The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the End of Taste

ARTHUR C. DANTO
Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1998

Reviewed by DAVE BEECH

Champions of the status quo are two-a-penny in art criticism. And yet, they are as
nothing compared with the patrons of past values who regard the status quo with
alarm. The forces of conservatism and reaction are pervasive in the professional world
of art journalism because they are insidious. Nevertheless, they do not present them-
selves in convenient forms for critique. Consequently, if we expect all conservative
art critics to write with a plum in their word processors, then we will be outfoxed by
those who do not. What do contemporary forms of conservative art criticism look
like, and how can we attend to them? The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the
End of Taste is an opportunity to Žnd out.
Arthur C. Danto, a prestigious and inuential American analytical philosopher and
art critic widely read by artist, critics, art historians and philosophers of art, was born
in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1924, and grew up in Detroit. After spending two years
in the Army, Danto studied art and history at Wayne University (now Wayne State
University) and then at Columbia University. Since 1984, he has been art critic for The
Nation, and in addition to his many books on philosophical subjects, he has published
several collections of art criticism. Danto has served as Vice-President and President
of the American Philosophical Association, as well as President of the American Society
for Aesthetics. In addition, he is an editor of the Journal of Philosophy and consulting
editor for various other publications. On top of developing a distinctive theory of
art, he has brokered a settlement between Continental philosophy and the analytical
tradition, by taking major Žgures from the history the modern European tradition,
particularly Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, and treating them as if they
were Anglo-American analytical philosophers. He lives in New York City.
The Wake of Art is of serious interest as an exploration of some key issues of current
debate of the philosophy of art. It is also of historical interest, as a collection of some
key texts that are more readable than most writing on art today, and by means of
which Danto has established his intellectual reputation and constructed his chief argu-
ments. The editors’ introduction is somewhat eager to impress, and is occasionally
obtuse as a result, but it manages to identify what is at stake in Danto’s philosophy,
while also indicating a few misgivings. It could not be said that the introduction puts
Danto’s writing in its intellectual milieu or social context; the editors, Gregg Horowitz

Historical Materialism, volume 10:2 (255–266)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002
Also available online – www.brill.nl
256 • Dave Beech

and Tom Huhn, concentrate on technical and formal argument to the neglect of
historical contingencies and intellectual rivalries. This means that their little
attempts at analytical jousting are never more than local cases of what T.S. Kuhn,
writing about ‘normal science’, called ‘mopping up operations’.1 The impression is
that Danto’s position is not a position at all, but something more like the best account
we have of the condition of art. It is a false impression, but Danto is understandably
grateful for it. In his Afterword, he writes, touchingly, of his ‘sense of being rescued
from a certain kind of darkness’ (p. 195) by their knowledge and understanding of
his work. The softness of their light is attering. A brighter, sharper light would have
been more instructive.

The conservatism of a liberal art critic

Danto is a conservative in the guise of a liberal – a libertarian, even. This alone is
enough to cause him to be placed on every Marxist reading list. Like other neo-
conservatives, Danto’s prose has the style of a pleasant and considerate personality,
even when he shuts another epistemological door on the struggle for a deeper
freedom than the moderate American brand that is his own ideological horizon.
Danto’s two main theses, the ‘end of art’ and the defence of ‘pluralism’, certainly are
more than soundalikes of more familiar neoconservative doctrines (namely, the
triumphalist post-Cold-War assertion of the end of history and the licence for inequity
known as the deregulation of markets). His neoconservatism is not well concealed,
but it is ‘neo’ enough to immunise him from standard leftist complaints about
cultural conservatism. Danto is not a typical old-fashioned reactionary art lover. His
arguments do not advocate traditionalism, élitism, exclusion, standards or taste. Danto
is a conservative who does without the staples of conservative art criticism.
Danto feels misunderstood by philosophers and art writers alike. ‘Art writers
in general have too weak a grip on philosophical analysis’, he complains, ‘and philo-
sophers, again in general, have too little interest in art or too scant knowledge of it’
(p. 193). Adding that anyone without a close relationship to New York City would
also have trouble dealing with his texts (‘where, after all, so much of that history has
unfurled. . . . From the late forties, when I moved to New York, until this very moment,
it would have been impossible for me merely to philosophize with the canonical
aestheticians, from Plato through Kant to Nietzsche and Heidegger, who for all their
conceptual muscularity lacked the privilege of living with the art of the late twentieth
century’ (pp. 193–4)), Danto does his utmost to disqualify the vast majority of his

1
Kuhn 1970, p. 24.
 Reviews • 257

readers from asking difŽcult and serious questions. This is an unlikely pose for a
philosopher of art who defends pluralism as necessary and precious. What is more,
it rules me out. I will persist, nonetheless, because, although Danto is worth reading,
his arguments are awed in their detail and unsafe in their conclusions.
The logic of Danto’s forlorn plight follows the contours of Marx’s ‘Foreword’ to
The Philosophy of Poverty, in which the young Hegelian economist makes a joke at the
expense of the author of The Poverty of Philosophy:

M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in

Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is
reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to
be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French
economists.2

Danto turns the joke inside out and takes it seriously as a badge of distinction that
both art writers and philosophers misunderstand him. It would be unfair to suggest
that Danto buys his right to be a bad philosopher with his reputation as a critic and
is actually a bad critic who survives on his fame as a philosopher, but the poverty
of Danto’s philosophy and the limitations of his art criticism do add up to a sort
of Proudhonian double whammy. He conspires to suffer the inadequacies of both
philosophy and an art criticism, despite being acutely aware of what those inade-
quacies are. This is because he responds to cognitive difŽculties by swapping hats.
Philosophy does not strengthen Danto’s art criticism; it stands beside it, like a body-
guard protecting it, in case intellectual bullies try to rough it up. And art criticism
does not transform Danto’s philosophy – conferring on it sensitivity to contingency
and particularity, for instance – but begins where philosophy fails and falls silent. In
this way, Danto preserves the shortcomings of philosophy and art criticism with an
apartheid of disciplines. While neither discipline can trespass on the other ’s ‘proper’
concerns, one cannot rectify the difŽculties faced by its accomplice. Danto is, therefore,
an unphilosophical art critic and an indiscriminate philosopher of art. Mopping up
will not sufŽce.
A philosophy of art, in Danto’s understanding, must be true of all art, without
exception, without favouritism and without historical and local bias. The difference
between philosophy and criticism comes across as merely a matter of scale, where
philosophy is monumental without detail, and criticism is narrow and temperamental.
What makes a statement about art philosophical, he argues, is that it is ‘worked out
at a level of abstraction so general that you cannot deduce from it the form of any

2
Marx 1963, p. 29; see also Marx 1982.
258 • Dave Beech

speciŽc style of art’ (p. 94). All previous philosophy of art, Danto takes pleasure in
announcing, has been nothing other than art criticism, because it restricted itself to
the art of the philosopher ’s own time. This is typical of Danto’s wit: he uses logic as
a form of entertainment at just the moment when he is laying down the law.
I want to argue that Danto’s thinking resorts to a series of false dichotomies in order
to instate a neoconservative agenda. First, I need to make two preliminary recom-
mendations.
One. It does no harm to Danto if we question whether his philosophy of art is, in
fact, a response to the art of his time. For one thing, to do so would be to adopt
Danto’s own conceptual schema. But, for another, Danto would agree. Danto accepts
that this is the case. The difference, for him, is that the art of our time (art under the
‘end-of-art condition’) allows the philosopher to understand art as such.
Two. We need to be cautious with Danto’s corollary that, for a philosophy of art to
be philosophical, ‘no art better exempliŽes it than any other ’ (p. 94). The inability of
a philosophy of art to discriminate between one kind of art and another is a measure
of its abstract scale. It is also, neatly enough, a philosophically generated guarantee
against what Danto regards as the blight of modernist criticism, that it was ‘yoked to
a form of advocacy, in the respect that to endorse a certain piece of art was to advo-
cate the kind of art it exempliŽed’ (p. 196).
If my Žrst preliminary observation warns against hasty attempts to dump Danto’s
central contention of the end of art, my second observation warns against cheap shots
against Danto’s other central contention, pluralism. These two rogues have to be
tackled, but they are not easy pickings.

The end of art

Endings are troublesome. 3 Divorce, death, defeat and New Year’s Eve are common
enough for the experience of endings to be familiar, and yet postulating endings with
any amount of theoretical seriousness inevitably leads to questions about how such
narratives are constructed and validated. Danto is experienced enough to be aware
of some of the difŽculties of taking endings seriously. Writers have made him aware
of them4 because they do not share his conviction that art’s history is at an end. In
another collection,5 Danto, having been quizzed on the matter, deploys two defences
of his claim that art history has come to an end. To pour cold water on the narrative

3
See Kermode 1968, Ricoeur 1984 and Currie 1998.
4
See Margolis 1997 and Carroll 1997.
5
Haapala, Levinson and Rantala 1997.
 Reviews • 259

of an ending on the basis that all narratives are constructions is, he says, ‘a bit of
metaphysical overkill’.6
Danto is trying to open up some theoretical space for the possibility that art has
been following a narrative logic, but has now reached its climax, and so it is philosoph-
ically pointless to argue that all such narratives are fallacious. He follows this line of
defence with the assertion that his argument is an empirical one and therefore
cannot be refuted on a priori grounds. ‘What it would take to show me wrong is to
show that the story goes on.’7 Notice, here, that Danto does not say that to show that
art goes on would destroy his argument; it is the story that matters. He readily accepts
that art goes on – hence the title of his Artforum article of 1993 (included in The Wake
of Art), ‘Art After the End of Art’ – but it goes on, he insists, without the beneŽt of
having a narrative to develop. So, Danto has to fashion a theory that can yield (i) a
story that is good for the entire history of art but which (ii) is ultimately, in our age,
expendable. It is the strain of this twin requirement that undoes Danto’s project.
Following Greenberg’s example, Danto lifts himself above the petty disputes
of recent and contemporary art by rooting his artistic commitments in an historical
framework. The end of art, or the end of art’s historical development, is compulsory
in Danto’s meta-narrative of art because his conception of history is teleological: art
history is the process by which art discovers its truth. Once that truth is discovered,
according to Danto, there is nothing left for art, or artists, to do. The result is not the
death of art but the continuation of art in the wake of its developmental history. Danto
conceives of art’s development in terms of Greenberg’s account of modernism in
which ‘all roads led to the same place’.8 Greenberg haunts Danto. If the relationship
between Danto and Greenberg is scrutinised, Danto’s position has serious difŽculties
(see below), but, taken at face value, Danto’s post-Greenbergianism slots nicely into
the millennial mood.9 Which is why Danto’s end of art thesis can strike a chord today
among those who are similarly convinced both of the developmental trajectory of
modernist and pre-modernist art history and the absence of a developmental force in
contemporary art and culture.10 Such empirical coincidences are largely circumstan-
tial. Danto does not seek merely to describe a familiar sense of ‘anything goes’ or
‘everything has already been done’. His argument extends beyond such observations
and also provides a theory. It is his theory that I want to question here.
Although there are serious errors in the logic Danto uses to bind the narrative and
its ending to art (he uses off-the-peg Hegel that conŽnes itself to a positive dialectic),

6
Haapala, Levinson and Rantala 1997, p. 28.
7
Haapala, Levinson and Rantala 1997, p. 29.
8
Greenberg 1985, p. 45.
9
See Anderson 1998, pp. 99–100.
10
See Lyotard 1984 and Gablik 1984.
260 • Dave Beech

the test of his theory of art is in the validity of the story that the theory requires. Danto
is mistaken when he says that the only way to disprove his theory is to show that
the story goes on; Danto would also be wrong if the story was false from the outset.
The narrative that Danto adopts is, roughly, Greenberg plus Hegel. 11 A rough
Greenberg provides the aesthetic content while a rough Hegel provides the philosophi-
cal form. Greenberg’s theory of modernist art’s programme of self-deŽnition is, Žrst,
isolated from a network of arguments about art’s autonomy and its modes of attention
– which Danto simpliŽes as the obsolete notion of puriŽcation and calls ‘aesthetic
Serbianism’ (p. 121) – before it is slotted into a teleological development of art’s real-
isation of its concept or truth. The Hegelianism is thin. However, philosophical point
scoring is unnecessary because Danto’s sub-Greenbergian story of art’s self-deŽnition
does not hold. It never did.
Danto usurps Greenberg by recruiting him in a kind of Hegelian ruse. He mis-
calculates, though, and renders the sublation of Greenberg too preservative and not
sufŽciently negative. Greenberg, in effect, becomes necessary for Danto, instead of
Danto’s sublation of Greenberg becoming necessary for Greenberg. So, the theory of
the end of the history of art does not dislodge the modernist theory but is vitally
dependent on the (historically local) validity of a Greenbergian project for art. Of
course, when Danto gets his hands on it, the Greenbergian project is not recognisably
Greenberg’s; it is, nonetheless, a classic, linear narrative of art’s incremental contribu-
tion to its own self-deŽnition.
Like all classic, linear narratives, Danto’s story of art is preceded and structured by
its ending. The narrative makes no sense without its ending. And, led by the ending,
the author is careful to arrange the characters and plot in such a way as to anticipate
or ‘cause’ the given ending. Consequently, Danto’s ending (which is different from
Greenberg’s ending), generates a narrative of art-historical events that conŽrms a
given account of art’s self-deŽnition. If there are rival and competing accounts of art’s
self-deŽnition (Danto and Greenberg’s being just this, among a relatively broad range),
then the story of art’s historical development is not a story at all, but an object of
hegemonic struggle. To pass off a particular narrative of art history as the story of
art’s development is ‘to engage in hegemonic struggle while at the same time denying
through omission the animosity and division implied by that struggle’ (all the better,
of course, to have an advantage over competing theories). As such, Danto’s theory
does not stand or fall on whether we can disprove it on a priori grounds, or whether
we can show that the story goes on, but, rather, on whether it can legitimately fend
off rival accounts of art history 12 or the argument that art has no history.13

11
Greenberg is usually linked with Kant. See Duve 1996.
12
Compare Pollock 1987, pp. 101–19.
13
See Althusser 1971 and Roberts 1996.
 Reviews • 261

The fact that Danto’s historical narrative does not derive from historical method
(and remains blithely untroubled by its lack of methodological self-consciousness),
means that, instead of grounding his philosophy of art on an empirical argument
that other philosophers can only dream of, Danto leaves himself vulnerable to even
rudimentary art-historical scrutiny. The end of art thesis is tied to an historical nar-
rative that has not so much been superseded as discredited. Art history has never
enjoyed uncorrupted scholarly achievement that was free from internal disputes, but
any untroubled false universalisations suggesting otherwise were taken to task in
two waves of art history’s politicisation in the 1970s and 1980s.14 The very idea of a
single, uncontested, homogenous history of art has withered under the strain of
several politicising assaults on art history as a discipline and as an object of study.
As a result, there can be no single and uncontested narrative of art history. In the
absence of such a narrative, it follows that there is nothing to end, no conclusion to
a self-deŽning development, and, therefore, no means of establishing the validity of
a switch from (modernist) art history to contemporary pluralism. As such, Danto’s
theory homogenises the narrative of art history in clear denial of the politicising of
art and its history over the past thirty years and more, which has proved time
and again that the given history of art is a particular story with its own distinctive
exclusions and prejudices. Danto’s depoliticising narrative is an act of conservative
aggression that is also, because of this, scholastically poor.

Pluralism
Pluralism is the name Danto gives to the condition of art after the unifying power of
art’s historical mission has gone. This argument is objectionable and falsifying. Danto’s
sub-Greenbergian historical schema leads inevitably to an end-of-art condition that
is unavoidably pluralist. So, and here is the rub, it does not matter a jot that his rivals
disagree with him. By disagreeing with him, they (or we) conŽrm his (pluralist) theory.
This may sound obscure. How does the fact that people disagree with him conŽrm
his theory? And what is the relationship between his theory and his narrative? His
narrative is of the coming to self-knowledge of art, which, when complete, results in
the end of art (of art having nothing more to discover about what art is). The theory
is that the history and practice of art is structured by such a narrative and that, at the
end of this narrative, the result is pluralism. It is pluralism – the necessary and actual
co-presence of opposing positions – that is conŽrmed if we disagree with him.
Danto’s argument is, in this way, inoculated against Greenberg’s more conspicuous
sins (exclusion, formalism, opticality), without giving Greenberg the boot. Secure in

14
See Clark 1973 and Borzello and Rees 1986.
262 • Dave Beech

his philosophical account of art’s historical becoming, then, Danto makes a case
for pluralism (resulting in the counter-intuitive statement that ‘I can like it all’ (p. 95))
on the prior argument that art can no longer be deŽned in terms of speciŽc artistic
qualities. He makes at least two versions of this prior argument, but on no occasion
is the conclusion yielded by the account. One of his arguments is that art has recon-
ciled with non-art (he refers not to conceptualism15 but to Duchamp and Pop), thus
precluding any conceptual or institutional differentiation of art from everything else,
and therefore pulling the philosophical rug from under the feet of personal preference.
One of his other arguments is that, even before avant-garde artists ‘redeemed the
everyday’, a philosophy of art could not favour any one kind of art, and therefore, it
seems to follow, there can be no philosophically established preference for some art
against others. 16
The error, in both cases, is to circumscribe judgement on the back of a categorical
inclusion. Simply, Danto is obliged to ‘like it all’ because it is all art. He is perfectly
capable of making judgements, such as his dislike of the 1980s painter David Salle
(p. 164), but he has no way of saying that the works he does not like are not art and
concludes that, on principle, he likes it all. Or, in his own words, ‘all that pluralism
excludes is that I should dislike something on grounds of stylistic advocacy’ (p. 201).
Would it not be more precise to say that what pluralism excludes is that I should like
or dislike something on grounds of stylistic advocacy? If so, then the conclusion
cannot be to like it all. If we take away liking and disliking something on grounds of
stylistic advocacy, we are not left with ‘liking it all’ but with, say, liking or disliking
it on other grounds, or else of not liking or disliking it at all. Is this an error that
demonstrates Danto’s capacity to sacriŽce logic for the greater good of his political
neoconservatism?
What animates Danto’s false dichotomy between ‘advocacy’ and ‘liking it all’ is
the authority of art. It has a plain political dimension, of course, underwriting such
statements as ‘like astronauts, we walk free from the pull of cultural space’ (p. 199).
Pluralism, for Danto, is living freely. In the land of opportunity, art critics are not
obliged to monitor their judgements and artists can do as they please – so long as
what pleases them is acting as self-reliant, entrepreneurial individuals. His is a
primitively individualist utopia. ‘There [are] no movements, really’, Danto says, ‘except
what individuals [are] doing’ (p. 90). His assertion of ‘the end of art’ edges closer
to the politically objectionable statement ‘there is no society’ than perhaps it Žrst
appears. Stock neoconservative positions mark out Danto’s territory, but the primary

15
For an alternative philosophical argument that refers primarily to conceptualism, see Osborne
1999; compare Lippard 1973 and Kosuth 1991.
16
Compare Rorty 1990, pp. 51–7.
 Reviews • 263

assumption of the unsound syllogism that results in the declaration that, if something
is art, then the philosopher-critic is obliged to like it, is art’s unquestioned value.
Is there any way that this assumption cannot be a culturally obedient and socially
compliant deference to art as an institution? Surely, the obligation to like all art is not
founded on a philosophy that excludes advocacy alone, but is built into the argument
through stealth. It is only by borrowing the accrued value of art and forgetting to
mention it that Danto’s argument can make sense at all. As soon as we question the
implicit cultural superiority of art, however, Danto’s obligation to ‘like it all’ turns to
dust.

Is pluralism inevitable?
Danto’s pluralism is weakly argued.17 ‘Inevitably’, Danto states, ‘Pluralism falls out as
a consequence of a good philosophy of art’ (p. 94). There are two types of inevitability
in Danto, the historical and the logical. And, like Greenberg, they lead to the same
place. Pluralism is inevitable because of the end of the narrative of art’s development,
and because a philosophy of art must not become art criticism. There is a further
argument, too, rooted in aesthetics: ‘there is no truth or falsity in art, which means
that Pluralism is Žnally unavoidable’ (p. 95). It would be worth dwelling on these
inevitabilities of pluralism, not least because they can seem quite compelling in a
certain light. A good philosophy of art, unlike criticism, is true of all art and therefore
cannot warrant the preference for one example of art over another (hence, pluralism).
And, since there is no true or false art and no true or false interpretation of art, no
one approach to art – by an artist or critic – can be favoured (hence, pluralism). How
fortunate, then, that the historical mission of art has subsided leaving no unifying
criteria for artistic practice and interpretation (hence, pluralism). In each case, Danto
opposes two systems, one (obsolete or absurd) system that uniŽes against another
(new and warranted) that leads inevitably – sturdily, quickly, without further
discussion – to what I can best describe as a post-universalist or post-consensus
culture. It is a conservative brand of post-universalism, it goes without saying.
Where there is no universal truth, or when what is passed off as such is in fact a false
universalism, the result is, according to Danto, (inevitably) pluralism. So, in effect,
there is nothing besides an alternative between one form of cultural, intellectual and
social harmony or another, either universal truth or pluralism.
There is no mention in Danto of either the possibility of a strained, stratiŽed,
alienating, enforced dispute in the absence of a shared, universal truth, nor the social
and cultural conditions that prevent universalism from ourishing. If, on the contrary,

17
Compare Norris 1996, pp. 155–8.
264 • Dave Beech

we understand division and dispute as the social and cultural forces that thwart
universalism, then the result is not inevitably Danto’s pluralism but cultural and
political struggle. This is precisely the reason why Raymond Williams once said
‘all criticism now is social criticism’.18 In such circumstances, pluralism – at least
the conservative brand promoted by Danto – is one of the forces at play in the
maintenance of the cultural and social settlement, one of the key techniques for obscur-
ing the political stakes by permitting and neutralising opposition in the ideological
guise of variety. If Danto’s end of art argument is blatantly constricting, with its effec-
tive barring of alternative narratives, his avowal of pluralism is a classic example
of the neoconservative mode of address: deploying the rhetoric of liberalisation to
halt the potential of politicisation. In other words, in the absence of a consensus or a
universal truth, what Danto overlooks or cancels is the very precondition of politici-
sation: rivalry, dispute, controversy, debate, power, force. It is, perhaps, too much to
ask that Danto agree with the political Left’s longstanding commitment to struggle
as the labour of universalism, but a consideration of the social processes that might
bring about universalism certainly puts a question mark over Danto’s sanguine binary
opposition of universalism and pluralism.
It is not enough, however, to index Danto’s philosophy of art to the familiar
moves of neoconservative philosophy, politics and social theory. The kernel of Danto’s
argument is protected by long-standing and widely held assumptions about art.
Omitting struggle and debate from the Želds of art and aesthetics has almost always
been seen as a sign of being on the side of art and aesthetics. This is why, when
feminist art historians challenged the pleasures of looking in and at art through
the concept of the gaze, they were quizzed not so much on a case-by-case basis, but
on the fundamental question of whether they were in fact capable of attending to
art and not merely recruiting art for other, political, ends. If, for the academic art
historian, feminist art history is like ‘playing a violin with a spanner ’,19 this is not
because they have introduced violence into the arena of art but because they attend
to the violence already present. In the same way, the very lack of any trace of
hegemony and struggle in Danto’s philosophy of art is prima facie evidence that his
thinking is an agent for authority and division. As such, perhaps, Danto does not
distort art in order to conŽrm his neoconservative values; he fails to challenge the
inherited value of art and builds a neoconservative philosophy out of what he can
salvage from art’s injured reputation. Hence, Duchamp and Pop, according to Danto,
completed art’s self-deŽnition, they did not, for instance, engage in an antagonistic
relationship with art. If I disagree with Danto on these and other points, it is not

18
Williams 1990, p. 97.
19
Quoted in Garb 1993, p. 219.
 Reviews • 265

because I am at last convinced of the validity of his pluralist philosophy but because
I have read his book in the same manner that I attend to art – with a spanner.

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