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as an Aristophanic whole, engaged in a Odyssian form of the connubially connected life, wedding is a social act, fraught with meanings. We want most immediately to give those we love – family and friends – a symbolic participation in our evolving condition – and the ceremony of wedlock transforms the company into symbolic union with ourselves. It is an acknowledgement that we do not because we cannot in the end live for ourselves alone. It admits some wider relevant society into our happiness, and creates through ceremonial enactment an entity larger than ourselves (Danto 2008, 13).
True to form, Arthur made the essay another opportunity to opine about boundary lines that fence off the ordinary from that which is more meaningful. In any event (as Arthur would say in moments of transition like this), the wedding was not the end of our story. A closeness developed between our families. Arthur and his wife, Barbara, took a keen interest in our children, which is how we learned that the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University had considered opinions on each of the Harry Potter novels, which he had eagerly read.
What continues to link us even after his passing, in the most tangible way, is Arthur’s former weekend house, in Brookhaven Hamlet, Long Island. He was deeply attached to this hideaway, which he had bought for a song in the early 1970s. It is where he wrote, voted, and thought. He even worked to help the area get a historically protected designation. He developed friendships with people in the neighborhood, including scientists from the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory. He took walks to the Carmans River Estuary, at the end of the street, and on sunny days would drive out to the ocean beaches at Smith Point Park. For some reason, my wife and I were entrusted with the care of the modest cottage for periods of summertime house-sitting. When Arthur’s physical condition frayed as he reached his eighties, it was no longer feasible for him to use the house, and he offered it to us to buy. The house and its garden have since become the anchor of my own family. Much of what is good about our lives happens there. It is where we feel we are “an entity larger than ourselves.”
Arthur had converted a garage on the property into a writing studio. He installed a skylight and hung a Chinese print. This is where he wrote some of his most seminal works, including The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and various texts in which he put forward his theory of “the end of art.” The humble shed was a launching pad for ideas that left a lasting mark on our world. I take occasional delight in telling my friends that art history, so to speak, ended in our garden.
Notes
1 1 Stephen Sifaneck, who passed away in 2013, at age 46, was my collaborator on the documentary.
2 2 American Society for Aesthetics, “1996 Annual Meeting.” At http://aesthetics-online.org/?page=report1.
3 3 András Szántó and Hans Ulrich Obrist, interview with Arthur Danto. Unpublished manuscript.
References
1 Danto, Arthur C. 1991. “Max Neuhaus: Sound Works.” The Nation, March 4.
2 ———. 1997. “The End of Art.” In After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ.
3 ———. 2008. “Philosophers and the Ritual of Marriage.” In Think, a Periodical of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, 17–18.
3 Writing with Style
ARTURO FONTAINE
Danto had style, a good style. When I make this aesthetic judgment, I’m sure I am right, although justifying my claim is another matter. We cannot define what good style is, yet we know it when we see it. Danto was engaged with questions of style all his life, as a philosopher and as an art critic. The last chapter of his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is devoted to metaphor, expression, and style. It is as if his whole exploration of the concept of a work of art culminates with his reflections on the nature of style. Hemingway said he had tried 39 versions of the final words of his novel Farewell to Arms. Asked why by Paris Review interviewer, George Plimpton, his famous response was: “getting the words right.” As a novelist myself, I’m absolutely sure that whether a page has life or not is a question of finding the right words. Why is style so crucial?
When I say that Danto had also a distinctive style – as I hope my samples of his writings will show – this does not mean that he wanted to erase the frontier between philosophy and literature. Philosophy is concerned with truth in an altogether different way than literature is, and Danto believed it important to maintain this distinction. Derrida’s alleged proposal – to read philosophy, the whole history of philosophy as literature – is, as Danto wrote, like visiting “a museum of costumes we forget were meant to be worn” (Danto 1986, 160).
Danto began with Buffon’s classic dictum (1753): “style c’est l’homme même” – style is the man himself. How did Danto interpret this dictum? Let us turn to an example of visual art: Lichtenstein’s “Portrait of Madame Cézanne” (1963) reproduces Erle Loran’s diagram of Cézanne’s famous painting of his wife. Loran’s diagram, included in his book, Cézanne’s Composition, attempts to show the geometric structure of the painting using lines, arrows, and vectors. Visually, says Danto, Lichtenstein’s picture and Loran’s diagram are roughly the same. However, the former is a work of art and the latter only a diagram. Why?
Danto used this example to distinguish between a straightforward representation – a diagram – and a picture that is about a diagram (Danto 1981, 141ff). Lichtenstein’s artwork is about the way Cézanne painted his wife. In other words, Lichtenstein was presenting with a certain ironic distance, how Cézanne looked at the whole world, namely, as geometric figures, as diagrams. Even his wife was seen in this fashion. Lichtenstein’s canvas, according to Danto, tried to inspire a certain critical attitude toward this “geometrizing vision.”
Danto’s main point, however, was that works of art, in contrast with mere representations, use the means of representation so as not to exhaust what one is communicating in what is being represented. His suggestion was that “in addition to being about whatever they are about, (artworks) are about the way they are about” (Danto 1981, 148–149). Style has precisely to do with “the way” artworks “are about whatever they are about.” So, Cézanne’s apples, thanks to his style, are not just about apples, but about apples as seen by Cézanne. This is how we need to interpret Buffon’s dictum.
Danto further believed that “style has to be expressed immediately and spontaneously.” He thought style was visible to others and invisible to the self, like “my face is visible to others but not to myself” (Danto 1981, 206). I don’t think Danto got this right. Style is not at all immediate and spontaneous. Take Flaubert: “One has to read, to meditate, to think always about style. … Patience and constant energy are required” (Flaubert, 13/13/1846).1 His letters show how much he struggled to achieve the style he was aiming at. Or Hemingway: “Since I started to break down all my writing … and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult…” (Hemingway 1964, 132). Hemingway’s style was not spontaneous but the result of a conscious and sustained effort.
Flaubert wrote that “style is only a way of thinking” (Flaubert 1859). What Danto said of Lichtenstein’s “Portrait of Madame Cézanne” is a sample of Danto’s style as a philosopher. Style is not something added to what the work of art reveals, so to speak, but it is part of the revelation. As Nussbaum asserts, “style makes itself a statement” (Nussbaum 1990, 7). Danto’s thesis about style is analogous to what Proust wrote in À la recherche du temps perdu: “style … is not a question of technique but of vision.” Proust believed that style “is a revelation” of “the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to us.” Thanks to art we have “as many worlds as there are original artists” and each one sends us “his special radiation” (Proust 1927, 254). Danto was a good reader of Proust; I remember him quoting from Proust’s novel very