a new autonomous object whose reality cannot be fully grasped by either of these elements or by any external observer. The real embraces us from above no less than eluding us below.
The relevance to art of this ethical detour will now perhaps be clear. It had seemed to me until recently that there was no Schelerlike figure in the arts to critique Kant’s aesthetics on analogous grounds. But it now seems clear that Fried is the man for the job. True enough, his concept of “absorption” seems to perform the basically Kantian labor of keeping us at a distance from the artwork through the preoccupation of its elements with each other, resulting in a “closure” that ensures their obliviousness to the beholder. Yet even in Fried’s account this is true only for a number of French painters of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anti-theatrical tradition – as theorized by the philosopher Denis Diderot – along with certain trailblazing forerunners such as Caravaggio.24 For it is Fried himself who has shown that, no later than the work of Jacques-Louis David, it becomes increasingly difficult to read any painting as straightforwardly theatrical or anti-theatrical – and that in the crucial career of Édouard Manet, the need for a painting to face and acknowledge rather than negate and close off the beholder becomes unmistakable.25
In aesthetics no less than ethics, Kant insists on the separation of disinterested spectators from the objects they contemplate. It is noteworthy that Greenberg and Fried do it the opposite way from Kant, by asking us to focus on the art object while subtracting the human side of the equation. This can be seen in Greenberg’s rejection of Kant’s transcendental approach to art in favor of something closer to Humean empiricism and, of course, in Fried’s vehement if qualified distaste for theatricality.26 What Kant shares with Greenberg and Fried is the assumption that autonomy must mean one very specific autonomy in particular: that of humans from world. This probably explains Fried’s unease with such recent philosophical trends as Latourian actor-network-theory, the vital materialism of Jane Bennett, and OOO itself, all of them committed in different ways to a flattening of the Kantian human–world divide.27 The analogy in aesthetics for Scheler’s anti-Kantian ethics would be the view that the basic unit of aesthetics is neither the art object nor its beholder, but rather the two in combination as a single new object. Despite Fried’s probable hostility to such a notion on anti-theatrical grounds, we will see that he comes surprisingly close to adopting it in his historical work. Though I will end up endorsing something much like the theatricality that Fried condemns, this by no means ruins the autonomy of the artwork, since the compound entity made of work and beholder is a self-contained unit not subordinate to any external practical or socio-political purpose. This admittedly strange result will require that we jettison a number of typical formalist principles in aesthetics, though mostly not the ones that post-formalist art has seen fit to abandon. At the same time, we will be led to some new and important considerations for philosophy.
Chapter 1 (“OOO and Art: A First Summary”) gives an overview of OOO aesthetic theory, which conceives of art as activating a rift between what we call real objects (RO) and their sensual qualities (SQ). This will return us to the long unfashionable phenomenon of beauty, which we grasp by contrast with its eternal enemy: not the ugly, but the literal. An examination of metaphor is the easiest way to see what is wrong with literalism, though metaphor also turns out to have a particularly clear theatrical structure, and this has important implications for the sphere of visual art no less than for literature.
Chapter 2 (“Formalism and its Flaws”) offers a more detailed tour of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The goal of this chapter is to pin down the strengths and weaknesses of that foundational book of modern aesthetics, which in most respects remains unsurpassed. I will claim that despite abundant discussion of that book, the basic principle of Kant’s aesthetic theory has been ignored more than overcome; for this very reason, it continues to draw us back into its midst, like a black hole capturing fugitive satellites. Among other things, I will claim that Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime does not hold. There is in fact no such thing as the sublime, assuming we follow Kant in defining it as the absolutely large or powerful. As Timothy Morton has shown in Hyperobjects, there is something deeply anthropocentric about absolutes and infinities: which Kant might be the first to admit, given his surprisingly human-centered interpretation of the sublime.28 Infinity has recently returned to philosophy in the works of Alain Badiou and his student Meillassoux, through their intriguing shared debt to the transfinite mathematician Georg Cantor.29 Yet I am inclined to agree with Morton that very large finite numbers are of greater philosophical interest than infinity. Certain kinds of beauty can provide an experience of gigantic finitudes without making an ultimately impossible passage to the non-existent sublime, which is replaced in OOO by the notion of the “hyperobjective.”
Chapter 3 (“Theatrical, Not Literal”) considers the work of Fried, the most significant living figure in the formalist tradition despite his own continuing rejection of that term. I will claim that Fried’s critique of literalism is uncircumventable, though he uses “literal” in a more restricted sense than OOO. Any art that ventures too close to the edge of the literalist crater must find some way to avoid it, at the risk of its dissolution as art: this is the major problem faced by Dada, though not – I will argue – with its supposed brother Surrealism. But whereas Fried pairs literalism with theatricality, I hold that the two are polar opposites. Indeed, we avoid the literalist destruction of art in no other way than through the theatricality which alone brings art to life. There is the added complexity that for Fried theatricality is not something that can be straightforwardly avoided, given that there is no art without a beholder. Nonetheless, when speaking as a critic of contemporary art, “theatrical” remains Fried’s adjective of choice for works that fail to impress him, and I do not follow him in this usage.
In Chapter 4 (“The Canvas is the Message”) we turn to Greenberg, focusing on the limitations specific to his powerful way of thinking. Turning away from an increasingly academic tradition of illusionist three-dimensional painting, the modernist avant-garde had to come to terms with the essential flatness of its medium: that of the background canvas. This shift to the flat background has at least two consequences. The first is Greenberg’s consistent denigration of pictorial content, which he tends to dismiss as mere literary anecdote that continues to suggest an illusion of depth. The second, seldom if ever noted, is that the flatness of the canvas background medium is also treated as a oneness devoid of parts. On the latter point Greenberg has much in common with Martin Heidegger, that tainted but central philosopher, who often ridicules the surface of the world and its various visible entities as “ontic” rather than ontological. Heidegger also shows a nagging reluctance to conceive of Being as pre-dispersed into numerous individual beings, whose multiplicity he tends to portray as merely the correlate of human experience. It is Greenberg’s version of this prejudice that prevents him from grasping the importance of pictorial content.
Chapter 5 (“After High Modernism”) considers several of the most prominent ways in which the High Modernism championed by Greenberg and Fried has been rejected. I will focus here on those who do not play a significant role in other chapters of this book. Something should first be said about Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg, two of Greenberg’s contemporaries, often portrayed as his rivals. I then turn to the more recent figures T.J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, and Jacques Rancière; though of necessity my treatment of each figure can only give a rough indication of where my views differ from theirs.
In Chapter 6 (“Dada, Surrealism, and Literalism”) we turn to Greenberg’s puzzling assertion that Dada and Surrealism are both forms of “academic” art. The problem with treating both movements in the same way is that, although they remain broadly linked in cultural history as overlapping
