Untitled

Critical Reflections
So, many years after the rise of the avant-garde, the discourse of contemporary
art theory continues to suffer because artificial, consciously produced differences
still remain unprivileged. Just as in the era of the historical avant-garde,
those artists introducing artificial, aesthetic differences are reproached for
being motivated exclusively by commercial and strategic interests. To react
to the fashionable with enthusiasm and hope, to see in it a chance for a
new and interesting social difference, is considered “improper” in “serious”
theory.
The unwillingness of the critic to identify himself with specific artistic
positions is chalked up theoretically to the opinion that we have reached the
end of art history. Arthur Danto, for example, argues in After the End of Art
that those programs of the avant-garde intended to define the essence and
function of art have finally become untenable. It is thus no longer possible
to privilege a particular kind of art theoretically as those critics who think
in an avant-garde mode—in the American context the paradigm remains
Clement Greenberg—have again and again tried to do. The development of
art in this century has ended in a pluralism that relativizes everything, makes
everything possible at all times, and no longer allows for critically grounded
judgment. This analysis certainly seems plausible. But today’s pluralism is
itself artificial through and through—a product of the avant-garde. A single
modern work of art is a huge contemporary differentiation machine.
If the critics had not, as Greenberg did, taken specific works of art as
the occasion for drawing new lines of demarcation in the field of theory and
art politics, we would have no pluralism today, because this artistic pluralism
certainly cannot be reduced to an already existing social pluralism. Even the
social art critics can make their distinctions between the “natural” and the
“socially coded” relevant for art criticism only because they place these (artificial)
distinctions like readymades in the context of modernist differentiation.
And Danto makes the same move as Greenberg when he attempts to draw
all the consequences from Warhol’s Brillo Boxes and to think of this artwork
as the beginning of an absolutely new era. Today’s pluralism means decisively
that no single position can be unequivocally privileged over another. But not
all differences between two positions are of equal value; some differences are
more interesting than others. It pays to concern oneself with such interesting
differences—regardless of which position one advocates. It pays even more
to create new, interesting differences that further drive the condition of
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