Danto has gone on to survey an important turn away from beauty as pleasing
surface arrangement in connection with the developments of bohemianism
and avant-gardism.^57 His overall argument is that beauty is important in life
generally, but only sometimes in art and not necessarily. Often in art,
especially in avant-garde art, striking, dramatic statement is more important
than pleasantness of surface.
In the face of their ambition to achieve, as Danto puts it,“something
closer to transformation rather than visual satisfaction”^58 – to achieve and
embody striking meaning and insight–why should artists be required by
theory to focus on form, arrangement, and the production of pleasure?
Central traditions of conceptual art, of performance art, of various forms of
constructivism in music (Boulez) and theatre (Brecht, Beckett), and of self-
conscious modernism in narrative literature (Calvino, Barth) seek promin-
ently to undo and criticize stale, perhaps bourgeois, obsessions with what
they see as escapist pleasure. They work for the sake of ideas and insight, not
absorption in form. Robert Rauschenberg notoriously once carefully erased a
de Kooning drawing and then framed and exhibited it as“Erased De Kooning
Drawing”in order to make a point, presumably a piece of wit about artistic
creativity and visual pleasure. As Timothy Binkley sums up these
developments,
Art in the twentieth century has emerged as a strongly self-critical discipline.
It has freed itself of aesthetic parameters and sometimes creates directly with
ideas unmediated by aesthetic qualities. An artwork is a piece: and a piece
need not be an aesthetic object, or even an object at all.^59
Perhaps worse yet, as both Kendall Walton and Arthur Danto have argued,
whichaesthetic response–absorption or disgust; awe, or indifference, or
amusement–a given work properly produces is a functionnotof its arrange-
ment or form alone, but of its independently established artistic identity and
meaning. Walton, for example, invites us to notice that if Picasso’sGuernicais
regarded by us as one member of the class ofguernicas–works that all(^57) Danto,The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art(Peru, IL: Open Court, 2003).
(^58) Danto,Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations(New York: Farrar,
Straus, & Giroux, 1994), p. x.
(^59) Timothy Binkley,“Piece: Contra Aesthetics,”Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35
(1977), pp. 265–77, reprinted inPhilosophy Looks at the Arts, revised edn, ed. Joseph
Margolis (Philadelphia, PN: Temple University Press, 1978), pp. 25–44 at p. 26.
68 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art