🖌 Insider #12 - The End of Art
... is a good thing.
👋 Hello, insiders!
There are a few new members this week! Let’s make some space for them. Everyone move a little to your right. Please grab a cushion.
In last week’s Insider post, I shared travel plans for the next couple of months, and an overview of all Insider posts so far. Take a look!
Today, I want to talk to you about the End of Art. *ominous music*
There are two kinds of revelations I come across in reading or learning something new. It happens this way in podcast conversations as well.
The first kind is when I learn something that had never occurred to me before. The best way to absorb a new idea is to make neural connections with older ideas. I immediately set about making space for the new idea, setting up connections with everything else.
The second kind of revelation is a little more interesting. This is when I hear an idea that I had thought about before, but to which I didn’t give any importance. Such revelations are crucial because they teach me to be more confident about my ideas, and to give more space to my own thoughts.
I had this second kind of revelation when I came across an article about Arthur Danto’s End of Art. Arthur Danto was an art critic and philosopher who had a moment of profound realization when he saw Andy Warhol’s famous art installation of Brillo boxes.
These are precise imitations of commercial packaging boxes, and were sent to galleries and museums to be stacked in various ways as art installations. Danto’s conclusion was that this marked the end of art.
He did not consider this a bad thing at all, and neither should we. Read on to find out why.
As an art critic, Danto identified art as having followed two distinct narratives.
The first narrative of art was the need to depict reality as closely as possible. He saw the history of art from ancient times to the 19th century as aiming for such verisimilitude. Art had a clear narrative goal - to capture reality.
This narrative ended with the advent of photography. And art was made free from the need to depict reality, and to seek a new narrative. This led to the explosion of new art forms - impressionism, surrealism, dadaism, fauvism, cubism, etc. The “-isms” became the second narrative of art - to explore what else could be done in the visual realm by playing with the rules of realism and perspective, with colour and line and shapes.
With Brillo Boxes, Danto believed the second narrative had come to an end. It was no more about the visual realm, because Warhol had make it impossible to visually separate art from non-art. Why were his Brillo boxes art, and why not the actual packaging boxes themselves? Danto said that art had now entered the realm of ‘art theory’. You had to have an understanding of context, history, and pop culture in order to appreciate something as art.
Going by Danto’s essay, art is no longer bound by the chains of narrative. It was now free to be anything it likes. I take this idea and connect it with Sartre’s existentialist credo - “Existence precedes essence”. That is, just as Sartre considered humans to have no intrinsic purpose, art no longer has a raison d’etre. Just like Sartre’s humans had the right to define the purpose of their own existence, all art was now similarly free to choose its purpose.
Read more about Danto’s End of Art in this wonderful illustrated essay.
Danto’s model of art was my second type of revelation because I had been thinking about this for a while. I always think (or over-think) about why I draw the way that I do, and SneakyArt has evolved through a number of conscious as well as subconscious decisions -
I like to draw with a single pen, thus reducing the number of things I can depict (e.g. color and tones)
I draw quickly, partly in order to be sneaky, which means I sacrifice details in all my depictions
I draw what makes me curious and ignore everything else
This has led my work to steer away from realism. I find realism tedious and “not worth” the disproportionate effort. (I recognize this as a purely personal choice; not a comment on anyone else’s work.)
In Episode 15 of the SneakyArt Podcast with war-illustrator George Butler, I discuss the purpose of art in an age of photography and various media formats. We talk about what art has to offer that sets it apart in people’s minds even today, or especially today. Listen to our conversation on your choice of streaming service.
Danto has been rightly criticized for his narrow vision of art. His model of art is wrong. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be discarded. I connect this criticism to a quote from a control engineering professor I had in TU Delft -
“All models are wrong. But some models are useful.”
It is a good argument that Danto’s model would be better informed by an understanding of non-Western artistic traditions, especially many that have never been inclined towards realism. It is also a good argument that art may not be in a post-narrative state but in a third narrative that we have not identified sufficiently well yet.
So I wonder what a narrative of art is in today’s world? Is there a unifying narrative to the infinite streams by which art expresses itself? Here I count not only photographs and fine art, but also cartoons, sketches, memes, videos and gifs. Maybe it is true that there is no longer a narrative journey to art.
A part of me is made deeply curious about these ideas, and I want to read some books of art theory. But is it a good idea for me to become self-conscious in this way?
The writer Jorge Luis Borges said -
“Gods must not engage in theology. The writer cannot, with human reasonings, destroy the faith that art requires of us.”
Apply this same idea to the artist in the place of writer. Maybe it is my job to be who I am in the fullest way that I can. Maybe it is my job to abandon every last vestige of self-conscious behaviour. Maybe I must be completely immersed in my culture, my ideas, my inspirations from the influences and forces that move my life. This includes my world, this newsletter, the creator economy and its liberations and chains, and it also includes each and every reader.
Thank you, reader. 🙏
📚 Related Reading
Chinua Achebe on Art as a Form of Citizenship
Kierkegaard on Why Anxiety Powers Creativity
Albert Einstein on The Political Power of Art
George O’Keefe on The Art of Seeing
Next week, a new podcast episode and a Post-Script conversation with the guest on my Insider Post! Thank you for your time and attention.
I’ve always felt that Warhol was engaging me in a conversation about the mundane and the magnificent. Aren’t the most basic forms the most life affirming? Not Chartres, but the cow head or the Brillo box. That’s a narrative about life at its essence, and Warhol wanted to tell me about it, and include a lot of jokes to keep me listening. He’s telling a story alright, but it’s different from the one Michelangelo told me. And as you say, that’s OK.