intelligibility of visual art depends. But it was an imagery largely devoid
of values, either personal or social, and quite deliberately so. Works such
as Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, Roy Lichtenstein’s simulation of comic
strip panels, or Claes Oldenburg’s soft “sculptures” of ordinary house-
hold objects render the most banal of subjects in ways that emphasized
their banality, while others (such as Warhol’s silkscreens of celebrities)
appropriate motifs from the mass media, exploiting them in repetitive
arrangements that have the effect of reducing potentially powerful sin-
gle images to affectless patterns. They thereby controvert the very pur-
pose of art, which is to focus attention on aspects of experience or
imagined possibilities that the artist regards as important, as worth
remembering or reflecting upon in the realm of values. In effect as well
as intention, therefore, such work constitutes anti-art, by any reasonable
standard.
In fact, the radical early postmodernists Henry Flynt and Allan
Kaprow (pioneers of such new genres as “conceptual art,” “performance
art,” and “installations”) frankly admitted that their work had nothing in
common with past art as such. Rightly so, since all of its features were
aimed—even more than those of Pop Art—at controverting the very idea
of art. Kaprow’s infamous “happenings,” for example, sought to col-
lapse the distinction between art and life that is essential if works of art
are to be perceived as representations of, or quasi statements about,
life—a distinction that had been recognized even by ancient philoso-
phers. Nonetheless, postmodernists soon referred to their work as art,
and to themselves as artists, although the means they employ—such as
the appropriation of readymade objects and images or “composition” by
chance operations—are antithetical to the meaningfully selective re-cre-
ation of reality (to borrow Rand’s phrase) characteristic of the process
by which works of art are created.^16
While a younger generation of postmodernists have ostensibly rein-
troduced value and meaning into their work, mainly in the guise of polit-
ical and social critique, they continue to employ spurious forms such as
“video,” “installation,” and “conceptual art”—all of which grew out of
the anti-art impulses of the 1960s. As I have noted, a key tendency of
those impulses was the deliberate blurring of the distinction between art
and life. But one should then ask, If so-called art works can now be
“indiscernible” from the objects of everyday experience (as philosopher-
critic Arthur Danto famously argued), then what becomes of the special
significance that philosophers originally placed on art in relation to
“sensuous cognition”? If there is nothing distinctive about art, why study
it at all in this context?
Mimesis versus the Avant-Garde: Art and Cognition 45