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Art as Made and Sensuous: Hegel, Danto and the ‘End of Art’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Jason Gaiger
Jason Gaiger*
Affiliation:
The Open University
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Abstract

Hegel's lectures on aesthetics embrace the world history of art in its broadest sense, encompassing the advanced cultures of Asia, Egypt, and Mesopotamia as well as the specifically European tradition that extends from Classical Antiquity through to the art of the Nazarenes and the burgeoning Romanticism of his own day. This attempt to bring the different stages and forms of art into a coherent system and to tell the story of their successive unfolding from the standpoint of philosophy lies at the very heart of Hegel's aesthetics. Indeed, the detailed attention that Hegel pays to the historical development of art has led Ernst Gombrich to recognise him as the founding father of the modem discipline of art history, with all the ambivalence that this expression conveys. In this paper, however, I am concerned less with the way in which Hegel's aesthetics have informed, and continue to inform, our ongoing attempts to understand the art of the past than with the relevance that his ideas still possess in relation to the art of the present. I shall argue that Hegel's aesthetics can tell us a great deal about contemporary art and that, read in the right way, his views provide an important corrective to a significant strand of contemporary art theory.

I want to start by addressing something that must be regarded as a considerable obstacle to any such endeavour: Hegel's theory of the ‘end of art’. If, as popular conceptions of this theory would have it, Hegel saw the development of art as in some way a completed historical enterprise superseded in his own time by the new science of philosophy, not only would there seem to be little meaningful role left for art to play in his larger philosophical system but also little that such a philosophy of art can contribute to helping us understand the new and unexpected directions that art has taken, and continues to take, right up to the present day. This interpretation of Hegel's views remains highly problematic and anyone familiar with Hegel's method of argumentation will remain dissatisfied with such a one-sided representation of his position. Nonetheless, the extant text of the Lectures on Aesthetics does appear to offer some support to such claims.

Type
Hegel Today
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 21 , Issue 1-2: number 41/42 , 2000 , pp. 104 - 119
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2000

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References

1 See Gombrich, Ernst, ‘Hegel und die Kunstgeschichte’, Neue Rundschau, Vol. 88, 1977, pp. 202–19Google Scholar.

2 Hegel, G.W.F., Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vols. 13-15 in the Theorie Werkausgabe edition of his Werke, 20 vols., eds. Moldenhauer, Eva and Michel, Karl Markus, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970 (edition cited hereafter as TWA); TWA, vol. 13, pp. 25–6Google Scholar. All translations are my own.

3 For a good overview of the arguments, see Carter, Curtis L., ‘A Reexamination of the “Death of Art” Interpretation of Hegel's Aesthetics’, in Stepelevich, Lawrence S., ed., Selected Essays of G.W.F. Hegel, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993 Google Scholar. Carter himself contends that ‘Hegel did not intend the death of art and that he explicitly and implicitly provides for the continuation and development of art.’ (p. 12) Although doubts have been cast on the reliability of the published text, pieced together by H.G. Hotho and published posthumously in 1835, Dieter Henrich has suggested that examination of the separate sets of lecture notes reveals that Hegel's position up until 1828 was even stronger than that represented in Hotho's edition. See, Henrich, Dieter, ‘The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel's Aesthetics’, in Inwood, Michael, ed., Hegel, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1985 Google Scholar.

4 Danto, Arthur, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 30 Google Scholar. Danto insists that ‘This thought is altogether Hegelian.’

5 Ibid., p. 4.

6 See, for example, Oelmüller, Willi, ‘Hegels Satz vom Ende der Kunst und das Problem der Philosophie der Kunst nach Hegel’, in Philosophisches Jahrbuch, No. 73, 1965, p. 78 Google Scholar. See, too, Dieter Henrich, op cit., p. 204: ‘Hegel's thesis that art is coming to an end goes together with a disavowal of what was once his finest hope — the return of a political system and a form of social life which requires and deserves aesthetic predicates.’

7 See Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, ‘Overbecks Triumph der Religion’, in Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst, No. 28, 1841 Google Scholar. For a partial English translation, see Harrison, Charles, Wood, Paul and Gaiger, Jason, eds., An in Theory, 1815-1900, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 196–9Google Scholar.

8 For the place of art in Hegel's complete system, see Hegel, G.W.F., Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1830), §553-77, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1975, pp. 440–63Google Scholar.

9 TWA, vol. 13, p. 130.

10 TWA, vol. 13, p. 21.

11 TWA, vol. 13, pp. 141-2.

12 See, Danto, Arthur, ‘The End of Art’, in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986, esp. pp. 84–5Google Scholar, and After the End of Art, op cit., p. 147.

13 For criticism of Danto's account of the different stages of the history of art, see my review article, ‘Danto's Philosophy of Art History’, in Art History, Vol. 22, No. 3, 1999, pp. 451–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 After the End of Art, op cit., p. xiv.

15 Ibid., p. 13.

16 Ibid., p. 36.

17 Danto offers nine such examples for consideration; here I list just four. See, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 1–3 Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., p. 111.

19 Danto maintains that ‘The concept of art, as essentialist, is timeless. But the extension of the term is historically indexed — it really is as if the essence reveals itself through history.’ After the End of Art, op cit., p. 196.

20 See, Carrol, Noël, ‘Essence, Expression, and History: Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art’, in Rollins, Mark, ed., Danto and his Critics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993, pp 79–106, esp. p. 80Google Scholar.

21 See, Richard Wollheim, ‘Danto's Gallery of Indiscernibles’, in Danto and his Critics, op cit., pp. 28-38.

22 Ibid., p. 34.

23 See, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, op cit., p. 31.

24 Ibid., p. 125. Danto maintains that ‘An object o is then an artwork only under an interpretation I, where I is a sort of function that transfigures o into a work: I(o) = W. Then even if o is a perceptual constant, variations in I constitute different works.’

25 After the End of Art, op cit., p. 16.

26 ‘The End of Art’, op cit., p. 111.

27 It is important to distinguish between Danto's theory of art and his practice of art criticism, for in writing about particular art works he is richly attentive to the sensuous and material properites of the works he discusses.

28 TWA, vol. 13, p. 23.

29 TWA, vol. 13, p. 57. Hegel observes that ‘a speech, too, can be addressed to sensuous feeling and imagination’; he thus includes in his account works of art without a physical base such as plays and poetry.

30 TWA, vol. 13, p. 102.

31 TWA, vol. 13, p. 394.

32 See, TWA, vol. 13, pp. 142-4.

33 TWA, vol. 14, pp. 127-8.

34 See, TWA, vol. 13, p. 393 and p. 123.

35 Rachel Whiteread in an interview with Rose, Andrea, printed in Rachel Whiteread: British Pavillion XLVII Venice Biennale, 1997, ex. cat., London: The British Council, 1997, pp. 29–30 Google Scholar.

36 Ibid., p. 30.

37 For a discussion of this aspect of Whiteread's work, including the compex interplay of mimetic and aesthetic factors, see Batchelor, David, ‘A Strange Familiarity’, in Rachel Whiteread, Plaster Sculptures, ex. cat., London, 1993 Google Scholar.

38 ‘Working against the grain of the multiple, these casts have instead the character of the absolute particular of something unique, which had existed in a specific place, and to which this now mutely points …’. Krauss, Rosalind, ‘X Marks the Spot’, in Rachel Whiteread: Shedding Life, ex. cat., Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1996, p. 80 Google Scholar.

39 Interview with Andrea Rose, op cit., p. 32.

40 Ibid., p. 34.

41 TWA, vol. 13, pp. 453-4.

42 TWA, vol. 13, p. 395: ‘die Kunst [besteht] in der Beziehung, Verwandtschaft und dem konkreten Ineinander von Bedeutung und Gestalt.’