A Future for Aesthetics

A Future for Aesthetics Arthur C. Danto The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 2, Aesthetics: Past and Present. A Commemorative Issue Celebrating 50 Years of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and the American Society for Aesthetics. (Spring, 1993), pp. 271-277. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28199321%2951%3A2%3C271%3AAFFA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-9 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism is currently published by The American Society for Aesthetics.

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ARTHUR C. DANTO

A Future for Aesthetics

Thisflea is you and I.... John Donne

I have lately been admiring the engravings executed for Hooke's Micrographia of 1665, especially plates xxxiv and xxxv, of the flea and the louse respectively; and I have wondered how, as an art critic, I could account for the uncanny power and strange beauty of creatures which, in Hooke's day, must have been regarded as pests, much as they are today. They are no less fiercely constructed than the mandragores and griffins of mythic imagination, but they at the same time show the limits of the imagination, able to little better, in confecting its creatures, than the mandragore or the griffin. The latter bear out a thesis of Locke's, in that they are composed of parts which belong to the gross anatomy of more or less commonplace creatures, with wings, darting tongues, talons, fangs, fins, and stingers-a bit from here, a bit from there, exemplifications of compound ideas fabricated of simpler elements, themselves derived from experience. Leonardo is recorded to have played in this fashion with membra animalium to fashion cobbled monsters-recombinant amalgams of found pieces. But who could have imagined these bodies, enormous in proportion to their skimpy, haired legs, inadequate, one would suppose apriori, to carry those plated abdomens and heavy, shelled heads? Hooke's flea is a creature as ornamental and as intimidating as a war horse in Nuremburg armor: the hairs stick stiffly out of its body like spikes, and give it the air of armed menace. And the louse, clutching a hair as if a spear, looks like a knight with a blazoned shield and the kind of horned headpiece worn by the Teutonic Order. There is little doubt that these minute creatures have been drawn just as the microscope revealed them to be; but more than visual accuracy is conveyed by the images. They convey a feeling that connects with a whole body of metaphysical

propositions; and it is this expressive supplement that I am somewhat at a loss to explain. Perhaps it has to do with the way the flea and the louse fill the space of their respective plates. The flea's helmet-like forehead all but touches the right edge of the space defined by the plate, and its battery of tail-hairs in fact touches the left-hand edge. That space has no room for anything else, so the insects look monumental. Yet they are not monstrosities, the way gigantesque insects in science-fiction movies are, large in proportion to the cowering humans who strive to evade their dangerous mandibles and slimy exudates. Hooke's plates instead imply that these microscopic creatures are, notwithstanding their size, monumental and imposing in the intricacy and the proportions of their astonishing bodies. The great microscopists of the seventeenth century were possessed by a miniaturist aesthetics. It was not merely that, as Swammerdam proposed, we could, with the aid of the microscope, "find wonder upon wonder, and God's wisdom clearly exposed in one minute particle." It was, rather, that God's skillfulness and artisanry was even more manifest in the universe's invisible detail. Leeuwenhoek felt that greater craft was required to execute tiny mechanisms than large ones that performed the same functions: it takes a better watchmaker to execute miniature timepieces than great clocks, for example. In this view, a flea betrays the hand of the Maker more conspicuously than, say, a horse. Indeed, had Leeuwenhoek written the Book of Job, he would have had God challenge our puny limits not with the Leviathan, but with the flea, to which he devoted no fewer than fifteen letters to the Royal Society. Leeuwenhoek's aesthetics led him to some major discoveries, for example, that fleas are

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51:2 Spring 1993

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism not spontaneously generated from excrement, as Aristotle had claimed, but that they have apparatuses of generation not all that different from animals greatly larger: he was even able to find the spermatozoa of the flea. (Aristotle, wrong as usual, thought such small creatures had no insides whatever, but were organic atoms.) One might as well expect to see a horse spring spontaneously from a pile of manure, the great Dutchman said in his earthy way, as to see a flea materialize from a dab of shit. The microscope's familiar name was pulicarium, or "flea glass"; and Ecce pulex! is the rhetorical gesture of Hooke's engravings. The engravings thus condense the miniaturist aesthetics that defined the world of the classic microscopists, and which those pioneers felt should define our own: the world grows more wonderful as we cross the limits of unaided visibility. They demonstrate as well the penetration by aesthetics of scientific observation. As much as anything, I suppose, I admire the way the microscopists assume that the tremendous skill of the engraver's hand should be turned as readily to something vanishingly small and finally annoying, like lice and fleas, as to the depiction of apocalyptic events: floods, fires, annunciations, crucifixions, final judgments. I admire even more the way these figures insist that nothing could be more wonderful than these minor beings, associated in the common mind with dirt and dogs. When Leeuwenhoek discovered that the tartar between his teeth housed whole populations of animalcules, he felt at once humble and triumphant. I am also struck, if I may say so, by the readiness with which, as aesthetician and art critic, I am prepared to think of works as distant from the masterpieces of high art as the flea is distant from the horse in the common scheme of value. The distinguished historian of Dutch art, David Freedberg, has recently devoted a fascinating essay to the "great book on the insects of Surinams'-Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium-of Maria Sibylla Merian, published in 1705, and which, in Freedberg's assessment, "raises the portrayal of insects to great art." Freedberg cites a passage from Johannes Godaert that could apply immediately to Hooke's formidable flea: insects are "miracles of nature, the irrefragable testimony of infinite wisdom and power. From the outside, they seem to be disgusting and abject, but when you look at them

closely, you soon discover they are very different." And perhaps this sentiment is distilled in Merian's certainly brilliant illuminations, in a book which, according to Freedberg, "stands at the apex of a tradition of scientific examination that has been growing for over a century." What Freedberg is endeavoring to do is to cast toward these pictures of insects something of the same view that Maria Sibylla Merian cast towards insects themselves: they overcome the distinction between high and low. He argues that if we identify art with painting, then the Golden Age of Dutch art ended in 1669, with the death of Rembrandt. "But if one considers art in its better and larger sense, the Golden Age is still at its height at the turn of the century.. . . Artistic energy may be seen to have drained from painting, only to pass into book production and the illustration of natural history." Our vision of art history, but most especially of Dutch art history, has been limited by what he somewhat fashionably calls the "patriarchal view." And the ascription of artistic greatness to Merian is further limited-"bedeviled," Freedberg puts it-"by the low view of illustration in general and the dismissal of natural history drawing as a predominantly female activity: " an inherently feminine because perhaps dependent activity, since there is no illustration without text. Even today, "illustration" and "illustrational" are terms of critical demerit by those who cannot have pondered the engravings of Micrographia, or Merian's luminous beetles. The phases of their metamorphoses are no less epic than the stages of Christ's redemptive ascent through filth and blood to transfigurative radiance. But aesthetics itself, let us face it, is about as low on the scale of philosophical undertakings as bugs are in the chain of being or mere illustrations are in the hierarchies of art. A philosopher whose name is synonymous with the production of books as technical as they are numerous once boasted to me, when I delivered a talk on the ontology of art at his high-stepping department, that he had written not one single word of aesthetics in his entire career. There can be little doubt that some contrast was implied between what he and what aestheticians did, which paralleled perhaps Freedberg's idea of the patriarchal privileging of painting over illustration. Aesthetics was not something the philosophically real man did. And quite apart from the invid-

Danto A Future for Aesthetics iousness of logical machismo, there was in this prolific philosopher's view the conviction that aesthetics has, by contrast with science, nothing to report regarding the real structures of the world. His work was in the philosophy of science, austerely construed, and, as he had little doubt that science must be the vehicle of truth, so had he little doubt that the science of science, as practiced by him, was the truth about the truth. But one great advantage of thinking about scientific illustration of the seventeenth century is the way it communicates to us that scientific and aesthetic considerations were as intermingled in them as were the bloods of the poet of the lady Donne addresses in his poem about that metaphysical flea which had bitten them both: "One blood made of two." Not just art and science, but aesthesis and cognition might concur that "This flea is you and I, and this / Oure marriage bed, and marriage temple is." Try to subtract expression from truth i;~ooke's plate xxxiv! Can aesthesis and cognition be any less commingled today? Or was their marriage an artifact of the era of the early microscope-of The Age of the Marvelous, to cite the title of an exhibition, itself marvelous, which constituted itself a lens through which we could see the mind of the Seicento, filled with the likes of fleas and microscopes? I think the future of aesthetics had better consist of finding this out, and possibly the place to begin is with scientific illustration, as practiced today (photography has not made it obsolete but, rather, more necessary than ever). But alongside this difficult investigation-it is not easy to know to what degree we are able to raise styles of representation to such a level of consciousness that they reveal the structure of consciousness itself-there is the task of clearing away the powerfully disenabling ideas of aesthesis that have tended to define the field, and which make it rather easy for my tough minded colleague to feel there would be no great point in thinking about aesthetics in his endeavor to reconstruct the spiffy language of science. His ideal is to expunge from language everything Frege had in mind by Farbung, leaving its analysis only a matter of unqualified Sinn and Bedeutung. My sense is that Hooke's flea exemplifies a symbol in which Farbung is so inextricably bound up with Sinn that we can almost infer from it the vision of the world held by the author of the Micrographia and by his primary audi-

ence-providing we can do the right sort of art criticism on this image. The flea's aesthetics implied the way Hooke and his contemporaries lived in the universe, and the question surely is whether it is any different for us. Beauty and truth may not be quite one, but they appear to have been sufficiently wed in the Age of the Marvelous that an adequately advanced aesthetics stood a fair chance of being queen of the sciences: show me what men and women hold to be beautiful and I will show you what they hold to be true. And the rhetorical question of the last sentence but one implies my view: that it is possible that aesthesis stains so deeply the way we represent the world that no simulation of mental process which seeks to filter it out could approximate the way the cognitive mind actually works. Hume famously wrote that "Beauty is no quality of things themselves, it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." Like the eye of the beholder, alternatively allocated as Beauty's residence, "the mind" is meant as a sort of philosophical attic in which the madwoman of aesthetic coloration is kept out of ontology's way. But there are an awful lot of things that have been taken seriously by tough-minded philosophers that other philosophers have supposed exist merely in the mind: time, space, and causality, to name a few. And while these may be but forms for the organization and rationalization of experience, it would be a neat trick to try to describe "things themselves" without using them. Kant had no way of doing that, and the things in themselves are described only privatively, as that to which the forms of the mind do not apply, leaving "things themselves," as Hume used the term, so commingled with the forms that we can hardly disassociate them. Hume did like to speak of causality as something the mind projects onto the neutral fabric of the world, leaving unclear how we are to represent the pre-projected world to ourselves. In any case, if beauty holds parity of philosophical nature with causality, aesthetics can hardly be discriminated from science in terms of objective authority. As for the eye, it is, after all, an extruded portion of the brain; the brain, in turn, that entire computational system, is mobilized by what the eye finds fair: if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, the brain at the very least keeps the object of beauty in focus, the eyes open and

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism upon it, and the rest of the body's impulses put on hold. In consigning beauty to the eye, the cynic believed it to be subtracted from objects, and in doing so overlooks the whole dense network of neural wiring that connects the eye to the rest of us, and us to the world through it. So in subtracting beauty from the world's objective order, we subtract ourselves from that order, and the philosophical disenfranchisement of aesthetic qualities (in the mind, in the eye) is in effect the self disenfranchisement of us, driven as we are by the colorations of meaning in choosing mates and metaphysical systems. I literally cannot imagine what objects are really like, abstracted from what might ingratiate the eye or satisfy the mind. Simply as a matter of genetics, and without bringing in issues of history and culture, there is probably enough complexity in the architecture of cognition to underwrite the truth of Hume's observation that "each mind perceives a different beauty "-which does not mean that there is no accounting for taste, but that we know too little about the genetics of cognition to be able to do so. On the other hand, and this would have been the other component in Hume's account, there is enough genetic overlap from individual to individual that it would be strange if there were not a few things which humans as humans would not agree were beautiful. Hume wrote that "it is fruitless to dispute concerning tastes," and if he is right, it is because the genetic understructure of aesthetics determines us to the reception of experience so seasoned with aesthesis that there is no opening for the intervention of rational dispute. But it is no less fruitless when tastes concur, when, to use his well-known example, "Whoever would assert an equality of genius between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance than if he had maintained a molehill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean." The two sides of Hume's thesis on taste are underwritten by the same physiology or psychology. The difference is that with the Ogilby-Milton case, the Ogilby-freak can at least be shown why his taste is perverse, why he ought to admire Milton, on the basis at least of the kinds of considerations which enter the criticism of poetry. Still, no one can be talked into liking Milton by such reasoning, when it is Ogilby who has that certain something that excites the soul. There are very

few who know anything about painting who do not reckon Mantegna as among the greatest painters of history. But of those there is a considerably reduced number that actually like Mantegna and perhaps an even greater number that actively dislike him. When we ponder such examples, of course, we have already gone well past genetics, and are dealing with culture and history, bracketed a moment ago. I forebear, even so, commenting on the crippled state of cognitive science in treating us in abstraction from our historical and cultural locations. It is the mind and the eye that locate us in culture and history, but my thought here, from which the engaging tangle of Hume and Ogilby, Milton and Mantegna have distracted me, is that even the prehistoric, precultural eye and mind, if there were such things, would have found beauty in things. On the other hand, the eve that makes the scientific observations and t i e mind that frames the scientific theories are so woven in with the history and culture of their owners that the neat enucleation of aesthesis is, as the Germans say, vorbei. The conjoint title of this journal-The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism-has increasingly been a matter of puzzlement to readers who in fact find very little actual art criticism in it. Either-to be consistent with its content-the title should be The Journal of Aesthetics simply, or-to be consistent with its title-its range of articles should be expanded to contain more of the sort of article which naturally finds a place in such publications as Artforum or October. But, in fact, as David Carrier once observed in a session at an annual meeting, members of the American Society for Aesthetics hardly follow contemporary art criticism, and this recommends just dropping the second conjunct. I have a different view of the matter. I feel, for example, that the wise founders of the Society felt that aesthetics has a reach far wider than the Dreoccupation with art as such-a position one might say is already in place in Kant, who has negligible things to say about art-and they would be dismayed to see how more and more of the content of the journal has been given over to aesthetic questions which more narrowly deal with art, so that aesthetics and the philosophical concern with art have increasingly been seen as synonymous. No: they saw aesthetics as virtually as wide in scope as experience, whether it

Danto A Future for Aesthetics be experience of art or of insects. Then, when it is art itself that is to be dealt with, it should be very largely in the form of art criticism. There is, then, the aesthetics which addresses itself to the encoloration of meanings-to speak in the formal mode-or which penetrates our experience of the world in such degree-to move into the material mode-that we cannot seriously address cognition without reference to it. It would be, on the whole, an immense contribution to our understanding of ourselves as cognitive beings if we were to study, from that perspective, the degree to which we are aesthetic beings, whose minds, as the in-the-mind-of-thebeholder sort of theory allows, are filled with (aesthetic) colorations and preferences. In brief, we allow the disenabling theory of aesthetics and use it as a pivot on which to argue for a disenabling theory of cognitive science, which fails to factor in what is "in the mind of the beholder." That means, in my view, that the progress of cognitive science is held hostage to aesthetics, and bound to be retardataire so long as the best work in aesthetics continues to restrict itself to conceptual questions of art. The future of aesthetics is then very much to be understood as the aesthetics of the future, construed as a discipline which borders on philosophical psychology in one direction and the theory of knowledge in the other. So much for the in-the-mind part of the disenabling formula. The other part-"of the beholdern-is disenabling in a different way: it assumes, which has been the practice since Kant, that aesthetics concerns primarily what transpires in the mind of beholders, and treats aesthetics as essentially a contemplative address to objects, divorced from practical considerations of every sort. We aestheticize only when the world is, so to speak, on hold. My view, on the other hand, is that if aesthetic considerations are commingled with cognition, and cognition itself harnessed to practice, contemplation is not the defining aesthetic posture at all. (As if we leave aesthetics behind when we snap out of our contemplative stances and duke it out with reality!) We may no doubt pause to admire the starry heavens above and the moral law within, but those parentheses of contemplation in no way exhaust all the ways in which we relate aesthetically to the world. So perhaps what we might call the aestheticization of aesthetics is by far the

most disenabling strategy of all. Just think about Hooke's flea once more: it instructs us in how the flea looks, but it does more than that by instructing us how to think and feel about the flea and about a world which has such creatures in it. I am content to follow the lead of David Freedberg in campaigning to have illustrations accepted as art. But that does not mean that henceforth plate xxxiv of Micrographia just becomes a focus for contemplation, to be viewed in the recommended disinterested way. It is no use promoting something to the status of art if that means putting it forever on cognitive sabbatical. But this brings me now to the topic of art criticism.

The Transfiguration of the Commonplace took a fairly hostile position on the aesthetic, but the target of the hostility was two-fold: detached and disinterested aesthetics, which is so salient in the philosophical tradition, and, beyond that, the tacit view, implicit in our practice, that art and aesthetics are so closely linked that they are somehow inseparable. My view was that aesthetics does cot really belong to the essence of art, and my argument was as follows. Two objects, one a work of art and the other not, but which happen to resemble one another as closely as required for purposes of the argument, will have very different aesthetic properties. But, since the difference depended on the ontological difference between art and non-art, it could not account for the difference in aesthetic qualities. The aesthetic difference presupposed the ontological difference. Hence, aesthetic qualities could not be part of the definition of art. True, the work of art has a set of aesthetic qualities. But so does that which resembles it without being a work. It may further be true that these are aesthetic qualities of different kinds. I am not quite sure there are two kinds of aesthetic qualities, but in any case one would need the concept of art to say in what the difference must consist. So I was able, pretty much, to put aesthetics on ice in working out, so much or so little as I was able, the defining character of works of art. Let me now illustrate my claim by considering the example which carried me so great a distance in that book and elsewhere: Warhol's

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Brillo Box of 1964. Now Brillo Box served a purpose in making vivid the deep question in ontology, of how something could be a work of art while other things, which resembled it to the point where at least their photographs were indiscernible, could not. The mere Brillo boxes which are not works of art nevertheless are not mere things; unlike mere fleas, they are among the kinds of things Joseph Margolis has called cultural emergents, which, like artworks, embody meanings. The interesting thing is to show how the meanings of these two cultural emergents differ, and hence how their aesthetics differ. Or better: to show the difference in the art criticism of these two objects. The "real" Brillo box, which actually houses Brillo pads, was designed by an artist, Steve Harvey, who was a second generation Abstract Expressionist more or less forced to take up commercial art. It has, in fact, a very marked style, which situates it perfectly in its own time and there are some very marked connections between it and some of the high-art styles of that time. Its style, however, differs sharply from that of Warhol's Brillo Box, which has almost no connection to those very high art styles at all. Where Warhol's is cool, it is hot, even urgent in proclaiming the newness of the product it contains, the speed with which it shines aluminum, and that its twenty-four packages are GIANT SIZE. Speed, gigantism, newness, are attributes of the advertising world's message-they pertain as certainly to that discourse as moon, blood, love, and death pertain to the discourse of poets. Warhol's work was very new indeed in 1964, but were we to read the NEW! as proclaiming that fact, the work would have a subtlety and cleverness we would not attribute to the box's design as such. The design uses sans-serif lettering-the lettering of the newspaper headline-to underwrite the urgencies of its message, and my hunch is that Harvey was influenced, in his motif, by certain themes in hard-edge abstraction. But none of this pertains to Warhol, who felt no such influence and had no such message. The wavy white band connotes water; the capitalized BRILL0 exemplifies spotlessness in a blaze of chromatic clarity against the white (a few years later the paint might have been Day Glo). Warhol just took all this over without participating in the meaning at all. For him, at best the sheer banality of the box was meaningful, and this, internal

to his box, was an external assessment of the commercial container. But to Harvey, the box was not banal at all. In any case, in point of meaning the two could not be more different. Though Brillo Box and the Brillo boxes belong more or less to the same moment in history, so far as external chronology is concerned, nothing about the Brillo boxes would enable you to know that there was an art work like Warhol's. You might infer from Harvey's boxes the existence of an art from which he derives his motifs and his reductions: almost invariably, advertising art draws on high art paradigms. But there is scant connection between Brillo Box and those paradigms: the nearest affines to Brillo Box would have been what Oldenberg and Lichtenstein were doing. But there are no interesting stylistic affinities between the various Pop artists, and certainly no affinity at all between Harvey's box and any of Warhol's affines-say a plastic hamburger by Claes Oldenberg. The real Brillo box could not have been done in, say, 1910, but for reasons altogether different from those which explain why Warhol's Brillo Box could not have been done in 1910. For all that they resemble one another, they belong to different histories, and though Harvey's work would be unthinkable without a certain kind of abstraction, and Warhol's boxes, of course, unthinkable without Harvey's boxes, Warhol's work was itself in no way dependent upon those kinds of abstractions, coming from a different space entirely than Harvey's. These differences could be protracted, but I have written enough at this point to underscore, I hope, the aesthetic differences between the two works and the way in which these aesthetic differences are exactly the differences between the art criticism appropriate to the two objects. I have no difficulty in accepting the commercial art as art for the same reason that I have none in accepting the scientific illustrations of the seventeenth century as art. But in this particular instance the differences, if not of a kind, are perhaps of a quality. Steve Harvey's boxes are about Brillo and about the values of speed, cleanliness, and the relentless advantages of the new and the gigantical. Warhol's iconography is more complex and has little to do with those values at all. In some ways it is philosophical, being about art or, if you like, about the differences between high art and commercial art. So Hegel may be

Danto A Future for Aesthetics right that there is a special kind of aesthetic quality peculiar to art. He impressively says it is, unlike natural aesthetic qualities (he uses the term Beauty, but that was the way aestheticians in his era thought), the kind of aesthetic quality which is aus dem Geisre geboren und wiedergeboren. But that is no less true of the aesthetic qualities of the Brillo boxes as of Brillo Box. We would expect nothing else, given that both are dense with meaning, and, in a sense, aus detn Kultur geboren. It may be less important to distinguish high from low art than either from mere natural aesthetics of the kind that we derive from our genetic endowment. So my concluding proposal is this: we understand the aesthetics of art as art criticism, just as I am supposing the founders of our society did,

enshrining the difference between aesthetics and the aesthetics of art-between what Hegel calls Schoenheit and what he calls in contrast Kunstschoenheir-in the conjoint title of the journal they established. Hegel, by the way, showed us how to do the kind of art criticism I fumbled towards in discussing the great engravings of the flea, in his marvelous-I would say unparalleled-passages on Dutch painting, and on the differences between it and what he terms modern painters who attempt the same things. Just as a matter of interest, Hegel does not once use the word "beauty" nor any of the standard predicates of aesthetic vocabulary. As art critic as well as aesthetician, Hegel shows us both dimensions of our future.