by Federico Vercellone

Dopo la fine dell’arte. L’arte contemporanea e il confine della storia
Arthur C. Danto Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2008, pp. 282, € 28,00

Since Hegel advanced his famous analyses on the so-called “end” or “death” of art in his Lectures on Aesthetics, people have never ceased to be amazed by both the rele-vance and inadequacy of this assessment. It was a catastrophic prediction that prompted a long run of symbolic murders and deaths in the 19th century. Soon the death knell was not only ringing for art but also – thanks to Max Stirner and Nietzsche – for mankind and even God. The most surprising thing is that these analyses were as telling as they were belied by events. After the death of art and God had been announced – leaving man to one side – we not only saw a barrage of artworks but also a stream of new divinities.

An old master such as Benedetto Croce can come to our aid in stating the main points of the matter – at least regarding art. Although perhaps not forgotten, he has today been relegated to a sort of semi-literary pantheon. Croce suggested that Hegel’s theory on the so-called “end of art” held true or collapsed on the basis of the assumption that art is the “perceptible manifestation of an idea”. In other words, according to Hegel, art is the highest form of perceptible appearance, the kind of form that expresses truth. This truth – which has been revealed throughout history – is attested by philosophy, which, for its part, after realising that it gave art its legitimacy, also discovered that it had a form, a far more elevated manner of expressing truth than appears in the forms of appearance and the perceptible.

The above regards Hegel and his announcement of the “end of art”. But the 20th century witnessed a totally different situation that also coincided with an unexpected ripening of Hegel’s themes. Here we come to Arthur Danto and his After the End of Art, published in English in 1997 and recently published in Italian by Bruno Mondadori. In one sense, art no longer wanted to be indebted to philosophy; it wanted to attest its own truth. It would not, therefore, draw its statutes from conceptual knowledge – as had occurred from Plato to Hegel. It logically followed that art would refuse to present itself as appearance, as the philosophers would have wished, and sought to establish itself as a unique reality with the same dignity as the “true” one.

This paradoxical affair was witnessed and interpreted starting, at the very latest, with Andy Warhol, who represents the conclusion of a path that is labelled as an entire century: the 20th century, the age in which art just wanted to be itself. It relinquished its philosophical inspiration and aspired to fulfil itself by its own means. Art’s ultimate aim (referring to the figurative arts and particularly painting) was no longer the attainment of representative perfection. It would have to analyse its own means in order to discover its own nature, beyond that attributed to it by philosophy. Thus, by reflecting on its means of expression – for example in the brushstrokes of Pollock’s abstract expressionism – painting found its own reality. This is the theory of the great critic Clement Greenberg. We can sensibly add that art acquired an autonomous constitution that was not assigned to it by philosophy, as had been the case in the longstanding tradition that started with Plato and culminated with Hegel.

The analysis of the artwork’s expressive components is also part of an enormously important process. Because art seeks to understand its own reality, it draws ever closer to reality tout court. Here Danto takes a revolutionary historiographic step that has great philosophical significance. In this descent from the ideal to the mundane, contrasting dimensions – from abstract expressionism on one hand to Pop Art and Warhol on the other – emerge as successive and consistent. Contrary to previous conceptions, there isn’t such a great distance separating Pollock’s dripping technique and Warhol’s Brillo Box (speaking of which, it is hard to say whether it is just another object or a work of art). Having freed itself from the clutches of philosophy, the work tends to present itself as one thing among the many, as one reality among the many.

How can we judge this somewhat disorientating situation? Yet again Danto offers some significant considerations. In the post-modern or post-historic condition, art can acquire a new freedom that was unknown to it when it had to fulfil the tasks assigned to it by history, or rather the philosophy of history. Art in this sense is free from canons and can pursue many new directions. Danto’s precious theoretical suggestion has certainly become essential when discerning the characteristics of today’s art scene. Importantly, however, this is accompanied by a new pluralism for art, which was accustomed to respecting canons imposed on it from outside. The result is a sort of Babel of languages and forms in which it is not always easy to separate the wheat from the chaff.