over and over again in the artworld of the time by really quite intelligent men and women who pretended to a kind of autism, and went around in clothes so splashed with paint that the very costume was an advertisement for the closeness between the artist and his work (Danto 1981, 109).
I have quoted this passage at length to show Danto’s gift as a writer. The painter is a “frog-god,” who with the “studied brutishness of the Dumb Artist” fills the canvas with splashes and drips of paint. This ironic passage is very much in the spirit of Lichtenstein’s “Brushstrokes” or Rauschenberg’s “Bed” and their allusions to Pollock’s drip painting. The reader enjoys the wit and spontaneity in Danto’s style, a style where often the risk and adventure reveal the daring on his part to take unfamiliar philosophical paths.
Style is part of our everyday life. A living room may be decorated in a modernist style, but also with a personal flair or touch that stands out against the background of a prevalent style. People dress and adorn their bodies, says Hegel, because of the need to alter the external world. The human being recognizes himself as such, as free, as a person, by altering the world. The world modified by human activity may be like a fingerprint of the self and, therefore, may allow self-recognition. The human being is always striving through different activities ultimately “to make this foreign world for himself,” because otherwise “he is not being at home in it” (Hegel 1835, 31, 98). Art is an attempt to mold and mark and humanize the external world, and so is style. Language is public, and when we recognize someone’s style, it is because the writer has impressed his first-person perspective into the material of language, thus making a home in it, a home the reader may also inhabit.
Style, as I have stressed, is not a mere container of something totally alien, namely, meaning. But here, too, as Danto well knew, translation of words and language, is a deep problem. Proust, as translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, is the same and not the same Proust who wrote in French. Following Quine, a skeptic of synonymy, one might say that “what matters is likeness in relevant aspects” (Quine 1953, 60). Danto has a pithier thought: “Try writing about Proustian jealousy with Hemingway sentences” (Danto 1981, 197). But if meaning is fused with the style of the writer, what is captured better by writing about Danto’s style than reading Danto without any companion at all?
Notes
1 1 My translation of “Il faut lire, méditer beaucoup, toujours penser au style…on arrive à faire des belles choses à force de patience et de longue énergie”.
2 2 Danto does not comment on this painting by Chardin.
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4 Sartre, Transparency, and Style
TAYLOR CARMAN
In
