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End and Origin of Art 1 The End and Origin of Art 1 Karsten Harries The End and Origin of Art (Philosophy of Modern Art) Lecture Notes Fall Semester 2002 Yale University Copyright Karsten Harries The End and Origin of Art 2 Contents Preface 3 Introduction 1. Zips and Slashes 7 Part One: The End of Art 2. “I Can Do Everything” 26 3. Narratives of the End of Art 49 4. Hegel on the Death of Art 65 5. The Place of Art in the Age of the World-Picture 87 Part Two: The Need for Art 6. Between Hope and Resignation 101 7. Art as Origin 124 8. Art and the Sacred 141 9. The Golden Calf 160 Part Three: The Present and Future of Art 10. Kitsch, Vulgarity, and Abjection 178 11. The Sublime and the Interesting 197 12 Evening Art 214 13. Dreams of Alchemy 232 Conclusion 14. The Snake’s Promise Technology and Art at the Beginning of the Third Millennium 253 The End and Origin of Art 3 Preface In these lectures I attempt to show why art, especially painting, continues to matter, despite so much in today’s art-world that argues against this — and, as I will also show, such arguments are supported by the very shape of our modern world. The title demands explanation. End can mean something like death. In recent years there has thus been a great deal of talk about a possible death or end of art. But end can also mean telos or goal. And these two readings can merge: there may be a sense in which art has to die when it finally reaches its goal. The “origin of art,” too, invites different readings. “Origin” may thus be understood as the source of something, like the source of a river. That source again may be understood temporally or essentially. In the latter case the inquiry into the origin of art becomes an attempt to situate art in the larger context of the human condition. But “origin of art” may also be read with Heidegger as describing the essence of art, claiming that it is in the nature of art to be an origin. All of these different readings figure in these lectures It was with Hegel’s thesis of the end of art and with Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” in mind that I chose the title The End and Origin of Art. Hegel figures especially in the first part of the course, which circles around the question: despite our seemingly so active art-world, is there a sense in which art today has come to an end? I also take a close look at more recent versions of the end of art thesis, such as those advanced by Arthur Danto and T. J. Clark. But it is Hegel’s version that proves the most difficult to reject. The death of art in what Hegel takes to be its highest sense turns out to be demanded by our modern understanding of reality. That understanding must be challenged, if Hegel is not to have the last word here. The death of art, so understood, turns out to be a presupposition of the aesthetic understanding of art that has presided over the progress of art ever since the 18th century, an understanding that has found eloquent spokesmen in Kant, Schopenhauer, Greenberg, and Fried. All modern art is art after the death of art in Hegel’s sense. Modern art, however, as Danto is right to insist, The End and Origin of Art 4 also reached some sort of end in the past century, first with Duchamp, then with Warhol. But, if so, it is precisely this end of modern art that invites a critical reexamination of Hegel’s thesis. Such a critique is a presupposition of keeping open the possibility of a step beyond modern art that promises art a genuine future. After a look at Marxist aesthetics, the second part of the course circles around Heidegger’s inquiry into the origin of the work of art. Here we find a thoughtful challenge to Hegel’s thesis that helps us to understand why it is just in what Benjamin called this age of mechanical reproduction that we need art to save our humanity. No aesthetic art can provide what is demanded. In Heidegger we find thus pointers concerning where art might go in the future. But these pointers are shadowed by Heidegger’s politicizing of art and aestheticizing of politics. Both remain temptations that demand a critical response. The shadow cast by National Socialism threatens to envelop Heidegger’s thinking on art so completely that it becomes difficult to take seriously his challenge to Hegel: does any attempt to recover for art today what once was its highest function not reduce art to a version of the golden calf, as Adorno suggests? The third part of the course turns more directly to the present situation and future of art. It examines the extent to which much art today, especially the turn to abjection, can be understood as a critical response to kitsch, where Lyotard’s appropriation of the Kantian sublime as the aesthetic category most appropriate to postmodern art receives critical attention: I show that in the end Lyotard’s version of the sublime reduces to the interesting, as analyzed by Kierkegaard. But the pursuit of the interesting has to end in despair. Has the sun of art then set, as Nietzsche suggests? But in Nietzsche we can also find hints about what a new dawn might look like. The turn to abjection taken by some recent art deserves reconsideration in this connection; so does alchemy, understood with Elkins, as a metaphor for painting. The course is framed by an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction considers the significance of van Bladeren’s slashing of Newman’s Cathedra. Do we The End and Origin of Art 5 posses today a sufficiently robust understanding of the essence of art to simply dismiss this would-be artist’s action as an act of vandalism? Very concretely this act raises the question: What is Art? The conclusion reconsiders what the book argued for: the claim that the task of art is to open windows in the world-building raised by objectifying reason: windows to transcendence. A presupposition of meeting this task turns out to be the strength to resist the snake’s seductive promise: you shall be like God! The End and Origin of Art 6 Part One: The End of Art The End and Origin of Art 7 1. Introduction: Zips and Slashes 1 On November 21, 1997, Gerard Jan van Bladeren, an artist in his early 40's who, so he says, likes to slash his own paintings for aesthetic effect, returned to Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, where in 1986 he had already slashed Barnett Newman's Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III? to attack a second work by Newman, this time Cathedra from 1951.1 When I read about this act of vandalism in the New York Times my first response was not shock or surprise, but a diffuse and confused sadness. Sadness, not so much because this particular work should have been mangled — there are paintings whose loss would have touched me rather like the death of a dear friend, but not one of Newman's works has befriended me in quite that way. But whether one likes a particular work or not, scarcely matters in cases such as this. Words by the painter Frank Badur, included in the Hommage a Barnett Newman, published by the Nationalgalerie Berlin in 1982 on the occasion of its acquisition of the last and largest of Newman's variations on the theme Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue? came to mind: "The tolerance and freedom that a society grants its art and artists are a measure of its own tolerance, its own freedom."2 The space granted to freedom seemed to have become just a bit less. But more seemed at stake. The tolerance and freedom a society grants its art and artists may reflect only indifference. Van Bladeren’s slashing of Newman’s art presupposes some sense that such art matters: matters enough to provoke the vandal. But does art matter? What saddened me was not so much the fact that this work of art had been violated, but rather that yet another work of art should have been mangled; also, that yet another self-proclaimed artist should, in the name of art, have chosen to violate the distance that, I continue to feel, should protect art from the world and its violence, a distance museum and concert hall have institutionalized. It seems to me important that, despite all the chaos and suffering in the world and notwithstanding the progressive commercialization and politicization of art, there should be places where individuals are 1 A version of this lecture appeared in a Dutch translation by Jan Willem Reimtsma as "Streepen aan repen," Nexus, 1998, no. 20, pp. 146 - 163. 2 Hommage a Barnett Newman, Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1982. The End and Origin of Art 8 free from what usually occupies them and permit themselves to become totally absorbed in, say, a string quartet by Haydn — or a painting by Newman. But why do I think this important? What does art matter? My reaction was confused in many ways. I know very well how questionable that distance I just invoked has become, how easy it is to defend such acts of vandalism as attacks on an old-fashioned, elitist understanding of art that today would seem to have lost whatever legitimacy it once may have had.
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