The "End of Art:" an Ambiguous, Equivocal, Ambivalent Term.

Clearly, the “end of art” theme is very ambiguous, both within Hegel’s own writings and in terms of our own contemporary treatments; if “the end of art,” really was Hegel’s own theme, it was understood by him in a way very different from how we now understand it.  Why, especially if no one today actually accepts Hegel’s philosophy in toto, do his Lectures on Fine Art continue to have such a strong influence on contemporary theory?  And why is “the end of art” consistently invoked by critics and philosophers in order to address contemporary works produced more than a century after Hegel’s lectures were delivered, many of which would have baffled the account in the actual Lectures?  Why is the “end of art” used to interpret works and developments that Hegel himself could never have foreseen, by people who are not Hegelians?  Why is this ambiguous, equivocal, ambivalent term invoked to clarify what’s taking place in today’s artworld?  How and why is all of this happening, and what are the consequences for philosophical aesthetics?

What, After All, is the "End of Art?"

Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)

Oil on canvas, 96 cm × 130 cm (37.8 in × 51.2 in)

What exactly is “the end of art,” as Hegel understood it, and how is it understood now?  The Lectures on Aesthetics (1823, 1826, and 1828-9)[1] develop a concept of art’s dissolution (Auflösung) (usually called the “end of art”) which is elusive and contradictory, but which nevertheless persists as one of the paradigmatic themes of today’s aesthetics and philosophy of art.[2]  For, although the “end of art” is discussed with great interest, and although it’s a central concept for many of our leading philosophers and critics, the precise meaning of the expression remains unclear.  As a result, despite numerous existing treatments of art’s dissolution, and despite its continued relevance for aesthetics and art criticism, there has as yet been no adequate application of Hegel’s aesthetics to contemporary art.  Hegel’s several statements to the effect that “considered in its highest vocation, art is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Hegel, 1828-9/1998:11) are variously interpreted and remain deeply perplexing.  Perhaps the “end of art” is so resilient precisely because of its equivocal, protean nature, its limitless flexibility: “The end of art could develop its remarkably durable effectiveness…because already in Hegel it is so densely surrounded by contradictions and inconsistencies that no consensus has yet been reached on whether there even is a Hegelian end of art.”[3]

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[1]. G. W. F. Hegel Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I Trans. T. M. Knox Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998 p. vi (cited hereafter as Hegel:1828-9/1998).

[2]. See, for current examples, David Carrier, “Warhol, Danto and the End of Art History” in Art US No. 26 (Fall, 2008) pp. 92-97 and Roger Kimball, “The End of Art” in First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life (Summer, 2008) No. 184 pp. 27-31

[3]. Eva Geulen The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor After Hegel Trans. James Mc. Farland (California: Stanford University Press, 2006) p. 8

Gestalt Psychology and Art History: Painting

 Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples 1895-98

Oil on canvas; 68.8 x 92.7 cm
The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Schapiro clearly leans toward holism not only at the level of the milieu, but also at the level of the individual work: “a painting is…a concrete individual object; we grasp its parts immediately and sometimes simultaneously, all together as a whole, as we do an object in nature” (Schapiro, 1999:11-12).  This may again reflect the influence of Gestalt psychology, which, as it happens, is a distinctively successful example of a holistic theory applied to an empirical and experimental science.   Gestalt psychology assumes the concept of the lebenswelt and focuses on the perception of the living organism.  Perceptual life is structured by relations of field and ground whereby organisms attend differentially to biologically relevant aspects of their environment.  The organism is not reduced to the purely biotic processes within cells, tissues, and organs, like salt diffusing across semi-permeable membranes.  Instead, Gestalt psychology takes the animal’s perceptual experience of its environs as an irreducible dimension of explanation.  Schapiro applied the concept of field-ground relations in his 1969 discussion of the systematic unity of the artwork, where he addresses special problems pertaining to the perception of artworks:

…we have learned often enough how limited is our perception of such complex wholes as works of art…in an object as complex as a novel, a building, a picture, a sonata, our impression of the whole is a resultant or summation in which some elements can be changed with little apparent difference to our sense of the whole; perception of such complexities is rapid and tolerant, isolating certain features and passing freely over others, and admitting much vagueness for the sake of larger effects.[1]

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[1]. Meyer Schapiro, “On Perfection, Coherence, and Unity of Form and Content” in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (Selected Papers IV) George Brazilier, 1994 p. 37

Dissolution, not End: Dialectic and Hegel's Philosophy of Art

Andy Warhol, “Brillo Box” (1964)

Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on wood, 17 1/8 x 17 x 14" (43.3 x 43.2 x 36.5 cm)

MOMA, New York City

The dissolution of art is fundamentally related to concept of dialectical sublation, which is “one of the most important notions in all of Hegel”[1] for art has, in fact, been sublated.  It is specifically with the irony of the Romantic period that art is supposed to have “come to an end” (in the sense indicated by Danto, for example); it has been cancelled and at the same time preserved, acting as the catalyst in the resolution of contradictory elements (reason and sensuality), and dissolving in the progress of that reaction.  Hence the connection between Auflösung is aufheben.  Hegel takes full advantage of the equivocal term Auflösung: literally, it  means “to raise up something; however, as a philosophical notion it can mean ‘cancel’, ‘dissolve’, or ‘preserve’, or all three at once!” (Carter, 1980:94).   Inwood says that the word “has three main senses:   (1) ‘to raise, to hold, lift up” (2) ‘to annul, abolish, destroy, cancel, suspend’ (3) ‘to keep, save, preserve’…Hegel regularly uses all three senses at once.”[2]  Similarly, Etter comments on “the difficulty of the German term aufheben, which may mean ‘to raise’, ‘to preserve’, or ‘to annul’-a profoundly plural ambiguity that Hegel exploits as the central explanatory term of his dialectical sense of history.”[3]  It’s worth quoting Hegel’s Logic at length to get a sense of exactly what he intends by the term, and to understand its central importance:

To sublate, and the sublated (that which exists ideally as a moment), constitute one of the most important notions in philosophy.  It is a fundamental determination which repeatedly occurs throughout the whole of philosophy, the meaning of which is to be clearly grasped and especially distinguished from nothing.  What is sublated is not thereby reduced to nothing.  Nothing is immediate; what is sublated, on the other hand, is the result of mediation; it is a non-being which has its origin in a being.  It still has, therefore, in itself the determinateness from which it originates.  “To sublate” has a twofold meaning in the [German] language: on the one hand it means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease, to put an end to.  Even “to preserve” includes a negative element, namely, that something is removed from its immediacy and so from an existence which is open to external influences, in order to preserve it.  Thus what is sublated is at the same time preserved; it has only lost its immediacy but is not on that account annihilated.[4]

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[1]. Curtis L. Carter, “A Re-Examination of the ‘End of art” Interpretation of Hegel’s Aesthetics” in Art and Logic in Hegel’s Philosophy Warren E. Steinkraus; Kenneth L. Schmitz Humanities Press, 1980 p. 94

[2]. Michael Inwood A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1999) p. 283

[3]. Brian K. Etter Between Transcendence and Historicism: The Ethical Nature of the Arts in Hegelian Aesthetics (Buffalo: SUNY, 2006) p. 69

[4]. G. W. F. Hegel Science of Logic A.V. Miller, trans. (London and New York: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. And Humanities Press, 1969) pp. 106-7

Art History as “Empirical Phenomenology”

Piet Mondrian, “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” 1943

Oil on canvas, 1.27 m x 1.27 m

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Since art historical knowledge is just one of many registers of interpretation and self-interpretation available to artists, we have to have knowledge of more the more general historical and social world expressed by the aesthetic life of the period.  The artists’ exposure to scientific theories of color, their interest in biological discoveries, their responses to developments in social life, their beliefs about synesthesia or mysticism, may all affect the form and content of the canvas.  The holistic nature of art history means that any art historical study is forced to invoke all of the human sciences, including but not limited to the social sciences like psychology, anthropology, sociology and so forth.  For example, Margolis describes Schapiro’s work as “centered on art history, but…more of a psychological discipline” and suggests that Schapiro practices a kind of “empirical phenomenology.”[1]  This last remark indicates an Hegelian tendency to view one’s own interpretations as grounded in the practices and traditions that make up one’s milieu and the consequent problems of historicism, relativism and interpretation are opened up by that view.  Each period appears to have its own aesthetic criteria and modes of artistic self-understanding, so the study of artworks demands singular combinations of disciplines in different cases.

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[1]. Joseph Margolis, “Meyer Schapiro and the Science of Art History” in British Journal of Aesthetics (Summer, 1981) Vol. 21, No. 3 p. 242

Modernism: Painting as Art Historical Practice

Pablo Picasso, Le Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

Oil on canvas, 243.9 cm × 233.7 cm

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

In modern times the most direct relation is not between painter and nature, or the painter and the Holy Spirit, but the painter and other painters.  Manet learned much from Velázquez both stylistically and in terms of content, which offers us a key to why he painted as he did.  Cezanne closely followed Poussin’s rules for composition, both as an aesthetic and stylistic discipline and as a kind of patriotic gesture that would establish his place in the tradition of French painting.  Picasso combined the most advanced stylistic elements available at the time, primitivism and cubism, and used them to depict the charged theme of prostitution in Le Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), perhaps in order to attain an optimal level of notoriety and secure the patronage of the Steins.  In each case, a painter’s self-understanding and interpretation of his milieu enters into his choice of subject and technique.  The painter’s explicit or implicit theorizing always has effects on the overall trajectory of his or her career, as well as effecting individual works.  All of these examples show painters exercising art historical knowledge in their pursuit of a career and an identity as an artist, and all of them illustrate the need to distinguish between internal (or emic) and external (etic) modes of art historical explanation.  Art history therefore has to be reflexive and historically sensitive with regard to epistemic questions, cross-disciplinary with regard to method, and pragmatic with regard to the relationship between theory and practice.  Particularly in the modern period, when artists very deliberately and self-consciously interact with and react against each other and their traditions (Manet with Velázquez, Picasso with Matisse, Van Gogh with Gauguin), no reduction to causes and general laws is available.  Painters and sculptors explain what they do, like other human beings, with reasons in form of the letters, journals, articles, lectures, and interviews they leave behind.  Artists both cause and are caused by the styles and schools with which they are associated and according to which they are categorized, and their interrelations with the tradition and their contemporaries forms the background within which they struggle to produce art that is powerfully expressive, unique yet immediately communicative.  Such reflexive causality may come to light in the biological sciences, but it’s far from Newtonian causation in the sense of an instance of a law.  There simply is no causal account of the paintings and sculptures they create in the sense that there is a causal account of a planet’s course in its orbit.

Modern Painting and Art History

Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)

Oil on canvas, 153 cm × 118 cm

Des Moines Art Center, Iowa

Hegel famously said that we are all children of our times. In the context of art history, the implication is that we have to study the cultural conditions under which artworks are made in order to fully understand and appreciate them: “For, on account of its nature, at once material and individual, the work of art issues essentially from particular conditions of the most varied sort, amongst them especially the time and place of its origin, then the specific individuality of the artist, and above all the technical development of his art.  Attention to all these aspects is indispensable for a distinct and thorough insight into, and acquaintance with, a work of art, and indeed for the enjoyment of it…” (Hegel, Aesthetics 1998, a34-5).

Hegel’s idea here is that art history starts with the dissolution of art, the condition under which our experience of artworks is mediated by theory.  Once our experience of art is unhitched from its role in our sittlich (or “social-worldly”) religious practices, it becomes mediated by art historical knowledge.  That’s true not only for the viewer but also for the painter, who in the modern period must act from some emic view of art history, some native sense of what the available moves are.  Therefore our knowledge of any painting, but especially a modern one, must include the details of how the painter viewed art history and his or her location in it.  So a full explanation of how a modern painting physically looks may often involve reference to the painter’s self-perception and self-interpretation.  Painters deliberately engage in dialogue with other painters and artists, and it’s within this dialogue that any one personal effort makes sense.  The work of an artist is now not to represent or transcend nature, nor merely to express their own times, but to find for themselves a location in art history.