Art after the end of art

ArtForum, April, 1993 by Arthur Coleman Danto

Another kind of politics began to ascend in that period, its best example a certain kind of feminism, one that calls in question the sort of painting that culminated, on Greenberg's theory, in materialist abstraction. The question began to be raised as to whether such art was at all the appropriate vehicle for feminine creativity, whether, in fact, it was not a form of false consciousness for women to seek to excel in something that was possibly just a form of expression created by males as the instrument of a male ethos. And analogous arguments sprang up through which various excluded minorities sought to express themselves in terms they felt corresponded to their condition, or, alternately, to their identities. I don't say this was altogether explicit in the '70s, but the tendencies emerged then, and crystallized, at least in New York, in the "Decade Show" in 1990 at the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art--a show that marginalized (guess what?) easel painting. The reasons, certainly, were different from those that prevailed in Berlin in 1920 or in Moscow in 1921 or in Mexico in 1942. But it has been the mark of a certain form of politicized art in this century to villainize easel painting, and the charge that such art is a Eurocentric white-male expression is only the latest form the politics has taken.

So the slogan "You can do everything!" is often politically qualified in practice. In my own contribution to the Tema Celeste colloquium, I talked about abstract painting as a possibility in the accommodating framework of objective pluralism, and a correspondent scolded me for underestimating the kinds of pressures there are on an artist who wants to be an abstract painter to produce work more feministically acceptable. (The writer was a woman.) There is beyond question a great deal of such pressure in the art world today, especially when one factors in the understandable desire to make art acceptable to critics and institutions and programs with a clear political agenda. To this I have no response. Causes are causes. The only respect in which "You can do everything" is true is that of a philosophy of art history of the kind I have tried to develop here, but it is consistent with this that all sorts of causes, political and otherwise, should be entering into the explanation of art.

I want to conclude on two notes. The first concerns abstract painting today. Abstraction is no longer the bearer of destiny in anyone's mind; it is but one of the things an artist can do. Many representational artists feel no conflict with it, and certainly none of the ostracizing kinds of conflict they felt in the '50s. Indeed, since a feeling of marginalization within the art world is felt by painters both abstract and representational, the two camps, bitterly divided in the Greenberg era, find the differences between them negligible today by comparison with the differences between either of them and performance, say, or installation.