Modern Art Theories

Author(s): Christopher Williams

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Autumn, 1998, Vol. 56, No. 4
(Autumn, 1998), pp. 377-389
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/432128

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 CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
Modern Art Theories
The ancient doctrine that artworks are imitative
or capture likenesses has been widely denied,
and by aestheticians who are thought to hold
sharply contrasting views about the nature of
art. Two of these views are of particular interest
to me. The first is formalism, or one of the views
that can be called formalism, which maintains
that artworks qua artworks are void of all repre-
sentational content and consist in mere patterns
of line and color that please us on a direct in-
spection. The second (and currently much more
discussed) view is that artworks differ from
mere physical objects by virtue of an invisible
art-making property, namely, an identification
that an artist makes whereby a physical object
acquires a representational content. For the sake
of terminological symmetry, and to distinguish
it from other positions, I shall call this second
view invisibilism-which should not be taken
to suggest that artworks themselves are invisi-
ble, but only that the art-making property can-
not be discerned in the visible physical object.
If we think about the overall history of art,
formalism and invisibilism look counterintu-
itive. But these views were motivated by devel-
opments in modern art, and these views can
look more promising against that background.
They are modern art theories, to use a term that
is calculatedly ambiguous between theories of
modem art and modern theories of art. I want to
sort this ambiguity out, to understand the philo-
sophical impact that modern art should have on
our thinking, and to argue that insofar as the
case against the ancient doctrine relies on his-
torical premises the case is far from conclusive.
We shall also see that formalism and invisi-
bilism have more in common than we might
have supposed. Depending on one's perspective,
their common ground can be good news for one
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56:4 Fall 1998
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theory, bad news for the other, or-as I think
most likely-bad news for both.
The view that modernism (which for my pur-
poses may include postmodernism) is thought to
threaten may be called the picture conception of
art. Differing accounts of what makes some-
thing a picture can be given, but I will take the
concept of a picture for granted; what matters
here is the relation of pictures to art, and whether
there are genuine, tenable alternatives to the pic-
ture conception. That the standing credentials of
the picture conception are unexpectedly strong
is the topic I begin with; and I wish to make
three claims about that conception, and a fourth
about art.
(i) The picture conception does a quite cred-
itable job of covering a very large number of ar-
tifacts we think of as works of visual art. Most
paintings and sculptures, whether they are tradi-
tional or modern, Western or non-Western, are
naturally described as pictures or as having a
pictorial character. This observation is espe-
cially worth making in connection with modern
art, which affords us works by Matisse, Picasso,
Mir6, Magritte, Kahlo, O'Keeffe, Hockney, and
many, many other undisputed picture makers.
Modernism also affords plenty of hard cases,
and I shall say more about these later, but their
existence should not obscure the plethora of
tractable cases.
(ii) If we accept the picture conception, we
are hardly committed to thinking that any pic-
ture whatsoever is an artwork. In this sentence
"an artwork" can have two meanings, one de-
scriptive and one normative, and it is only the
normative that I want. However, we should first
378 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

distinguish, in a somewhat idealized manner, other light entirely by thinking about corre-
the two meanings. To call something an artwork sponding claims for science.
may be to say that an artifact was made under If we wanted to, we could say that one "the-
the concept of art, however well or poorly it suc- ory of science" holds that the task of science is to
ceeds aesthetically or artistically. Or it may be ascertain, via some theoretical apparatus, causal
to say that an artifact has, or comes to have, the or other regularities that unaided observation
values characteristic of art, however it was does not disclose to us. But why should we want
made. (Any view about art is given the best runto? This "theory" again does not tell us any-
for its money with the second meaning, since thing we did not already know, and we can
that meaning helps to shift attention away from scarcely imagine any rival theories that could
flawed, unsatisfying works and also to weaken take its place without changing the subject. To
any tendency to acquiesce in historically paro- be sure, there are controversies about the ratio-
chial understandings of the artifacts that can fall nality of scientific procedures and the differ-
under the concept of art.) ences between science and pseudoscience, the
Now a child's drawing, on many reckonings, status of theoretical entities, the best way to
is not an artwork in the normative sense, whereas understand theory change, and so forth, but
a painting by Vermeer is. Both are pictures. Yet these controversies concern-or only fruitfully
we need not suppose that the difference between concern2-particular cases in science. They
the Vermeer and the child's drawing is to be arise against a background in which the nature
sought in some additional, extrapictorial ingre- of science itself is fixed, and must be fixed if the
dient that only the Vermeer has; instead we controversies are to be intelligible.
could suppose that the difference merely has to It would be more than surprising to have a
do with its being the kind of picture that it is. bona fide theory of science, and it is not obvious
The Vermeer illuminates some aspect of its sub- why the situation with art should be any differ-
ject (to use a natural idiom) as the child's draw- ent. But someone could insist that the situation
ing does not. And so we might think that a pic- has to be strikingly different because of the way,
ture becomes an artwork when it proves to be for instance, in which our appreciations of vari-
peculiarly revelatory of its subject-perhaps ous artworks relate to each other. Once Cezanne
revelatory in the way that only a picture, as op-is recognized to have artistic merit, our appreci-
posed to a verbal description, can be. Clearly, ation of Duccio need not, and presumably should
more would have to be said about "revelation," not, be discredited.3 Yet oxygen-theory does in-
but it is at least worth remarking that the notion terestingly displace phlogiston-theory. And so,
of artistic beauty (to use an old-fashioned if we are not to be perplexed, it might seem that
idiom) could be explicated by this means. a theoretical apparatus for limning the general
(iii) The picture conception need not-in my shape of art is necessary for our understanding
view, should not-be thought of as a theory of of art, while a theoretical need does not exert the
art (in such expressions as "Plato's imitation same pressure where our understanding of sci-
theory"). For it could-in my view, should-be ence is concerned.
regarded as a basic framework in which we de- This conjecture is mistaken. The problem is
bate about the inclusion or exclusion of individ- that there are two levels of possible perplexity in
ual artifacts rather than as an object of debate in the Cezanne-Duccio pairing, and one level is
its own right. 1 The whole of this essay is needed too abstract for a general question of art to gain
to make all of this large claim plausible, but the a foothold and the other is not abstract enough.
following reflection is a start. If the picture con- The first level is occupied if we ask how an ap-
ception is a "theory," it does not really explain preciation of Cezanne can coexist peacefully
anything at all, but merely registers what is ut- with an appreciation of Duccio.4 The right an-
terly obvious about the majority of artworks that swer is that excellence comes in many varieties,
we know. To label Mrs. Siddons a picture is not that we are equipped to appreciate them all, and
to theorize about the painting, save in a mislead- that there need not be any onus to reduce one
ingly grandiose sense. This reflection is quite kind to any other. This claim would have to be
simple-too simple, one might fear. To show elaborated and defended, but notice that we
that it need not be so, let us put the matter in an-
have left the notion of art well behind us. If the

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Williams Modern Art Theories
peaceful coexistence of Cezanne and Duccio is a
problem, much the same problem arises for our
admiration of Pericles and Lincoln as statesmen.
Yet a theory of statesmanly virtue is not needed
in order to make our understanding of that phe-
nomenon, the joint admiration, satisfactory.5
The second level of perplexity is occupied if we
ask how it is that we (can) admire Cezanne, on the
assumption that we already admire Duccio, or vice
versa. Here the solution is to find an obliging critic,
someone with the knack of describing Cezanne's
work in such a way as to help make the scales fall
from our resistant eyes. The critic's offices may be
in vain-a familiar point-but the point to make
here is that criticism is the only means we have
for doing anything about perplexity at this level.
And criticism of particular artworks is not the
same as general theorizing about art, unless we
just beg all the relevant questions.
I suspect that only if we conflate these two
levels will we think that the Cezanne-Duccio
pairing creates a need for an authentic theory of
art, and I shall try to strengthen incredulity re-
garding this need as we go along. Let us just
note now that if a ground-floor theory of art is
as vacuous as a ground-floor theory of science,
then the aspect-revealing picture conception
would seem to be the most promising candidate
for being the analogue of the regularity-reveal-
ing theory conception of science.6
(iv) My fourth claim requires a little stage
setting. We shall have trouble accepting both the
claim that the picture conception is not a theory
and the claim that no theory of art is needed at
the ground floor if we think that our cognitive
relationship encounters special hardships be-
cause the nature of art is intrinsically problem-
atic. The claim is that there are no special hard-
ships of this sort.
The nature of art would be problematic at the
base, and insolubly so, if we assigned to art in-
compatible characterizations, as we do with the
protagonist of the barber paradox, who was said
to shave all and only those men who did not
shave themselves. But nobody has suggested
that art is like this, and in any event those clam-
orous for theory want a manageable problem,
one that a theory could treat. Now we would
have some justification for their pessimistic as-
sessment and hope for the proposed cure if the
nature of art were such that we were unable to
identify artworks by sight, unable to make the
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379
most elementary recognitions of particular in-
stances. Yet perceivers are able to identify art-
works. The old story about the grapes that
Zeuxis sculpted and the birds took to be real is a
most meager resource for philosophy: birds, and
people, do not usually mistake a sculpture for
food, and when they do, they are usually fools or
juveniles, not innocently gulled adults, because
artworks generally look quite different from
other, nonart objects in which perceivers have
an interest. The occasional trompe l'oeil detail
in a work does not disturb this conclusion, in
part because wholesale illusionism must be un-
common in art if the concept of art is to be use-
ful, in part because illusion extends to only a
portion of any work.
This last point can be expanded. It is some-
times suggested that Renaissance artists aspired
to create illusions by depicting objects in linear
perspective. If true, this claim would help to
make the nature of art seem problematic, if only
on the picture conception. However, it is not
true. Suppose we say that there is indeed an il-
lusion of the third dimension in the ideal-limit
Renaissance painting, the Albertian window: it
is simply a fallacy to infer from the illusion of
depth to an illusion about the objects depicted in
that depth, and there is no reason to think that
the depicted objects would take us in. Hence
there is no problem arising from considerations
of illusion with art on the picture conception.
Nor does art become more problematic in the
twentieth century (and this position can be held
even if we do not accept the picture conception).
Only a few would confuse a Rothko with an
accidentally painted canvas that a centrifuge
might produce. Much of the reason is that the
probabilities are extremely low that a random
process would yield Rothko's subtleties. We
may worry that the mere (and logically undis-
missable) possibility of a "centrifuge Rothko" is
enough to problematize the nature of art spe-
cially; but this would be a hasty judgment, be-
cause if the example reveals anything it reveals
that unlikely contingencies can always occur.
And so a worry here would just be the far more
general one about epistemological skepticism.
Again, art has been left behind: the skeptical
worry has here an illustration picturesquely in-
volving art, but an illustration to the same effect
could be made with anything else. Hence there
is no special problem.
380
Still, confusions between modernist works and
mere physical things can occur, but as with the
grapes of Zeuxis, they can be easily explained
through the perceiver's inexperience or impa-
tience (a more significant factor for modernist
than for traditional art), or again, in the rela-
tively rare and exceptional instance through
the playful idiosyncrasies of a particular work.
The newness in appearance of modernist work
may mean that the necessary experience for the
perceiver takes longer to come by, but that may
be all. As with more traditional art, the phenom-
enon of isolated confusions hardly forces us to
conclude that this art, or our conceptual relation-
ship to it, poses peculiar internal difficulties.
Perhaps it will be said that this reply fails to
show due appreciation for the context of intro-
duction for modernist works. When modernist
works made their debut, according to this objec-
tion, they were so new and strange that recogni-
tion of them was not easy. So (to continue) it is
one thing to recognize that Rothko's pieces are
artworks after the community has digested their
achievement, but quite another to be present at
the creation, and to grasp them as artworks at
that time. To counterreply, it is quite unclear
why we should attach so much importance to
the first viewers' perplexed responses as to sup-
pose that a theory of art must be addressed, as it
were, to them. But let us suppose, for the sake of
argument, that it should be so addressed, and go
on to ask how a theory could help those viewers
and how we are to understand the help.
II
The formalist Clive Bell, writing in 1914, at-
tempted to vindicate the work of Cezanne be-
fore a world that was still largely unreceptive to
that work, and propounded a theory of art
within which a more comprehending reception
for Cezanne and other postimpressionists could
be effortlessly secured.7 Half a century later, in
1964, the invisibilist Arthur Danto attempted
something similar when philosophers (presumed
to be baffled) invited him to make sense of
Warhol, a more advanced (or more adventurous)
modernist.8 The provocative idea animating
these projects is that our thinking about art-not
individual works but art itself-should change
profoundly, somehow, because of the experi-
ments, or faits accomplis, call them what we
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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
will, of Cezanne or Warhol, and that accepting
these artifacts as artworks at the time makes our
standing conception of art uncouth.9
Unusual artworks can certainly prompt retail
changes in our thinking about art. Cezanne may
lead us to question whether a picture might show
more by containing less detail than a convention-
ally realistic picture does; Warhol, how much
mechanicality the art-making process can as-
similate and still yield an artwork. But such
changes as these need not dislodge the picture
conception. So how exactly could the experi-
ments or faits accomplis of the avant-garde have
the wholesale revisionary implications that ei-
ther formalism or invisibilism envisage? In this
section and the next I want to consider spelled-
out attempts to answer this question.
One way of interpreting wholesale revision-
ism is crude on the face of it, but its very crudity
makes it a useful starting point. We may think
of this attempted answer as the revolutionary in-
terpretation of the avant-garde, and it says that
the nature of art is simply transformed by what
avant-garde artists do (or have done). To sim-
plify things, we could say that artists made pic-
tures before 1910, and that their pictures were
artworks too, but that after 1910, and for what-
ever reason, artists made formal patterns in-
stead, which in the new dispensation qualify as
artworks and uniquely qualify. 10 Thus, a Rothko
appearing before 1910 might in hindsight be re-
garded as prescient, but it would not be an art-
work, and for the same reason that a Vermeer
appearing afterwards would be a mere historical
souvenir but not an artwork either. A similar
revolutionary narrative could then be told about
the displacement of formalism in (to simplify
once more) 1960. This last remark reveals that it
is possible, on the revolutionary interpretation,
for both formalism and invisibilism to be true
theories at different times. I I As theories of mod-
ern art, they become, for one art-historical mo-
ment, applicable theories of art in general.
The revolutionary interpretation is unappeal-
ing because it divides the history of art into
discrete, conceptually unrelated segments, and it
is not at all clear how we can tell anything
grander than a bare causal story about the rela-
tions between the segments. This result is unap-
pealing from a less speculative perspective as
well, because of a related difficulty that con-
fronts us in whatever post-revolutionary space
Williams Modern Art Theories
we occupy as spectators. For it is not clear that
pre-revolutionary art can be art for us, can be
anything more than an historical souvenir itself,
unless it coincidentally makes sense under the
terms of the new dispensation. And yet our ex-
perience of art suggests that subsequent artistic
developments frequently deepen our apprecia-
tion of past achievements, and this is contrary to
what the revolutionary interpretation would lead
us to expect. These objections seem decisive.
The revolutionary interpretation nevertheless
acquires an air of greater plausibility, but only
an air, if we suppose, as Danto did, that there is
an analogy between recalcitrant observational
phenomena, which (new) scientific theories ex-
plain, and recalcitrantly avant-garde works, which
(new) theories of art explain. But the analogy is
confused. A theory of art tells us what the gen-
eral character of art is, whereas a scientific the-
ory merely explains the particular phenomena
that fall within the purview of the theory. To
think, on the basis of the analogy, that an avant-
garde work could trigger a revision in our con-
ception of art would thus be akin to thinking
that the switch from the Ptolemaic to the Coper-
nican theory of the solar system could trigger a
corresponding revision in our conception of
what science does. To have a proper analogy
with a scientific theory we require not a theory
of art but an "artistic theory," which ostensibly
shows how a puzzling C6zanne painting, for ex-
ample, need not puzzle us. There are no artistic
theories,12 nor any reason to think a theory of
art could be called upon to do its job.
The force of this claim can be brought out by
means of a dilemma. Either the puzzling paint-
ing is already felt to be an artwork indepen-
dently of a theory or it is not. If the painting is
already felt to be an artwork, then a theory is
useless, since we wanted the theory to make the
painting intelligible as an instantiation of the
concept. On this horn of the dilemma, the puz-
zlement we have can be expressed as follows:
"How, given that this artifact is felt to be art or
to be assessable as art, do we understand it?"
This is a reasonable question, one which we can
imagine people asking, but one whose answer
requires criticism, once again, not theory. The
first spectators of early modernist works felt
consternation in front of what they saw and
many of them were prepared to deny, at the time,
that what they saw was art. But the consterna-
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381
tion has its point only if those spectators felt in
some inarticulate way that the mystifying arti-
facts were artworks after all, albeit ones which
they were unable to appreciate. (Their denials
are charitably construed as exaggerated admis-
sions of a natural frustration.) The irritation
passed, if it passed at all, by viewing and re-
viewing the works, perhaps accompanied by
pointers, which sympathetic others supplied, on
how to look at the works.
Now let us suppose that the painting is felt not
to be art. We then have a problem characterizing
the puzzlement that we have: the painting is not
a puzzling artwork (by hypothesis), but we do
have to be puzzled by it nonetheless in order to
justify the importation of the enlightening the-
ory. So we will have to say that the painting is
aesthetically puzzling in some way, where "aes-
thetically" does not carry the more restricted
implications of "artistically." But there are no art-
independent aesthetic anomalies that theories of
art can target and remove. We never find our-
selves in a predicament where we would say,
"This artifact is aesthetically puzzling-would
it be less so if we thought of it as an artwork, if
we revised our conception of art so that it un-
problematically instantiated the concept?" And
even if we thought we were in this predicament,
the justification of any theory intended to ac-
commodate the artifact would be unabashedly
circular.
I am not suggesting that there are absolutely
no independent aesthetic perplexities: we might
be pleased, for example, by the appearance of a
certain object, despite its odd colors or the re-
pellent materials of which it is composed, and
our pleasure may, in that light, mystify us. But
surely the solution here lies just in getting ac-
customed to the object (that is, to the organic
whole that comprises separately displeasing
parts), not in supplying a theory. For insofar as
an aesthetic puzzle is genuinely independent of
the art concept, a theory of art will pass the puz-
zle by.
The dilemma shows that neither formalism at
an earlier time nor invisibilism at the present is
supported by avant-garde gestures, understood
in a revolutionary fashion. The dilemma also
shows that a transcendental claim about art is
similarly unfounded, namely, that an artwork is
an artwork in virtue of a theory of art. This the-
ory-dependence thesis, as we may call it, seems
382 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

an obvious truth-even a platitude-if we inco- be extraneous, and, what is more, that element
herently accept the analogy between scientific will always have been extraneous (for if it was
theories and theories of art while trying to pre- not always so, the explicative interpretation
serve the thought that there are no independent simply collapses into the revolutionary).
aesthetic anomalies for theories of art to treat. To be sure, we pay a certain price for our
The thesis then looks irresistible: just as there greater sophistication. We can no longer regard
would be no scientific statements about obser- formalism and invisibilism as being, or having
vational phenomena were it not for scientific been, true in consecutive temporal periods, as
theories, so too (it seems) there would be no art- we could before, because the two theories iden-
works without theories of art.13 Yet the thesis is tify different art-making properties, which are
anything but obvious, and it is a good deal the same properties that make objects artworks
bolder than a mere mind-dependence thesis in all periods. So we now have modem theories
about art. It is difficult to tell what the evidence
of art instead of theories of modem art. We thus
for the theory-dependence thesis is, since we raise the standard of proof considerably for the
have to assume the truth of the revolutionary in- theories, since they are more easily defended if
terpretation of modernism in order to get any we suppose that they only became true after
empirical support for it from recent history. And rationally unignorable historical achievements
this assumption, in turn, shows that we cannot made them so. Still, one of the theories-at most
argue for the revolutionary versions of formal- one-might be true for all that, and it will be all
ism or invisibilism by appealing to the thesis. the more impressive for having satisfied the
higher standard of proof.
III Another aspect of the price we pay emerges if
we think about how we must view historical pe-
The revolutionary interpretation is not the only riods that lie prior to the arrival of the true the-
strategy we could adopt for characterizing the ory (and almost all periods are prior, since on
revisionary impact of modernism. Rather than both of our theories the truth arrives very late).
saying that modernism represents a break in art We have to think that the practice and the un-
history, we could say that modernism discloses derstanding of art were systematically discon-
the underlying characteristics that art had had, nected from each other in the pre-enlightened
latently and unselfconsciously, all along. This dispensation, the aestheticians among our an-
result is better, since we avoid the embarrassing cestors (and they were not alone) were vainly
consequence that the artworld just changed the looking for a Northwest Passage when they
subject in 1910 (or 1960). We can call this strat- characterized-that is, thought they were (accu-
egy the explicative interpretation. rately) characterizing-what artists were doing
Those who have been philosophically im- in picture-making terms. Perhaps such an egre-
pressed by the fact of modernism eventually gious disconnection did occur; at least it could
come to terms with it in this more sophisticated occur. But then it is worth remarking that if this
way, which allows us to view the overall history view of the past is correct, the idea that the na-
of art as reflecting a progressively more encom-ture of art is constituted by decisions, stipula-
passing conception of what that history is about. tions, or theoretical pronouncements rapidly
If Cezanne made art, then his paintings reveal loses coherence, since the relevant thoughts or
what is artistically significant about the Old actions of pre-enlightened artists and aestheti-
Masters; if Warhol made art, we thereby learn cians can hardly be regarded as constitutive of
what makes Brueghel's paintings qualify as those artists' works. And thus the explicative in-
well.14 The difference between the new works terpretation actually subverts, rather than rein-
and the old lies in, and only in, the unusual forces, the transcendental theory-dependence
transparency that the new works, as instances ofthesis (as well as its empirical counterpart, the
art, exemplify: with modernism there are fewer institutional theory of art).
extraneous-artistically irrelevant-elements to If, as the picture conception suggests, the un-
distract us. The upshot, so far as formalism and derlying essence of art did not become fully ex-
invisibilism are concerned, is that the picturing plicit only in the recent past, there will also be a
element found in the older works will turn out todisconnection between understanding and prac-

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Williams Modern Art Theories
tice. The avant-garde did think that the artist's
task was, in Ezra Pound's slogan, to make it
new, and it could be argued that this imperative
partly meant that the acknowledged task was
not to make pictures. If modernism did not bring
about the desuetude of the picture conception,
then (again) it could be argued that the avant-
garde partly did not know what it was up to. I
believe that this argument is sound, but the con- Either formalism or invisibilism holds out the
clusion does not help the revisionary projects.
There are two reasons why it does not help.
The first is that it is easy to overmagnify the
newness in the avant-garde imperative, since
artists can make art new merely by making new
sorts of pictures (as most modernists uncontro-
versially did), and so the occurrences of "partly" the second. How do we tell which of these three
in the argument above are nontrivial. The sec-
ond is that avant-garde statements about art are
notoriously ill considered, owing in part to un-
settledness in the artistic practices, and there-
fore some disconnection here should hardly
come as a surprise. Many statements in mod-
ernist manifestos are just foolish-we should do
well to remember the futurists' solemn call for a
ten-year suppression of the nude in painting-
and general statements about the nature of art
are plainly liable to create mischief for the un-
wary.15 If we bear these points in mind, the
threat of a disconnection should be less worri-
some for modernist practitioners than for pre-
modern. In any event, if we have to accept a
measure of disconnectedness (as seems unavoid-
able), modernism affords the better-the more
localized-site.
If we regard the explicative interpretation as
the right one for our purposes, and I think it is,
we are ready to consider the claims of formal-
ism and invisibilism directly. Surveying the uni-
verse of art (Old Masters and modernists, but
also cathedrals and carpets), formalism looks
for the lowest common denominator, and finds
it: configured surfaces are what the diverse ob-
jects in the universe have in common. Invisibil-
ism, on the other hand, looks for what, by its
lights, is a visually hidden parameter: an inten-
tional fact concerning an artistic identification.
(The two sets of explananda are not perfectly
coextensive, since an invisibilist might not ac-
cept the carpet as an artwork, because it might
lack the right intentional ancestry. However, the
two sets should match fairly closely, and so this
complication is minor.) Since the lowest com-
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383
mon denominator and the hidden parameter are,
to speak loosely, features that are present in the
artifacts under review, the issue is whether these
items have the significance that these theories
demand of them.
IV
prospect of a deep and exciting discovery about
art. From a naive standpoint, we would have
thought that artworks had content and that the
content was accessible to perception. The picture
conception affirms both halves of this thought.
Yet formalism denies the first half, invisibilism
views is actually true?
Because we cannot complacently invoke the
verdicts of art history to do our work for us, the
question is more difficult than it appears. It
seems to me that we shall only be in a position to
answer it by asking, to begin with, which view
harmonizes best with our prereflective experi-
ence of art and, then, by asking whether any re-
flective adjustments that a theory subsequently
invites us to make impoverish that experience.
There are difficulties, too, about what counts as
the impoverishment (or enrichment) of aestheti-
cally pleasurable episodes, or about the extent to
which pleasure even shapes the experience of
art, but I assume that we can get around these by
using the following standard that ought to be
modest: insofar as the experience of art involves
receptivity to a concretely structured phenome-
non, a theory that attenuates the receptivity or
concreteness will impoverish that experience.
Theories of art, by common agreement, can-
not go proxy for art criticism, but recognition of
this fact should not blind us to the reality that
theories, sincerely endorsed, should neverthe-
less modify our perception of aspects of works
as a class. In the case of formalism, which I con-
sider first, we are at least implicitly encouraged
to attend selectively to contentless patterns and
to regard the remaining features of the artifact
as so much aesthetic dross. Some might think
the effort required for this selective attention is
heroic (Bell apparently thought so), but we
might rather think that it is a quixotic, ascetic
exercise, because the reasons for undertaking
the exercise are comprehensible only from the
formalist perspective, and also-and I think
384
more importantly-because people simply do
not perceive pictures in a content-free way.
Danto, in an extremely telling critique of for-
malism, has noticed that it leaves us with a very
thin vocabulary for appreciating the saliences of
a work. 16 For example, the Mona Lisa is not, on
formal grounds, so different from Duchamp's
LHOOQ-that is, not different enough to ac-
count for the aesthetic differences between the
works. Although Danto himself puts the matter
differently, acceptance of formalism should de-
sensitize us to the differences that are not re-
ducible to those that are formally describable.
Thus, for reasons such as these, our experience
becomes impoverished, and so we are better off
without formalism.
This conclusion is probably news from no-
where. But what is interesting, and what Danto
has not noticed, is that a complementary critique
applies to a consistent invisibilism. Whereas
formalism attempts to reduce the experience of
art to unconceptualized sensations, invisibilism
attempts a reduction in the opposite direction, to
conceptualizations that are only incidentally re-
lated to sensations. One of Danto's hypothetical
artworks will make this point clearer, a failure
(on his view) that he does not discuss in great
detail, but which I want to examine more closely.
An artist paints a white canvas bisected by a
horizontal black line, and she calls her work Old
Man Planting Spring Cactuses. According to
Danto, the identification is unsuccessful, not in
the sense that the result is humdrum art but in
the sense that the result is not even intelligible as
art. The piece fails, given certain cognitive con-
straints on imagination, because Danto "can see
no identification that might sustain that inter-
pretation."'7 Presumably Danto is not just con-
fessing to an imaginative weakness on his part,
one which better imaginers would not share; in-
stead, the problem seems to be that perception
cannot be structured as the title demands. Yet it
is not clear why the problem is not merely psy-
chological. Suppose we say that Old Man does
make sense, as follows: the line is the horizon at
which the old man stands, insignificantly small,
planting his cactus in an empty desert. In the
spirit of Danto's whimsical vignettes, we might
then feel that the work, far from being a failure,
displays a stunning existential pathos.
Now we could say that my interpretation of
Old Man shows that the example is a bad one for
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The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Danto's purpose, which is to illustrate the notion
of an unsuccessful artistic identification. But
we should say something much stronger: that
my interpretation shows that no identification
need be unsuccessful if we are ingenious enough
to partner the perceivable object with an exotic
conceit. Because ingenuity has no upper bound,
and because (according to invisibilism) the per-
ceivable object is a physical object that has no
content of its own that can help to shape certain
interpretations rather than others, invisibilism
can sustain the stronger inference.
If we make this last admission, we are ready
to admit more. The availability, in principle, of
an exotic conceit does not show that the distinc-
tion between successful and unsuccessful iden-
tifications cannot be drawn for Danto, but rather
that success rests entirely on the explanatory
scripts that the artist or her admiring (but more
articulate) critic volunteers. And this is to say
that there is no space at all for the idea that the
conceptual component of a work may be intrin-
sically a part of what we see.
Without that idea, if we complain that my in-
terpretation of Old Man is forced, labored, arti-
ficial, or crucially depends on a mere conceit,
invisibilism has seemingly no other resources
with which to identify the complaint than to say
that we must be requesting a more highly con-
ceptualized script. The feeling that there is not
enough perceptual continuity between the can-
vas and the content is not an intelligible reason
for thinking the interpretation forced, any more
than it would be in the case of another of Danto's
examples, a monochromatic red square titled Is-
raelites Crossing the Red Sea. If the Israelites
can pass over and the Egyptians drown without
a discernible trace, surely the old man can van-
ishingly plant his cactus on the horizon. And if
we consistently disallow explanatory appeals to
the perceivable object-if we generalize from
what we are doing in these two examples-the
basis for adjudicating between more and less
successful partnerings of script and object be-
comes increasingly rarefied and intellectual.
The invisibilist may have a vestigial but pre-
potent attachment to the picturing conception
(as may the formalist), and that attachment can
help explain a readiness to reject Old Man and to
accept yet another example, the look-alike New-
ton's Third Law, which represents the path of an
isolated particle moving inertially through space.
Williams Modern Art Theories
With Third Law we may feel that, in an admit-
tedly borderline sense, we see the content, but
not so with Old Man. But again, this feeling can-
not be a reason here. Such pictorial qualities as
artworks have are only incidental to the works,
since the representational notion on which in-
visibilism insists in the case of a Brueghel paint-
ing is the same notion as that which character-
izes the whole host of Danto's hypothetical
minimalist pieces, and representation for them
is not fundamentally pictorial.
The invisibilist reconception of art on non-
perceptual lines has an untoward effect on our
experience. We should expect the spectator who
internalizes invisibilism to resist forming any
impression of a work until after he consults the
title and other pertinent explanatory material,
just as formalism encourages resistance to our
natural content-perceiving proclivities. As be-
fore, people simply do not look at art this way,
and enjoining them to change their perceptual
habits involves considerable strain. To the extent
that habits are affected, the experience reduces
to the unpacking of conceits, and it is difficult to
see how-nonfacetiously and in fact-we should
find our black-and-white canvases moving, if we
mean what we usually mean by that accolade. (I
do not want to deny that some of these works
might be moving, but we should first have to be-
come disengaged from the theory.) One could
bravely argue that a reconceived experience could
be better than what we prereflectively have; it
would certainly be different. But the argument
would indeed have to be made, and apart from
the invisibilist perspective we have no motiva-
tion to make it.
There are, in sum, no good historical reasons
for denying the picture conception of art. How-
ever, if we do misconstrue the history, there is
also no further reason to think that the choice
between the two theories is inevitable and ex-
haustive, that if formalism is unpalatable we
must settle for invisibilism, or vice versa. Only
if we assume that we do not authentically see the
contents of artworks does it make much sense to
suppose that we apprehend either mere lines and
colors or else something that is inaccessible to
ordinary perception. But any mysteries concern-
ing the perception of contents are equally mys-
teries for the perception of other objects, and so
we ought not to make that assumption merely in
the course of attempting to make sense of art.
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385
V
Even if formalism and invisibilism are inade-
quate, it may still seem that the picture concep-
tion has to be in worse straits. I wish to discuss
some sources of this feeling, and to show, pro-
grammatically, that the feeling is mistaken. One
category of sources consists of conceptual ob-
jections to the picture conception; another con-
sists of empirically hard cases in the history of
modern art.
(i) There are a number of easily stated con-
ceptual objections, and they are just as easily
disarmed. One of these-that being a picture is
at most a necessary condition for being an art-
work since not all pictures are artworks-I dealt
with in section I. Another is that the picture con-
ception would commit us, impossibly, to the
making of comparisons between the picturing
and pictured items in order to determine aes-
thetic excellence, but this objection presupposes
a confusion between our recognition of a pic-
ture's content (which is something that occurs
without our making comparisons) and our un-
derstanding of it (which could not take place un-
less we had some independent familiarity with
the kind of item pictured).18 Still another objec-
tion is expressed in the epigram (which appar-
ently impresses some philosophers) that art
does not duplicate the world because a single in-
stance of the world is already enough. Although
copies of things do have a point in the economy
of human life, which the epigram bypasses, the
epigram also fails to register the fact that many
pictures-surrealist ones, to name a notable
class of examples-are not narrowly duplica-
tive at all. In the background, however, there
lurks a somewhat different objection, to which
more attention needs to be paid.
This objection is less easy to state. The rough
idea is that if artists did have a picturing agenda,
the standard of aesthetic excellence would then
be set by how well the picture approximated the
appearance of the pictured item. There are two
versions of the idea: if artists made pictures,
they would in the limit either make artifacts that
are indistinguishable from other things (hence
redundant) or else pictures that are maximally
realistic, like photographs (and hence redundant
after the nineteenth century, because of photog-
raphy). For our purposes it does not matter
which version we work with, since the central
386 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

thought, common to the versions, seems to be
that perfect self-effacement is internal to, a reg- was later intended to reveal, Danto likened the
ulative ideal for, the concept of a picture, and in postimpressionist artwork to a brilliantly coun-
such a way that individual pictures can be as-
sessed as approximations to the ideal.
Once the central thought is stated explicitly, it supposed to indicate a break with mimesis.20
is difficult to see why we should think that it is
even remotely plausible. We may imagine that
there is some plausibility if we are specially in-
terested in self-effacing pictures. However, main-
taining this impression involves mistaking the
special purpose of a picture for what pictures
must be if they are to have purposes simpliciter.
Cezanne's blotchy rendering of Mont Sainte-
Victoire or Munch's wavy rendering of a screamer
are no less pictures, and no less satisfying as
artistic pictures, for having blotchy or wavy el-
ements that real mountains or screamers (or
photographs of them) lack. And there is no rea-
son to think that a person who makes a picture
must regard a nonpicture or a photograph as the
terminus of her efforts, as if she were to fail in
her mission to the extent that she made anything
but either of these two things. A picture maker
will want to get the picture right, but there are
many kinds of rightness, and not all, and not
many, of them can be accommodated within a
self-effacing picture (or in any other single pic-
torial vehicle).
Notwithstanding the implausibility of the self-
effacement ideal, we sometimes encounter co-
vert endorsement of it. In his most systematic
exposition of his theory, Danto relies on a
wholly conceptual argument to discredit the pic-
ture conception, and that argument presupposes
the self-effacement ideal. He asks us to consider
the paradoxical plight of the mimetic artist:
mimesis must either fail when it succeeds (by at-
taining self-effacement) or succeed when it fails
(by retaining non-self-effacing elements).19 But
this paradox (which Danto misleadingly casts
as a practical dilemma for the artist) cannot even
be framed unless we normatively require that a
particular picture efface itself. And that require-
ment is the merest imposition: being an artwork,
being a picture, and having non-self-effacing
elements are in no sense an inconsistent or re-
flectively unstable triad.
The weakness of the conceptual considera-
tion is concealed, however, if it plays an auxil-
iary role in the historical anti-picture argument.
In the semi-historicized presentation of the
problem that the dilemma of the mimetic artist
terfeited dollar bill inscribed with "Not Legal
Tender," and the existence of such an artifact is
But if the inscription is meant to be analogous to
the blotchiness of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the fal-
lacy is evident. Similarly, when Bell sought to
confirm his negative claims about the place of
representation in art, he appealed to the aesthetic
significance of so-called primitive art, whose
virtues rest, as we learn on closer inspection, not
on an avoidance of representation as such but on
what Bell calls "accurate" or "exact" representa-
tion.21 But we cannot shore up the negative
claims by such an appeal unless we surrepti-
tiously introduce the conceptual consideration.
As these examples suggest, it can be difficult
in fact to find pure historical or pure conceptual
anti-picture arguments. It is easy to blur the two,
to begin by supposing that the modernist of our
choice did not appear to make pictures; but then,
come to think of it, if the artist had wanted to,
the project would have been pointless anyway.
Still, we should take care not to blur them. The
hybrid argument offers only illusory solidity:
once its elements are distinguished the argu-
ment collapses.
Some artworks by Kandinsky, Malevich, Mon-
drian, members of the New York School, and
others are extremely abstract. At first sight it
seems either that they must be damaging coun-
terexamples to the picture conception or that re-
garding them as artworks must be impossible.
Because the attempt to deny that these paintings
are works of art is plainly an act of desperation,
the first disjunct begins to look inescapable.
Yet a strong argument can be made that these
works are not true counterexamples. A number
of abstractions with which we are familiar do
have quasi-pictorial resonances, such as Pol-
lock's Lavender Mist and Rothko's signature
stacked rectangles, which have discernible af-
finities with the luminous (as well as numinous)
clouds of Friedrich.22 Even Morris Louis's series
of Unfurleds can be seen naturally as belonging
marginally to the landscape tradition.23 And a
Mondrian may furnish a convincing image of
rational purity and simplicity (not usually con-
sidered a visible object, but which might none-
theless be given a visible form). Such works are

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Williams Modern Art Theories
not straightforwardly pictures, but they do sus-
tain picture-like perceptions, particularly over
time, as the story of art absorbs them. Perhaps
every work that claims enduring interest will
sustain at least these perceptions, and such a
finding should not surprise us if the picturing
conception is as entrenched as I have maintained.
A redoubtable abstraction that continues to
move and captivate spectators, they know not
how, may merely be awaiting the right critic
who is able to find apt descriptions for what the
spectators sense that they see.24
These cases are certainly hard, but they indi-
rectly point up a hardness that art has always
had. Describing the content of a Chardin still
life does not pose the difficulty that describing a
Kandinsky does, and yet describing how the still
life illuminates its subject does. Because de-
scribing the importance of a work's content may
not be ultimately separable from describing the
content itself, it is possible that modernism as a
whole has made explicit a deep property of art
after all-the awkwardness and even tentative-
ness that we feel when we try to put our experi-
ence into words-but this office is a far cry
from the office of making explicit a revisionary
understanding of art as such.
It is worth remarking that Danto deals in a
similar way with hard cases, which his own
view constrains him to locate somewhat differ-
ently. For him the difficulties lie with the artist
who says of her work, "This is an ordinary arti-
fact and nothing more," or "This is paint and
nothing more."25 His policy is to say that the re-
fusal to make an artistic identification can be an
identification in the right circumstances, which
seem to be necessarily exceptional. There is a
good thought in this maneuver, but we may le-
gitimately wonder why this maneuver is deployed
only now, on behalf of invisibilism, whereas a
counsel of greater conservatism would have
urged an earlier deployment, on behalf of the
picture conception. Had it been deployed then,
we would have said that an artist's refusal to
make a picture would-or rather could-yield a
special kind of picture-like painting. (On this
more conservative approach, the importance of
the artist's decision would be desirably lessened
also.)
Even so, the main drift of invisibilism, and
formalism as well, is in effect to deny that hard
cases are really hard, except provisionally and
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387
to the unschooled spectator. The reason is that if
the spectator attends diligently to the artistic
identification, or confines her attention scrupu-
lously to the formal pattern, there ought to be
available to her a pretty definite answer to the
question of whether something is an artwork or
not. This feature of these theories does not sit
happily with the historical fact that many kinds
of art-jazz and blues, cinema, the European
novel-reveal their art-making properties to the
next generation. (Here I am using "art" in a
broader way, of course, than I have used it else-
where in this essay.) And this feature is closely
related to the theorists' confident assertions that
the representational or sensuous elements of a
work are irrelevant to our understanding. These
claims concerning irrelevance moreover dis-
close what is arguably a serious additional ob-
jection to the modern art theories.
It would be remarkable, too remarkable, if we
could know in advance what perceivable ele-
ments were or were not relevant to a grasp of
what a work of art is finally about. We-both
ourselves over time and a genuinely plural set of
spectators-need to do some protracted looking
and receptive ruminating instead, without pre-
established criteria of interpretative relevance,
inasmuch as relevance is always decided by our
engagement with the peculiarities of particular
works themselves. Formalism and invisibilism
offer us a shortcut where no shortcut is really
practicable or desirable. Since pictorial contents
and pictorial significance do not, and perhaps
cannot, become apparent all at once, the picture
conception is better able to coexist with the facts
of history and our own experience than the the-
ories that would succeed it.26
CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
Department of Philosophy
University of Nevada-Reno
Reno, Nevada 89557-0056
INTERNET: CTW@UNR.EDU
1. This formulation is meant to echo a claim P. F. Straw-
son made about our commitment to interpersonal attitudes:
"This commitment is part of the general framework of
human life, not something that can come up for review as
particular cases can come up for review within this general
framework." "Freedom and Resentment," in Free Will, ed.
 388 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982),
p. 70. I do think the two areas are interestingly parallel.
2. The difference between science and pseudoscience (the
"demarcation problem") might be regarded as having raised
a general question about the nature of science. So posed, the to be equivalent to "artistic theory." If so, this usage is very
question did not have good answers. However, we can ex-
plain why certain practices in certain contexts are scientifi- explain works, and so he in effect denies their existence too.
cally irrational; and debates about these explanations do not
have to bring the general issue into play at all.
3. Technical achievements in art are a different matter. To were producing art on those walls. Not unless there were neo-
adapt E. H. Gombrich's well-known observation, our admi-
ration for the realism of Giotto may be driven out by an ac-
quaintance with the Wheaties box.
4. That appreciation enters into the characterization is im-
portant: it has no analogue in science, and its absence there
points up differences between feeling and intellect (rather
than a differential need of theory).
5. We might want to know which virtues are the states-
man's virtues, and drawing up the catalogue may then count
as a theory. We are embarked on a different inquiry, how-
ever, and one that takes our admiration for Pericles and Lin-
coln, and our pretheoretical ability to identify (at least) par-
adigmatic instances of admirable statesmen, largely for
granted.
6. Most promising, that is, if the candidate has to equip us
with some explanation of why we value the artifacts we call
artworks. I agree with those philosophers who find the in-
stitutional theory of art defective on related grounds.
7. Clive Bell, Art (New York: Capricorn Books, 1958).
Apart from the familiar part I, chap. 1 ("The Aesthetic Hy-
pothesis"), this book is generally unread, but another perti-
nent portion is part IV, chap. 1 ("The Debt to C6zanne").
8. Arthur Danto, in the original statement of his position
in "The Artworld," reprinted in Philosophy of the Visual
Arts, ed. Philip Alperson (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1992), pp. 426-433, is unequivocally an invisibilist.
How matters stand in The Transfiguration of the Common-
place (Harvard University Press, 1981) is cloudier; in chap-
ters 6 and 7 Danto aligns the art-making properties of a
work with certain expressive, rhetorical, and stylistic quali-
ties whose relationship to artistic identification is at least
unclear and at most nonexistent, and which suggest that a
second theory is in the making rather than a development of
invisibilism. For simplicity, I will ignore this complication
in the later work, and will treat Danto as a straightforward
invisibilist.
9. It is possible that the individual works that allegedly
help to usher in a changed conception of art will have a dis-
tinctive significance. Thus, one might argue that in the case
of Warhol's Brillo Box, "art becomes its own philosophy"
(whatever that might mean exactly). My concern will be
with changes in the general conception.
10. The choice of date is pleasantly due to Virginia
Woolf's quip that "in or about December, 1910, human char-
acter changed." "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," in Collected
Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1967), vol. I, p. 320.
Rather than associating the changes with postimpression-
ism, Woolf looks to Shaw, Samuel Butler, and the greater
liberties taken by Georgian cooks.
11. In "The Artworld" this may have been the line that
Danto took. Formalism (which he called the RT, or the real-
ity theory) is not presented as having been false in the period
between postimpressionism and pop art.
12. In Making TheorylConstructing Art (University of
Chicago Press, 1993), Daniel Herwitz sometimes uses the
word "theory" to cover what avant-garde artists and critics
say about modernist works, and here "theory" might appear
loose. But Herwitz does not think that such "theories" really
13. Danto endorses the thesis: "It would, I should think,
never have occurred to the painters of Lascaux that they
lithic aestheticians." "The Artworld," p. 431. No argument
is given for this claim-unless the historical procession of
theories of art (IT [the imitation theory], RT, Danto's theory)
is its surrogate, but then taking the procession in this way in-
volves the incoherent commitment I just mentioned.
14. In "Modernist Painting," in Modernism with a
Vengeance, vol. 4 of The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed.
John O'Brian (University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 85-
93, Clement Greenberg hints at such a line of thought for
pre-pop modernism, as did Bell. However, Greenberg spoils
his version of the line when he writes, "Whereas one tends
to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture
itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture first" (p. 87),
which makes it sound as though there were more of a differ-
ence between the Old Master and the modernist than just a
difference in explicitness-and the making of the claim re-
quires a sharp (and dubious) distinction between seeing a
picture and seeing what is in it. (We should also notice the
persistence of the picture conception in Greenberg's lan-
guage, which must merely enshrine primitive thinking if that
conception is wrong.) See Danto, "The Artworld," sec. I,
and Transfiguration, chap. 5, for other intimations of the ex-
plicative line of thought.
15. The futurists' call is found in Theories of Modern Art,
ed. Herschel Chipp (University of California Press, 1968),
p. 293. Chipp's instructive collection offers a wealth of
artists' quite unsubstantiated statements about art. And crit-
ics are often not much better. Greenberg, for example,
thought that surrealism was less advanced, less serious, than
the kinds of art he favored. Defense of Greenberg's large
claim would seemingly call for an extensive philosophical
investigation, which we do not find. For a helpful discussion
of this example, see Danto, After the End of Art (Princeton
University Press, 1997), p. 9. (Danto gives us very good rea-
son to be suspicious of large claims made by critics, but cu-
riously seems to take such claims at face value, and even at
more than face value.)
16. Danto, Transfiguration, pp. 30-31 and all of chap. 4.
17. Danto, Transfiguration, p. 130. I am not querying here
the role that Danto thinks titles play, that of supplying a di-
rection for interpretation, but I would query it elsewhere.
Also without demur here, I acquiesce in Danto's practice of
using "interpretation" for the action that the artist or specta-
tor performs on a mere physical object.
18. This objection is found in Collingwood's Principles
of Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1938), p. 44. Collingwood is
rightly amused at the stockbroker who would collect por-
traits only if he could check the painting against the sitter,
but would we be able to assess a portrait aesthetically if we
did not know what a face was or lived in a faceless world?
19. Danto, Transfiguration, p. 26.
20. Danto, "The Artworld," p. 427.
21. Bell, pp. 25-26.

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 Williams Modern Art Theories 389

22. As Robert Rosenblum contends in Modern Painting
and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko
(New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
23. Robert Hughes treats Louis this way in The Shock of
the New (New York: McGraw Hill, 1992), chap. 3. Some
might object that Hughes's book, adapted from a television
series and aimed at students or curious philistines, is a bad
source of support. I think, on the contrary, that such books
provide the very best support, since they must stick as
closely as possible to the experiential roots of what makes
art interesting to us.
24. We should not forget, however, that quasi-pictorial
resonances are not the same as Danto's officially nonpicto-
rial notion of representational aboutness. We see pictures
and quasi-pictures.
25. Danto, Transfiguration, pp. 2-3, 131-135.
26. 1 wish to thank Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Anita Silvers,
Annette Baier, Stephanie Semler, and several anonymous
readers for many helpful comments.

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