32 Volume XV, No. 1, 2002 Leon Rosenstein

The End of Art Theory

Leon RosensteinSan Diego State University

In aesthetics . . . one can argue more and better than in anyother subject.

Anatole France1

A Mildly Polemical PrefaceIt needs finally to be said, in paraphrase and in extension of

Hegel, that art theory on the side of its highest possibilities is a thing ofthe past. How did this come about? How did art theory come to itsdemise?

Things die off in various ways: they wear out, they dissipateinto triviality, they self-destruct, they no longer have any raisondtre. Postmortem analysis of art theory will reveal that at the turnof the millennium it has succumbed to all four of these.

Hegels premature obituary concerns art, of course, and not arttheory.2 The precise and complete quote reads:

1 The Unsubstantiality of Aesthetics from Preface to Life and Letters,trans. Bernard Miall (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1924), reprinted in Literary Criti-cism, Pope to Croce, ed. Gay Allen and Harry Clark (Detroit: Wayne State Univer-sity Press, 1962), 582.

2 Or aesthetics, or philosophy of art, or philosophy of fine artall ofwhich terms Hegel uses with equanimitythough he seems to prefer the first forits precision. See Hegels Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans by T. M. Knox (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1hereinafter cited as Hegel/Knox. An al-ternative translation of the Introduction of this work by F. P. B. Osmaston (tobe found in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, eds. Albert Hofstadter and RichardKuhns (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) is sometimes to be preferredand will be cited as Hegel/Osmaston.

HUMANITAS 33The End of Art Theory

Art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs whichearlier ages and nations sought in it, and found in it. . . . Conse-quently the conditions of our present time are not favorable toart. . . . In all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation,is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for usgenuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into ourideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and oc-cupying its higher place.3

As to the manner and cause of arts end, Hegel adds: it is pre-cisely at this its highest stage that art terminates, by transcendingitself; it is just here that it deserts the medium of harmonious pre-sentation of mind in sensuous shape and passes from the poetryof imaginative ideas to the prose of thought.4 In the present ageHegel claims that the form of art has ceased to be the supremeneed of the spirit,5 because art as a vehicle of the evolution ofSpirit is now no longer competent to bear its load, that this task isnow the burden and right of pure thought, of philosophy (indeed,of Hegel).

Hegel was wrong about the art of his own now (roughly the1820s when he composed his lectures on art which were posthu-mously published after his death in 1831). We all know (or wellbelieve) that arteven great art, on the side of its highest possi-bilitieswas being produced then and has been produced since.But perhaps it was just his timing that was off. Thus, while hisobituary for art may have been premature, that error does not en-tail that in principle the basic assumption on which it rests,namely that of its possibility, is false. Surely it is possible that atsome time art might die.

In fact, I think he may have been right on two counts(1) thatart can demise, on the side of its highest possibilities (after all,other modes of human endeavor have disappeared), and (2) thatupon and through its death, art is destined to be transformed orsubsumed (aufgehoben) into philosophy. Historically, I would ar-gue further (but not here) that arts time probably came severaldecades ago. What I do intend to show, however, is that art theorystime has now arrived.

Arthur Danto and his followers and critics have made much of

3 Hegel/Knox, 10-11. The Osmaston translation has highest possibilites,while Bernard Bosanquets translation has highest destiny.

4 Hegel/Osmaston, 444; in Hegel/Knox at Introduction 8,iii,c,, p. 89.5 Hegel/Knox, 103.

Hegel: Arthas lost forus genuinetruth and life,and has ratherbeen trans-ferred into ourideas.

34 Volume XV, No. 1, 2002 Leon Rosenstein

some of the foregoingthat art might be dead and that it has been(to use Dantos term) philosophically disenfranchised.6 The im-plication is that philosophy has overtaken (more properly takenover) art, in the same fashion as a greater power subsumes aweaker. Danto also, like Hegel, seems to think that the disenfran-chisement (if not quite a necessary event) is a good thingfor artand for philosophy.

While I would agree that philosophy has supplanted art, Iwould view the process in the other direction and reach a differ-ent appraisal. It is, rather, that philosophy has been artistically co-opted, that art has (perhaps from the ennui of exhaustion, perhapsin a crisis of despair, perhaps as an emetic from constipation) at-tempted to transform itself into philosophy, which has become themere handmaiden (or the evil confidante with bad advice) ofart. And I think, further, that this transformation, or transubstan-tiation, is not a good thingneither for art nor for philosophy.

Lamenting the demise by transformation of the great art of thepast, Nietzsche made a similar point in the 1880s in The Will toPower:

No one is simply a painter; all are archeologists, psychologists the-atrical producers of this or that recollection or theory. They enjoyour erudition, our philosophy. Like us, they are full and overfullof general ideas. They like a form, not for the sake of what it is,but for the sake of what it expresses. They are the sons of a schol-arly, tormented, and reflective generationa thousand miles re-moved from the old masters, who did not read and only thoughtof feasting their eyes.7

6 See Arthur C. Danto, The End of Art, in The Death of Art, ed. Berel Lang(New York: Haven Publishing, 1984); Arthur Danto, Art After the End of Art,in Embodied Meanings (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994); Arthur C. Danto,The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press,1986); Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1981); Philosophizing Art (Berkeley: University of Cali-fornia Press, 1999); and Beyond the Brillo Box (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,1992). In the above list I am referring only to the basic or original statements ofthese authors. Of course the literature in the past twenty years regarding thesetheories has been immense. The most recent attempts by Dickie to defend him-self (and, implicitly, Danto) from some of the criticisms I shall point out below,such as circularity and vacuousness on the one hand and inherent crypto-evalu-ation on the other (see The British Journal of Aesthetics 38:2 [1998], 39:3 [1999] and40:2 [2000], respectively), I do not find convincing simply because they lead alongdifferent routes to the same impasses.

7 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale(New York: Random House, 1967), 437.

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One might say of Nietzsche the same as was said of Hegelthathis timing was off. But his point was sound.

Of courseto be polemicalthe fundamental problem withcontemporary art theory, the cause of its demise, has been broughton by its subject matter, by contemporary art. Having stretcheditself to its limits in every directionfrom being a mere sensuousmedium to mere disembodied thoughtart of the last several de-cades became everything and nothing. And died:on the side ofits highest possibilities, of course. Art theory, in consequence, try-ing to swallow this whole realm of being and nothing, simply ex-pired by engorgement (or by starvation, depending on ones view-point).

But having had my polemical moment, I do not wish in whatfollows to address the issue of the death of art per senor whetherthe actual event occurred (or the onset of the disease began) withDuchamps Dadaist ready-mades such as Bicycle Wheel andFountain, or with Kandinskys Nonobjective Expressionism(both of which emerged during World War I), or with Pop Artistssuch as Warhol and Ed Ruscha in the 1960s, or with Conceptual-ism and various forms of Ideological Art (where the idea or mes-sage, even a written text, becomes the art object) in the 1970s. Myconcern is with the death of art theory. I intend to show that con-temporary art theory is at an end and why that is so.

The Context and Scope of the ArgumentI do not want here to discuss the death of art. I do wish to dis-

cuss the death of art theory. But is it merely a happy coincidencethat Dantos preoccupation with the death of art has led him topropose the artworld theory of art and that this has spawnedsuch successors as George Dickies institutional theory of artwhich are the paradigms of art theory at the end of its time? Thereader may let this question pass for the moment as a rhetoricalone, for we need to consider what is meant by art theory at theturn of the millennium, which I am claiming is at its end.

Unlike science, philosophy has never spoken in the collectivevoice of consensus that would allow it to talk about the philo-sophic view of reality in the late nineteenth century, for exampleor about the philosophic view of anything at any time, for thatmatteras one could speak of a similar view in physics. There is

Art of recentdecadesbecameeverythingand nothing.

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no equivalent in philosophy of the quantum theory in physics.Hardly surprising, then, that one cannot really speak of arttheory at the turn of the millennium and expect this to denoteanything so neat as a single theory accepted as tr