Interview with Arthur Danto

We are delighted to inaugrate our series of interviews with prominent thinkers with
Professor Arthur Danto. Professor Danto kindly invited Naked Punch's New York
correspondent, Tully Rector, to his apartment for what turned out to be an enjoyable and
informative conversation.

Tully: How would you characterize the difference between the post-historical
moment and what you call “the era of art”, in terms of this transition in the
60s?
ACD: You know the slogan they had at the time, where they talked about
overcoming the gap between Art and Life—this was something that Fluxus
talked about a lot—and Rauschenberg in a famous quotation said that he
“worked in the gap between Art and Life”, and what he meant was that you
could make art out of anything at this point. “A pair of socks”, as he put it.
That idea, that you’re interested in eradicating in some way or overcoming in
some way the gap—that’s the word—between Art and Life, I think that
characterizes it. Which opens up a great deal. The materials of the artist when
Rauschenberg began, like his work Monogram, I mean he takes a stuffed goat
and puts a tire around its midriff and slathers paint on it. Or he uses Coke
bottles. From about ‘57 to ‘64 if you’re thinking in terms of periods,
Rauschenberg and Johns ultimately connect, think of tributaries flowing in,
with Duchamp and Cage and then Fluxus, Pop, these other things. Think of
Minimalism, for example, which begins to open up in the middle ‘60s, using
pre-fabricated sides of houses. Robert Morris used piles of hemp, flax, things
of that sort, that’s what I had in mind. That you can’t tell whether it’s a work
of art by looking at it any longer. From that perspective I think aesthetics
drops completely out of the picture. So then what are you involved with?
You know I came across this wonderful formulation recently. There’s a book
by a guy who’s at Oxford named Joseph Koerner, The Reformation of the Image,
and at one point he talks about Hegel: he refers to a transition from “an
aesthetic of forms to an aesthetic of meanings”, and I think that’s it. In that
book he talks about keeping iconoclasm at bay when the Reformation was
taking place, and everyone was saying we don’t need images any more.
People had become devoted to images and these icons that they prayed to,
and they said that was in violation of the second commandment, so they
began tearing them down, smashing crucifixes. Then Luther began to work
out an extraordinarily interesting set of ideas in which the image would be
understood as a text. It embodied the same ideas that Luther was trying to
get across in his sermons. He talks a lot about this altarpiece in the church at
Wittenberg by Lucas Cranach which tries to do that, particularly in the
predella, where in the center is a crucifixion that looks sort of like a
sculpture. You start to wonder what a sculpture would be doing there and are
led to reflect on the reality of the crucifixion. It’s an interesting idea and I
think that something like that, where meaning replaces form as a central
organizing concept for thinking about art, that’s something that happened as
a result of this transformation in the 60’s. I’ve got this idea but I haven’t
published a lot on it yet, actually, that one of the main things that helped
crystallize all this in New York in the 60’s was Zen. Daisetz Suzuki’s lectures
up here at Columbia on Zen.
Tully: You wrote about that in your essay on Munakata.
ACD: On Munakata, yes! And I’ve got an essay but it’s not out yet called
“Upper West Side Buddhism”. I listened to Suzuki, went to those lectures,
and Cage would come up, Guston would come up, Duchamp, that whole
Suzuki thing was very important at the time. Cage’s idea was basically just
that, overcoming the gap between Art and Life. Why shouldn’t any sound be
a musical sound? Why restrict it to just the sounds that classically have been
regarded as musical sounds? You know the famous piece 4’ 33”?
Tully: It had its anniversary a couple years ago.
ACD: Yes, it was 1952 the first time it was performed up in Woodstock,
New York. It was performed by Anthony Tudor. Essentially you let the
sounds of the world flow in and that’s the piece. Whatever particular sounds
happen to be occurring, that’s the work.
Tully: And it would be the structure of silence that permits those sounds to
flow in.
ACD: Well, in a way it is. But the silence isn’t necessarily part of the
meaning. If somebody should play Bach while that’s happening, that would
be the piece. But mostly it’s just coughing and shuffling papers and
motorcycles going by. And Suzuki opened things up for that, too.
Tully: You’ve also written about the “disciplined spontaneity” of Zen.
ACD: Yeah.
Tully: Which one could argue has been part of the story of the genesis of art
all along, even in the Romantic period. That art is produced out of a
disciplined spontaneity. “The spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected
in tranquility”, where a logic is generated out of and then imposed back on to
a free flow of emotion. It’s an old idea, at least.
ACD: It’s an old idea, but I think it took on its ontological meaning in the
50’s. What I think was interesting to people at that time was that there’s no
particular way that religion has to be practiced. There used to be all these
books, Zen and the Art of Archery, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, there
are all these ways, or you could cook or whatever and these are all, or can
become, so to speak, religious practices. There is no one way. This was one of
Suzuki’s ideas. At first I thought about spontaneity and I saw that one of the
ways this was taken in was in the Abstract Expressionists’ work, the gesture,
but now I think Zen had less of an impact on Abstract Expressionism than it
did on this other idea: that there is no one way the work of art has to be.
Tully: And you’ve also said that that represents a particular kind of selfconsciousness,
a Hegelian-style self-consciousness on the part of the artistic
tradition.
ACD: I think so. That was the idea, at any rate.
(Laughter)
Tully: Right.
ACD: I’ve been chipping away at these thoughts, one way or the other.
Tully: One interesting way is that, you’ve written that “Art has ended with
the disclosure, with the coming to consciousness, of its own philosophical
structure”.
ACD: I thought that. That’s right. I’ve had a lot of different formulations of
that. The “end of art” idea came to me around 1984 when I published the
first paper. I thought that when it was no longer possible to tell which is a
work of art and which isn’t, that there are no formal differences, so to speak,
then there is no longer the possibility of a direction. That means the end of
“history” for Art. There’s no longer any possibility of a master narrative, and
I think we are really living in that kind of a world at this point. Philosophical
ideas are not supposed to come out like that, but I think Art actually did
come out that way. I got very keen on the question. After all, Hegel talked
about the end of Art in the Lectures on Aesthetics, but he meant something
different. I don’t think he could’ve acknowledged as art most of what I was
perfectly willing, at the end of the 20th century, to see as art. I think he
thought “the end of art” meant that art could no longer do what it had done,
now philosophy could do that…but I’ve lived in a less robust period of
philosophy. People didn’t expect anything of philosophy anymore. They
didn’t know what to do with philosophy anymore. It wasn’t as though art, as
Hegel puts it, was dependent on the senses, was “the sensory presentation of
ideas” and so forth, which philosophy can dispense with. It was a very
different notion, therefore, the “end of art”. It was really a different kind of
thesis. I used to say, a little bit outrageously, that it ended in April of 1964,
which is kind of specific. Things began to fall into place in that way. It kind
of astonished me, but it turned out to be true, this new way that art began to
be made.
Tully: So what ended was not the production but the narrative that had
previously existed to explain, to give meaning to that production, and the
questions about narrative which Duchamp and Warhol and Cage,
Rauschenberg, all the artists you’ve been talking about, the questions their
work represented were all at bottom the question of master narratives. Here
you have the question of art, of what art is, being asked by a work of art itself
from inside the realm of art, and that this is a special kind of selfconsciousness,
maybe a terminal kind. The self-consciousness of metanarrativity.
ACD: That’s right.
Tully: And I was wondering if…I mean you’re right: we are living in what
you call the post-historical moment, where narratives have collapsed across
the board, not just in art. It seems however that there isn’t really anywhere to
go once you’ve made the meta-narrative point. Once you’ve asked the
question of questioning.
ACD: Yeah.
Tully: You either retreat into a kind of nostalgia or studied naiveté, or just
keep boringly repeating the question, or you throw up your hands and say the
hell with it like Duchamp did—
ACD: But people do go on making art in this fantastically diverse way. That’s
what really astonishes me. The impulse to make art is as powerful as it’s ever
been, more powerful in the sense that you don’t even need to have any formal
training. You can just start making it. You go into art schools today and you
find that they no longer teach skills. They no longer teach painting. They may
have it for those who want to make portraits or something, but basically you
go there to work out these ideas. To find out what it is that you want to say
and how you want to say it. The faculty is just there to help you with that
kind of thing. And more and more people want to do it. I was just invited
out to Utah State, in Logan, Utah, way up in northern Utah, and they have an
art department. I was invited out to give a lecture—they do these things,
invite people from New York to come out and give the students some idea
of how people in New York think—and I asked how many art students they
had. Well they had about 650, and I thought that was amazing. Just
wonderful. That 650 people are majoring in art at Utah State. Then I got
back to New York—this turned out to be a magic number—I got back and
asked the head of the visual arts department at Columbia, who was reviewing
applications at the time, about the size of the applicant pool. He said 650
people were applying for 22 places. And at Columbia you’re going to be
paying tuition like you were going to medical school or law school, and
there’s no help. None to speak of, really.
Tully: Jesus.
ACD: Yeah. So people stagger out of art schools these days with this
enormous debt, but this is how they want their lives to be. This is the kind of
life they want to have. And I think a lot about that, I’d like to get a better
idea of why that’s happening, but for one thing most of the formal obstacles
have been withdrawn. You don’t have to have the kind of talent that used to
be necessary to be an artist. You can be an artist in a very different way, and
there are all kinds of means available to you. I was thinking about the end of
the 60’s and into the 70’s, when these marvelous photographers like Nan
Goldin or Cindy Sherman were appearing. Photography was a natural first
step because right away anybody can get a creditable image by means of the
camera. Nan Goldin took something out of vernacular culture, the idea of a
slide show, and that work—The Ballad of Sexual Deependency for example—that
work that she was doing was remarkably good.

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