Novelty: A History of the New by Michael North

Author:Michael North [North, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Literary Criticism, General, American, European, philosophy, Aesthetics
ISBN: 9780226077901
Google: SV75AAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-10-18T00:27:36.813551+00:00

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MAKING IT NEW: NOVELTY AND AESTHETIC MODERNISM

THE ARTWORLD OF THE NEW

Very shortly after the publication of Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, its influence outside the history and philosophy of science was demonstrated by the publication of a paper called “The Artworld” by the art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto. This paper, with its simple and yet sweeping title, is now famous for a number of reasons, most of them related to the fact that it records Danto’s first encounter with the work of Andy Warhol. The Brillo boxes that Warhol had just shown for the first time became the chief exhibits in Danto’s argument that a decisive shift to a new understanding of art had occurred, a shift so fundamental that it might almost be said to have marked the end of the history of art. In the years since the first publication of this essay in 1964, a tremendous amount of attention has been focused on this claim, and on its implications for art produced after Warhol—so much in fact that relatively little notice has been given to the essay’s opening gambit, which is to present, in terms clearly derived from Kuhn, a thumbnail sketch of the beginnings of aesthetic modernism.

To see something as art at all, Danto argues, requires the supporting context of “an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.”1 What he had in mind at the time, he said many years later, was something like the meaning philosophers since Ludwig Wittgenstein have given the term world. In this case, it would designate the world “populated by all and only artworks, much as The Animal World was made up of all and only animals.”2 In other words, Danto calls on world to do much the same duty done in Kuhn’s work by worldview or, more famously, by paradigm. The artworld is not, Danto has always insisted, what has come to be known as the art world, the assembled social institutions that administer the production, exhibition, and analysis of artworks, but rather the collection of entities that fit a conceptual definition of art. The first example given in the essay is the collection of traditional artworks that fit a mimetic theory of art.3

In discussing the fate of what he calls the IT, the imitation theory of art, Danto follows out the implications entailed in calling it a world. Since it is a category that includes only and all those things considered works of art, it is total, complete, cohesive, and theoretically unchangeable; that is to say, if the collection is to be altered in any fundamental way, the theory must be changed. Of course, as exceptions present themselves, auxiliary hypotheses may be patched onto the main theory; but sooner or later, if new items demanding the designation art continue to occur, there must be a violent, abrupt, and complete redefinition, a revolution. Danto calls this sort of change a “conceptual revolution,” and he cites as prototype “certain episodes in the history of science.

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