The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

Abstract

IN THE PRESENT STATE of the artworld, it is possible that a painting be exhibited which is merely a square of primed canvas, or a sculpture shown which consists of a box, of undistinguished carpentry, coated with a banal tan chemtone applied casually with a roller. Such works may be scored as largely empty, as indeed they are when we contrast the former with The Legend of the True Cross by Piero della Francesca, or the latter with the Apollo Belvedere. Yet the painting is not in the way in which a square of primed canvas, indiscernible from our work, may be: an canvas awaiting an Annunciation, say; or the way in which a crate indiscernible from our sculpture may be, which awaits a cargo of bric-a-brac and a bill of lading. For empty as applied to our works is an aesthetic and critical judgment, presupposing that its subjects are artworks already, however inscrutable may be the differences between them and objects which, since not artworks, reject such predicates as a class. Our works are titled Untitled. This is a title of sorts rather than a mere statement of fact, as it sometimes is when an artist neglects to give his work a title and it enters the catalogue raisonne unbaptized. So are those mere objects untitled which happen not to be discernible from our works, but