TMAR Blog #14: Arthur Danto's "After the End of Art"

I’ve been a lot less prolific on here than I’d intended so far, but that hasn’t been out of laziness or writer’s block; I’ve produced a good 20 pages of notes and abortive drafts on various things that I keep up abandoning. The main one was a meta-critique of the sorry state of cultural critique and art criticism on independent mediums like Substack, which was stupid to begin with since everyone is already sick of the “online commentary complex” and joining in wasn’t going to help anything. I also started something on the “abstract substance” of art, using musical improvisation and poetic metaphor as examples for what happens during the process of artistic production, and I even briefly considered saying something about why I don’t like Kant. Basically I kept finding myself in a situation where I imagined myself jotting down a quick take that immediately turned out to be too complex (or too annoying) to address briefly, so I’d get gummed up and drop it. I’ve always had that problem with essays, which is why criticism is a useful format; it’s a lot easier to deal with a large idea provisionally in reference to a specific subject than it is to take the idea itself head-on.

Anyway, I think I’ve had a breakthrough with all my unwieldy intersecting trains of thought and set up the grounds for a project that I imagine will occupy me for at least a year or two, all thanks to Arthur Danto’s After the End of Art, which I more or less hated. (Apologies to the Danto fans I know.) Still, reading something you disagree with against itself can be more productive than nodding along to something you like, so I do feel some deference towards the book for the response it provoked in me. The core of my issues with the book aren’t entirely fair to Danto to begin with, because a lot of what I think he gets wrong was not yet definitively wrong when the book was written in 1995. I have plenty of little squabbles with art historical asides that range from the bizarre (he sees van Gogh and Gauguin as the key innovators of 19th century French painting, for some unexplained reason) to the indefensible (“. . . there seemed to be no obvious sense in which cubism represented a development beyond impressionism.” [p. 64] ????), he loves Hans Belting (I still want to read his Likeness and Presence for the scholarship on obscure Byzantine painters but I gave up on The Invisible Masterpiece very quickly because his theories of art are unbearably clunky), and it’s all undergirded by a Hegelianism that treats history as something so rigid and strictly knowable that I can’t help but picture him walking through a yard where every other step lands on a rake that flies up and smacks him in the face. So it’s not like I have a particularly generous attitude towards Danto. Still, I can grasp that his assertions about the end of art felt far more legitimate to a person of his generation in the ‘80s and ‘90s than it does now, coinciding, obviously, with Fukuyama’s End of History.

I just glanced at the Wikipedia page on the End of History and saw that the period is now being called a “vacation from history” by some following Brexit, Trump, Ukraine, Gaza, etc., which is a handy reference as to what I mean. Those events are sort of dumbly blunt examples as they’re largely symptomatic of social changes that have been obvious for a while now and just represent the point where the return of what was repressed under liberalism became undeniable even to the New York Times and PBS. My point on the “vacation” then, regarding art, is that artists experienced their era as period in which art history had ended in a real sense, and that feeling of being posthistorical was earnestly productive for a time, roughly from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Trump’s win in 2016. Most of my generation, in their 20s in 2016, had been end of history liberals or flattering themselves as radical leftists while remaining liberals in essence, i.e. we were optimistic about the inevitability of progress and/or felt justified in not really being concerned with it, so we were ripe for a rude awakening. I’ve always thought in retrospect that the appeal of Merlin Carpenter’s work lay mainly in his cynicism existing long before 2016, but I don’t know if I’ve ever consciously formulated it as a Marxist negativity towards the liberal end of history consensus of the ‘00s and ‘10s; maybe I have, it feels obvious. What matters is that it’s clear the period of the end of art/history has been over for nearly a decade and has to be historicized as separate from our own era. The presumptuous self-assurance that things will inevitably progress may have been naive and wrongheaded, but it led to a lot of productivity and enthusiasm that is gut-wrenchingly romantic to remember now. I say this impartially; it was simply a better time for culture, but I wasn’t too into it as it happened. I didn’t like, I dunno, Die Antwoord or Lil B very much when they came out but it’s shocking to compare them to today’s fully-manufactured music climate. It’s still kind of crazy to remember Animal Collective played on David Letterman in 2009, and that now that feels unfathomable. Those are moments from the end of the end of history, and, although I don’t miss the era at all, it’s impossible to look back at it without a sense of loss. I recall very clearly that the end of 2016 felt like the air being sucked out of a balloon, and culturally we’ve never found a way forward the overarching cynicism that ensued, even if I still think it was for the best.

In brief, my theory is that the posthistorical moment was a short repression of or respite from history that carried on culture “outside of” history, but it was actually a means of sustaining culture (like the economy) on artificial life support. The more recent “cultural crash” of the past decade has been a liberation of art into history, which has mostly paralyzed it in large part because these changes haven’t been acknowledged or reckoned with. Art reentered history because of the deluge of information unleashed by the internet’s rise to dominance in the 2010s, which relativized every cultural group’s belief in its own solidity and uniqueness. That is, in the simplest and vaguest terms possible, more or less the thesis of what I’ve been thinking about, but it doesn’t have much to do with Danto so we can put it aside for the time being.

Danto’s famous theory is that Warhol’s Brillo Boxes of 1964 ended art by making it possible for everything to be art. There’s plenty of objections to be made to that, not least pointing out that his great personal revelation may not have been definitive since it led him to give up on being an artist, but the two most important misapprehensions are first, that the strict periodization of art reduces artworks themselves to mere examples of this periodization and second, that this freedom from history that he labels “The End of Art” is far from the liberatory boon he claims it is. A third point would be that “posthistory” was itself a period and Danto was premature in proclaiming its arrival with such finality, which he comes ironically close to realizing when he mentions Greenberg’s own failed predictions about the future of art [p. 102], or the way charged debates like those between realism and abstraction have dissolved over time [p. 120-21], but I’ve already addressed that above.

On the first point, the insistence on an orderly progress of history is largely reinforced by a faulty account of art history that follows the widespread but incorrect assumption that art before modernity developed along lines of an ever-greater mimesis. Steinberg’s “The Eye Is a Part of the Mind” falsifies that narrative more thoroughly than I ever could (I still need to write about that, his argument for Pollaiuolo’s lasting value even after Michelangelo is one of the better things I’ve read in the past year), but it will suffice here to examine a line from p. 50 of After the End of Art. While approvingly discussing Gombrich’s postivist notion of art history, he cites Gombrich quoting Plato from The Greater Hippias, namely that “our sculptors say that if Daidalos were born today and created such works as those that made him famous, he would be laughed at.” Danto calls this claim, that archaic forms of art are self-evidently made ridiculous in comparison to more realistic ones “a wonderful piece of perceptual wisdom.” I’ll reserve my judgment regarding that line’s truth for the Greeks, but for us it’s indefensibly stupid. Do we laugh at Pollaiuolo, or Egyptian hieroglyphics? I prefer Romanesque churches over Renaissance churches, I prefer Renaissance painting over Baroque painting, and I prefer Baroque music to Renaissance music. For that matter I don’t think anyone can make a particularly convincing argument for an objective hierarchy between, say, Manet, Jackson Pollock, and Rosemarie Trockel. All these things are simply different, and while any lover of art should have some appreciation for all of them, I don’t see the any legitimate means for determining some sort of definitive sequence of progress, either before or after modernism. Moreover, adhering to that logic of progress unravels the use of judgment and historical knowledge by putting it on a one-note linear track and therefore obscuring the need to actually know anything about art: if the conditions of art are a guaranteed historical progress then that history is already achieved by our making it in the present, so there’s no need to consider the relative success or failure of anything. Danto would protest this flippant oversimplification, I’m sure, but my point is that his account seems to want to leave no room for a consideration of art outside of this narrative. At some points this mindset leads to strained, embarrassing metaphors, like comparing an abstract painting that is composed only of brushstrokes to a play where the “production consist[s] only of stagehands pulling ropes and moving flats,” as if all mediums have the exact same relationship to their materials, but it mostly leaves open the void of his second problem, the presumption that the end of this history guarantees artistic freedom.

Even if I agreed with Danto’s argument for the End of Art, which I don’t, his idea that everything is possible after the Brillo Boxes is still unworkable. If everything was possible it would be possible for an artist to make art for 50 years on the subject of a single speck of dirt. There’s hypothetically nothing stopping anyone from doing that, but practically speaking there’s every reason not to and the possibility of anyone actually wanting to do so is slim to none. Even if someone did it’s fair to assume the art would be worthless. Freedom is never a patent absolute in these terms because countless interlocking conditions of social and subjective contingencies force everyone into very specific situations that they do not have full control over. The possibility of “doing whatever you want” is never truly unbounded; it’s only a state of mind, albeit a powerful and desirable one. It would be fair, in fact, to call the very act of making art as carving out a space for fostering and perpetuating that sense of freedom. Danto had that feeling when he saw a reproduction of Warhol’s Brillo Box in a magazine, and his philosophical convictions led him to believe that art itself was over because of it. What he failed to recognize was the historical contingency of that gesture, that pop art may have represented a freeing rupture for him in 1964 but was not a freeing rupture for everyone for all time. Pop art is now a historicized genre, and while it is an important vector of ‘60s art, it’s one among a number of currents and arguably a relatively limited one. The dumb-as-rocks exhibitions at Taglialatella Galleries prove definitively that pop culture appropriation as it was done in Warhol’s time has almost nothing in common with its reiteration in the present, which is not to say that pop itself is worn out, just that a proper pop gesture in 2025 requires something that Danto’s account of posthistorical freedom doesn’t account for.

In simple terms, even if we grant that artists are now free to do whatever they want in a way that’s unique in comparison to the past, another problem emerges out of that freedom that seems to me to be the great problem of contemporary art: What the hell do artists want to do? How do they discover the conditions of wanting to do something? What we want is culturally conditioned, of course, and the cultural conditioning of the art world encourages artists to be purely unique geniuses while still in art school, only they’d better be malleable, cooperative geniuses that make unthreatening paintings that people want to buy. This is a dreadfully poor situation for an artist to discover what they really want, in the terms I’ve suggested of finding a sense of freedom. The market is certainly not free. Whatever, we know this. If Danto experienced a life-changing break with historical continuity in the ‘60s, that’s not particularly surprising because many people did around then. Things changed frequently and rapidly, and epiphanies were easy to come by. It felt as though culture was changing in some definitive way, leaving the past behind, setting the stage for something else. For many reasons those utopian dreams didn’t come to pass, and that bubble of idealism has long since been popped by the ruthless hand of market rationality. The reason that most interests me, and concerns us here, is that people who were adults in the 1960s experienced these ruptures because they had grown up in the more stable climate of an earlier culture that made stronger claims (however illusory) about its objectivity and the inescapability of its norms. The suggestion that things were otherwise was a thrilling prospect and led to a lot of things, some great, some half-baked, some awful. The problem is that culture has never restabilized, for better or for worse, so what was once experienced as an exciting break is now little more than a muddle of misery and distraction in our atomized, online non-culture. Society continues its ruptures unabated, but it only sows malaise, anomie, and vertigo. On p. 147 Danto lauds the fact that there is “no favored vehicle for development any longer,” which elides the basic problems of what development is and how one can do so without a vehicle. Starting with Millennials that problem has stopped being one that we can defer or assume will work itself out. What I’m interested in now is how to address that, which inevitably has to do with the internet as the problem and, to my own surprise, I think has to do with the internet as a solution, albeit an extremely pessimistic and far-from-ideal one.

This is just a brief sketch about something much larger than Danto framed in relation to his book, so I’ll leave it off here for now. From here on I’m planning to flesh out these ideas continually, probably piecemeal and usually in relation to other writing. As always, “Don’t forget to like and subscribe!”