A Hunger for Aesthetics

Enacting the Demands of Art

Michael Kelly

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231526784
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

For decades, aesthetics has been subjected to a variety of critiques, often concerning its treatment of beauty or the autonomy of art. Collectively, these complaints have generated an anti-aesthetic stance prevalent in the contemporary art world. Yet if we examine the motivations for these critiques, Michael Kelly argues, we find theorists and artists hungering for a new kind of aesthetics, one better calibrated to contemporary art and its moral and political demands.

Following an analysis of the work of Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, and other philosophers of the 1960s who made aesthetics more responsive to contemporary art, Kelly considers Sontag's aesthetics in greater detail. In On Photography (1977), she argues that a photograph of a person who is suffering only aestheticizes the suffering for the viewer's pleasure, yet she insists in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) that such a photograph can have a sustainable moral-political effect precisely because of its aesthetics. Kelly considers this dramatic change to be symptomatic of a cultural shift in our understanding of aesthetics, ethics, and politics. He discusses these issues in connection with Gerhard Richter's and Doris Salcedo's art, chosen because it is often identified with the anti-aesthetic, even though it is clearly aesthetic. Focusing first on Richter's Baader-Meinhof series, Kelly concludes with Salcedo's enactments of suffering caused by social injustice. Throughout A Hunger for Aesthetics, he reveals the place of critique in contemporary art, which, if we understand aesthetics as critique, confirms that it is integral to art. Meeting the demand for aesthetics voiced by many who participate in art, Kelly advocates for a critical aesthetics that confirms the power of art.

1

THE POP EFFECT

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for … organizing new modes of sensibility. And the means for practicing art have been radically extended. Indeed, in response to this new function (more felt than clearly articulated), artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, materials, and methods.

—SUSAN SONTAG,
“ONE CULTURE AND THE NEW SENSIBILITY”

Contemporary artists since 1960, at least, have been very theoretical and self-critical, or, as Susan Sontag claims in the epigraph, they are now “self-conscious aestheticians.” This means that aesthetics is deeply embedded in artistic practices, making it a partner in the production of contemporary art and “new modes of sensibility.” So we should expect aesthetics to be an ally in our efforts to understand contemporary art, whether historically or theoretically. In this light, the prevalence of the anti-aesthetic stance in the practice and theory of contemporary art is especially puzzling. Making this puzzle even starker, the current stage of the anti-aesthetic stance emerged precisely when aestheticians began to critique contemporary art in unprecedented ways. For example, Robert Morris’s “Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal” appeared in 1963, just when a number of philosophers were recognizing the philosophical significance of contemporary art and had even begun to transform aesthetics so that it could grasp art in its contemporaneity, that is, grasp how contemporary art is distinctive not just historically, but conceptually.

POP ART AND AESTHETICS

Ironically, a promising, if nascent, collaboration between aesthetics and contemporary art was emerging just as the anti-aesthetic stance (re)asserted itself. This means that it is strategically important to the effort to counterbalance or dislodge the anti-aesthetic stance today that we reexamine the 1960s when this collaboration failed to take root, not only because that period is a significant chapter in the history of the drive within modern philosophical aesthetics (since at least Georg W. F. Hegel) to grasp the contemporaneity of art, but also because this reexamination will help us to identify conceptual strategies to reinvigorate this drive, whether the strategies come from the paths taken or not taken by aestheticians. To this end, I will focus on the critical reception of the emergence of American Pop art in the early 1960s (mostly East Coast) by four philosophers—Sontag, Stanley Cavell, Arthur C. Danto, and Umberto Eco—who realized that Pop required them to transform aesthetics and who, largely because of their transformative efforts, continue to be influential in aesthetics today.¹ I call this influence the Pop Effect on aesthetics, though it is really the cumulative effect of modern art on aesthetics. Though “Pop” may be a difficult art-historical development to pinpoint with any confidence, I think the impact of Pop on shaping contemporary aesthetics is not unclear, at least on a normative level, and is thus a more manageable phenomenon. That impact is my focus.

Another reason Pop art is particularly relevant here is that Pop artists sometimes spoke in anti-aesthetic terms—and critics and theorists used such terms to speak on their behalf—because they resisted existing aesthetic theories while defying traditional art forms. By embracing popular, industrial, and commercial art and by being willing to treat mass culture as art, too, Pop art clearly signaled a break from aesthetic theories developed mainly, if not only, in response to the “fine arts.” As Lawrence Alloway puts it, Pop developed “more in line with history and sociology [development of mass culture] than with traditional art criticism and aesthetics. In London and New York, artists … revealed a new sensibility to the presence of images from mass communications and to objects from mass production assimilable within the work of art.”² If Pop embodies the anti-aesthetic stance in this sense, it would seem all the more unlikely that aestheticians could critique it, except perhaps to return the favor of an outright rejection. However, as it turns out, the break from aesthetics was not as total as it first seemed, as we saw in the preface in the cases of Marcel Duchamp, Barnett Newman, and Morris. The same is true in the case of Pop, for when Alloway says that Pop (among other art movements of the post–World War II period) was an “alternative to an aesthetic that isolated visual art from life and from the other arts,” he had in mind only a notion of aesthetics derived “from the eighteenth-century separation of the arts from one another,” which with few exceptions excluded popular or mass culture.³ But philosophers in the 1960s realized, in part by following the lead of artists, that this kind of separated, medium-centric aesthetics was no longer appropriate, even though it may have been to some extent perpetuated by modernist critics such as Clement Green-berg. The urgency to understand the aesthetics of Pop and its artistic practices compelled philosophers such as Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco to overcome the apparent impossibility of a philosophical critique of contemporary art because, as they recognized at the time, nothing less than the future of aesthetics was at stake. This makes Pop a pivotal first chapter in the regeneration of aesthetics because to revisit Pop critically is to challenge a potentially canonical embodiment of the anti-aesthetic stance in contemporary art history and theory.

The reason Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco are exemplary here is that they realized that Pop was a development within art (whether continuous with modernism or a break from it) that aesthetic theory at the time could not understand or explain because most aestheticians had not yet fully appreciated the philosophical significance of the history of modernism and were thus ill-prepared to comprehend 1960s art. Cavell captures the problem succinctly: “I believe it is true to say that modernist art—roughly, the art of one’s own generation—has not become a problem for the philosophy contemporary with it (in England and America anyway).”⁴ As we will see, however, several philosophers, including Cavell, believed they had a philosophical responsibility to critique contemporary art, starting with Pop art in the early 1960s. In Cavell’s prophetic words, “aesthetics stands to art or to criticism as the philosophy of, say, physics stands to physics; for no one, I take it, could claim competence at the philosophy of physics who was not immediately concerned with the physics current in his time.”⁵ In 1964, Sontag confirmed this normative and methodological commitment of philosophy to grasp the contemporaneity of art: “Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending or justifying art which becomes particularly … insensitive to contemporary needs and practices.”⁶ If aestheticians at that time had been able to realize this commitment fully, the recent iteration of the anti-aesthetic stance may never have gotten off the ground (or taken root in that period). Looking to the present, if we renew and sustain this commitment now, the anti-aesthetic stance should have less currency, less traction.

More specifically, what Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco recognized in the 1960s was that Pop art was a recalcitrant new “fact” that appeared in galleries in England, the United States, and around the world, seemingly out of nowhere. The philosophers’ main options were either to explain the fact away using existing aesthetic theory, thereby being, as Sontag said, “insensitive to contemporary needs and practices,” or to transform theory with the aim of explaining the fact (even if they did not look favorably on Pop). It may be true that the dominance of the twentieth-century positivist paradigm of philosophy as science prevented aesthetics from responding adequately to modernism because it was expected to be a science about a set of phenomena—artistic practices, works of art, and affective experiences—that routinely defy science (as Newman argued when he railed against aestheticians who unwittingly adopted ornithology as their model, as we saw in the introduction). Yet some aestheticians learned several discipline-formative lessons from the philosophy of science without any longer aspiring to make aesthetics into a science. They learned—especially from the models of science developed by Karl Popper, R. N. Hanson, Nelson Goodman, and Thomas Kuhn—that aesthetic theory needed to be substantially transformed if new facts incommensurate with existing theory demanded such transformation.⁷ So rejecting Pop was not an option, any more than rejecting new facts would be acceptable in the sciences. For example, as Danto says in response to Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box, no existing aesthetic theory could explain this work as art, yet there was no denying it was art.⁸ Warhol’s work thus presented a serious theoretical challenge to aesthetics to explain the new fact, even if that meant starting aesthetics anew. In turn, these four philosophers learned that being receptive to new facts in art means not only being open to the contemporaneity of art, but also being attuned to the historicity and futurity of art because art’s contemporaneity is intelligible only against the background of its historicity and in anticipation of its future. In this light, the emergence of Pop was a test determining whether aestheticians were capable of critiquing contemporary art in its historical and philosophical variety, complexity, and temporality—without imposing any grand or metanarrative—so that it would no longer be seen as appearing out of nowhere or, worse, heading nowhere. I think these four aestheticians, among others, largely passed this test and thereby embody the Pop Effect, which should be the normative legacy of Pop within aesthetics, especially with an eye to its regeneration.⁹

Despite the potential of the Pop Effect within contemporary aesthetics, however, philosophers have not received any substantial credit for their critique of Pop art, at least not in the recent art-historical accounts of that period, of which there have been many, since 1960s art is now a significant object of research.¹⁰ For example, Thomas Crow hardly mentions any philosophers in The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent.¹¹ This omission is puzzling because he enumerates many historical conditions, events, and factors outside the art world that he believes shaped the art of the 1960s and must be part of any narrative explanation of it.¹² Two important, welcome exceptions to the exclusion of philosophers in recent historical accounts of Pop art are Sarah Doris’s Pop Art and the Contest over American Culture and Sylvia Harrison’s Pop Art and the Origins of Post-Modernism.¹³ Doris discusses Sontag, particularly the essays “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964) and “One Culture and the New Sensibility” (1965). By contrast, I focus on Sontag’s earlier “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition” (1962) because I want to demonstrate that she critiqued Pop as it first emerged. At the same time, Danto has only a minor role in Doris’s analysis, and, problematically, he is portrayed as an institutional theorist of art, which is precisely what he has worked explicitly for decades to prove he is not.¹⁴ For her part, Harrison’s account features Sontag, on the belief that her criticism is “of the utmost importance to the theorization of pop during the sixties” because she “attempted to meet critical challenges posed by key issues of pop.”¹⁵ I fully agree with Harrison, but whereas she places Sontag under the category of “Cultural Critics,” despite the presence of a category of “Philosophical Critics,” I regard Sontag as a philosopher because that was part of her academic training and, moreover, that is how we can best clarify and appreciate her enduring normative contributions to contemporary aesthetics.

Despite Doris’s and Harrison’s exceptions, the relative omission of philosophers from contemporary accounts of 1960s art, although not explicitly a result of the anti-aesthetic stance, are symptomatic of it and thus need to be addressed because they perpetuate an inaccurate, normative model of aesthetics as being disengaged—in principle, not just in fact—from contemporary art. With the aim of correcting this model because it is inaccurate and, moreover, because it underwrites the anti-aesthetic stance by isolating aesthetics from contemporary art, I examine how Sontag, Cavell, Danto, and Eco critiqued 1960s art as Pop emerged. Since my focus is on the general approaches these philosophers took to 1960s art, it is not possible to discuss many individual Pop artworks with the kind of aesthetic, moral, and political specificity that will be evident in the following chapters. The aim here is first to open up discursive space for philosophical reflection on the contemporaneity of contemporary art through the work of four philosophers who critiqued 1960s art.

Let me be clear that I am proposing that we follow only the examples of Sontag’s, Cavell’s, Danto’s, and Eco’s acts of critiquing 1960s art, not the specific theoretical models or substantive content of what they offer through their critiques. For example, readers (then and now) might agree or disagree with Danto’s interpretation of Warhol’s Brillo Box as unveiling an essentialist definition of art. Either way, I hope they will recognize the more important issue for our purposes: because the Warhol art that Danto critiqued was first exhibited (April 1964) only a few months before his essay “The Artworld” first appeared (October 1964), it is clear that he was willing and able to critique contemporary art philosophically. But my point here is more general than Danto. Just as moral philosophers argue that “ought” implies “can,” meaning that it is a mistake to expect humans to act in a particular ethical way if they cannot act in that way under any circumstances, it would be a mistake to argue that aestheticians should critique contemporary art if they simply cannot do so, as those dedicated to the anti-aesthetic stance allege. Fortunately, Sontag’s, Cavell’s, Danto’s, and Eco’s critiques of 1960s art demonstrate that aestheticians can indeed critique contemporary art, making it possible to claim—even insist—that philosophers today should and can do so.

THE PLIGHT OF THE PUBLIC

Crow’s The Rise of the Sixties is a good focus for an analysis of the nascent collaboration between aesthetics and contemporary art in the 1960s because his aim—not unlike Sontag’s, Cavell’s, Danto’s, and Eco’s at the time—is to provide a new narrative, or explanatory “framework of understanding,” of the art created during (and since) the 1960s. Such a framework inevitably involves aesthetics as well as art history because it is a normative as well as historical enterprise. So aesthetics will have to be brought into this framework, even if Crow is not inclined to do so.¹⁶

The conceptual core of Crow’s new narrative is his account of the “plight of the public” in the reception and legacy of 1960s art.¹⁷ He thereby unwittingly highlights the centrality of aesthetics at the time because this plight involves aesthetics in its origins, content, and resolution. Look, for example, at how Crow describes the plight of “ordinary viewers” experiencing Pop art for the first time: “hoping for coherence and beauty in their imaginative experiences, [they] confronted instead works of art declared to exist in arrangements of bare texts and unremarkable photographs, in industrial fabrication revealing no evidence of the artist’s hand, in mundane commercial products merely transferred from shopping mall to gallery, or in ephemeral and confrontational performances in which mainstream moral values are deliberately travestied.”¹⁸ The “plight” here is owing to the fact that the general public’s aesthetic expectations about art—the norms of “coherence and beauty in their imaginative experiences”—were not met in the 1960s; in fact, they seemed to be deliberately undermined by artists, setting up a confrontation that Crow believes is endemic in Pop (and in contemporary art to this day) and that, as Peter Sloterdijk observes, brings iconoclasm (and the anti-aesthetic) into the picture: “Whoever scandalizes the public [and thus destroys the collaboration between the producing and receiving sides of artistic activity] admits to progressive iconoclasm.”¹⁹ The issue of aesthetic norms—often articulated using an anti-aesthetic discourse—is at heart an issue not merely of interpretation or taste, but of understanding, and thus it is an implicit invitation to aestheticians to participate in the discussion of 1960s art because their task is the critical underst...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Dewey Effect
• 1. The Pop Effect
• 2. The Sontag Effect
• 3. The Richter Effect
• 4. The Salcedo Effect
• Notes
• Index
• Series List