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Notes & Comments

March 2014

But is it art?On art: context, meaning, and vandalism

Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917


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A couple of months ago in this space, we said farewell to Arthur Danto, thephilosopher and art critic, who died last fall at eighty-nine. Professor Danto had

interests in philosophy that were distinct from his interest in art, but there was one

area of overlap. It revolved around the question What is art? Professor Danto had

many clever things to say about this question, particularly in his book TheTransfiguration of the Commonplace(1981). Why is it, he wondered, that one red

square is just a red square while another, visually indistinguishable from the first, is

Number 34, a contemporary abstract masterpiece in the collection of the Museum of

Modern Art? Or imagine two additional red squares, both indistinguishable from each

other and the first two red squares. One of this second pair is a storm advisory issued

by the weather service: you can see on the internet whenever a storm approaches. The

other let us callKierkegaards Anguish, an audacious and brooding piece of artistic

appropriation on view at a trendy Chelsea gallery.

You might be tempted to say that a red square is a red square by any other name, andleave it at that. But Professor Danto was quite right, we believe, in pointing out that the

four red squares he asks us to imagine have very different semantic structures. The first

really is just a red square. It does not signify anything beyond itself. The second,

however, does point beyond itself. The heir to work by Mondrian, Ad Reinhardt, Frank

Stella, Robert Ryman, and other abstract artists,Number 34occupies an interesting

place in the history of abstract art, and is intelligible only within that context. Had it

been just a red square, MOMA would not have paid $1 million to acquire it. The third

square, the one issued by the weather service, also points beyond itself, but in a

different way fromNumber 34. It means a storm is coming: a useful advisory, but not

something that would interest MOMAs acquisition committee. The fourth square, by

an as-yet-unknown artist eking by in a shabby one-room apartment, is an ironic

commentary on the entire artistic tradition in whichNumber 34stands.

Kierkegaards Anguish is visually indistinguishable fromNumber 34, but it has a very

different artistic temperature and occupies a very different place in recent art history.

There are those who believe that such Dantoesque thought experiments are tooingenious to take seriously. We understand the impatience. But we also believe that

they pose interesting semantic questions. Where we dissent from Professor Danto is on

the question of whether such speculations tell us much about art. As a piece of

philosophical lucubration, Professor Dantos thought experiment is both ingenious and

unsettling. We are doubtful that it has much, if anything, to do with the metabolism of

artistic practice.

That said, there is no doubt that the art world is a strange place. If anythingcan be a


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work of art, how then can you define what art is? To define means to make definite,

to draw a border around something: This sort of thing here is art, but that sort of thing

over there isnt. These were the sort of reflections that kept Arthur Danto scribbling

away. His trip to Damascus involved a stop at the Stable Gallery in the early 1960s,

where he saw Andy WarholsBrillo Boxes. If such objects could be taken seriously as

works of art, he asked himself, what couldnt?

It was a good question, though whether it makes Warhol the nearest thing to aphilosophical genius the history of art has produced, as Professor Danto wrote, is

another matter. In essentials, the semantic drama Professor Danto found in Andy

Warhol had its debut half a century before in the work of Marcel Duchamp. Indeed,

Duchamp helped to inaugurate the two chief currents of artistic nullity which still, even

now, dominate the art world. With his readymadesordinary objects torn from

everyday life and presented as works of arthe ushered in the great tradition of artistic

banality that occupies so many rooms of so many galleries and museums to this day.Duchamp impishly dusted off an ordinary bottle rack, put it in an art gallery, and said:

How about it? How many thousands of artists have followed suit, parroting Duchamps

nihilistic gestures ad nauseam?

Duchamp also popularized the tradition of the transgressive that has made so muchadvanced contemporary art a tired exercise in dreary but predictable histrionics. In

1917, Duchamp shocked the more decorous precincts of the art world withFountain, a

urinal signed R. Mutt and presented as a sculpture. It takes a lot more than a

plumbing fixture to shock the jaded palettes of todays beautiful people. But behind

every beaker of bodily fluid you see in an art museum, behind all the pathetic outr

exhibitionism of anti-bourgeois bourgeois animus masquerading as art, you can

discern the sinister rictus of Marcel Duchamp.

To a large extent, the art world today represents the institutionalization of Duchampsearly-twentieth-century pranks. The great irony is that Duchamp intended not to

extend the boundaries of art but to short-circuit the entire project of aesthetic

delectation. I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into to their faces as a challenge, henoted contemptuously, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

Duchamp had the courage of his contempt. He gave up on art entirely and devoted

himself to chess.

The world of art is not coterminous with todays Duchamp-inspired art world. Thereare plenty of artists uninfected by the nihilism of Duchampian banality and the new

Salon of pseudo-avant-garde outrage he helped to found. But the art world, as distinct

from the world of art, is largely a rancid compact of Duchampian decadence, cynically

milking the prestige of art for an enterprise that is more about the exhibition of

politicized snobbery, celebrity, and the incontinent expenditure of money than artistic


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afflatus or aesthetic excellence. The result is a cultural situation that is aesthetically

exiguous but sociologically complex, not to say inadvertently comic. We were reminded

of thisthe aesthetic nullity and the rich, sociological comedyby a recent story

involving the Chinese celebrity artist-activist Ai Weiwei and the non-celebrity Florida

painter Maximo Caminero.

We doubt there is a more trendy contemporary artist than Ai Weiwei. The fifty-six-year-old artist has managed to combine the gestures of avant-garde knowingness and

single-minded cultural entrepreneurship in a way that makes even stars of the genre

like Damien Hirst look like amateurs. Ai has also garnered an unassailable aura of

authenticity through his courageous criticism of the oppressive Chinese state. But if Ai

has been a thorn in the side of the establishment, the establishment has more than

reciprocated, harassing and jailing the artist, who was beaten so severely by the police

in 2009 that he required emergency brain surgery.

But what about the work? Its difficult to offer a generalization, because much of it ismore activity than art. Ais photographs are part of his artistic oeuvre, but what about

his activities as a blogger? It is hard to say. But this encyclopedia description of

Disposition, Ais contribution to the fifty-fifth Venice Biennale, provides a good sense

of the feel and sensibility of his work:

Disposition. . . is composed of two major projects,Straightand S.A.C.R.E.D. The

first work is an installation made of steel rebars salvaged from collapsed school

campuses during the Sichuan earthquake on 12 May 2008, which are straightened

by hand after they were bent by the force of the earthquake. The second project,

S.A.C.R.E.D., is composed of six metal containers, each depicting a scene during

Ais eighty-one-day secret detention. The title is an acronym for the six episodes

illustrated in the work, standing for Supper (eating), Accusers (interrogation),

Cleansing (shower), Ritual (walking), Entropy (sleep), and Doubt (toilet).

In some ways, perhaps, Ai is a sort of Honor Daumier for the postmodern worldfullof biting satire and specializing in acerb parodybut without the stupendous graphic

command that made Daumier a great artist as well as a social critic.


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Link to this Video | More video from guardian.co.uk

Video via The Guardian

We suspect that Ais celebrity reign will be brief. He is an artist in whom attitudevastly outstrips accomplishment. For the time being, however, he occupies a summit

position in the art world. Which brings us to Maximo Caminero. As we write, Ai

Weiwei: According to What? is on view at the Prez Art Museum Miami. (James

Panero has some appropriately tart things to say about that monument to a collectors

vanity and civic irresponsibility in our January issue.) The show includes large

photographs of Ai smashing a neolithic vase and a table on which stand sixteen Han

Dynasty vases dappled with brightly colored paint. Well, there were sixteen. Thanks to

Mr. Caminero, there are only fifteen now. He did to one of the pots on the table what Ai

did in the photograph. He picked it up and smashed it. I did it, he said, for all the

local artists in Miami that have never been shown in museums here. According to

some reports, the pot was worth $1 million (though Ai calls the figure exaggerated).

This saddened Mr. Caminero, who has been charged with criminal mischief. It was a

spontaneous protest, he said. I was at PAMM and saw Ai Weiweis photos behind the

vases where he drops an ancient Chinese vase and breaks it. And I saw it as a

provocation by Weiwei to join him in an act of performance protest. . . . I had no idea

the vase had any value.

Nice try. Mr. Caminero erred in acting like a celebrity artist without first making

himself a celebrity. Big mistake. Ai Weiwei destroys or vandalizes ancient treasures andit is a metaphor for the conflict between East and West, a conflict between culture and

commercialism. Local Florida artist tries something similar and it is the pokey. You
http://www.guardian.co.uk/videohttp://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/19/ai-weiwei-vase-miami-art-gallery-video


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see what a muddle it all is. Back in the 1980s, a juror in the trial over Robert

Mapplethorpes rebarbative photographs of the homosexual S&M underground

acknowledged that he hated the pictures. But he nonetheless concluded that if people

say its art, then I have to go along with it. Theres a moral here somewhere. But where

is the new Aesop with sufficient eloquence and authority to draw it for us?

This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 32 March 2014, on page 1

Copyright !2014 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com

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