Gombrich and Danto on Defining Art

Author(s): David Carrier

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Summer, 1996), pp. 279-
281
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 Discussion
Gombrich and Danto on Defining Art
At this time, when so much has been written about
ArthurC. Danto's definition of art, it may seem that
the entire subject is exhaustedby philosophers.' The
basic positions, it might appear, have been worked
out, and Danto, in turn,has certainly repliedat length
to his critics.With the aim, then, of promotingfurther
discussion, I wish to show that there is at hand an al-
ternativeview deserving serious attention. I want to
presentthis accounthere because it is found in a jour-
nal not, I believe, customarilyread by aestheticians,
and because it is developed by an art historian not
thoughtof as usually taking any special interestin the
concerns of aesthetics. It is convenient to do this by
explaininghow I myself came to identifythis position.
At the beginning of The Story of Art, E. H. Gom-
brich writes: "There really is no such thing as Art.
There are only artists."2In context, in the introduc-
tion of a survey book which, after all, by the next
paragraphgoes on to deal with a variety of other is-
sues, it is easy to pass by this remark.To the extent
that I thoughtabout it, I imaginedthat perhapsGom-
brichintended some referenceto Karl Popper'snom-
inalism. And yet, it is worth stopping here, for in re-
sponse to a recent query he has explained at some
length exactly what he had in mind in this passage:
I go back deliberatelyto the old meaning of the term "art,"
when art was identified with skill or mastery,the art of war,
the art of love, or whatever else. Art is something with a
skill. There's no disembodied skill as such; skill is always
applied to a particulartask. I don't know if you know this
wonderful paper by Abrams on "Art-as-Such,"about the
eighteenth century,now in the volume called Doing Things
with Texts.... he discusses the coming of the new conception
of art in the eighteenthcentury.I very muchrecommendthat
paper,it's absolutely wonderful. He has a paperin that vol-
ume on the aesthetic attitudeand its root in artistic attitudes,
in Kant and so on; and anotherin which he stresses partic-
ularly the role of Shaftesburyand the grand tour,the teach-
ing of milords the role of appreciating art. As he rightly
says, people admired paintings and sculptures,but no one
The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism54:3 Summer 1996
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talkedin the seventeenthcenturyof art as such. So that'sthe
philosophical background.In a sense, it is quite relevantin
the long discussions about Leonardo, art, and science. For
Leonardo,arte was a skill, a know-how applied both to his
scientific experimentsand to painting.3
It may seem initially as if this account, which cer-
tainly makes no reference to Danto's claims, has no
real impacton philosophical analysis. If there are not
artists, or artworks,at least there is this skill, artmak-
ing. The thrust of Gombrich's limited nominalism
thus is merely to displace discussion. If we are not
committedto the existence of persons who make art,
or that sort of object called artworkshaving essential
art-properties,still we accept the existence of a kind
of activity of persons,the activity of artmaking.If we
do not allow the existence of agents, still we admit
that there is an activity performed by those agents.
Nothing very deep, it might seem, has been changed.
But this, I think, is not the entire story, for what-
ever Gombrich'sown intentions, this remarkis rele-
vant to how we philosophers,following Danto, think
about art.4 The target of Danto's critical analysis is
the claim thatart-as-suchhas an essence. If we accept
his account,then what follows is thatthis no longer is
true, not after such artists as Marcel Duchamp and
Andy Warholhave transformedreadymadesinto art-
works. If Fountain and Brillo Box can be artworks,
then no longer is there some distinctive sort of thing
constituting art. No longer does art have an essence,
although at earlier times it did. (What then follows,
Danto argues, is that we live in a posthistoricalera.
Whether his reading of the implications of this dis-
covery that art has no essence is correct is, of course,
another story.)
As he makes clear, Danto's argument only has
force against someone who believes that art perhaps
has an essence. For someone who, following Gom-
brich,thinks thatthere is no such thing as art, Warhol
cannot have the importance which Danto gives to
him. (This reconstructionof the largerframeworkof
280
debate is intellectually satisfying, for it helps explain
why Gombrich has paid very little attention to
Warhol.5)In what he identifies as our posthistorical
period, there will be artmaking,Danto has said, even
though no longer is there a history of art. For Gom-
brich,this history must be understooddifferently.Be-
cause thereis no such thing as art, therecannotbe any
end to the history of art. The skills of artmakingex-
isted before the modernconceptof art was developed,
and could continue to exist even were it discarded.We
may, for example, understandhow the various Re-
naissance mastersdiscussed in The Story of Art were
expert artmakers, even if their culture lacked our
characteristicconcept of art-as-such.
In thus shifting debate from concern with art to
emphasis upon these skills, Gombrich'sframework
offers two importantphilosophical advantages.First,
we no longer need worry aboutwhetherthe history of
art has ended; and, second, we need not ask questions
about when it began. What we are ratherconcerned
with are the activities associated with artmaking;and
these, we may reasonablyexpect, existed before there
was available a concept of art, and may exist after
thatconcept is abandoned.Giotto, Piero, and Raphael
made sacred objects, and so there have always been
worries aboutthe appropriatenessof placing the arti-
facts they createdin the museum and analyzing them
with the secularizing tools of art history. When the
present-day museum includes objects from non-Eu-
ropean cultures,including some societies which def-
initely seem to lack our present concept of art, this
worry is multiplied.If, rather,we focus on artmaking,
then these difficulties are removed.6 A culture can
have craftspeople whose activity requires some (at
least implicit) concept of artmaking,even if it admits
to no identifiable concept of art. In assembling and
preservingsuch artifacts, and appreciatingthem aes-
thetically, we acknowledge that we understandthe
value of this craft, even while recognizing that the
culturesin which many of these objects were created
would be bewilderedby our museums.7
But this presentanalysis, it is naturalto feel, is not
entirely satisfying philosophically,for it too easily re-
moves the "bite" of Danto's analysis without ade-
quatelyengaging with his argument.If Duchampand
Warhol showed that there is no essence of art, then
their work, Danto claims, was extremely significant.
The manyphilosopherswho assertedthatartdoes have
an essence are then shown to have arguedincorrectly.
PerhapsDanto is mistaken,but surelyhe cannotbe de-
feated simply by arguingthat, if a properontology is
concernedonly with the activities of artmaking,and
not such objects as artworks, then Duchamp and
Warholdid not show thatart neverhad an essence.
Here the philosopher may recognize echoes of
Thomas Hobbes's disagreement with Descartes's
cogito argument,where he complains:
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The Journalof Aesthetics and Art Criticism
M. Descartes is ... assuming an identity between an intelli-
gent being and intellection, which is the act of an intelligent
being; or at any rate between an intelligent being and intel-
lect, which is the power of an intelligent being.8
What then is the force of saying that there is no actor
performing mental activities, but only those various
actions themselves: perceiving, sensing, and think-
ing, and also dreaming and imagining? Insofar as
these activities may seem to require someone per-
forming them, nothing at all, it may appear,may be
gained. To shift talk from the agent to that agent'sac-
tions only turnsour attentionfrom nouns to verbs. If
Lisa sees the painting,
then thereexists both the agent,Lisa, and the activity,
seeing,performedby Lisa. On one readingof his text,
Descartes claimed to infer that the actor had to be
identical with an eternally existing soul. That infer-
ence surely is faulty. But can we talk about actions
withoutcommittingourselvesalso to agentsperform-
ing them?That question, the history of philosophyof
mind shows, is harderto answer.
I believe that aesthetics might be advancedby con-
sidering,in an analogousway, the implicationsof this
Gombrichiancritiqueof Danto'sanalysis. Frenchthe-
oreticians have much to say about "the death of the
author."If Gombrich,considered"in Britain ... a tra-
ditional figure, in France ... is ranked as a radical
thinkeralongside figures such as the deconstruction-
ists," we might, learning from him, consider the im-
plications of speaking of "the death of the artist."9
DAVID CARRIER
Departmentof Philosophy
CarnegieMellon University
Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania 15213-3890
INTERNET: DC40@ANDREW.CMU.EDU
This essay is for RobertMangoldon the occasion of his Oc-
tober, 1995 exhibitionat PaceWildenstein,in gratefulthanks
for the contributionwhich his dialogueshavemade to my un-
derstandingof the crafts of artmaking.I thank Arthur C.
Danto, RichardF. Kuhns,RobertMangold,MarianneNovy,
RichardShiff, and Philip Alperson for criticizingan earlier
draft.
1. See ArthurC. Danto, "The Artworld,"The Journal of
Philosophy61 (1964): 571-584, and, for more detail, his The
Transfigurationof the Commonplace:A Philosophyof Art
(Harvard University Press, 1981). For commentary, see
Danto and His Critics,ed. MarkRollins (Cambridge,Mass.:
Basil Blackwell, 1993).I havenot triedto surveythe literature.
Discussion
2. Gombrich, The Story of Art, 16th ed. (London:
Phaidon, 1995), p. 15.
3. See my "Talkingwith Sir Ernst Gombrich,"Artforum
(forthcoming). I did not query Gombrich about Danto's
work. His reference is to M. H. Abrams,Doing Thingswith
Texts:Essays in Criticismand Critical Theory (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1989); see also M. H. Abrams,"Kantand the
Theology of Art," Notre Dame English Journal (1981):
75-106. A friend who is familiarwith Gombrich'swork has
questioned this reconstructionof his claims: was it likely
that in 1950 Gombrich had this complex claim in mind,
when Karl Popper'scritiqueof Hegel provideda readily ac-
cessible source for simpler ways of defending anti-essen-
tialism? Perhapsnot, but why should we not now accept this
as Gombrich'sintendedreadingof his text, filtered as it per-
haps is through his more recent reflection? Gombrich, we
can allow, has found a new interpretationof his text; this
way of describing what he has done, though perhaps un-
Gombrichian,seems intuitively plausible.
4. What Gombrichhimself is saying, readinghim in con-
text, is that speaking of something called 'Art with a capital
A has come to be something of a bogey and a fetish" (Story
of Art, p. 15). He suggests that getting away from the usual
distinctions between "high art" and everyday kinds of im-
ages, works which he has often analyzed, we learn more
about the concept of representationin art.
5. Pop art is dismissed, withoutreproduction,in TheStory
of Art. In his book on patternsGombrichdoes reproducea
Warhol, in the context of analysis of the "depersonalizing
tendencies of the multiplyingmedia"(TheSense of Order:A
Study in the Psychology of DecorativeArt [Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1979], p. 151).
6. Meyer Schapiroadopts such an approachwhen, in "On
the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art" (reprintedin
his Selected Papers: RomanesqueArt [New York: George
Braziller, 1977], pp. 1-27), he describes the ways in which
a culturethat perhapslacked the modernconcept of art cer-
tainly had a concept in some ways like ours of aesthetic ex-
perience. Vasari, it could similarly be argued, surely had a
highly developed concept of artmaking, even if his era
lacked our museum-cultureconcept of art.
7. Such an analysisraises an implicitpoint aboutDuchamp
and Warhol:is thereenough overlapbetween their activities
and those of such craftspeoplefor their artifactsto deserve a
place in our museums? Here see ArthurC. Danto, "Martin
Puryear,or the Quandariesof Craftsmanship,"reprintedin
his EmbodiedMeanings:CriticalEssays & AestheticMedita-
tions (New York:Farrar,Straus,Giroux, 1994),pp.289-295.
8. "On Meditation II: Second Objection," in Descartes,
Philosophical Writings,trans. and eds. Elizabeth Anscombe
and Peter Thomas Geach (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1971), p. 128.
9. EricFernie,Art History and Its Methods:A CriticalAn-
thology (London: PhaidonPress, 1995), p. 224.
Whatever Happened to Beauty?
A Response to Danto
Whateverhappenedto beauty?In "Beautyand Moral-
ity,"' ArthurC. Danto meditates on the relative scar-
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281
city of beauty in recent art. He seeks the explanation
in our attitudes about the appropriateuse of beauty.
Following Kant to a point, he contends that beauty
casts a universalized light upon a phenomenon, re-
minding us thatwhat is presentedbeautifullyis an in-
herentpart of humanexperience.Beauty is appropri-
ate as a means of markingthe loss of a loved one, for
it remindsus thatthe pain of loss is a universalhuman
experience."Itis as thoughbeautywere a kind of cat-
alyst, transformingraw grief into tranquilsadness,"
Danto observes (p. 364).
Appropriateas beauty's healing influence seems
when one is faced with personal loss, it seems far
from apt in the face of political defeat for a cause that
is a matterof moral urgency.Beauty seems wrong in
such cases, "wrongbecause one is called upon to act
... and not to philosophize"(p. 365). Danto elaborates
this point by considering the category of artworks
that display what he calls "internalbeauty."Beauty is
internal to a work of art when it is "internallycon-
nected with the referenceand the mood"(p. 366). For
such a work, beauty is part of the work'scontent. Ac-
cordingly,Danto contends, "it can be a criticism of a
work that it is beautiful when it is inappropriatefor it
to be so" (p. 370).
Judgmentsthatbeautyis inappropriateunderliethe
decision to forego beauty in much contemporaryart.
"Ours... is an age of moral indignation,"Danto re-
minds us (p. 374). He seems to concur with artistic
abstinence from beauty in many instances. To find
beauty in images of suffering,to seek aesthetic satis-
faction where injustice prevails is, in his view, a
moralfailing. Oursocietal aversionto beauty,accord-
ingly, has to do with our heightenedmoral sensitivity.
Wecannot in good conscience close our eyes and ears
to the troubles of our world, but beauty threatensto
conceal them.
YetDanto takes a mixed view of the activist artthat
has largely supplantedart thatis beautiful.Too often,
he contends, political activists have failed in their
efforts to "enlist art as an ally in their campaign"
(p. 374). The problem, as Danto sees it, is that when
art designed to inspire moral response fails as art, it
also "failsmorally,extenuatedonly by the good inten-
tions of the artist"(p. 375).
Danto concludes that "the lesson is that art has its
limits as a moral arm. There are things it can do and
things it cannot. It can do what philosophy can do,
and what beauty can do. But thatmay mean that phi-
losophy too has its limits as a moral arm" (p. 374).
Our age has yet to learn this lesson, however.Moral
indignation continues to hold sway among artists.
"Beauty,"Danto predicts,"maybe in for a ratherlong
exile" (p. 375).
Is this a fair assessment of our time's relation to
beauty? I think this must depend on what we take
beauty to be-and this is scarcely a matterof agree-