The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Everyday Aesthetics

 An important event in the life of Andy Warhol was when he was shot.  In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he imagines how a close friend (called “B”) might describe this event to him.  However we need to understand that whatever a B says (an B stands for any close friend) throughout this work it is just as likely an expression of Warhol’s own views (Warhol uses A for himself): 

"The founder of the Society for Cutting Up Men [the shooter] wanted you to produce a script she'd written and you weren't interested and she just came up to your work studio one afternoon. There were a lot of people there and you were talking on the telephone. You didn't know her too well and she just walked in off the elevator and started shooting. Your mother was really upset. You thought she'd die of it. Your brother was really fabulous, the one who's a priest. He came up to your room and showed you how to do needlepoint. I'd taught him how in the lobby!"

As with many of his vignettes this one is quite funny.  The first four sentences are straightforward.  But, as with Nietzsche’s aphorisms, the twist comes at the end.  The next two sentences make sense since Warhol was close to his mother, although they are written in a deadpan way.  The last two sentences are more philosophically interesting.  His brother is typecast…he is a priest.  But he is not “fabulous” in the way priests are supposed to be.  Instead, he shows Andy how to do needlepoint, an everyday life skill used as a hobby more often by women than men in our society. The priest does the opposite of what he is supposed to do qua priest, i.e. directing Andy to God, especially at this moment when, according to his mother, he might die.  He learns this skill from B just before coming up to Andy’s room.  Divine salvation is rejected in favor of everyday life.

In this paper I will interpret The Philosophy of Andy Warhol as an important contribution to the aesthetics of everyday life, and, more broadly, to "life aesthetics" in general. (I have been influenced by several contemporary Chinese aestheticians in stressing the latter.)  But first we must deal with a possible confusion.  When most philosophers hear the name "Andy Warhol" in relation to aesthetics they immediately think of Arthur Danto.  Throughout his life, Danto frequently referred to the moment he walked into the Stable Gallery in New York City and saw Warhol’s Brillo Boxes as the moment in which he discovered the essence of art.  He first wrote about this in in his famous "The Artworld" in 1964.  But in 1975 Warhol writes this book which, I shall argue, basically refutes Danto’s entire philosophy of art.  Danto’s point was that Warhol provided him with an insight that gave him his definition of art.  That definition changed over the years, but basically, as in 1964, it was that something is art if it can be seen as art by someone with appropriate art historical knowledge.  In being seen as art it has the “is” of artistic identification.  Danto had asked what makes the Brillo Boxes art and their indiscernible counterparts in a warehouse owned by the Brillo Corporation not art. The answer is that because Warhol’s boxes are in an art gallery at a particular time in art history they are appropriately seen as art, i.e. appropriately seen under the artist’s interpretation, i.e. under Warhol's interpretation.  Brillo Boxes had been “transfigured” into the world of art.  

Danto shows himself to be essentially a dualist in that he holds that there are two realms:  the realm of art and the realm of “mere things.”  Of course this does not make him a dualist in the classical sense, for he does not hold that the realm of art is a realm of souls or a spiritual realm.  But his use of the term “transfiguration” should be taken seriously.  Just as Jesus is transfigured into the realm of heaven, so too the boxes are transfigured into the realm of art.   As Danto says later, the Brillo Boxes in the gallery have “aboutness” whereas brillo boxes, as "mere things," do not.  Thus even if we assumed that Danto did not literally believe in anything supernatural we can also assume that the structure of his theory is dualist.  

As a result, it would make no sense to Danto for us to talk about the aesthetics of everyday life.  Aesthetics has been reduced to the Philosophy of Art, and Philosophy of Art to Danto's own definition of art.  Moreover, for Danto, aesthetics isn’t important anyway since Brillo Boxes and the brillo boxes on the factory floor have the same look and hence the same “aesthetics.”  What distinguishes them is something the eye cannot descry!  The art work is a physical object plus its interpretation.  It is its interpretation that makes it art, just as, for a Christian, a person is a body plus a soul, and it is the soul that makes a person a person.

Warhol, writing nine years later, pretty much refutes Danto, and retroactively, since what Warhol really meant had nothing ever to do with the apotheosis of objects into the art world or the creation of art as a two-sided thing, mere material object as body, and meaning as soul.  This idea, which Danto, none-too-originally, shared with earlier writers such as R. G. Collingwood, is deconstructed by Warhol's book.  The point of Warhol, even back in 1964, was deconstruction the world/artworld dichotomy, NOT setting up a wall between the two or a situation in which one is privileged and the other is only "mere."   

One cannot read TPAW as a normal book.  It is more like an aphoristic work by Nietzsche.  What readers have not generally recognized however is that it has a complexity of structure, and considerable depth.  It consists of fifteen chapters:  Love (Puberty), Love (Prime), Love (Senility), Beauty, Fame, Work, Time, Death, Economics, Atmosphere, Success, Art, Titles, The Tingle, Underwear Power.  The chapters most relevant to the concerns of aestheticians are Beauty, Atmosphere, and the last four.  The Tingle is worth an article on everyday aesthetics of its own since it is an obsessive dialogue between B and A about cleaning one’s apartment where it can be seen that cleaning can transcend mere cleaning and can take on an aura of its own, perhaps even of the sublime.  Underwear Power does something similar in relation to the activity of shopping.  However I will focus here on the early chapters and their relation to the aesthetics of everyday life and more broadly the aesthetics of life.

I say “life aesthetics” or "aesthetics of life" since in part I want to forestall those who would say that the art and work of Andy Warhol is as far from “the everyday” as one can get.  He seemed the apostle of fame and glamour.  Although he was fascinated by fame and glamour he was equally fascinated with the everyday.  One could say that he devoted his life to making the extraordinary seem ordinary and the ordinary seem extraordinary. 

Bluejeans  

It is significant that Warhol said “I believed in bluejeans too” in the context of talking about the value of uniforms.  Jeans were treated as uniforms in the early 1970s.  They were essential to everyday life.  Everyone wore them as a symbol of solidarity with the cultural left (the hippie movement) and the political left.  But Warhol treats them as objects of aesthetic delight. 

"The ones made by Levi Strauss are the best-cut, best-looking pair of pants that have ever been designed by anybody. Nobody will ever top the original bluejeans. They can't be bought old, they have to be bought new and they have to be worn in by the person. To get that look. And they can't be phoney bleached or phoney anything. You know that little pocket? It's so crazy to have that little little pocket, like for a twenty-dollar gold piece."

Bluejeans are not aesthetically simple.  There are levels of quality, for example Levi Strauss being at the top for a variety of reasons, including cut.  One aspect of their aesthetic excellence is that they are the originals.  However, there are those who intrude a phoney aesthetic onto jeans, where they think that the jeans have to look worn and that this is best effected inauthentically by various means that do not actually involve the owner wearing them for a long time.  Authentic beauty in jeans requires that something about the history of the jeans must obtain.  Another example of the phoneyness is the  bleaching of the jeans.  But an example of charming authenticity is the little pocket, which was more likely there for a small watch then for a gold piece.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanse  

We realize that Warhol must have done thorough research on them, say in an encyclopedia, since the information and the set of aesthetic issues are essentially the same as those found in the wikipedia article.

he dialogue continues, when B says "French bluejeans?" and A replies "No, American are the best. Levi Strauss. With the little copper buttons. Studded for evening wear." "How do you keep them clean, B?" "You wash them." "Do you iron them?"

As observed in the anonymous Wikipedia article, the little copper buttons, which were put in for structural support, also had a secondary aesthetic function.  Thus, having the buttons which look  nonfunctional, yet are not, is enhancing.  

The talk about American being the best again has to do with authenticity, in this case cultural authenticity, even though that authenticity has its own inauthenticity in that one might think that jeans arose in cultural consciousness because of construction workers or cowboys, but it was really movie stars, westerns, and youth rebellion, all distinctly American that gave jeans their meaning.  Another sign of inauthenticity would be ironing:   "No, I put fabric softener. The only person who irons them is Geraldo Rivera." Ironing them would be inauthentic in the very way that Geraldo Rivera, with his fake hair and manner, was notoriously inauthentic, possibly the paradigm of inauthenticity.

A says "This talk of bluejeans was making me very jealous. Of Levi and Strauss. I wish I could invent something like bluejeans. Something to be remembered for. Something mass." It may strike one as odd that Andy Warhol envied anyone, and yet from his perspective, having this kind of impact on the aesthetics of everyday life would be massive, hence the reference to “mass.”  Of course he is remembered by us for his art.  It would be inventing jeans or something like that in the way Levi and Strauss did, something both tasteful and nearly universal, that he would consider truly memorable.  

On the Aesthetic Republic under a Warhol Presidency

"Oh, A," B said impulsively, "you should be President! If you were President, you would have somebody else be President for you, right?" This riff on being President is related to the idea of cultural importance.  Warhol would make a good President because he would delegate responsibility in a radically democratic way.

B says:  "You'd be just right for the Presidency. You would videotape everything. You would have a nightly talk show—your own talk show as President. You'd have somebody else come on, the other President that's the President for you, and he would talk your diary out to the people, every night for half an hour. And that would come before the news, What the President Did Today. So there would be no flack about the President does nothing or the President just sits around. Every day he'd have to tell us what he did, if he had sex with his wife . . . You'd have to say you played with your dog Archie—it's the perfect name for the President's pet—and what bills you had to sign and why you didn't want to sign them, who was rotten to you in Congress . . . You'd have to say how many long-distance phone calls you made that day. You'd have to tell what you ate in the private dining room, and you'd show on the television screen the receipts you paid for private food for yourself. For your Cabinet you would have people who were not politicians. Robert Scull would be head of Economics because he would know how to buy early and sell big. You wouldn't have any politicians around at all. You'd take all the trips and tape them. You'd play back all the tapes with foreign people on TV. And when you wrote a letter to anyone in Congress you would have it Xeroxed and sent to every paper."

At this time in his life Warhol was obsessed with a tape recorder he had.  He took it with him everywhere and taped every conversation he could.  He referred to the tape recorder ironically as his wife.  

Warhol realizes, as we found with Trump, that the Presidency is the ultimate platform for popularity and fame.  Unlike Trump, who was, after all, not a talk show host but a Reality TV host (a very different, less intellectual thing) Warhol would make his Presidency a nightly talk show, thus raising the level of intellectual discourse on a daily basis for the entire country.

My philosophy of everyday aesthetics has to do not just with description but also with serious thinking about the ideals of everyday life, as for example was engaged in by such thinkers as William Morris and Le Corbusier.   

Note that Warhol as President would not consume a great deal of time and space:  his show would be half an hour every night, and it would involve talking out his diary, which would be the same sort of stuff we are getting in this book, that is, reflections on the aesthetics of everyday life.  That is why it would come before the News.  News, in an important way, is NOT about everyday life, or ordinary things.  It is about murder and wars and other such things.  If it were everyday stuff it would not be “news.”  So although we may see the news every day, and although that is part, then, of our everyday experience, the news itself is precisely NOT a window onto anyone’s everyday world qua everyday. 

What is everyday includes such mundane, but probably immensely important, stuff as having sex with your wife or playing with your dog, and the work of actually signing bill, and the worries over moments of disrespect from colleagues, and what and where you age, including how you financed that eating.  So Warhol as President would be a hero of returning to the everyday.  The rest of the aphorism, if I may call it that, is influenced by Plato probably.  We are talking here about an ideal aesthetic republic here.  So instead of politicians Warhol would hire experts to, for example, buy and sell properly. And unlike Nixon or Trump or multiple other politicians, Warhol would tape but never hide his tapes.  So too with letters.  Total transparency.  Of course he would not agree with Plato’s idea of the noble lie.  So his politics would combine expertise and democratic openness in a way much more conducive to harmony, which was after all Plato’s own goal, then Plato’s own Republic.

B says:  "You'd be a nice President. You wouldn't take up too much space, you'd have a tiny office like you have now. You'd change the law so you could keep anything anybody gave you while you were in office, because you're a Collector. And you'd be the first nonmarried President. And in the end you'd be famous because you'd write a book: 'How I Ran the Country Without Even Trying.' Or if that sounded wrong, 'How I Ran the Country with Your Help.' That might sell better. Just think, if you were President right now, there'd be no more First Lady. Only a First Man."

 This relates not only to politics but also to ethics, one based on aesthetics.  So niceness is more important than duty since niceness demands empathy and sympathy, which require imagination, which is the aesthetic faculty.  This faculty would compel him to be an aesthetic minimalist President in his tiny office.  He would not take up airs.  He would not let ego take over.  Also, along an aesthetic dimension, Warhol allows for primacy given to collecting of loveable objects.  And of course he is a Taoist, trying to achieve goodness in the state through action through non-action, i.e. through aesthetic simplicity.   The Taoist says you can run the country best when you follow the Way and do not even try.  You do not make being the ruler a matter of power and glory but a matter of elegant action that achieves harmony as in the work of a master craftsman.  And then it is no surprise that the alternative version of his book entails a great democratic modesty, more appropriate to the true spirit of America.  So, the title of “First” is moved from the pathetic secondary position of the first lady to the primary position of a man of excellence who follows the Tao and actualizes will to power in an authentic way, to paraphrase Nietzsche. 

 “You'd have no live-in maid at the White House. A B would come in a little early to clean up. And then the other Bs would file down to Washington to see you just like they file in to see you at the Factory. It would be just like the Factory, all bulletproof. Visitors would have to get past your hairdressers. And you'd take your extra-private hairdresser with you. Can't you see her in her inflatable jacket, ready for war at any moment? Do you realize there's no reason you couldn't be President of the United States? You know all the bigwigs who could get you in, all of society, all the rich people, and that's all anyone's ever needed to get to be President. I don't know why you don't declare yourself in the running right away. Then people would know you weren't just a big joke. I want you to say every time you look at yourself in the mirror, 'Politics: Washington, D.C.' I mean, quit fooling around with the Rothschilds. Forget about those long trips to Montauk in the Rollses. Think about a little helicopter to Camp David. What a camp it would be. You'd have such a camp. Do you realize the opportunity of the White House? A, you've been into Politics since the day I met you. You do everything in a political way. Politics can mean doing a poster that has Nixon's face on it, and says 'Vote Mc-Govern.'"

Warhol recognizes the inevitable hypocrisy of everyday life when one hires maids.  In our household we learned this I think per necessity during the pandemic.  Previously we had cleaners who came in once every two weeks.  We prided ourselves in our democratic treatment of them.  But that was false in a way.  After he had to lay them off because we were in partial quarantine, we had to clean everything as the same level of perfection once per week.  We achieved this, and by doing so we avoided the hypocrisy of false smug appeals to democratic sentiments.  We also became much more mindful, along the lines of Thich Nhat Hanh of the minutiae of dirt and grime, and ofthe subtle joys of cleanliness. 

His Factory and His Business

It is wonderful the way Warhol conceived his own studio workplace as something everyday by calling it a factory and treating it as such.  We are just a business, he implied.  We on the outside always saw the setup as one of glamour.  But it was quite the opposite, just as it was the opposite of Danto’s idea of an isolated Artworld.  To repeat my introduction, Warhol was the non-Danto.  So, instead of the Presidential world being like Plato’s world of Forms or Kant’s transcendent or transcendental domain, Warhol’s Presidency would not involve a President-World (Danto being himself just another Platonist with dualist assumptions and thin surface of anti-dualism) or an Artworld, but just another factory making things for the people.

Beauty

Warhol insists “I've never met a person I couldn't call a beauty.” (61)  He sees beauty everywhere.  This makes him like one of my ideals in the aesthetics of everyday life:  Plato’s Diotima, who speaks of the ladder of love in which the rung next to the top is one in which we see a vast sea of beauty.  As Warhol puts it, “Every person has beauty at some point in their lifetime.” (61)  He does not share the common belief that personal beauty is stable and exclusive.  As he says, “Sometimes they have the looks when they're a baby and they don't have it when they're grown up, but then they could get it back again when they're older. Or they might be fat but have a beautiful face. Or have bow-legs but a beautiful body.”  (61)  Neither beauty nor ugliness is permanently attached to any person.  I know a woman who is obese, and yet she spends a couple hours day attending to her face.  She is perhaps beautiful in that one area.   

Experience of personal beauty and evaluation of it is part of the aesthetics of everyday life.  Like an ordinary language philosopher, Warhol thinks about what we say when we use the word “beauty”: 

“I always hear myself saying, "She's a beauty!" or "He's a beauty!" or "What a beauty!" but I never know what I'm talking about. I honestly don't know what beauty is, not to speak of what "a" beauty is. So that leaves me in a strange position, because I'm noted for how much I talk about "this one's a beauty" and "that one's a beauty." For a year once it was in all the magazines that my next movie was going to be The Beauties. The publicity for it was great, but then I could never decide who should be in it. If everybody's not a beauty, then nobody is, so I didn't want to imply that the kids in The Beauties were beauties but the kids in my other movies weren't so I had to back out on the basis of the title. It was all wrong.”

In short, everybody is a beauty.  Warhol is quite aware that he is doing philosophy.  He even pins down the difference between beauty and “a beauty.”  He can judge it, but cannot define it.  He further says: “I really don't care that much about "Beauties." What I really like are Talkers. To me, good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love.”

This could be straight out of the Symposium.  Diotima places love of the soul of the interlocutor at a higher stage of the ladder of love than mere physical beauty.

Unlike Plato, however, Warhol prioritizes fun.  He just thinks it more fun to be with talkers, and generally, with people who are doing things, than with beauties, who are just being something.  “Fun,” we might also observe, is a primary category in the aesthetics of everyday life.

Warhol’s Platonism extends to his handling of portraiture. He observes that, “[w]hen I did my self-portrait, I left all the pimples out because you always should. Pimples are a temporary condition and they don't have anything to do with what you really look like. Always omit the blemishes—they're not part of the good picture you want.” This must have been how the idealistic Greek sculptors saw it too.

Returning to the question of relativism, Warhol says “When a person is the beauty of their day, and their looks are really in style, and then the times change and tastes change, and ten years go by, if they keep exactly their same look and don't change anything and if they take care of themselves, they'll still be a beauty.”  This seems to imply there can be a kind of permanence even in a world dominated by fashion.

For Warhol, there are certain looks and styles that are eternal in a way in that they are right as long as authentic: “Schrafft's restaurants were the beauties of their day, and then they tried to keep up with the times and they modified and modified until they lost all their charm and were bought by a big company. But if they could just have kept their same look and style, and held on through the lean years when they weren't in style, today they'd be the best thing around. You have to hang on in periods when your style isn't popular, because if it's good, it'll come back, and you'll be a recognized beauty once again.”

Warhol spends considerable time thinking about what does and does not make one a beauty.  It might be a matter of lighting, as good lighting can make all the difference.  He makes a big difference between a temporary beauty problem and a permanent one.  "Being clean is so important. Well-groomed people are the real beauties. It doesn't matter what they're wearing or who they're with or how much their jewelry costs or how much their clothes cost or how perfect their makeup is: if they're not clean, they're not beautiful. The most plain or unfashionable person in the world can still be beautiful if they're very well-groomed."  Previously I had written about cleanliness, but in fact it is very important to beauty.

 

Goodman's implicit definition of art

In his famous essay "When is Art?"  (in Ways of Worldmaking originally) Nelson Goodman says he has not defined art, but in a way, he has.  We find first that art is a form of symbolization, and that this symbolization may be representational, expressive or through exemplification. Of course this does not distinguish art from a rock sample in a Natural History museum.  However we are also informed that something is art if and when it is functioning as art.  At first, this just seems a circular definition.  But Goodman adds that we know it is functioning as art if it has at least some of what he calls the symptoms of the aesthetic.  By "symptoms of the aesthetic" he appears to mean "symptoms of art" since he does not talk about these in relation to non-art aesthetic phenomena.  He doesn't specify any of these symptoms as either necessary or sufficient for art.  

The symptoms, as he lists them, are syntactical density, semantic density, relative repleteness, exemplification, and complex reference. (Note that he does not think that the stone in the Natural History is art even though it does exemplify: so exemplification by itself is not sufficient for art status.)  You can go to the essay itself for his explication of each of these symptoms.  The important point about all of them for our purposes is that they involve what he calls "nontransparency."  That is, in attending to these features we do not look through them to the thing referenced but rather we focus on the symbol itself.  Even though the stone in the natural history museum exemplifies it does not do so in a nontransparent way.

So one could say that, for Goodman, something is art if it functions as art, and it functions as art when it works as a nontransparent symbol.  Goodman himself does not say this, perhaps because he is worried that in doing so he would be redefining the concept of art.  However, as Weitz observed, that's pretty much what each of the classical theories of art does anyway.  

Another feature of Goodman's approach is that he is clearly opposed to Danto and Dickie, although his argument against the Purist program is remarkably similar to Danto's in that both think the purist art (like the all-black paintings by Ad Reinhardt) is fine:  it is only their claim that their work does not refer to anything outside that is the problem.  For Danto they refer to everything else in the style matrix, and thus, really, to all previous art, whereas for Goodman, they refer to all the other objects that have the same property, for example an all-red canvas refers to all other things that have the property of redness, for example roses.

I have already discussed the relation between these philosophers here.  In my previous post, however, I did not sufficiently stress the importance of Conceptual Art, and in particular Claes Oldenburg's "Placid Civic Monument" (1967).  (Each great philosopher of art has his/her preferred works of art:  in Goodman's case it is this particular conceptual piece, and this is largely because it operates as a counterexample to the opposing theories just as Warhol's "Brillo Box" operated as a counterexample for Danto.)  In this work, Oldenburg hired grave diggers to dig a hole behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art and then had them fill it up again.  The work was the event.  Whereas Danto and Dickie require that a work of art be an object or, in Dickie's case, an artifact, Goodman does not require this.  But, contra Dickie, Goodman stresses that the artist calling something a work of art is neither necessary nor sufficient for arthood.  So, Oldenburg's work might be problematic for Danto and Dickie but not for Goodman. 

Danto would probably handle this by saying that someone with sufficient art historical knowledge can see Oldenburg's work as art.  Dickie would probably handle it simply by saying that artifactuality is conferred on the event and not on any specific object and that Oldenburg is the representative here of the artworld.  All three would agree that it is art, but for different reasons.  The work is art for Goodman because it functions as art for a time:  it symbolizes, and it does so through exemplification of certain properties, although Goodman does not say which ones these are.  

We can say, however, that "Placid Civic Monument" exemplifies the property of monumentality (although this might be problematic for Goodman, as I will note later).  It is worth noting that the work was deliberately placed in view of an Egyptian obelisk, "Cleopatra's Needle," also in Central Park. The obelisk reaches upwards whereas, in a mirroring way, the hole reaches downwards.  Also the obelisk is about eternity whereas the hole is notably temporary.  In brief we can say that what makes it art for Goodman is a nontransparency that causes us to focus on properties that are exemplified (like Bell, in a way, although the number of types of properties to be exemplified are increased from lines, forms and colored shapes to include such things as size and texture) whereas Danto and Dickie call on us to focus on what is not exhibited, in Danto's case on what we see through the atmosphere of artistic theory and, in Dickie's case, on the status gained through the actions of Oldenburg as a representative of the artworld.  It is interesting that although all three theories would designate this work as art, each calls on us to focus on quite different features:  and each has different implications for how one ought to appreciate avant garde art.  Also, whereas Danto and Dickie both think that "once art, always art," Goodman holds that something can lose art status when it no longer functions as art.  Yet this is not entirely correct since Danto thinks that Warhol's "Brillo Box" is no longer art if it leaves the gallery and the artworld entirely and returns to the warehouse where it is indistinguishable from industrial brillo cartons:  then it just reenters the world of non-art. 

By the way, isn't there something strange about a nontransparency that calls on us to note relations to things considered extrinsic to the work of art?

To understand the five symptoms of the aesthetic in Goodman one does best just to focus on relative repleteness (which also, I think, explicates what is meant by "exemplification" or at least exemplification that is artistic).  That is, one should focus on the difference between appreciating a Hokusai single-line drawing of a mountain and a stockmarket chart:  in the first on focuses on "every feature of shape, line, thickness...counts..."  whereas in the second only height counts.  So, when the rock is moved to a pedestal in an art museum and treated as art the treatment involves a requirement on viewers to focus on every feature of every physical quality.   

What Goodman seems to neglect, however, is other things that can be exemplified.   For example, monumentality is exemplified, as I have argued, in Oldenburg's work, but this is not a physical quality (i.e. not of the same sort as color and texture).  Goodman may well say that in this case we are symbolizing through expressiveness, but Oldenburg was exemplifying monumentality more than expressing it if expression has to do with an emotion expressed. 

  


 

Goodman. Danto and Everyday Aesthetics Significantly Revised

Goodman's famous "When is Art?" appeared in his 1978 book Ways of Worldmaking.  The chapter seems at first to be mainly directed against formalists such as Clive Bell and more importantly, probably, Clement Greenberg, although neither of these are mentioned (he simply refers to a group of theorists and artists which he calls "purists" and sometimes "formalists").  Goodman wants to show that the purists are wrong that the abstract art they favor does not symbolize.  He has a broader notion of "symbolize" such that something can fail to represent or express but could still symbolize if it exemplifies.  All of this mainly seems to be just a matter of semantics, Goodman having a much broader use of "symbol" than the purists.  As we shall see, however, this is far from the case.

 

A more important target for the essay is the work of Arthur Danto, although Goodman never mentions Danto.  (Surely they knew each other:  New York is not that far from Boston).  Both Goodman and Danto are trying to account for found art and conceptual art as well as for highly abstract minimalist art.  A useful way to see their distinction and implicit disagreement can show, in part, how Goodman leads us on a path that seems at first to be more world-connected than Danto's and hence more useful for the project of everyday aesthetics.  In fact, the two can be used to supplement each other since Goodman focuses on the sensuous and directly apparent aspect of experience, whereas Danto focuses on the cultural-meaning and not immediately apparent aspect.

For Goodman, something is art when it functions as art, and something functions as art when its exhibits an unspecified number of symptoms of the aesthetic (although the most important of these is exemplification.)  Thus objects, such as paintings, can move several times in their lifetime in an out of arthood.  It follows from this that they can also move in and out of the everyday.  Goodman of course did not realize, or at least, did not mention this.

Unfortunately, when they are out of arthood they are also out of the realm of the aesthetic since Goodman doesn’t really take into account non-art aesthetics.  

Take for example a rock picked up in a driveway (Goodman's example).  Goodman believes that when the rock is in the driveway it has no aesthetic properties (this of course cannot be accepted by everyday aesthetics) but that when it is put on a pedestal in an art gallery it comes to exemplify certain properties (and so, is symbolic even if it does not represent or express).  In doing this it comes to function as art.

The relevance of this for everyday aesthetics is that there can be a realm between non-art and art that is aesthetic but not enough so, or in enough ways, to be art.  I doubt that Goodman would have agreed with this (given his metaphysical strictures against possibility) but, as I see it, the rock can have potential aesthetic properties which are actualized in the experience of someone who looks at it with an artist’s eye, and then those properties can be full actualized when the rock achieves art status in the context of a museum exhibit where it is displayed as art and thus can fully function as art.  

Goodman does not define art in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but he does talk about what he calls "symptoms of the aesthetic" by which he means symptoms of arthood:  these are syntactic density, semantic density, relative repleteness, exemplification and multiple and complex reference.  There is no need here to go into detail about these, except to mention that relative repleteness means that a line in a Hokusai painting is richer in meaning than a similar line on a Stock Exchange chart.  I suspect that all of the symptoms of the aesthetic refer basically to one thing:  it is the same intuition expressed in different ways.  The conditions of syntactic and semantic density are both described in terms of very fine discriminations, as is also relative repleteness.  Goodman himself suggests that all of the symptoms are one when he says that they all "focus attention on rather than, or at least along with, what [the work] refers to."   We cannot simply look through the symbol to its referent as we would in the case of a traffic light or a science text.  We must "attend constantly to the symbol itself."  We know something is art if it calls attention to the properties it exemplifies in a fine-grained way.  That pretty much sums up Goodman's theory.

Danto (I am speaking here just of his view in "The Artworld") would hold that for the art to be art it is not sufficient that it be exhibited in a gallery by an artist, although this can contribute to its arthood.  It must be seen as art by someone with suitable art historical and art theoretical knowledge, i.e. seen under the appropriate concept of art. It must also have some part that is seen with what he calls the “is of artistic identification.”  This special "is" might better have been called "the is of imaginative identification" since a child sees his hobbyhorse as a horse imaginatively and yet this does not mean he or she sees it as art.  The "is of artistic identification" is necessary but not sufficient for art. 

So whereas Goodman can be seen as expanding the formalist conception of art (initiated by Kant and expanded by Bell to include relations of lines and colors) to include new material (for example texture and the type of material used), Danto can be seen as rejecting it.  Whereas Goodman thinks art calls on us to attend quite carefully to its many exhibited referential features, Danto thinks that we need to attend to things that are not exhibited (at least directly in the work) for example art history, art theory, the intended meaning of the artist, the title, and physical artworld placement (i.e. in a gallery or museum).  As I have suggested, I think both are right about this.   

An interesting feature of Goodman is that art's function is cognitive and, as cognitive, it does relate very much to the world, through various forms of reference.  Danto's approach also provides reference to the world but in his case it is through aboutness or meaning.   Two paintings can be visually indistinguishable, but their titles, for example Newton’s First Law and Newton’s Second Law, provide external reference and hence meaning. (The body is in fact unimportant since except as a receptacle.  This can be seen by the fact that two different works can have the same body, or at least a visually identical one.)  In addition to the titles there is whatever else might go into the intended meaning of the creator. 

Both Goodman and Danto might well admire an all-red painting, but for Goodman the key is in how the artist has drawn our attention to the particular quality of redness and to all sorts of other exhibited features.  Goodman does allow, however, some external reference through his notion of metaphorical exemplification as well as through the fact that the property of redness is shared by all of the other red things in the world.  Danto focuses instead on the way in which we see the painting based on our knowledge of art history, the intentions of the painter, the title and so forth.   

For Goodman it is what you see that gives you at least indirect reference, i.e. exemplification.  (Denotative reference plays only a small role in Goodman’s theory of art.)  For Goodman, even work that is entirely abstract can exemplify its properties, properties which are shared by objects outside the artwork.  Thus the entire distinction between properties that are intrinsic and ones that are extrinsic seems to dissolve (not entirely though).  Goodman's approach explains why, after seeing a show by a good artist, we tend to see things in the world in terms of the works.  He in a sense captures the dynamic interaction of art and world in a way that Danto does not.  But then Danto provides captures something about that in a way Goodman does not.  In short, for Danto artworld knowledge can enter into that which is expressed or even exemplified by a work of art. 

So Goodman could accommodate Danto's insight, and Danto Goodman’s.  But artworld knowledge does not play such an important role in Goodman as it does in Danto.  Actually it seems to play no role at all.   Danto stresses the "is of artistic identification" which, as I suggested above, seems more like an "is of imaginative identification" or that, plus, seeing the object as art.  Goodman allows for metaphorical exemplification, and hence also for imaginative identification.  However, he has no role for an is of artistic identification where it is required that we see the object as art according to a theory of art.   (Both Goodman and Danto draw on Weitz.  Goodman, like Weitz, moves away from defining art, replacing "What is art?" with another question.  Danto, like Weitz, thinks that the conflict of theories of art is really important even though the conflict of philosophical theories of art ended when Warhol and he discovered what art really is.  The importance of theories continues rather in further complexities of the style matrix.) 

Another important difference between the two concerns what happens when the artwork leaves the art gallery.  For Danto it is still art if it is purchased, taken home and perceived by someone with suitable art historical knowledge.  What is not clear is what happens if the Warhol Brillo Box is taken to a warehouse where it is indistinguishable from the Brillo boxes there:  is it still art?  (Danto at one point imagines the Brillo Box just is an appropriated Brillo box from the factory.  That version of Brillo Box, not Warhol's version, would then be totally indistinguishable from the other Brillo boxes, assuming that its history of origin is forgotten, or someone switches it with a real Brillo box by accident.)

Danto sometimes talks like Dickie:  once art, always art, and therefore Brillo Box is still art out of the gallery, as though once it has been displayed as art in the art gallery it cannot stop being so...even if it is impossible to locate it amongst its indiscernible counterparts in the warehouse.  (But at other times he takes the opposite position holding the Brillo Box is reduced to its real counterpart once it is taken out of the gallery.  Danto: you can't have it both ways!)

Goodman however says that once it ceases to function as art it is no art.  Well he hedges on that a bit (more than a bit): he says a Rembrandt may still be a Rembrandt after it has been taken out of the museum and used as a blanket.  Yet under these post-apocalyptic conditions it would no longer be functioning as art, and so it would not be art, unless you could say it had the potential to once again be art...which, as we saw, would go against Goodman's spare metaphysics.) 

But the question of when it is art is really more important, for him, than "what is art."  It is art when it functions as art, which does not happen when it functions as a blanket.  So one of Warhol's Brillo Boxes taken to the warehouse no longer functions as art and hence is no longer art for Goodman, which seems right to me, until I think of the curator who has been desperately looking for his stolen art, and at last finds it hidden in plain sight in the warehouse.   She is not going to say, "well it is no longer a work of art." So that is  a problem for both Danto and Goodman. 

So, what is the value of this debate to everyday aesthetics?   It is not explicit but rather lies in the gradual evaporation of the distinction between that which is intrinsic and that which is extrinsic in formalist art (especially for Goodman), combined with his view that art is essentially cognitive.  Because art's significance goes beyond representation and expression to also include exemplification, including both literal and metaphorical exemplification, and both of sensually evident and experientially somewhat hidden cultural properties, this draws our attention to aesthetic qualities of everyday life. 

Goodman’s expansion of "formalist" to include not only relations of lines and colors but also texture and material, and perhaps much more (insofar as the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction does dissolve) encourages us to focus on art features in a much more multi-sensuous way than is allowed by traditional formalism. 

Bear in mind that, strictly speaking, Goodman has to be against the aesthetics of everyday life:  he seems to make no distinction between art and aesthetic, and he seems to reduce the aesthetic to the artistic, so that the aesthetic is only within the realm of art.  But again, as anything can move in or out of the realm of art, depending on how it functions, one could imagine an in between realm, the realm of everyday aesthetics where some, but not the sufficient number or intensity of symptoms of “the aesthetic” (which is to say, of arthood) are present. 

A big difference between Goodman and Danto here is that Danto lays a lot of emphasis on imaginative seeing and Goodman seems to lay none at all.  The “is” of artistic representation, since it can also be applied to what the child does in pretending that a stick is a horse, plays no role in Goodman, except perhaps in the domain of metaphorical exemplification.  Once the “is” is let in, and metaphorical exemplification emphasized we can see that the artist, in looking imaginatively at both her subject matter and her materials is, through the process of creative work, able ultimately to make something that, in Danto’s words, embodies meaning. 

 

My view of everyday aesthetics would incorporate both insights even though neither were actually applied by their authors beyond the world of art.  One of the reasons for this is that neither Danto nor Goodman seemed to pay much attention to the artist’s perspective in the creative process.  (Yuriko Saito has pointed out how most philosophers, certainly in the analytic tradition, have neglected the creator’s perspective.  Exceptions are Nietzsche and Dewey, and, oddly given his idealism, Collingwood, who is one of those rare philosophers who thinks a lot about the relationship between the artist and her materials and subject matter in the studio.)

But this, of course, requires seeing the relationship between everyday aesthetics and art aesthetics as being dynamic and interactional.  It would reject those views of everyday aesthetics which see the everyday as totally detached from art every bit as much as it would reject those who, like Danto in some moods, see art totally detached from the everyday.  For Danto, if Rauschenberg’s Bed is stripped of its paint it becomes a mere bed again, and if Warhol’s Brillo Box is taken out of the gallery and, even more generally, out of the artworld context, it too loses all of its art-relevant properties, which are the only aesthetic properties of much interest to Danto.  My view, perhaps closer to Goodman on this point, is that the materials taken up by artists in the creative process contain aesthetic properties already, and that these are transformed in the creative process.  Dewey says that art refines and intensifies everyday experience.  This is how that is done:  the artist in the creative process refines and intensifies art-like aesthetic properties already there in the non-art world, both the ones favored by Danto and the ones favored by Goodman.

Further Thoughts on Danto vs. Goodman

The battle between Danto and Goodman is between seeing the body (the work of art) through atmosphere, where the body is basically unimportant, to seeing and looking at the body with emphasis on discriminating and appreciating fine distinctions concerning properties (in an enhanced formalist fashion) with little or no attention paid to background context.  So this debate is a variation of the contextualist vs. formalist debate that we all the time in art circles (although the contextualists are the current winners). 

Both Danto and Goodman are thinking of Ad Rhinehart and other "purists" of the time.  Both think that the purists are wrong, and both spend considerable energy proving them wrong!  This makes reading both philosophers sometimes seem dated:  who really cares now that the purists were wrong?  The important point however is why they are wrong.  Danto thinks they are wrong because what he calls "Reality Theory" (based ultimately on Bell and Fry, Fry being the one who is quoted by Danto) is wrong.   For Danto, purists fail to see that they are using the “is” of artistic identification.  They fail to see the background presence of the style matrix. 

Goodman also believes that the purists are wrong, but this time because the purists do not see that there is a third kind of reference in art, even art that is not representational or expressive.  So they do not see that their work actually does symbolize, i.e. it symbolizes through exemplification.   Looking at storeroom samples helps us see this.  (It is interesting to me, an everyday aesthetician, that Goodman goes to everyday life for his key example and his fundamental insight.  Of course the path for this was already cleared by Wittgenstein.)  It is not that the painting is just like a sample swatch.   Both exemplify, but the painting has other symptoms of the aesthetic as well.  One needs to have more than just exemplification.

Danto’s critic makes the painting art because he sees it as art through his/her appropriate art historical knowledge.  Goodman’s critic sees the painting as art because she sees that it functions as art and sees that because she can see that, when looking at it closely, it exemplifies certain properties.   How do you know that it does?  The key is that it is in an art museum.  Being in the art museum draws attention (in audience members) to “formal” properties, whereas if it were in another museum, say a geology museum, this would draw attention to other properties. 

 

So for both Danto and Goodman being in a museum, although not a sufficient or a necessary condition for art, is practically a guarantee of arthood because it directs a certain kind of seeing.  Danto’s kind of seeing is a “seeing as” based on background knowledge.  Goodman’s kind of seeing is more like that of Hume’s good judge:  it involves delicate discrimination.  Goodman’s definition of art in terms of five symptoms emphasizes looking at it in terms of what he calls "intransparency."  Background knowledge could even be a hindrance to this.

 

So what should we do, follow Danto or follow Goodman?  The answer is to follow both, even though you probably can't do so at the same time.   They both provide a great way to see and understand art. 

 

Note also the impact on seeing outside the museum, i.e. in everyday life. Danto is looking for thick perception, as Allen Carlson would put it, Goodman for thin, but very thorough, perception.  The Goodmanian might be made aware of all of the ways in which subtle discrimination can work in everyday life.  The Dantoian critic will help us be aware of how context can help us see things through at atmosphere of knowledge of history and concept. 

  

Why Goodman’s exemplification theory of art is not enough, and neither is Danto’s artworld theory, why they need to be combined and also enhanced by the Confucian concept of li. And by the way, you will also find my current definition of art here.

This may seem really antique to some.  But I still teach this stuff from the 60s and the 70s.  And I do think that Danto’s and Goodman’s theories from this period can provide a jumping off point for theoretical advance.   I will promote here something like Goodman’s exemplification and Danto’s is of artistic identification, but in both cases, I believe there needs to be an enhancement.  The basic question to ask is “why should anyone care whether something has the is of artistic identification and why should anyone care that something exemplifies in an artistic way?”  Why should we seek to see something through the atmosphere of artistic theory?  What is the point of seeing a Franz Klein expressionist work in such a way that we can place it in Danto’s style matrix, for example?  And, in response to Goodman, why should we care to focus on properties of line, color, texture, size, etc. of an intransparent work of art made out of a common rock displayed in a museum?   It could be said in both cases that this is your big chance to notice these properties.  But we could notice them outside the museum and in completely non-art contexts (at least the properties Goodman is stressing, maybe not the ones Danto stresses).  Maybe what is happening is that the properties have become subjects of entertainment once the object entered the museum.  There is something strangely Plato-like in Goodman’s theory.  Sure, he rejects Platonism strictly speaking, but, like Plato, the focus is on words, or rather concepts, and so when we see an red abstract painting, on his view, we are aware of the ways in which the redness of red is exemplified, which means that there is indirect reference to all other things that are red.  But classifying things under the term “red” is not really of any interest unless you are some sort of obsessive collector of red things.

Here is my suggested solution to the problem, one that Goodman would not be happy with, but Danto might be.   The idea is inspired by Crispin Sartwell’s book Six Names of Beauty.  Sartwell, in his last chapter reminds us of the way in which the philosophy of Confucius evolved through Chu Hsi and Wang-Yang-Ming to stress the importance of li, which, when found in the Analects, is generally translated as “ritual.” (143-146) Later in Chinese philosophy it is taken to mean the essence of things, not simply their Platonic essence but the way in which they partake in the community and the cosmos.  Then, with Wang Yang-Ming, a pragmatist tendency intervenes so that “li” comes to depend on the interaction of the live creature, as Dewey would put it, with the environment.   Wang Yang Ming also introduces a love element to this theory, which both Sartwell and I like largely because we are both enamored by Plato’s theory of beauty and love in the Symposium. 

So let’s hypothesize, in a comparative philosophy way, that the reason why we care about arthood in Danto’s sense or in Goodman’s sense, or, better, in a combination of Goodman and Danto (since Goodman covers the cognitive dimension of our bodily encounter with exemplification, and Danto covers the cultural/historical aspect, each complementing the other, Goodman covering the way in which art involves certain ways the world is and Danto ways in which art and artworld interact) is that what emerges is “li” or, if we want to put it this way, the ritual-emergent essence, ritual being the way in which a complex whole is imbued with meaning that has reference to individual, community and cosmos, all together.   Art ultimately gets as essences in the way ritual does.  Art is our contemporary way of doing ritual (or maybe just one contemporary way).
 

We who love art care about art because of something that normal people with normal vision cannot see.  Something emerges because of atmosphere, but not just the atmosphere of the artworld, or simply because there are a lot of predicates missing from the style matrix (and we are somehow aware of all of these missing things, e.g. the non-imitation and non-expression of purist art) on Danto’s account. 

Something emerges, something is there which is exhibited only to those who know how to see, and what is exhibited is the li.   Now the li is socially-historically constructed:  I am not using this term to indicate anything that science can discover or describe.  Li is complex multi-layered aura of significance; an aura of possibility, but also an actual aura as-experienced.  This aura is emergent upon relations with self, community, culture, world and universe.  (Again, we are not positing the relation to the actual universe but rather to the universe as a concept, as something experienced, as something that is part of our consciousness, as even what Kant would call an a priori concept.) 

What Danto misses is that blob of paint we see as Icarus in the Bruegel painting is not just something imagined as Icarus but rather something with heightened significance based on its relations with every other aspect of the painting: and it is also perceived as a window, in a way, to the culture at large, to our own inner selves and also to our world as much as to the world of 16^th century Flanders.  It is not the atmosphere of theory or even art history so much as all of that plus all of the other appropriate atmospheres, the atmosphere of European history for example, and more.  See it through the atmosphere of what it is to be human, and of course the atmosphere of the theory of what it is to be human, as it evolves in our culture, too. 

And, speaking of Goodman, it is not that we need to simply notice all of the syntactic and semantic density of the work as symbol plus its repleteness, exemplification and complexity.  Take the print by Hokusai as his reference.  Rather there musts be something much more, something which would include not only what the Dantoian aesthete would see, but also a recognition that the curved line in the Hokusai would not have any meaning at all without its organic relations to the entire painting, and then pushing beyond that to the various organic relations that can emerge in study or contemplation between this work, self, world, etc.  It is only when the Hokusai line emerges with the aura of li that we get it, i.e. that we appreciate the painting is the best and fullest way.  Otherwise, the difference between perceiving a Hokusai and perceiving a cure in a stock market chart (when it goes up it is good for us financially) is just a matter of degree.  I think that Goodman was moving in this direction when he included a sixth symptom of the aesthetic. 

Sartwell’s thought that in loving beauty we love the entire world can be translated into the notion that the beauty of a Hokusai connects to the world not simply in terms of multiple reference (Goodman in the end is just too mechanical:  multiple reference just means more labels applied, whether metaphorically or not…and the issue is not one of application of labels). 

Something is art if it has Danto’s “is” of artistic identification, exhibits some of Goodman’s symptoms, and expresses “li.”  (This may be the first time I have ever attempted a definition of art!)

In what ways can we talk about the Japanese tea ceremony as art?

Is the Japanese tea ceremony art?  I am prompted to think about this question as I have assigned "Zen and the Art of Tea" by Daisetz T. Suzuki to my students for my Philosophy of Art class. Of course this is not the question that Suzuki himself is interested in:  his question has more to do, as the title indicates, with the relationship between Zen and the art of tea.  That in itself raises issues about the boundaries between art and religion and how those boundaries can sometimes be overcome, or dissolve.  The context of our discussion here is a previous discussion of Danto's definitions of art.  His early artworld paper seemed to define art as whatever can be seen as art by someone with appropriate art historical and art theoretical knowledge. Towards the end of his life he defined artworks are embodied meanings that get viewers to engage in acts of interpretation to "grasp the intended meaning they embody."  It is not clear how the two different definitions relate to each other. (There was an intermediary definition created by Noel Carroll and based on Danto's Transfiguration of the Commonplace that has also often been discussed:  I won't go into that here.)  My point right now is that coming from thinking about Danto to thinking about Suzuki is a bit like jumping from a hot shower into a cold bath.   It is not clear how a tea ceremony can be seen as art under a theory that stresses the artworld or seeing something in terms of art history and it is not clear how a tea ceremony is to be interpreted, or even whether a particular tea ceremony counts as an artwork even though there is, to be sure, an art of tea.  At a minimum one could say that (1) there is something one might call the "tea ceremony world" i.e. the world of practitioners, events, histories and so forth, something like Danto's "artworld" (2) tea ceremony is often listed as one of the Japanese art forms much like painting and Noh drama, (3) interpretation and aboutness can play a role in the tea ceremony as it is important to understand how things work symbolically.  Is this enough to make interesting comparisons?

The central ideas of Suzuki's 1938 essay are, I would say, simplicity, soft-heartedness, and swallowing the universe in swallowing tea.  Simplicity is a common aesthetic quality often also stressed in the West not only in art but also in ritual contexts. We are well aware of similarities between the search for simplicity that can be found both in Zen and in Cistercian monasteries. Simplicity is also a value in modernist design.  When Suzuki says "the art of tea is the aestheticism of primitive simplicity" we can think of the tea room and its comparison to the work of modernist architect Adolf Loos.  However, the next part then puzzles:  "its ideal, to come closer to Nature, is realized by sheltering oneself under a thatched roof in a room which is hardly ten feet square but which must be artistically constructed and furnished."  How is being sheltered in such a room bringing oneself closer to Nature? (I am not questioning the validity of this, just trying to wrap my mind around it.) Of course it might be closer to Nature than sheltering oneself in a skyscraper, but one might think less than in not sheltering oneself at all.  But maybe sheltering in the hut puts one in the right frame of mind for coming closer to Nature.

Bringing closer to Nature, if essential to the Art of Tea, might pose a further problem for a follower of Danto, which is that the constitution of something as art is a matter of taking it out of the realm of mere real things and moving it into the realm of the artworld, thus seemingly further away from Nature.  One would think that for Danto making art cannot be consistent with getting close to Nature.  

Suzuki further says, in comparing Zen to Tea, "Zen also aims at stripping off all the artificial wrapping humanity has devised" and that it "combats intellect."  Suzuki even opposes Zen to philosophy which he thinks is "accessible only to those who are intellectually equipped, and thus cannot be a discipline of universal appreciation."  Danto was nothing if not a philosopher, and his philosophy was only really accessible to the intellectually equipped. Moreover, he treated art like philosophy, insisting that being able to distinguish art from non-art, especially in contemporary contexts, requires a special form of intellectual equipment, thus making impossible any universal appreciation of art.  If the tea ceremony is art under a Zen concept it does not also seem to be art under Danto's concept of art, or if it is, the two paths to art status are going in very different.  Danto takes us away from Nature to a highly cognitive and hence intellectual Artworld, and Zen and Tea follow the reverse path.  

Suzuki says that "the art of tea symbolizes simplification, first of all, by an inconspicuous, solitary, thatched hut erected...as if the hut were part of nature..."  That it symbolizes something would indicate "aboutness" on Danto's account, but imagination seems to play a radically different role here than in Danto.  For Danto we might use imagination in seeing the Brillo boxes as art when they are in the gallery.   We use imagination when we perceive something under what Kant calls "the is of artistic identification."  We are supposed to see the thatched hut as quite the opposite of art, as Nature, in the Suzuki case.  

Suzuki stresses the Zen ideas of harmony, reverence, purity and tranquility, all of which are notions that play a role from time to time in the Western arts as well.  But they are not necessary to art as the West conceives it, and no one would accept Suzuki's "these four elements are needed to bring the art to a successful end" as true of great architecture, painting, dance, or photography in the West. Occasionally purity gains prominence as when Clement Greenberg stresses that true art must be pure, something that Danto, by the way, spent a lot of time opposing.

Suzuki interprets harmony in this case as "gentleness of spirit" which he sees as governing the art of tea:  "The general atmosphere of the tea-room tends to create this kind of gentleness all around - gentleness of touch, gentleness of odor, gentleness of light, and gentleness of sound," and he describes how one would appreciate handmade teacup in the tea ceremony in terms of a charm of "gentleness, quietness, and unobtrusiveness."  

I have no intention here, by the way of setting up Danto, New York, or the West as in any way superior on the issue of art:  what interests me mainly here is how difficult it is to talk about the two together!  Perhaps gentleness of spirit, or the pervasiveness gentleness of the tearoom can be seen as the dominant aesthetic quality that the tea room master seeks to achieve.  Suzuki goes so far as to suggest that gentleness of spirit is "the foundation of our life on earth" and says "if the art of tea purports to establish a Buddha-land in its small group, it has to start with gentleness of spirit."  So the idea is that the foundation of a good life would being with establishing gentleness of spirit:  it is not just a matter of aesthetic choice, one aesthetic quality among many, but the key one.

The problem posed by feminist art history for defining art, especially for Danto

"In this hierarchy [a hierarchy of art forms based on art history's organizing of art into categories] the arts of painting and sculpture enjoy an elevated status while other arts that adorn people, homes or utensils are relegated to a lesser cultural sphere under such terms as 'applied,' 'decorative' or 'lesser' arts."  Rozsika Parker and Griselda Polock  "Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts

Danto in his famous paper "The Artword" says that what he calls "the is of artistic identification" is needed to constitute something as a work of art.  So, the presence of the "is" appears to be at least a necessary condition for art.  The "is of artistic identification" is poorly explained by Danto, although one can eek out basically what he meant by it.  He says that it is featured prominently in statements about artworks, that it is not the is of identity nor that of predication or existence, and that children use it when they say of a drawn circle "that is me."  Obviously, however, this is not enough to make such a circle art.  So the is of artistic identification, although necessary, is not sufficient for something to be art.  Danto does make clear that the is of artistic identification, when it indicates that something is art (unlike the drawn circle case), contains within it some reference to things beyond the physical object apprehended, such things including the presence of the Brillo boxes in an art gallery, the way in which the paint is inseparable from the bed in Rauschenberg's Bed, and the way in which the title, and all of its implications, are inseparable from each of the imagined pair of otherwise identical paintings called Newton's First Law and Newton's Third Law.  I want to keep in mind that the is of artistic identification, in a sense, contains within it the way in which the physical object, what Danto calls the mere real object, is situated within an artworld context, i.e. the gallery, the history of art up to that point, the title, and the intentions of the artist.

Now, when reading this in conjunction of "Crafty Women and the Hierarchy of the Arts" by Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, the question is whether, among all of these other matters, a certain patriarchal stance is also included within the is of artistic identification.  In short, does this feminist critique of art history (rather dated, I admit) pose a problem for the definition of art and also for Danto's definition of art in particular?

One way that the project of defining art can play out is in terms of making distinctions between art and craft.  Another version of this, slightly off center from the first, involves the distinction between fine and decorative art.  The problem that "Crafty Women" poses is not so much that of destroying these distinctions entirely as that it raises some interesting questions about them.  The first thought that comes to mind is that if, as Danto suggests, something is art if it can be seen as art by someone with appropriate art historical knowledge, i.e. someone versed in the ways of the artworld, then how do we deal with embroidery, quilts and Navajo blankets?  It is not at all clear that the women who were so prominent in these various art forms as makers were necessarily able to see these things as art with appropriate art historical knowledge.  And, perhaps more interestingly, when some of these things were moved into the art museums in the 1970s the manner by which they were moved, and the explanation of this, was open to question by such feminist art historians as Parker and Pollock (PP).  So, as PP observe, Ralph Pomeroy (1974) introduced his appreciative understanding of Navajo blankets by saying that he intends to forget certain things about these blankets:  to consider them as "Art with a capital 'A'" he is going to look at them "as paintings - created...by several nameless masters of abstract art." PP write "several manoeuvres are necessary in order to see these works as art."  (50)  For Pomeroy to see them as art requires, as PP puts it, these maneuvers:  "the geometric becomes abstract, woven blankets become paintings and women weavers become nameless masters." That is, although from Danto's perspective, these things become art because they can be seen as art under an appropriate theory, there is a problem of misrepresentation based on certain sexist and probably also racist assumptions.  To be fair to Danto, in later writings, and perhaps even in the artworld essay, he stressed the intentions of the artist, and so the feminist approach to this (of PP) which stresses giving honor to the actual originator might agree with Danto in that the originator is not honored if the work is only seen as art if she and the originating context are abstracted out of the picture.  (An additional feature here is that the original material out of which it is also seen as something else, i.e. dye on unpainted fabric as a kind of painting).  Focusing on the term "nameless masters" which seems to imply that the makers were men since "master" is a male term, even though it is obvious to all that women have produced these works.  So, in order to see them as art Pomeroy had to see them as produced not by women but by men. There does seem something unfair going on when a blanket only is seen as art if these changes are made. Is patriarchy then contained within the is of artistic identification?  Probably today this work can be seen as art without making all of these transformations, and perhaps patriarchy is not now included in the is of artistic identification. However, distinctions between art and craft and between fine and decorative art still hold sway.  

Perhaps the larger issues, particularly relevant to everyday aesthetics, is the one raised by PP when they say that "the feminine spirit in art is ...linked with the domestic sphere."  If an art form is linked to the domestic sphere and particularly to the activities of women within that sphere then it is more likely to be seen (in a sexist society) as non-art, mere craft, or decorative as opposed to fine art.  Moreover, it may well be that women are seen as closer to Nature than to Culture, and that even though, unlike animals, they do participate in the human making of "means of subsistence" transforming "materials into tools, houses, clothes and utensils" they have secondary status because, as Sherry Ortner argued, their activities occupy a position between Nature and Culture, their activities of cooking and sewing being cultural but taking place in the home.  Cooking in the home, as Ortner argues, is seen as closer to nature than haute cuisine which is seen as "real" cooking, and this is done usually by men. Thus, women "perform lower level conversions from nature to culture."  (This may pose a problem for my own arguing forthcoming at the ASA that food can be art based on the work of great chefs.  The feminist claim could be that the very notion of "great chef" degrades home cooking and forces women into the realm of culture, and that my not intending that effect is irrelevant.)

Now the conversion of nature to culture can be seen as something like the conversion Danto posits of a mere thing to an artwork under the application of the "is" of artistic representation.  The place or location of the activity is central here too.  The actual Brillo box does not just appear in a warehouse, but also in the grocery store and in the home, as involved in domestic chores.  The Brillo box as artwork appears however in an art gallery. Warhol in creating "Brillo Box" has taken something from everyday life associated with the traditional domain of women and has brought it into the City of Art through his act of construction (which, interestingly, Danto seriously under-emphasizes:  as far as he is concerned, Warhol could have just made these objects out of cardboard or could have even just appropriated one from the warehouse, since the physical manifestation is not important here...is the very act of making art too close to the natural and is the Dantoian rejection of the act of making as insignificant a manifestation of the patriarchal place of the "is" of artistic identification?).   

Much has been written about the danger of everyday aesthetics setting up the trivial as equal to the masterwork.  Perhaps as PP argue, the endless assertion of the superiority of the distal senses and of the fine arts insofar as they are subject to reflection and judgment is also a function of an anthropological reality, i.e. the endless assertion of feminine stereotype in art history which, they argue, is needed to provide an opposite against which male art can find meaning and sustain dominance.

I don't think that all of this comes down to saying that Danto was somehow unconsciously sexist, or at least not just that.  That would be boring even if true.  What is interesting here is the idea that Carolyn Korsmeyer, a well known philosopher of art (and a feminist), has placed these two articles together in a textbook such that anyone who reads carefully would naturally ask whether the claims made by PP can not only undercut traditional masculinist history of art but also pose problems for Danto's theory of art.  It is not that Danto is guilty of the same thing Pomoroy was when talking about Novaho blankets.  Pomoroy was clearly a formalist much in the tradition of Clive Bell in his transformation of the women's work into abstractions by nameless masters.  Danto would not abide by that, nor would his theory.  The formalist theory of Bell and Greenberg might well be the model for what Danto called Reality Theory of art which, for Danto, is replaced by his own theory of art.  In arguing against what he called purists he was obviously also arguing against formalists.  For Danto the content and context is essential to the artwork's being an artwork.  So when something enters into the realm of art it carries with it the intentions of the artist, including for example the intentions of the women who wove the blankets that are now treated as art.  That said, there may be a residual acceptance of the ideology.   There is certainly a similarity with Pomoroy in that seeing something as art by someone with art historical knowledge brings it into the world of art.  One could say that Danto to make himself clear must add a condition or two, i.e. that the seeing x as art must be constrained not only by art history but also by history of the context and intended content of the item under consideration.  This is undercut a bit however by the way that the history and content of the original designing of the Brillo boxes was undercut by replacement of those ideas by Warhol's own.

PP are mainly criticizing the acceptance of a duality and therefore of an opposition, in this case between the feminine and the masculine, between the domestic and the public, and in the way that we treat the transformation from Nature into Culture (the Nature/Culture opposition is not itself overcome).  And so they say:  "The important questions concern women artists' relationship to an ideology of sexual difference in which the notions of masculine and feminine are meaningful only in relation to each other. What accounts for the endless assertion of a feminine stereotype, a feminine sensibility, a feminine art in criticism and art history?  Precisely the necessity to provide an opposite against which male art and the male artist fine meaning and sustain their dominance."  What I am suggesting is that the opposition between Nature and Culture as understood in terms of an opposition between mere things of the home (e.g. Brillo boxes, etc.) and things in the artworld where the artworld things gain more status reproduces the feminine/masculine opposition that is the grounding of patriarchal dominance.  "Ideology is not a conscious process, its effects are manifest but it works unconsciously, reproducing the values and systems of belief of the dominant group it serves."  

When is art? Goodman vs. Danto, and the relation of this to everyday aesthetics

Goodman's famous "When is Art?" appeared in his 1978 book Ways of Worldmaking.  The chapter seems at first to be mainly directed against formalists such as Clive Bell and more importantly, probably, Clement Greenberg, although neither of these are mentioned (he simply refers to a group of theorists and artists which he calls "purists" and sometimes "formalists").  Goodman wants to show that the purists are wrong that the abstract art they favor does not symbolize.  He has a broader notion of "symbolize" such that something can fail to represent or express but could still symbolize if it exemplifies.  All of this mainly seems to be just a matter of semantics, Goodman having a much broader use of "symbol" than the purists. 

A more important target for the essay is the work of Arthur Danto, although Goodman never mentions Danto.  (Surely they knew each other:  New York is not that far from Boston).  Both Goodman and Danto are trying to account for found art and conceptual art as well as for highly abstract minimalist art.  A useful way to see their distinction and implicit disagreement can show in part how Goodman leads us on a path that seems at first to be more world-connected than Danto's and hence more useful for the project of everyday aesthetics.  In fact, the two can be used to supplement each other since Goodman focuses on the sensuous and directly apparent aspect of experience, whereas Danto focuses on the cultural meaning aspect which is not immediately apparent.

For Goodman, something is art when it functions as art, and something functions as art when its exhibits an unspecified number of symptoms of the aesthetic (although the most important of these is exemplification.)  Thus objects can move several times in their lifetime in an out of arthood, and thus in and out of the everyday.  Unfortunately, when they are out of arthood they are also out of the realm of the aesthetic since Goodman doesn’t really take into account non-art aesthetics.  Take for example a rock picked up in a driveway (Goodman's example).  Goodman believes that when the rock is in the driveway it has no aesthetic properties (this of course cannot be accepted by everyday aesthetics) but that when it is put on a pedestal in an art gallery it comes to exemplify certain properties (and so, is symbolic even if it does not represent or express).  In doing this it comes to function as art.

The relevance of this for everyday aesthetics is that there can be a realm between non-art and art that is aesthetic but not enough so or in enough ways to be art.  I doubt that Goodman would have agreed with this (given his metaphysical strictures against possibility) but, as I see it, the rock can have potential aesthetic properties which are actualized in the experienced of someone who looks at it with an artist’s eye, and then those properties can be full actualized when the rock achieves art status in the context of a museum exhibit where it is displayed as art and thus fully functions as art.  

Goodman does not define art in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but he does talk about what he calls "symptoms of the aesthetic" by which he means symptoms of arthood:  these are syntactic density, semantic density, relative repleteness, exemplification and multiple and complex reference.  There is no need here to go into detail about these, except to mention that relative repleteness means that a line in a Hokusai painting is richer in meaning than a similar line on a Stock Exchange chart.  I suspect that all of the symptoms of the aesthetic refer basically to one thing:  it is the same intuition expressed in different ways.  Goodman himself suggests this when he says that all the symptoms "focus attention on rather than, or at least along with, what [the work] refers to."  We cannot simply look through the symbol to its referent as we would in the case of a traffic light or a science text.  We must "attend constantly to the symbol itself."

Danto (I am speaking here just of his view in "The Artworld") would hold that for the art to be art it is not sufficient that it be exhibited in a gallery by an artist, although this can contribute to its arthood.  It must be seen as art by someone with suitable art historical and art theoretical knowledge, i.e. seen under the appropriate concept of art. It must also have some part that is seen with the “is of artistic identification.”  So whereas Goodman can be seen as expanding the formalist conception of art to include new material (for example texture and the type of material used), Danto can be seen as rejecting it.  Whereas Goodman thinks art calls on us to attend quite carefully to its many exhibited referential features, Danto thinks that we need to attend to things that are not exhibited (at least directly in the work) for example art history, art theory, the intended meaning of the artist, the title, and physical artworld placement (i.e. in a gallery or museum).  As I have suggested, I think both are right about this.   

An interesting feature of Goodman is that art's function is cognitive and, as cognitive, it does relate very much to the world, through various forms of reference.  Danto's approach also provides reference to the world but in his case it is through aboutness or meaning.   Two paintings can be visually indistinguishable but their titles, for example Newton’s First Law and Newton’s Second Law, provide external reference. In addition to the titles there is whatever else might go into the intended meaning of the creator.  Both Goodman and Danto might well admire an all-red painting, but for Goodman the key is in how the artist has drawn our attention to the particular quality of redness.  Goodman does allow, however, some external reference through his notion of metaphorical exemplification.  Danto focuses instead on the way in which we see the painting based on our knowledge of art history, the intentions of the painter, the title and so forth.   For Goodman it is what you see that gives you at least indirect reference, i.e. exemplification.  (Denotative reference plays only a small role in Goodman’s theory of art.)  For Goodman, even work that is entirely abstract can exemplify its properties, properties which are shared by objects outside the artwork.  Thus the entire distinction between properties that are intrinsic and ones that are extrinsic seems to dissolve (not entirely though).  Goodman's approach explains why, after seeing a show by a good artist, we tend to see things in the world in terms of the works.  He in a sense captures the dynamic interaction of art and world in a way that Danto does not, but then Danto provides captures something about that in a way Goodman does not.  In short, for Danto artworld knowledge can enter into that which is expressed or even exemplified by a work of art. 

So Goodman could accommodate Danto's insight, and Danto Goodman’s.   But artworld knowledge does not play such an important role in Goodman as it does in Danto.  Actually it seems to play no role at all.   Danto stresses the "is of artistic identification" which, as I have argued, seems more like an "is of imaginative identification" or that, plus, seeing the object as art.  Goodman allows for metaphorical exemplification, and hence also for imaginative identification.  However, he has no role for an is of artistic identification where it is required that we see the object as art according to a theory of art. Another important difference between the two concerns what happens when the artwork leaves the art gallery.  For Danto it is still art if it is purchased, taken home and perceived by someone with suitable art historical knowledge.  What is not clear is what happens if the Warhol Brillo Box is taken to a warehouse where it is indistinguishable from the Brillo boxes there:  is it still art?  (Danto at one point imagines the Brillo Box just is an appropriated Brillo box from the factory.  That version of Brillo Box would then be totally indistinguishable from the other Brillo boxes assuming that its history of origin is forgotten, or someone switches it with a Brillo box by accident.) Danto sometimes talks like Dickie:  once art, always art, and therefore it is still art out of the gallery, as though once it has been displayed as art in the art gallery it cannot stop being so...even if it is impossible to locate it amongst its indiscernible counterparts in the warehouse.  (But at other times he takes the opposite position holding the Brillo Box is reduced to its real counterpart once it is taken out of the gallery.  Danto: you can't have it both ways.)   Goodman however says that once it ceases to function as art it is no longer art.  Well he hedges on that a bit (more than a bit): he says a Rembrandt may still be a Rembrandt after it has been taken out of the museum and used as a blanket. But the question of when it is art is really more important, for him, than "what is art."  It is art when it functions as art, which does not happen when it functions as a blanket.  So one of Warhol's Brillo Boxes taken to the warehouse no longer functions as art and hence is no longer art for Goodman, which seems right to me, until I think of the curator who has been desperately looking for his stolen art, and at last finds it.  She is not going to say, well it is no longer a work of art.  So that a problem for both Danto and Goodman. 

So, what is the value of this debate to everyday aesthetics?   It is not explicit but rather lies in the gradual evaporation of the distinction between that which is intrinsic and that which is extrinsic in formalist art (especially for Goodman), combined with the way in which art is essentially cognitive.  Because art's significance goes beyond representation and expression to exemplification, including both literal and metaphorical exemplification, and both of sensually evident and experientially somewhat hidden cultural properties, this draws our attention to aesthetic qualities of everyday life. 

Goodman’s expansion of "formalist" to include not only relations of lines and colors but also texture and material, and perhaps much more (insofar as the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction does dissolve) encourages us to focus on art features in a much more multi-sensuous way than is allowed by traditional formalism.  Bear in mind that, strictly speaking, Goodman has to be against the aesthetics of everyday life:  he seems to make no distinction between art and aesthetic, and he seems to reduce the aesthetic to the artistic, so that the aesthetic is only within the realm of art.  But again, as anything can move in or out of the realm of art depends on how it functions one could imagine an in between realm, the realm of everyday aesthetics where some, but not the sufficient number or intensity of symptoms of “the aesthetic” (which is to say, of arthood) are present. 

A big difference between Goodman and Danto here is that Danto lays a lot of emphasis on imaginative seeing and Goodman seems to lay none at all.  The “is” of artistic representation, since it can also be applied to what the child does in pretending that a stick is a horse plays no role in Goodman, except perhaps in the domain of metaphorical exemplification.  Once the “is” is let in, and metaphorical exemplification emphasized we can see that the artist, in looking imaginatively at both her subject matter and her materials is, through the process of creative work, able ultimately to make something that, in Danto’s words, embodies meaning. 

My view of everyday aesthetics would incorporate both insights neither of which were actually applied beyond the world of art.  One of the reasons for this is that neither Danto nor Goodman seemed to pay much attention to the artist’s perspective in the creative process.  (Yuriko Saito has contributed a lot to this issue by pointing out how most philosophers, certainly in the analytic tradition, have neglected the creator’s perspective.  Exceptions are Nietzsche and Dewey, and, oddly given his idealism, Collingwood, who is one of those rare philosophers who thinks a lot about the relationship between the artist and her materials and subject matter in the studio.)  But this of course requires seeing the relationship between everyday aesthetics and art aesthetics as being dynamic and interactional.  It would reject those views of everyday aesthetics which sees the everyday as totally detached from art every bit as much as it would reject those who, like Danto in some moods, see art totally detached from the everyday.  For Danto, if Rauschenberg’s Bed is stripped of its paint it becomes a mere bed again, and if Warhol’s Brillo Box is taken out of the gallery and, even more generally, out of the artworld context, it too loses all of its art-relevant properties, which are the only aesthetic properties of much interest to Danto.  My view, perhaps closer to Goodman on this point, is that the materials taken up by artists contain aesthetic properties already and that these are taken up and transformed in the creative process.  Dewey says that art refines and intensifies everyday experience.  This is how that is done:  the artist in the creative process refines and intensifies art-like aesthetic properties already there in the non-art world, both the ones favored by Danto and the ones favored by Goodman.