Deaths of Art: David Carrier's Metahistory of "Artwriting"

Abstract

I n Artwriting [1], David Carrier has succeeded in identifying a genre of thought and discourse that is vitally important to the world of art, but that has not been subject to the sort of detailed attention that such a discourse deserves, particularly from philosophers. Carrier's 'artwriting' is the kind of writing on art that lies outside the rather narrow disciplinary boundaries of art history. It is either concerned with explaining the significance of the new and the contemporary or-drawing on older traditions of speculative, philosophical art theory or on relatively informal discourse oriented toward travel and personal observation (like Ruskin's, for example)-it aims at placing art within a context that would not be considered narrowly artistic. Among the artwriters whom Carrier analyzes with unusual care and grace are Clement Greenberg, Ernst Gombrich, Michael Fried, Adrian Stokes, Rosalind Krauss and Joseph Masheck. How, it might well be asked, has philosophical aesthetics come to take seriously writers whose work it has more often ignored as marginal,journalistic or wildly speculative? Let me take a leaf from Carrier's book to construct something of a 'genealogy' [2] for his own procedure-that is, where Carrier is concerned with showing how artwriters construct genealogies to distribute value and significance to artists and then constructs his own genealogy of twentiethcentury artwriters from Greenberg to Masheck, I want to suggest a necessarily selective and abbreviated genealogy of aesthetics over the last 100 years that can help to show both why we should take Carrier's project seriously and what questions we should be asking about it. Following Arthur Danto, Carrier argues that aestheticians have too often confined their attention to presumed properties of the work of art, the artist or the audience. They have supposed, for example, that works are possessed of something called 'significant form' [3], or that genuine artists must be in a special inspired state of mind, or that a work is authentic only if it succeeds in infecting its audience with a special kind of emotion. The generic feature of all such attempts at defining art, Danto argued 25 years ago, is to be found in the view that theory is secondary and adventitious in 'the artworld' [4]. By posing the case of physically indiscernible objects that are significantly different works of art