Antecedentes o marco referencial 35

4.2.1. Dickie’s institutional theory of art and its discontents

In simple terms, one can see art as a cultural function and thus relative to our institutions of art. I shall outline the analytic philosophy of Dickie and then Danto’s version of the theory, in order to determine in what sense the institutional theory adequately defines art.

Dickie (1969:45, 1971:53, 1974:10) states in various ways that “works of art are art because of the position they occupy within an institutional context”. His first attempts at the theory begin with the following notions: “… a work of art in the descriptive sense is 1) an artefact 2) upon which society or some subgroup of a society has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation” (Dickie 1969:23). Writing about this early formulation of the theory, he acknowledges that “society” or “subgroup” creates the wrong impression, that works of art are created by society or a subgroup acting as a whole, which he does not intend saying.

Rather, what he wants to say is that it must be “contemplated by a single person’s treating an artefact as a candidate for appreciation” (Dickie 1971:17), that is, the action of artists. Here one would include Duchamp’s “ready-mades” – the “art world” need not concur.

157 It would simply require a kind of christening an object as art; a fiat that such and such should be a candidate for appreciation. However, Hanfling (1999) makes the point that there is a distinction between being regarded as a work of fine art and actually being a work of art. The former concerns knowledge about the language and practices of the people concerned (for example at the time of the Lascaux cave paintings); regarding the latter we need simply “look and see” (Hanfling 1999:194). It is therefore not clear whether the institutional theory makes this distinction clear, even in the following form.

Dickie then reformulates his theory as follows: “…a work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artefact 2) upon which some person or person acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the art world) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation” (Dickie 1971:45). Therefore it is not society acting as a whole that defines art. Although Dickie has been criticized, most notably by Wollheim (1987), Dickie maintains that Wollheim misinterpreted his theory by focusing on the earlier 1969 version. Thus, when Wollheim cynically asks whether art is made, whether “arthood” is confirmed by representatives of the

“art world” who meet and jointly act as a group to confer status on certain objects, he is apparently unaware of Dickie’s later claim that there is no requirement for consensus, or nominating representatives of a vague “art world” as a totality, that would have to record conferrals and meet and set forth an agenda and so on.

Furthermore, Dickie reflects that institutional theory seems to be informal, but that he errs by using formal language. Wollheim ridicules his expressions like “confers upon” and “acting on behalf”. Dickie dropped the formal language in 1984. He argues in the reformulation that artists participate with understanding to make artworks, that artworks are artefacts to be presented to an “art world” public, and that the public try to understand the object. Thus one may construct an equation linking artist to the work of art to the “art-world” public which together equal or constitute the “art-world system”.

This deceptively simple theory accounts for art that the “eye cannot decry” (Dickie 1971:84) and opens up the possibility on a level of theory for dubbing a work such as Warhol’s Brillo Boxes⁸⁴ (1960) which is indistinguishable from the “real” Brillo Box, an artwork. The institutional theory can make such a distinction and even call the one object art, because of the “characteristics that artworks have as a result of their relation to their cultural context …”

84 Museum of Modern Art collection, New York.

158 (Dickie 1969:97). And to give further weight to the theory, Dickie adds that this cultural and historical context is necessary.

Certain writers (Lord 1987; Scholz 1994) have argued that Dickie’s “art-world system” is circular, that the definitions of each term are contained in the other. Dickie, however, embraces and endorses the circularity of his argument. He argues that we learn the “art system” as children and the cultural code of art, artist and public forum, the art potentially been appreciated. Accordingly, one can learn that as a “set” – artist, work of art, public, art world, art world system – co-create one another. They are “inflected concepts”, that bend on themselves both “presupposing and supporting one another” (Dickie 1971:102). Dickie’s (1971:103) “structural notion” as he calls it is meant to be a formulation of what we already know as opposed to theories such as formalism, expressionism, idealism and mimetic, which try to define art in other terms. The emphasis here is that the art object is a cultural “product”

which is passed on through teaching and learning, like for example, eating in a ritualized way. Art is a cultural invention and practice, and as such artworks are acculturated objects that may become “consensual linguistic practice” (Dickie 1971:108).

There are problems⁸⁵ with this theory, however, such as the power that institutions may have in deciding what is to be considered art and seen as part of a particular culture. The institution in question may be wrong and short-sighted. Brand (1995) claims that being a work of art is incompatible with institutionality because creating, presenting and appreciating a work of art are not governed by conventions. In short: institutions, according to Brand (1995) may preclude creativity, while art-making is more often than not thought to involve creativity, originality and spontaneity (Brand 1995). Dickie’s “acculturated object” therefore may be little more than the ideology of an institution, a game that the artist plays or defining art as objects that a dealer or gallery sell as art, without telling us anything about art as an ontological state of existence. Therefore, perhaps the “object” is just an object that acquires value owing to its place within the cultural game, or there may be an intrinsic “depth”, but it would be unknowable and unquantifiable, apart from its embeddedness as institutional “play”

(having social, economic, political, historical and cultural “value”).

85 C.f. Matravers, D (2000, 2007) analytic critique of the Institutional theory, especially his attempt to overcome the theory being reduced to an object of art simply by fiat with what he calls good reasons, though no trans-historical reasons are to be found in my opinion.

159 4.2.2. Danto’s institutional theory of art and its discontents

Danto takes Dickie’s notion of the “art world” a step further. He maintains that “x is a work of art at time t if and only if the theory held by the ‘art world’ at t canonizes x” (Danto 2003:15). Therefore, it is not so much a declaration on the part of the artist that X is a work of art or that X is accepted by a dealer or a museum or the like, but the writing in of X within the context of an art historical framework.

Danto’s version of the “institutional theory” is a subtler and wider version than that of Dickie.

One could argue that it “embraces all those aspects of our culture that need to find space for those exercises of the imaginative celebration that cannot be reduced to other cultural categories” (Appelbaum & Thomson 2002:253). Brillo Boxes (1960) by Warhol is considered an artwork in the context of the narrative of art history and perhaps spells the end of modernism, the end of a purely formalist concern and ushers in the posthistorical and postmodern age, wherein art can still be made, but without a clear direction and by extension – definition. It is therefore not what is in the object as such, that is, art as inviting a kind of contemplative aura and aesthetics. Rather the cultural theoretical edifice associated with the object, through which we see it or are taught to see it in a particular way, provides the framework⁸⁶ for viewing an object as art. This explains how it is that a new art theory may effect our view or perception of certain objects in an art context.

The fact is that today any object could conceivably be an art object. Danto asks what it could mean to live in a world where anything could be art. He maintains that the history of art is such that self-consciousness has reached its end, that we inhabit a kind of posthistorical and philosophical self-awareness⁸⁷. One could say a theory of this sort came about in tandem with and as a consequence of the art of the mid to late twentieth century. The “new vision” of the

“absolute Brillo Box could only have drawn upon the associated meanings that gave life to Brillo Box as a work of art in 1964, not 1864, (that is) a space that opened up for at least a

86 In the same way, we don’t ordinarily see reality as it is (Kant’s Noumenon), but what the eye is able to see (that is, specific wave-like frequencies that resonate as visible light). So that “reality” is the interaction between our limited, relative perception and external reality (the external world), though we know it to be inaccurate or approximate at best. This coheres with my earlier discussion of mimesis.

87 This could be contested as it is perhaps only with hindsight, in the making/writing of “history” that any given time period is made aware.

160 certain segment of the “art world” to accept it as art without hesitation” (Danto 2003:ix, brackets my inclusion). Thus the historical situation contributes to an object’s status as art;

“external factors” as Danto (2003: x111) puts it.

These “external factors” take time to ferment and enter public consciousness and may even mean the overhaul of a culture’s conception of beauty or even its eradication. Duchamp’s

“readymades” of 1917 were not immediately accepted by the “art world” of the society of independent artists who sponsored the exhibition. Fry’s exhibition of postimpressionists at Grafton gallery in London in 1910 and 1912 caused an outrage because of the lack of its

“life-likeness”. What Duchamp and the postimpressionists were trying to do was to be critical of the “retinal flutter” (Danto 2003:xv) and develop an intellectual art in Duchamp’s case and a revised aesthetic in the case of postimpressionism. Later Fluxus used food as art; the minimalists used sections of prefabricated buildings and other industrial products; pop artists appropriated cartoons on the inside of bubblegum wrappers and presented them as paintings;

conceptualists such as Denis Oppenheim dug a hole in a mountain in Oakland, California and offered it as sculpture which could not be transported to a museum. A situation therefore developed wherein everything could be art. Beuys’s famous maxim that “everyone is an artist” captures this spirit. In dance someone simply sitting in a chair could be a dance-piece;

avant-garde music challenged the distinction between musical and non-musical events. The life–art schism was blurred⁸⁸. In this maelstrom, Danto’s theory that such objects, once canonized, become vessels of meaning or art, allows for the proliferation of creative “acts”

that widen the category of art, but situated within theoretical discourse, there are still intelligible boundaries. In other words, even as the form that art takes may vary, there is an ongoing debate and theoretical culture in tandem with art practice, such that categories, comparisons and what one might term an “ordering” give some kind of coherence to the arts, even if it is at first merely a label. Nevertheless, these interventions destabilize the traditional subjects and methods of art as they do an art theoretical paradigm – which Danto appears to take into account.

But Danto’s theory poses difficulties. The theory may allow for malleable readjustments, that is, as art changes and transforms so the theory adapts to co-opt it as yet another art form, this

“malleability” may be construed as flimsiness, even vacuousness. Art may be inextricably

88 Did this spell the “end of art” or the beginning of a new conception of art? Danto cites Hegel who purports that art is intellectual, not natural, but “born of spirit” (in Danto 2003:13) and that a higher state of “absolute-spirit” (Hegel’s phrase) no longer require art practice to satisfy its highest needs.

161 bound up with social institutions and artistic conventions, but none of these is so crucial and pervasive as to determine the nature of art itself, that is, rather than tell us what art is, such a theory relies on others to tell us! Since the “art world” and artists change historically, for example before museums, there could be no museum-goers, the historical argument is self-defeating. In other words, you cannot argue for a particular theory of art that says that the theory of art is subject to change with the art, for that very notion itself is embedded in an historical moment and therefore it too may change.

Relativising the “historical moment” one realizes that only in an “art world” of a certain sort, with artists playing a specific social role in concrete historical circumstances of the modern and postmodern twentieth century capitalism, could have generated the problem of status. It is a distinctively contemporary issue. The institutional theory of Danto is not so much a theory of art, but the question of status in contemporary art. It was not so much Greenberg, Rosenberg and others who introduced abstract expressionism into mainstream art theory as it was the “historical moment” of New York within contemporary society that gave such art status as great art and therefore a certain cultural clout to the said theoreticians. Knowledge becomes power; aesthetics and extra-aesthetic become one. This may be dangerous. Culture and civilization are equated. There is no self-critique. Totalitarianism under the guise of democracy and freedom is the order of the day.

Another difficulty with the theory is that the art institutions of a particular country may or may not support government and the latter need to justify the support of the arts given the fact that the arts certainly require financial assistance. Both institutions may have a different moral imperative or perhaps more ominously, the same moral conception of art, which may or may not curtail artistic expression. These issues will be looked at in the next section (4.3.), specifically in relation to my interviews with the South African National Gallery acting director, Hayden Proud.