Opening Doors
I became, as far as I know, Arthur’s last graduate student. He helped guide me into the art world conceptually, and also by opening doors in a practical sense, using his connections. Arthur approached his duties as a dissertation adviser with a light touch and in a spirit of avuncular generosity. He steered clear of the confrontational approach that some feel compelled to adopt in such circumstances. I got the feeling that he was somewhat bemused by sociology, a young discipline that operated on a more mundane plane than his own. But he was more than willing to come along for the ride.
In a way, I set out to pick up where Arthur had left off, to drill into the layers that his theoretical inquiry left untouched. For me, the art world was not a mental construct, but a living-breathing site of human and organizational interactions. As a sociologist, it behooved me to ask how, as an empirical matter, the transfiguration of the commonplace actually happened – as a product of the daily functioning of real-world institutions. It was clear to me that a key site of this organizational alchemy was the art gallery, where values were nurtured in a dual sense. It was in galleries that the first rough version of art history was written, much as newspapers have been said to have drafted the first version of our collective history. And it was in galleries that art, for better or for worse, intertwined with commerce. The value of each work would now be reflected in a sometimes exceptionally high price, which in turn denoted the artwork – in the currency of the marketplace – as belonging to a class apart from ordinary things. Arthur encouraged this investigation and took evident pleasure in crossing over to another discipline to see a world that fascinated him from a different point of view.
Approaching the art world as a social scientist rather than as a philosopher led me to different conclusions than Arthur’s, which, I believe, were complementary rather than contradictory to his. For example: from where did contemporary art’s limitless pluralism derive? In Arthur’s view, the relevant dynamics, here as elsewhere, were lodged in ideas. They were philosophical. At the risk of oversimplifying his position, he argued that a series of erasures over the course of the twentieth century had removed all previously necessary conditions placed upon art and led, step by step, to a final reckoning in Andy Warhol’s 1964 Brillo Box installation – the first work to directly, and at the right time in the flow of history, tackle the question of what distinguishes a work of art from an ordinary thing. The defining question of art having been reached, any compelling reason to move in any particular direction was rendered moot, according to Arthur’s theory. Discourse fractured in a thousand equally legitimate directions, “art having finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself, and remaining, as it were, solely as the object of its own theoretical consciousness” (Danto 1997, 31). Art had dissolved into a sea of open possibility. The show would go on, unshackled from historical prerogatives, but without a binding narrative. This was Danto’s so-called “end of art.”
But could ideas by themselves wreak such havoc? For me, puncturing the boundary of what Arthur termed the “post-historical” era in art was a sociological event as much as a philosophical one. It had to do with the shattering of the tradition-bound confines of the art world, which for all sorts of complicated reasons had been trapped, like a fly frozen in amber, in a latticework of premodern sociological relations. The 1960s seem quaint in our eyes now, but this was the time when the art world was beginning to turn into a much larger and culturally and economically integrated, national and international entity. Growth and commercialism went hand in hand. The shared discourse that had hitherto bonded the small, informal community of art-world denizens, and provided a matrix of common understandings and a relatively clear sense of historical direction, was starting to evaporate.
Big, complex, market-driven systems are pluralistic by nature. They splinter into niches and sub-niches – so many lagoons in the wider ocean. Think of a dinner table. Eight people can easily maintain a shared conversation. Once you have a dozen or more, they pair off and cluster. Different conversations sprout up at each end of the table. Something similar was going on in the art world. Art galleries exacerbated this fracturing. The gallery system responded to growth by multiplying in numbers, rather than by scaling in size. Big fish didn’t eat the little fish. The little fish multiplied. By the 1980s, what had been a handful of Manhattan galleries had given way to hundreds, each one a microcosm of its own. Countless more were taking part in a burgeoning global art conversation. This metastatic complexity, and the resulting discursive opacity, was an evolving sociological condition that was catalytic to the onset of aesthetic pluralism. Or so I argued.
In short, for me, the story of the art world was, above all, a parable of modernization: of the agony and ecstasy, the losses and gains, of what it means to grow into a mature, highly organized, transactional industry. I think Arthur saw this as an interesting subplot on the margins of his deeper and wider macro-narrative. We spent many hours as well talking about the art world’s micro-dynamics. Here, too, Arthur was inclined to leave the details to others. He was famously reticent about being linked to an institutional theory of art. Nonetheless, as a former artist, he took a keen interest in the day-to-day functioning of galleries and the art market. Galleries, after all, did the work of filtering the universe of artists and artworks, elevating some to wider attention and, if all went well, inscribing the lucky few into the permanent art-historical record. Arthur and I had fun unpacking just how this accreditation of cultural legitimacy happened – how certain galleries and gallerists achieved the authority to do this work, and how, through each individual exhibition, and the unfolding chain of gallery exhibitions and sales over time, certain artists and objects were woven into the enduring narrative of art.
Crossing over into the sociological realm led to another adventure, involving a pair of Russian émigré artists, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. The two had made boundary crossings central to their lives and to their art collaboration. As proponents of a kind of Russian pop art, they thumbed their noses at the Soviet state, which they had left behind, continuing their gadfly projects in America, where they found a measure of success. Komar and Melamid convinced Arthur to advise them on their ongoing undertaking, whereby populations of entire countries would be polled about their tastes in art. Did you know that blue is the favorite color of all but one country? Komar and Melamid painted “most wanted” and “least wanted” images based on the findings of each survey. They decided that after having polled lay populations, it was time to study the experts. So they sent questionnaires to the membership of the American Society for Aesthetics. I was asked to organize the survey and write the report.
In the winter of 1996, Arthur and I went to Montreal for the society’s annual conference. We presented our findings in a “town meeting” discussion. The session was memorialized in a conference report, which, based on my analysis of the survey data, pointed out that “apparently the society waffled about a number of questions, refusing to commit itself unconditionally and non-contextually to questions of taste.” 2 Accordingly, on my urging, the artists had summarized the survey conclusions pictorially around the theme of equivocation. They produced a diptych composed of a larger and a smaller image, reflecting the aestheticians’ lack of commitment on the matter of painting size. “When the ‘most wanted’ and ‘least wanted’ paintings were arranged by the artists with one directly above the other and a thin metal band separating them,” the society’s publication recorded, “they exactly approximated the shape of an ordinary refrigerator.” It was just the sort of intellectual merriment that Arthur loved. It required a sense of humor and a willingness to go where others in his position might not feel appropriate going.
3 Today’s Art World
My dissertation research involved interviewing the artists and employees of three leading New York galleries. Being connected to this process allowed Arthur to indulge in his journalistic fascination with the art world. He was far from a disengaged observer of the scene. He loved going out. He loved parties and enjoyed eating in restaurants. He relished fraternizing with artists, collectors, curators, and gallerists. Those who knew him were aware that philosophy and his late-blooming career as a critic, in the end, allowed him to enter the innermost sanctum of the art
