The Bad Bear News
Honoring Arthur Danto
It is a cheap game to patronize the dead, unless their deaths be accountable to your own understanding. Amiri Baraka, "The Politics of Rich Painters."
French art critics of the nineteenth century were a little bit obsessed with propriety, or what they called la bienséance. A statue of an orgiastic female was okay for a gentleman’s quarters — but in public?! Likewise, the slapdash brushwork of the Impressionists would be okay in a student sketch — but in a gallery?! Reporting on the Salon of 1850, a critic complained that a heroic statue of a man crushed by a bear violated all the rules of bienséance:
“What then will be the fate of this work, and where will it be placed, unless the bears of the Alps or Pyrenees also start erecting statuary in honor of their fellow bears who rid them of the humans ?”
« Aussi quelle sera la destinée de cet ouvrage, et où le placera-t-on, à moins que les ours des Alpes ou des Pyrénées ne se mettent aussi à ériger des statues honoraires à ceux de leurs semblables qui les débarrassent des hommes? »1
And they’re back. (The critics, not the bears.) Sean Scully, an Irish-American artist, is about to inaugurate a sculpture for the median at Broadway and 117th Street —actually one of seven sculptures by Scully to be shown. The sponsor is the Broadway Mall Association, a local beautification project. Scully's piece is called Stack Blues (in honor of Arthur Danto), meaning the philosopher-cum-art critic who taught across the street at Columbia and lived around the corner on Riverside Drive. Danto and Scully once formed a kind of mutual admiration society, but since Danto died ten years ago it’s hard to see how Danto could reciprocate beyond the grave.
Bienséance? In what way does this sculpture evoke, or reference, or suggest Arthur Danto? Or is it rather, because it doesn’t, that it does? Scully might as well have taken, say, an enlarged Brillo Box, and called that, too, “in honor of Arthur Danto.” Then Scully and his friends — including Arthur Danto — could sit around and argue that the content or the form of any individual artwork has nothing at all to do with its being Art, Art being not what’s said, or how what’s said is said, but what is said about it and who says it. Why, one could shoot someone on Broadway and call it Art, depending on the one, of course. MAGA-nimously, Scully and his sponsors have developed a curriculum for kids to accompany the sculpture so that kids, too, can learn to play at being narcissistic five-year-olds who think saying it loud enough will make it Art.2 Danto’s gone, of course, but his philosophy lives on among a certain self-lubricating elite still trying to squeeze the blood from that particular stone.
Thus David Carrier takes on the task of telling us that Barbara Westman was a major artist, really — the wife of Arthur Danto, said in passing:
“[Danto] alluded to the Hegelian idea, discussed by Karl Marx and reclaimed by Francis Fukuyama as the Cold War wound up, of the end of history as defined by class struggle. What we find in Westman’s art, I would propose, is a version of this post-historical world.”3
Westman’s art in other terms — vignettes of little doggies for The New Yorker—is at the cutting edge of historical consciousness because the cutting edge of historical consciousness consists in confirming that whatever is, is, as it should be. Carrier’s been carrying on like this for fifty years; he still hasn’t gone beyond the level of a first-term graduate student in Art History, self-assured that one has only to drop the names and pile on the syllogisms to sound just like Teacher. Or the level of a narcissistic five-year old (but I repeat myself) who always wins, because whatever happens, happens because they tell it to. Carrier after fifty years can’t tell the difference between Art History (the way things are supposed to have been) and Art Criticism, which brings out the contradictions in a work of art. With the End of History and the End of Art, contradiction is neither possible, nor to be tolerated. Carrier of course, who was a student of Arthur Danto, can hardly have invented any of this on his own, only one wishes he wouldn’t be so obvious. Crack ho’: it ain’t the old capital of Poland.
Walter Benjamin, a real critic, one of the greatest, in one of his most important works, describes the game:
“As is known, there once was a machine so built, that it could respond to any chess-player’s move with a countermove assuring it of victory. A puppet […] sat facing the board. In fact a […] dwarf sat inside, a master at the game of chess who controlled the puppet’s hands. […] One might envision a similar object for Philosophy. The puppet always wins.”
„Bekanntlich soll es einen Automaten gegeben haben, der so konstruiert gewesen sei, daß er jeden Zug eines Schachspielers mit einem Gegenzuge erwidert habe, der ihm den Gewinn der Partie sicherte. Eine Puppe […] saß vor dem Brett […] In Wahrheit saß ein […] Zwerg darin, der ein Meister im Schachspiel war und die Hand der Puppe […] lenkte. Zu dieser Apparatur kann man sich ein Gegenstück in der Philosophie vorstellen. Gewinnen soll immer die Puppe.“4
The puppet wins. The bear’s supposed to lose. Perhaps we need to raise a subscription of our own:
Critic being mauled by an artist.
Consider it done.
WOID XXIV-08
Monday, June 17, 2024
Étienne-Jean Delécluze, Exposition des artistes vivants, 1850 (Paris: Comon, 1851), p. 95.
“Sean Scully: Broadway Shuffle,” Broadway Mall. https://broadwaymall.org/public-art-3/sean-scully-broadway-shuffle/
David Carrier, "Remembrance. The Wild Art of Barbara Westman," Two Coats of Paint (May 21, 2024). https://twocoatsofpaint.com/2024/05/the-wild-art-of-barbara-westman.html
Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte. Gesammelte Schriften Band I.2 (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015), p. 693.