Arthur Danto died the other day. He was a genial writer, impossible to dislike. His writing gleams with healthy good sense. But it was also bent by his training in philosophy, and the struggle to hear his arguments out grew more and more difficult as I came to see philosophy itself as a terrible waste of time, and Kant its very Satan. Danto began as an academic philosopher, but he was drawn to art criticism by an encounter with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box. This was a puzzle that Danto had to solve.

The first essay in his last book, What Art Is, unwinds the coil of twentieth-century antics that climaxed in Brillo Box, and in what Danto came to call “the end of art history.” “Wakeful Dreams” abounds in interesting observations, but I found it tedious to try to detach them from the philosophic thesis that Danto wrings from them. This thesis, in a nutshell, holds that art is a kind of philosophy, a practical criticism of modern society. This criticism is embodied not in texts, and not quite in works of art themselves, either, but in a meaning that is understood (and presumably acknowledged) by other artists, gallerists, patrons, and critics. Brillo Box is art because Andy Warhol said it was, and everyone else who mattered agreed with him. It is essential to this analysis that the meaning of the artwork be shared by artist and viewer. To me, this raises the question whether an artwork can survive the death of its creator and its first viewers.

I can assent to the proposition that art is identified by consensus. But I cannot detach that consensus from the array of individual human beings contributing to it. I cannot locate the consensus in the artwork. Artworks are, in my view, meaningless. That’s why I disagree with Danto so strongly about the appropriation of the Brillo Box. If there is an artist here, it is James Harvey, the commercial designer who created it. Andy Warhol’s replica is pure imposture — counterfeit. Danto’s attempt to set it apart as something new and special is plausible piffle.

There is one problem in concluding that the commercial Brillo box is what Warhol’s Brillo Box is about. Although I would have hoped for the contrast to be between art and reality, it is hard to deny that Harvey’s Brillo box is art. It is art, but it is commercial art. Once the design is set, the cartons are manufactured by the thousands. They are made of corrugated cardboard to protect the contents while still being light enough to be lifted and moved, and to allow for easy opening. None of that is true of Andy’s boxes; only a few were made, and their purpose was purely to be seen and understood as art. It is pure snobbishness to deny that commercial art is art just because it is utilitarian. And besides, cardboard boxes are part of the Lebenswelt. Andy’s box is not. It is part of the Art World. Harvey’s box belongs to visual culture, as that is understood, but Andy’s boxes belong to high culture.

Danto overcomes the snobbery of disdaining commercial art only to succumb to a philosophical delirium that reproduces the effect of snobbery. When he writes, “but it is commercial art,” Danto merely resets Harvey’s box as “reality,” placing it in the desired, but quite specious, relation to Warhol’s alleged artwork.

What I see in Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box is a curatorial statement. I do not believe that his constructing the box out of different materials constitutes a creative act. (I don’t object to it, either.) The artist whose work is on exhibit is, as I say, James Harvey, and Andy Warhol’s role is that of the dealer or gallerist. Danto’s attempt to recast this reality is, at bottom, offensive. A fake is a fake is a fake. Perhaps it would be better to say that there are no fakes — every “fake” is real enough in itself — but only fakers. Andy Warhol’s fakery was so thoroughgoing and transparent that I have come to regard him as a fake, not as a faker. The fakers in the case of Andy Warhol are the “artworld” people who proclaimed his genius. It kills me to be obliged to place Danto among their number.

Who knows “what art is,” and who cares? It’s pretty clear from the history of oil painting on wood and canvas that this sort of art is something for which a few people are willing pay a good deal of money to acquire, as well something in which many more people (not necessarily the same people) profess to find beauty, not just when the painting is new but for centuries afterward. Isn’t that enough?

***

Consider the history of Vermeer’s reputation. After his death in 1675, he did not, as one might imagine, slip into oblivion, only to be triumphantly rediscovered in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. He was triumphantly rediscovered, but not in Holland, where in fact he was never forgotten. In the Eighteenth Century, Vermeer was a local taste, peculiar to Nederlanders. His name meant nothing outside his homeland, and when his pictures changed hands — they were certainly recognized as important paintings — they were attributed to other artists, Rembrandt, de Hooch, or Metsu. (We shall consider the history of Metsu’s reputation some other time.) Were the Hollanders crazy to value Vermeer? Was the rest of the world crazy to take so long to do so? These silly questions imply that Vermeer’s pictures had (and have) an intrinsic value, a fixed atomic weight that it is up to us to appreciate. This is nonsense. There is no intrinsic value. The simple explanation is that Vermeer captured the potential beauty of the moral life of Holland, and his countrymen saw as much. It was only as the values of that moral life spread throughout Western society, gradually overcoming the masculinist grandiosity of the hitherto prevailing aesthetic, that Vermeer’s paintings came to be loved by viewers from other countries. It is certainly arguable that his paintings contributed to this spread.

The first Vermeer to hang on American walls was the Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to which it was donated (after a loan) by Henry Marquand, a New Yorker banker and the picture’s second modern owner to regard it as a Vermeer. Two links back in the chain of provenance, it was exhibited by Robert Vernon, in the British Institution show of 1838, as a Metsu. The idea, which we should have to infer from Danto, that the Londoners of 1838 could not have appreciated the picture properly because they were unaware that Vermeer had painted it, is not a thriving one. More telling still is Pierpont Morgan’s acquisition of A Lady Writing, in 1907. Approached by the dealer, G S Hellman, Morgan declared that he had never heard of Vermeer. By the time Hellman was through with his spiel, however — and this included a recital of the prices that Vermeers were fetching lately — Morgan handed over the asking price, $100,000, without demur. I am inclined to believe that the painting genuinely appealed to him. That’s all that matters.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 30th, 2013 at 3:25 pm.