say, momentously different. And you get all these funny situations that happen. Somebody makes a work of art which consists of a lot of cigarette butts and the janitor just throws it away. I mean that kind of thing has been happening in avant-garde art for a long time.
Alan Saunders: Who then determines whether a particular object is a work of art? I mean is there some, as it were, institution however informal, that's deciding on this, is the custodian of the knowledge, is providing the information that we need to understand that something is a work of art?
Arthur C. Danto: Well, after my paper was published, there got to be a kind of institutional theory of art where there actually was proposed that the art world is an institution, which makes determinations of that sort. Obviously it's not like an election that's held, but there's a certain grain of truth in it. That is to say, that Warhol's box was art in 1964 only for a handful of people who had been participating in a discussion which would have included I suppose, discussing the meaning of Duchamps, and for them, the Brillo box was a work of art whose time had come, and would know what were the reasons, what was the history in virtue of which something like that became possible as art and so forth. And nobody who was not privy to that discussion would have been in any position to talk.
Alan Saunders: You take the view, don't you, that now art is over, the history of art has ended.
Arthur C. Danto: Well no; in a way I do, I did write a fairly well-known paper called The End of Art; what I meant really was it was a dramatic way of saying that there's no longer the possibility even of a direction. I think up until the sixties, it was possible to think of the history of art as an unfolding narrative and what we have to do is to wait and see what's produced, and the next season, and the season after that, and everybody would be interested in what's the next big thing and things like that. Then suddenly, once you begin to get a situation where anything can be a work of art, but you can't tell in advance whether you're in the presence of a work of art or not, then at that point, there's no longer the possibility of an unfolding narrative at all. And when anything is possible, that seemed to me to be the end of things. I didn't mean that people weren't going to go on making art and the paper, The End of Art, was published I think in 1984. There's plenty of art that's been made since then, in fact probably more art's been made since 1984 than had been made from the beginning of time until 1984. So there's a lot of it around. But there's no longer, I think, as I wrote someplace, there'll be surprises, but there won't be any philosophical surprises.
Alan Saunders: Arthur Danto, I've enjoyed our conversation.
Arthur C. Danto: So did I, thanks a lot.
Alan Saunders: Thank you very much for joining us.
Arthur C. Danto: You're altogether welcome.
