vector 2_1.cdr - Universitatea de Arte "George Enescu"

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[5] Arthur C. Danto, op. cit..
[6] Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity:
An Incomplete Project”, in Hal
Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture,
Pluto Press, 4th impression, 1990,
p. 9.
[7] Morris Weitz, “The Role of
Theory in Aesthetics”, in The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, vol. 15, no. 1, 1956, pp.
27-35.
limits of art. According to the dialectic way the same aesthetic theory
defines itself, the perverse effect of theoretic self-management of art by art
institutions is the recognition of its own death by the aesthetic theory as an
internal need of its autonomy, the same way a computer game player has two
extra lives without its fictional enemy being aware of this convention. For in the
logic of art theory as aesthetic theory is inscribed not only its ability to define
"what is art", by imposing the aesthetic quality as a norm of artistic practice, but
also its ability to ostensibly limit itself in relation to the institutionally legitimised
practice, thus reducing it to an asignificant condition, as if the latter were free of
any discursive feature. This thus leaves also to theory the role of representing
the self-understanding of the artistic practice. However, both in the hermeneutic
criticism of the reduction of art to mere representation made by Danto after the
Warhol moment, as well as in the variant of conceptual institutional criticism, art
creates theory, relating itself to the theories that have the task being its
representative before the cultural consciousness. What is left for the project of
"emancipation" of contemporary art from philosophy to establish (Danto's
5
terms ) is the identification of the art institutions to which these theories apply
in order to question their subjacent logic. Once theory is suspected to be
practice, seeking to impose a social domination over an entire practice, the
gallery itself goes into a crisis, being an institution that belongs to modernity:
incipit institutional criticism.
Art in academia
Upon entering the laboratory of theory, the contingent work of art
necessarily becomes "Art" and takes on the form of an abstract specimen,
annihilated in its immediate effects and subjected to an endoscopy by critical
rationality. This recently manufactured picture of Art has a correspondent in
that of Theory, both being presented as autonomous cultural spheres. Both
descriptions of art and art theory are, in fact, the disguised versions of the
autonomisation in post-Kantian modernity of the cognitive and aesthetic sphere
as forms of instrumental and expressive rationality, respectively, as indicated by
6
Jürgen Habermas , within which what is being distanced through the dialectic of
their mutual externality or complementarity is the practical sphere of action of
the both.
The end of the philosophy of art as a failure of theory's normative
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project, adjacent to that of defining art, hailed by Morris Weitz , marks in the
philosophical discourse the internal insufficiency of conceiving art theory as
modern philosophy, thus generalising the precarious condition of the particular
case of aesthetic theory. Contemporary art seems to diverge from philosophy as
art delimitation practice by means of philosophy's own self-criticism, to the
extent to which the philosophical reflection ascertaining its own insufficiency is
identified with an abstractization of the practice it depends on implicitly,
defining itself in modern fashion as subject to the categories of anhistoricity and
universality.
The arguments in Weitz's text against the general theory of art are
already history: on the one hand, as normative project, theory cannot define
the concept of art, since artistic practice does not know a common feature for all
art genres, being rather a dispersed manifestation of similitude and mutual
reference relations between singular practices. The historic continuity of art
witnesses, on the other hand, precisely the reactivity towards any externallyimposed
conceptual delimitation. Thus, from a principle point of view, according
to the second Weitzian argument against theoretical essentialism,
if such
definition were possible as a real definition of the concept of art, it would
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block creativity or innovation in practice .
In fact, Weitz's academic reaction to the essentialist-type classic art
theories that create art models based on the particular features of one or another
of the contingent art manifestations, is today but the symptom of the change in
the image of philosophical practice described by Habermas as the shift the
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position of legislator to that of interpreter . In this case, philosophy changes
from the position of legislator of artistic practice, a role specifically pertaining to
academia, for that of interpreter of the rationale for which artistic practice
extends its institutional frameworks in the proximity of the everyday ones.
Whereas the first limit of the aesthetic theory of art, the empirical one, of
defining art in the terms of the essence of this concept, may be relevant for the
state of theory at the moment Weitz's article was published, the argument
stating that creativity would be limited by theory owes obviously to the avantgarde
vision of art, according to which art is "the negation of all canons". And the
echo of the Kantian definition of art's irreducibility to rules and of its Romantic
adoption is easily felt here.
More important are though the consequences of Weitz's criticism on the
relation between art criticism and art theory: it seems to require the descriptive
neutrality of theory, thus reduced to recording the artistic phenomenon (without
explaining it, which would require theory). And a side-effect of this identification
of theory with art criticism is the (restrictive) definition of the latter as an
explanation of the rationale of an artistic intervention free of any pre-established
framework on what art is, motivated by the abandonment of the task of
managing the right of any phenomenon to artistic status in the hands of
institutions. In this case, either, the self-criticism of the philosophical discourse
does not offer, therefore, a way out of the representationalist paradigm that
conceives the limits of art as de facto limits, of its description or of the mirrorlanguage
in which the figures of artistic practice are captured and then retransmitted,
but only proposes a limitation of it to one of the terms already
assumed by the speculative paradigm that has generated it.
A modern aporia: art criticism or theory?
Surprisingly for the late state of modernity in which it appears, the
answer to the issue of de-legitimising theory as art philosophy and of the relation
between the contingency of art criticism and the normative generality of
aesthetic theory was in fact provided over a century and a half earlier by Hegelian
modernity. Redefining the tasks of art theory, Hegel marks the paradox
constitutional to the modern accepted meaning of theory as generalisation of
criticism in relation to the contingency of the historicity of the artistic
phenomenon.
In his Introduction to the Berlin Aesthetic Lectures of the 1820's, Hegel
summarises two paradoxes that continue to fascinate the self-critical manner of
legitimising art theory as aesthetic theory. The fascination exerted by his theory
consists in the dialectic conception of the concept as an absolute that needs to be
concretised and, simultaneously, of the particular as a negative that needs to be
captured in what it has to offer specifically.
The first Hegelian paradox is that of the relation between the general and
abstract character of theory and the particular and concrete character of artistic
practice. In a brief, methodological, fragment, Hegel effectively designates the
aporia of the dialectic relation between theory and art, as a paradox between the
justification of art criticism through the implicit and non-critical use of a general
[8] ibidem, pp. 29-30.
[9] Jürgen Habermas, “Filosofia ca
locţiitor şi interpret (Philosophy as
stand-in and interpreter)” in
Conştiinţa morală şi acţiune
comunicativă (Moral Consciousness
and Communicative Action), transl.
by Vasile-Gilbert Lepădatu, All
Publishing, Bucharest, 2000.
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