“The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art” by Arthur C. Danto

In a perfect world, everyone who writes about art would write like Arthur C. Danto. His essays are models of expositional clarity, sound judgement and logical argument, although this last attribute should come as no surprise since he is Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He also happens to be an outstanding scholar of art and aesthetics. If he lectures as he writes, then his audiences are indeed fortunate. Reading The Abuse of Beauty is like listening to a gifted orator who draws on both personal experience and impeccable scholarship to illuminate a fluent and fascinating discourse.

Rather than being a single treatise, The Abuse of Beauty is actually a collection of essays, three of which were part of the Paul Carus Lectures series, while the others are reprinted or reissued from various sources. The collection is thematically unified, however, by its examination of the question of why, in the 20th century, beauty ceased to be a sine qua non of works of art and, in fact, for many artists, became an anathema to be shunned at all costs.

Professor Danto addresses the question from several points of view. He begins with the Pop art phenomenon of the 1960s, using Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box as a focal point, although he actually had an embarrassment of riches to choose from in Warhol’s oeuvre, including the Campbells tomato soup can. The main point is that by elevating a mass-produced item to the level of art, the traditional criteria of what constitutes a work of art were sent reeling into the outer darkness much as Newton’s Laws of Motion were knocked for a loop by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The idea emerged that anything could be regarded as a work of art, a concept that, alas, loaned itself to extremes of definition. Professor Danto cites the example of avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s rash proclamation that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, was “the greatest work of art ever”—an unconscionable statement for which Stockhausen was instantly disgraced.

There were, of course, a number of predecessors to the Pop art revolution who questioned the value system of art, including the artists of the Dada movement who came to prominence in the years during and after the First World War. Professor Danto has written the best exposition of the Dada movement and philosophy that I have ever read. Countless art history texts simply make a vague statement about Dada being an anti-art movement. Professor Danto actually explores Dada’s raison d’être as a reaction against a society that for centuries had accepted the ancient Greek idea of beauty as a necessary component of art, and art as a facet of civilization, and yet, in a most tragic paradox, had enmeshed itself in the most devastating war that history up to that point had known. It was no coincidence that the Dada Manifesto was published in 1918. The Dada artists’ dissociation from a society they held in contempt was epitomized by Marcel Duchamp’s painting a moustache on a postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa in 1919, and printing under it L.H.O.O.Q., where the letters, when read with a French pronunciation, sound like the sentence, “Elle a chaud au cul”—”She has a hot ass.” (If, however, you have read Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The DaVinci Code, you may wonder if Duchamp had another enigmatic meaning in mind.)

In his historical review of aesthetics, Professor Danto draws considerably upon the theories of Kant and Hegel, both philosophers of the Enlightenment period. Hegel, in particular, was the first major philosopher who actually made a deliberate attempt to look at works of art and to listen to music. Kant and Hegel, but especially the latter, argued art was a transcendent concept on the same plane as philosophy and religion, encompassing ideas that could find only an inadequate expression in language. For both Kant and Hegel, and the cognoscenti of the Enlightenment, beauty, or what they preferred to call “taste,” was an inherent feature of every successful work of art. They could never have envisioned, far less understood, the paradigm shift of the 20th century when certain works of art were created deliberately to evoke reactions of disgust, and, as Professor Danto points out, the artists who created these works would have felt they had failed in their purpose if the adjective “beautiful” were attached to their work.

It is not possible here even to list the enormous range of topics that Arthur Danto explores, everything from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism, to what he calls the “transformative” quality of art. Continuously illuminative and insightful, he moves easily and skilfully through art movements and philosophic schools. I confess I disagree with his dismissal of both formalist analysis and what he calls the “art as cultural index model” as valid methods of studying works of art. A knowledge of structural and compositional elements, as well as an awareness of the social, political, economic and intellectual milieu from which a work of art emerged, greatly enhance criticism and appreciation.

Not least among his laudable traits, Professor Danto manifests a Puckish sense of humour, which tempts me to the facetious speculation that, in beginning his study with Pop art and ending with the aforementioned topic of his final chapter, he was proceeding from the ridiculous to the sublime.

One of the most cogent comments on art that I have ever encountered, and that is relevant to the subject of this review, comes from Canadian composer Barbara Pentland, who wrote: “The creative force has to be such that the laws necessary for its expression should be continually challenged. There is an element of daring in all great art.” I’d venture to say that also in this book of criticism there is an element of daring. ■

The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art by Arthur C. Danto, Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 2003, softcover, 167 pp, $29.95.

David Rozniatowski is a Winnipeg-based art historian.