Tully: So would you say then that now you need, really, a talent to notice or a
talent to think, rather than a talent to craft?
ACD: Exactly. That’s it. I mean, Barbara and I just visited her nephew, who’s
a sculpture student at Rutgers, and he’s building these intricate house-ofcards
structures with tiles painted with nail polish. He gets all the girls to give
him their old nail polish. It was really quite beautiful and he has this
incredible patience. So you know it seems to be a transformation of a really
remarkable sort. I felt with the Whitney Biennial of 2002, where you had all
of these artists that no one ever heard of, that they were all working. Here was
a beautiful work: it was a little collaborative called Praxis, just a man and a
woman and they had this little storefront down in the East Village. You
could go in on Saturdays and get one of three things: you could get a hug,
you could have a band-aid put on and they would kiss it, or you could ask for
a dollar and they’d give you a dollar. Simple things, but people would go in,
they’d line up, get hugged, ask for a band aid—she’d put it on and make
them feel better—or they’d get a dollar. And I thought, God how simple can
life get, but there was something very moving about that work. It was
interactive, people just came in, the couple were being artists in this kind of
way. I thought it had a lot of meaning.
Tully: Would you say that the meaning of this particular work, for example, is
mostly intelligible because it’s in dialogue with the institution of the Whitney?
That here there’s this very simple practice going on, you know, playing with
the idea of the museum as this sacred hall of seriousness.
ACD: Yes and no. When the curator found them they were doing the same
thing. Praxis already existed out there, they had their storefront, and when
they took it into the museum it was a performance. At certain times you
could come and participate in this performance, but the performance was
ongoing. So it didn’t draw its energy from the institutional factor of the
Whitney. It was the other way around.
Tully: Do you think that this radical stylistic freedom, formal freedom,
demands new responsibilities? A lot of conservative art critics claim that with
the expansion of styles, the plurality of styles as permissible outlets for artmaking,
that the critical principles—what you might call the discourse of
justification—hasn’t caught up with this radical expansion, hasn’t kept pace
with it.
ACD: I think that it has in a way. But that’s the problem. That’s just it: as a
critic, what do you do, you know? You try and find out what’s happening, try
and explain it, explain it to yourself.
Tully: Do you think that art now has a much deeper obligation to be
interesting because it has so much more formal freedom?
ACD: Well I don’t know the answer to that. I think it’s always pretty
interesting because it has so much autobiography in it, and individual lives
are interesting. I feel as though it’s evolving in ways that I don’t have any
control over. As a critic I feel that I can’t redirect it, and neither can Hilton
Kramer. He can’t redirect it.
I: Thank God.
(Laughter)
ACD: You try and give people a sense of where things are going and you
can’t do much more than that. But the obligation to be interesting, yeah, in
some sense that’s true. The diversity of things that you see when you go
down to Chelsea just amazes me. There’s a young artist that’s a friend of
ours, Janine Antoni. Do you know Janine?
Tully: Lick and Lather?
ACD: Yes, right. She’s an interesting artist. Most of her work is connected
with her body in some way. She paints floors with her hair as a brush, draws
with mascara, with her eyes—she calls them “butterfly kisses”, a page of
butterfly kisses. It’s very feminine, everything involves some aspect of her
body. She had this idea and worked on it for a year, learning to do tightrope.
She learned how to weave flax and made a tightrope, then learned to walk it,
and made a large cushion for her to fall on. In the work she walks across the
tightrope and at a certain moment falls and leaves an impression of her body
in that. And the whole thing is the work. It’s very magical, very poetic.
Tully: Very Peircean.
ACD: Yeah. But, you know, the guy who reviewed it at the Times couldn’t see
it. He thought it was an artworld spoof of some kind. That’s the trouble, if
you just rush in and don’t ask any questions, or think its wrong to ask
questions, you’re going to write something silly and you’re going to make the
work look silly. To work for a year and get a review like that? And you have
to review Janine because she’s an important artist, but to do it in that way,
that’s a critical disgrace as far as I’m concerned. But I feel that happens a lot,
people don’t do the work that they need to do to find out what’s really
happening. Critics have something against fraternizing with artists or they
feel like they can go in and tell right away whether something’s good or not,
just by looking at it, things of that sort.
Tully: So this kind of work, instead of contributing to the deterioration of
critical principles or whatever, like some conservative art critics claim,
actually tries to cultivate a quality of attention that is pretty rare, you know, in
the world, with everything moving so fast.
ACD: I think so. It’s analogous to what Paul de Man called “close reading”.
It doesn’t just mean peering, it means doing a little legwork, trying to find out
what’s really going. And then you form a judgment on top of that—was it
worth it, is it any good, and so on.
Tully: Do you think that philosophical aesthetics has kept up with the
development of art?
ACD: A little bit. People who are doing aesthetics, younger than me for sure,
but people who have been influenced…what I did, I think, more than
anybody, was to bring contemporary art into philosophy.
Tully: People like Shusterman? He works a lot with contemporary art.
ACD: Shusterman, absolutely. Absolutely. And people like Dave Horowitz,
who writes about Richter. Contemporary aesthetics is one of the most
interesting parts of philosophy now because there is that vital connection
between what happens in the art world and people working philosophically,
working with what they are given.
Tully: Do you think that the work that goes on in the art world, especially
under this expanded concept of art, produces specific kinds of truths that are
maybe different from the kinds of truths philosophers produce or discover?
ACD: I don’t know the answer to that, but I do feel that there are lots of
things that artists are dealing with that philosophers aren’t dealing with,
issues of gender, sex, moral issues.
Tully: Political issues.
ACD: Poltical issues definitely.
Tully: I mean just look at Richter, and what he was able to do in October 18,
1977. It was a tremendous achievement.
ACD: That’s right. And everybody’s doing it. There’s this great hole out
there that artists are dealing with and philosophers are not, and I’d like to see
philosophers do it a bit more.
Tully: Why do you think philosophers don’t deal with it?
ACD: I don’t know, I think there are certain constraints in academic life that
prevent that from happening. If you’re a philosopher it means these days that
you’re ambitious for an academic career, and that means you must have a
certain kind of bibliography and certain standards. I don’t knock it, by any
means. Philosophy has absolutely been a great in a period when everything
else has gone to hell in the academy. I mean the intellectual values, the
virtues of logic, the virtues of clarity, that philosophy has endured. If anyone
wanted to rebuild the curriculum, the only thing they’ve got is philosophy to
work with because everything is swamped.
Tully: But some people would claim that they’ve preserved certain standards
at the cost of a greater dialogue with, as you’ve said, real cultural and human
issues.
ACD: They may have, yeah. I think that’s true and I think philosophy has
paid a pretty heavy price for that. But I’m not so sure the way in which
anyone else in the academy has dealt with it is very good either.
Tully: Do you think that it’s a necessary price? That there’s an inverse
relation between precise academic defensibility and real depth or
inclusiveness?
ACD: No, I don’t think that. I think it would be great if philosophers took
on more of it. I don’t know if post-analytic philosophy will…there was a
reader some years ago, right, an anthology of post-analytic writing?
Tully: You’re in it. An essay you wrote…
ACD: It was my APA address.
Tully: Philosophy as/and/of Literature
ACD: That’s right. Who edited it? It was John Rajchman and…
Tully: Cornel West.
ACD: Cornel West. It was a great idea, that book.
Tully: Rorty and Cavell were in there too.
ACD: And Donald Davidson.
Tully: He had very interesting things to say about literature, about the
operations of metaphor, Davidson did.
ACD: Well he was a very cultivated man. You know he was a classics scholar.
Tully: He wanted to be a novelist when he was young.
ACD: Really? I never knew that. It would’ve been rough, because Donald for
a long time had this writer’s block. I mean he couldn’t even write philosophy
for years and years. He had therapy, was psychoanalyzed, and that broke this

page 2/3
--> Next Page