The End of the History of Art?

by Hans Belting Review by: Joyce Brodsky The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Winter, 1987), pp. 309-311 Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431873 . Accessed: 28/10/2013 08:29
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Reviews of art. Must art be constitutesthe reenfranchisement defended as sui generis? As ineliminable? As If the first, it is not just Plato and nonredundant? Kant who have disenfranchised art, but Dickie as well, for he sees works of art as a function of social relations. And if art is made to depend on interpretation in the way that Danto suggests, why is this not itself a kind of disenfranchisement?There are no answers to these questions, and these are the questions that press in from every side. Indeed, if we are to believe Danto's earlier suggestion about the sorts of questionsthat make a text art, then his philosophical essays must themselves be works of art. This, I think, is precisely what Danto wants to deny in the two essays that follow. These deal with the relationof philosophy to literature.There are, as readersby this time will have come to expect, many digressions in the telling, but in the end Danto defends the view that philosophy is different from literaturein that "philosophy wants to be more than universal: it wants necessity as well" (p. 154). Literature,by contrast,does not purportto be true of every possible world. It purportsratherto be true of every reader who reads it. Nor, we are told in the essay which follows, is literaturea kind of philosophy. Here, at last, we find Dantoon trackonce more, for art (it seems in this, the penultimateessay of the volume) is not philosophy and cannot be disenfranchised by supposing that it is. Literaryart "is the idea made flesh" (p. 178); philosophy parades sets of disembodied ideas which it portraysas necessary and universal. The two, after all, are not the same. But this conclusion finds little supportin the final essay of the volume which was delivered as the fourth Mandel Lecture, and accordingly sets out to explore the relation between human evolution and art. Using the model of art history explored earlier, Danto suggests that history is a productof thought, and, acknowledging Hegel, he thinks that while art could "not have been the chief means of human evolution" there was "a historicalmoment in which it was that." Why? Because art, as we have already been told, "reached a stage where it contributedto the internal development of human thought" (p. 204). Art, we are told yet again, reached its end by becoming philosophy. But this is bewildering, for contraryto what Danto has promised in this volume, art in the final essay just is philosophy, and so, in Danto's terms, remains sadly disenfranchised. Perhaps Danto thinks that posthistorical art will be nonphilosophicaland so "fully art," but if he makes a case for this in the present volume, I have yet to discover and understandit. DAVID NoviTz Universityof Canterbury,New Zealand
BELTING,HANS,

309 The End of the History of Art? The University of Chicago Press, 1987, xiii + 120 pp., $16.95.

In two provocative essays about the history of artits contemporaryplight and its development from Vasari's Lives of the Artists, published in 1550Belting raises many of the crucial questions that should have disturbedthe praxis of most scholars in "the discipline," but so far has only informed the methods of the very few. On the first page of his book he raises what he considers to be the central issue: while artists are making art and art history as an academic discipline survives, "what does stand seriously in question is that conception of a universal and unified 'historyof art' which has so long served, in different ways, both artist and art historian" (p. ix). In the last sentence of his book, when he indicates the direction that the discipline might take, he pays that long overdue respect that has eluded George Kubler'sThe Shape of Time, by sharingin its proposalfor an "anthropologicallygroundedconception of artistic production as a paradigm of human activity, a possibility which was most recently explored, in a generaltheoryof the historicityof artand its products, by George Kubler" (p. 94). However, in the first essay, Belting rightly rejectsone aspect of Kubler's approach-the morphological-as another version of stylistic history (p. 18). But like Kublerbefore him, Belting undercutsthe ramificationsof his astute questions and insights. He is perhaps nostalgic for the modernism that postmodernism has appropriatedas only another style, and perhaps even for a unified history of artalthough one very different from the traditional narrative.For Kubler, continuity resides in morphological development, as emendation of a Focillonlike "life of forms." Belting rightly eschews such structuralist strategies, but instead, opts for a state of suspension because now "one must live with this pluralism of styles and values which apparently characterizesour society, if only because there is no exit in sight" (p. 56). In the example of postmodern architecture, "architecturalstyle no longer testifies for progress and utopia and against yesterday's conventions. Architects no longer set their buildings against ideals of outmoded architecture, but rather single out historical prototypes which then become available as models. This, too, is an 'end of the history of art' " (p. 55). He rejects the postmodern enterprisethat introduces "antimodernideals of art which in fact are only illusory alternatives. The resulting confusion threatens to discourage anyone hoping to single out the essential problems, or to determine their bearing on our present historical situation" (pp. 55-56; emphasis is mine). He singles out Suzi Gablik's Has ModernismFailed?, Rosalind

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310 E. Krauss's The Originalityof the Avant-Gardeand Other Modernist Myths, and Hal Foster's PostModern Culture, as examples (p. 114). He also rejects the hermeneutical enterprise because "too art historiansets himself up as often the interpreting a second artist, a 're-creator'of the work. I would like to avoid this conception of a 'work' " (p. 21). But as Belting briefly discusses, andjust as briefly rejects, all contemporary strategies and in turnformalism, positivism, and the encompassing, unifying and progressivehistories of art that have defined the traditionsince Vasari-the logic of refusal really leaves one with no exit. Like ArthurDanto in The Death of Art, Belting labors under the burden of of art into spirit-art becomHegel's transformation ing philosophy or criticism-but his picture of that ultimate demise is more complex than Danto's onedimensional story about the rise, development, and end of representation. Vasari's narrativeabout origins and cycles, genii and masterpieces, situated the norm in nature and classical art. Belting identifies that story with a kind of "criticism of valuation" by an artist, for artists, who were Vasari's contemporaries. The shifts in criticism prior to the creation of the discipline of art history in the nineteenth century maintained some kind of a unity of praxis and theory. The rise of art history as a separate pursuit, estranged from the making of art, resulted in the notion of the "artwork," the norm of which was located in antiquity, but the model functioned within the discipline as a guide to excellence, not as a model for the artist. It instructedart historiansabout what to include and to exclude in a narrativeabout masterpieces. While it borrowed some of Vasari's ideas, it severed his central concern with the art of his own time. Most nineteenth-centuryand many twentieth-centuryart historianshave been totally uninterestedin the art of their contemporaries. Aesthetics and philosophy-not art history-represented the story of the modem style, which even further estranged the historical discipline from the making of art. Because art historians refused, or could not encompass what appearedto be a radical critiqueof the tradition,they courtedthe destruction critics are of theirdiscipline. But if in postmodernism artists and artists critics who quote and appropriate the whole of past art and its histories-even modern art, thereby denuding it of its radical position by defining it as "only a style" -is the history of art reopened as a discipline? Not so for Belting. I think that many of the problems that Belting encounters(as did Danto) arise from what he considers art history to be the history of. "Art history, as everyone knows, studies the vehicles of representation, namely, works of art" (p. 57), and "in our of speaking context it bearswitness to the importance

REVIEWS

aboutrealitywheneverwe speak aboutart . . . which either as image or counterimagealways participates in a dialogue with a recognizableform of reality" (p. 26). While Belting acknowledges the importanceof recognizing that art history "itself practices representation," that is, it "endows art with a meaningful history of its own distinct from general history" (p. 57), I think the fault lies in identifying art with representation in relation to reality. If art, however, is considered to be an activity involving conventions within different systems of communication,then a historyof artwould resemble what history itself has become, i.e., a mapping of social institutions and patterns of behavior. That would grounda generaltheoryof the historicityof art in human actions and institutions. Pluralistic discourses would then become necessary in order to discuss the different kinds of things made as patterned activities in varieties of contexts. This might help account for the fact that the same object can enter many systems at differenttimes and be a partof differentsystems at the same time. If an object is first made as an embodimentof a magical or religious or political event, or to serve craft functions or to be decorative, it can then become an artwork when appropriated by an art system. It may also account for an object that serves the faithful in a religious context, to be, at the same time, a vehicle of complex intellectual or formal play for the literati. Belting acknowledges the complexity that might reside in a single object, qua Kubler,but not the complexity that arises from understanding that art is a social activity that functions through the use and emendation of conventional signs in particularsystems. As I previously indicated, at the very end of the last essay Belting acknowledgesthe historicityof art, but throughhis dissatisfactionwith pluralismand the variousforms of postmoderncriticism, he abortsany possible direction his inquiry might take. However, in his essays he summarizes for art historians the "state of the discipline," and provides them with a place from which to begin its transformation.Perhaps pluralistic discourses will prevail, rather than the notion of "a discipline," in order to understand what people made in the past for those events thatwe artistsdo in all now call art, and what contemporary the contexts in which they act. If that is the case, we might have to acknowledgethatthe stories heretofore told in art history were perhapsone-dimensional,but not that the history of art is at an end. The nostalgia for a norm and for a model of value (the classic) has plagued art history (as it has most humanisticdisciplines) from its inception. Weariness in the light of a great variety of art events and discourses capsulated under the postmodern rubric betraysthat same art historicalhabit. Belting's quote from the artist Herve Fischer should begin our

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Reviews revision. "Art is not dead. What is finished is its history as a progress toward the new" (p. 4).

311
the chapter headings suggest organization, one that is

thematic ratherthan chronological. The "aesthetics of proportion" traces Pythagorean influences; St. JOYCE BRODSKY Augustineis creditedwith originatingthe "aesthetics of light." There is a ratherperfunctoryaccount of symbol and allegory. Eco explains the scholastic Universityof Connecticut preoccupationwith establishing beauty as a "transcendental," hence a necessaryconcomitantof being Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. in general, as a move to undercut the Manichean Eco, UMBERTO. Yale University Press, 1986, 131 pp., n.p. doctrines of the Cathari and the Albigensians who saw the world as a place of perpetual conflict between good and evil, darkness and light, fair and A nicely producedbook with its stylish jacket-gold lettering on a detail from Les tres riches heures du foul. The issues raised by the problem of "tranduc de Berry-Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages is scendentals," though technical, are of great philoitself a sort of miniature. Who could resist an sophical interest,and I wish that Eco had had more to overview (advertised span: sixth- to fifteenth- say about them. On the other hand, it is hard to do century)that takes up no more than one hundredand that without a specialized vocabulary. In the discusfourteen pages'? As it turns out, alas, the title is sion of Aquinas (the only authorto get a chapterto misleading and the monograph itself a disappoint- himself) the technicalitiesbecome obtrusive. Perhaps ment. One hopes that, being brief, it will be concise this is because Eco has devoted a whole book to and elegant. Not so. It is, so to speak, a long-winded Aquinas (II problema estetico in Tommasod'Aquino book with a lot left out. Perhaps it can be recom- [Milan, 19561) and is involved in the detail. For mended to neophytes as a sampler, a miscellany of whatever reason, Eco's usual perspicuous style sudexcerpts and summaries, intriguing fragments. denly ossifies. Boethius, Albertus Magnus, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus are represented along with some non[Aquinas]proposedan existential ontology, in which household names such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf, the primary valuewas ipsum esse, the concrete act of Witelo, Robert of Grosseteste, and Theodulf of existence. He superimposedthe constitutive and deterOrleans. Some nice bits: here, for example, is mining combinationof essence and existence upon that of matter and form. For Aquinas, the quo est did not Bernardof Clairvaux, taking a stand and going on to explain the ens; form without matterwas nothing.... marvel at the Romanesquesculptureand ornamentaIn this ontology, the hyperuranicworlds were overtion that he is constrainedto deplore. asidefromsociety,relinquishWewho haveturned
ing for Christ's sake all the precious and beautiful taken by life and it is scarcely necessary to stress the radical import of this new Thomistic conception of things for the mediaeval mentality (p. 75).

lightandcolour,its thingsin the world,its wondrous

sweet sounds and odours, the pleasures of taste and touch, for us all bodily delights are nothing but dung . . (p. 7). In the cloisters . . . why do the studious monks have to face such ridiculousmonstrosities?What is the point of this deformed beauty, this elegant deformity'? Those loutish apes'?The savage lions'?The monstrous cenThe spotted tigers? The soldiers taurs?The half-men'? fighting'?The hunters sounding their horms? . . . In short there is such a diversity of figures, such ubiquitous variety, that there is more readingmatteravailable in marblethan in books, and one could spend the whole ratherthan in day marvellingat one such representation meditatingon the law of God. In the name of God! If we are not ashamed at its foolishness, why at least are we not angry at the expense'?(Ibid.)

What audience is Eco addressing? A hard question. The introduction is no help since it does not square with the text. For example, Eco writes: my constant concern is to establish how the theories currentat the time were related to its actual sensibility and its actual artistic products. My purpose in clarifying aesthetic theory is to discover how far it corresponded to, and how far it diverged from, the realities of the age-to discover what meaningfulrelationsthere were between mediaeval aesthetics and the other aspects of mediaeval culture and civilization (p. 1). But the book does not deal with these issues. The passage quoted above from St. Bernard is about as close as he ever gets to talking about art. Where passing allusions occur, they are drawn from familiar secondary works by, e.g., Panofsky, Hauser, or

Eco's comments on this and other passages are informaland perceptive. Perhapsone should not ask for more. Since aesthetics (for better or for worse) had yet to be invented, any book on medieval opinions is going to be something of a scrapbook. If there are good scraps well-arranged,why cavil? But

Huizinga.
Perhaps it is not to the author but to the publisher, Yale University Press, that one should take one's complaints. There is no mention of art in Eco's

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