Art as Appearance: Two Comments on Arthur C. Danto's After the End of Art

In his latest book about art Arthur Danto claims that aesthetic appearance—visuality in the visual arts—has become more and more irrelevant for most of contemporary art. This essay first immanently critiques the distinction between the aesthetic and artistic properties underlying this claim. Danto's claim about the irrelevance of the aesthetic is not compatible with the spirit of his own writings: what Danto denies in After the End of Art has been a cornerstone of his theoretical work since The Transfiguration of the Commonplace , namely, that the aesthetic is indeed both an elementary and a defining property of art. Examples ranging from Duchamp's Fountain to a recent installation by the Art & Language group are discussed to support this critique. Second, the essay defends Danto's contention that developing a "definition of art" is a sensible enterprise. But it turns out that Danto's (self-ascribed) "essentialism" concerning art has no essentialist implications in any specific sense.     

Hegel and Historicism

Abstract

This article summarises the story of the production of the historical volumes by the South African Democracy Education Trust (SADET). SADET was established after former president Thabo Mbeki expressed concern that there was very limited research done on the achievement of a peaceful political settlement in South Africa after decades of violent conflict. SADET's mission is, and has been to conduct a major study of South Africa's political history between 1960 and 1994. The focus of the article is on the project's editorial structure and on its research methodology, particularly the benefits and limitations of the use of oral interviews as the main research tool.     

Philosophy as an Art of Dying

This essay proposes a close look at the tradition of martyr-philosophers in the Western world (Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Edith Stein, Jan Pato?ka) and advances the claim that the death of these people has a distinct philosophical significance. For various reasons, these philosophers place themselves in limit-situations where they cannot use words anymore to express themselves, but have to turn their own flesh into a radical means of expression. Their dying thus becomes an extension of their work, and the image of their violent deaths comes to be regarded as an inseparable part of their heritage. First, I discuss Socrates as the founder of the tradition of “philosophical deaths” in the West; his gradual “taming” of death in Plato's Apology is discussed in some detail. I then introduce a modern case of “Socratic death,” that of Jan Pato?ka (1907–77). Finally, I map out the cultural and social mechanisms, as well as some of the phenomenological preconditions, presupposed by the notion of “philosophy as an art of dying.”     

Strategic Essentialism and Vatican Policy

Abstract

Just as women's NGOs around the world use essentialism strategically—calling upon their assigned roles as mothers to create change for their children that they might not feel empowered to create for themselves—the most recent Vatican policy holds on to the remnants of essentialism as a policy for protecting exclusive male access to ordination, and therefore power in the church. Previously, essentialism had protected male superiority in existence, social roles, the family, and the church, but one by one, all of these have been conceded except male superiority in the church. The paper further proposes that the traditional male role, of which the church has been a principal support, has in fact now become detrimental to males.     

According to What: Art and the Philosophy of the "End of Art"

In 1964, when Danto first encountered Warhol's Brillo Box, Jasper Johns made a painting titled According to What. Danto's new book After the End of Art also provokes this question because in his restatement of Hegel's verdict on art's historical role he drops an essential part of the implied definition of art: the issue of adequacy between content and presentation. Why dispense with this crucial point of quality judgment? My critique falls into three parts. The first part shows how the whole historical argument rests upon a shift of criteria. According to Hegel art reached its highest point of achievement in classical antiquity when adequate embodiment seemed indispensable to the presence of the spirit. It subsequently lost this exclusive rank—first through Christianity, then through modern philosophy—when a new spiritual self-awareness emerged which no longer seemed to need external manifestation. Although Danto disputes the concept of absolute self-possession as the metaphysical vanishing point of Hegel's construction, he nevertheless subscribes to its apparent evidence in late twentieth-century art and culture. In the second part I discuss the characteristic distortions of Hegelian-type historicism and confront them with both the obvious misrepresentation of the works of art themselves and the different code of conduct in practical art history. This leads to a rather disenchanting conclusion: according to an old, deeply ingrained philosophical prejudice there is no problem about quality in art, because the true yardstick and fulfillment of art is philosophy itself. The final part tries to unpick this tangle by showing that there was in fact, contemporaneous with Hegel, a remarkably different interpretation of the self-same auspices of modern art which comes much closer to its actual achievements, and this without denying the basic philosophical predicament of which Danto has reminded us.     

Historicism and constructionism: rival ideas of historical change

ABSTRACT

A seemingly unitary appeal to history might evoke today two incompatible operations of historicization that yield contradictory results. This article attempts to understand two co-existing senses of historicity as conflicting ideas of historical change and rival practices of temporal comparison: historicism and constructionism. At their respective births, both claimed to make sense of the world and ourselves as changing over time. Historicism, dominating nineteenth-century Western thought and overseeing the professionalization of historical studies, advocated an understanding of the present condition of the human world as developing out of past conditions. Constructionism, dominating the second half of the twentieth century, understood the present condition as the recent invention of certain ‘historical’ environments, without prior existence. As competing ideas of historical change, they both entail a comparison between past and present conditions of their investigated subjects, but their practices of temporal comparison are irreconcilable and represent two distinct ways of historicization.     

New Historicism: Postmodern Historiography Between Narrativism and Heterology

In recent discussionsof the work of new historicist critics like Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Montrose, it has oftenbeen remarked that the theory of history underlying their reading practice closely resembles thatof postmodern historiographers like Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit. Taking off from onesuch remark, the aim of the present article is twofold. First, I intend to provide a theoretical basisfrom which to substantiate the idea that new historicism can indeed be taken to be the literary-critical variant of what Frank Ankersmit has termed the "new historiography." Inthe second half of the article, this theoretical foundation will serve as the starting point of afurther analysis of both the theory and practice of new historicism in terms of its distinctlypostmodern historiographical project. I will argue that in order to fully characterize the newhistoricist reading method, we do well to distinguish between two variants of postmodernhistoricism: a narrativist one (best represented in the work of Michel Foucault) and aheterological one (of which Michel de Certeau's writings serve as a supreme example). Abrief survey of the two methodological options associated with these variants (discursive versuspsychoanalytical) is followed by an analysis of the work of the central representative of newhistoricism, Stephen Greenblatt. While the significant use of historical anecdotes in his workleaves unresolved the question to which of either approaches Greenblatt belongs, the distinctiondoes serve a clear heuristic purpose. In both cases, it points to the dangerous spot where the newhistoricism threatens to fall prey to the evils of the traditional historicism against which it defineditself.     

历史主义与20世纪上半期的中国史学

历史主义作为一种对待历史的方法和态度,在西方可谓由来已久。但是,作为一种系统的历史哲学思想,它却是对19世纪盛行一时的实证主义史学的直接反动。在西方的学术界,历史主义又被划分为“德意志类型的历史主义”和“绝对主义的历史主义”两大类型。所谓德意志类型的历史主义,就是指由德国哲学家狄尔泰、德尔班和李凯尔特等人创立和发展起来的新康德主义的历史学说。     

Essentialism,Memory and Resistance: Aboriginality and the Politics of Authenticity

This paper is about how the discourses of white intellectuals operating in Aboriginal Studies create a knowledgeable gaze which seeks to police the cultural practices through which Aborigines produce themselves. Aborigines have become the focus of a gaze which analyses, questions, and problematises their resistances and even their identities. Determining the boundaries of Aboriginal authenticity has become the preoccupation of some European intellectuals whose concern with situating the culture of Aborigines is at the expense of acknowledging the positioning power of their own cultural practices. This paper seeks to reverse this knowledge-power relationship by focusing on discourses operating in Aboriginal Studies and the effects of power created by the custodial pastoral roles which some white intellectuals have taken on.     

From Historicism to Postmodernism: Historiography in the Twentieth Century

Book reviewed in this article:
Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge     

Hermeneutics without Historicism: Heidegger,MacIntyre, and the Function of the University

Martin Heidegger and Alasdair MacIntyre both claim that universities perform important philosophical functions. This essay reconstructs Heidegger’s and MacIntyre’s views of the university and argues that they have a common source, which I call hermeneutics without historicism. Heidegger and MacIntyre are hermeneutical philosophers: philosophers who are sensitive to the ways in which thought is mediated by interpretation and conditioned by history and culture. But both of them reject the relativistic historicism sometimes associated with a hermeneutical approach to philosophy. This desire to have it both ways leads Heidegger and MacIntyre to attach tremendous importance to activities that take place in universities but nowhere else. The essay also asks whether MacIntyre’s defenders should be troubled by the similarities between his account of the function of the university and Heidegger’s. I argue that they should not, because, while Heidegger’s account of the university has obvious moral and political failings, these failings result not from non-historicist hermeneutics as such, but from specific features of Heidegger’s version of it.     

翰海春拍力推市场蓝筹——写实画派与学院艺术演绎独有景观

自2003年下半年开始,中国书画和接续至今的当代艺术的相继飙升助推了整个市场大盘的增量和结构性提升,在天价和流拍带动的涨跌舞蹈中,很多的收藏者和投资者被牢牢的栓在了前卫艺术的热门板块上体验惊风骇浪,     

历史和历史哲学

历史哲学是对人类理智事业中一个独特领域 (人类历史而不是自然史 )的哲学研究。由于历史具有“历史”和“历史学”两种含义 ,故而有思辨的与分析的两类历史哲学。2 0世纪 ,思辨的或实质的形而上学的历史哲学式微 ,批判的或分析的历史哲学蔚为大观。与这种二元划分不同 ,历史哲学还分为“可臻完善论”(perfectibilism)和“千禧年论”(millenari anism)的历史哲学。二者都相信进步的观念 ,都属于思辨的历史哲学。本文探讨了杜尔阁、孔多塞的历史哲学。