Kant’s Theory of Modern Art?

Can Kant’s theory of fine art serve as a theory of modern art? It all depends on what ‘modern’ means. The word can mean current or contemporary, indexed to the time of use, and in that sense the answer is yes: Kant’s theory of genius implies that successful art is always to some extent novel, so there should always be something that counts as contemporary art on his theory. But ‘modern’ can also be used adjectively, perhaps more properly as ‘modernist’, to refer to art of a particular moment, in some cases superseded by postmodern art. Kant’s theory is not a theory of modernist art in at least one prominent form, the formalism of Clement Greenberg. But other theories, such as those of George Dickie and Arthur Danto, although triggered by particular works of modernist art and meant to accommodate them, were meant to be theories of what art was always doing, and Kant’s is too. In that sense it can be considered a modern theory of art but not a theory of modern art.

On the crisis of criticism and public art

At the turn of the millennia, the politically unbiased analytical thought of the world describes the total humanitarian entropy, which has unsafely plunged the theory and practice of art into a deep crisis. Accordingly, academic scientists, and primarily philosophers and culturologists, as well as art historians who have not lost their independent critical thinking ability, are consolidating into an ever-increasing front of those analysts who resist the current situation, because they tend to see behind the superficial statistics of a sharply increasing number of glossy magazines, exhibition reviews and other printed materials, including circulations of ordinary booklets that massively accompany any art projects of all kinds of galleries or public art actions, which go to significant investment funds from private foundations and centers — the premature death of art criticism, which, in the figurative expression of James Elkins, has become “like a trackless thicket, tangled with with unanswered questions”. Artistic practitioners, accustomed to servile survival in the conditions of the global art market, which imposes the rules for the production of a creative product solely in their own interests, are in a state of crisis no less severe than criticism. Manipulative interpretations of the concept of publicity, as well as the orientation of public art towards the function of socio-political and socio-educational regulatory action, like a mediator between society and power, legitimizes and strongly supports the phenomenology of things. Without a transcendental goal, the reification of the community’sthinking leads to a slide of creative consciousness and formal vocabulary of art expression to the level of kitsch, which was sharply criticized back in 1939 by Clement Greenberg. The fetishization of an art object as a commodity contributes to the steady cultivation of an instrumentalized consciousness by artists. Public visual practices, formally inheriting the idea of dissolving in the stream of everyday life, first proclaimed by the historical avant-garde, actually dissolve in consumerism, turning art objects into objectified political and sociocultural invectives, or, according to D. Lukacs’ terminology, such invectives that have undergone the process of reification. Meanwhile, visual public projects also actively use conceptualized clichés in the form of neutral abstract design objects, where the dominant criterion of conformity to the spirit of the times as quasi-modernity is the uncommonness of an innovative solution to lexical expression. The phenomenology of a thing legitimizes any experimentation, but it is not able to overcome the deepening crisis of theory and practice, drawing the cultural and artistic existence of society into a prolonged state of hysteresis. Analysts see the only way out of this situation in the return to the culture of the theory and practice of the traditions of Kantian-Hegelian philosophy, and in particular the postulates of transcendental aesthetics.

‘The Historical Approach’ and ‘The Historian’s Journey’, from History: The Last Things Before the Last (Kracauer 1968)

This chapter is a close analysis of the two chapters from Kracauer’s 1968 book History: The Last Things Before the Last. The chapter covers the influence of Husserl’s concept of the Lebenswelt on Kracauer’s conception of history and explores Kracauer’s notion of ‘ante-room history. Here, Kracauer compares film and photography with historiography, and sets out a conception of non-linear historical time. The notion of the historian, and the exile, as ‘palimpsest’, is also considered. The influence of the art theorist Clement Greenberg on Kracauer’s application of notions of medium specificity to film, photography and historiography is also considered

Hacia un nuevo Laocoonte

El modernismo es una teoría de la relación del arte con su medio, y en ningún lugar se ve esto más claro que en el pensamiento de Clement Greenberg (1909-1994). Greenberg fue probablemente el crítico de arte más influyente del siglo xx, uno de los responsables del reconocimiento del impresionismo abstracto y de la pintura de campos de color, así como del desplazamiento del centro del mundo del arte desde París a Nueva York. Su práctica como crítico de arte estaba, además, fundada en una ambiciosa teoría del modernismo artístico y, en particular, pictórico. “Towards a Newer Laocoön”, aparecido originalmente en 1940 y que se publica aquí por primera vez en español, forma parte del puñado de ensayos imprescindibles para comprender su pensamiento estético (la lista incluye “Vanguardia y kitsch” [1939], “Pintura modernista” [1962] y, quizá, el “Seminario 1” [1973] y el “Seminario 6” [1976]).

Desplazamientos del modernismo: Greenberg en el pensamiento artístico de José Luis Castillejo

Este trabajo reflexiona sobre el debate formalista del modernismo greenberguiano al que se adhiere el escritor, diplomático y coleccionista José Luis Castillejo en su trabajo, tras su expulsión del grupo Zaj a finales de los 60, para analizarlo críticamente y examinar su validez en la práctica del escritor. El punto de partida del texto es un estudio más detallado de la correspondencia hallada en archivos públicos de España y Estados Unidos entre el escritor y el crítico Clement Greenberg desarrollada entre 1981 y 1983, un material al que no se le ha prestado la atención que se merece por su relevancia para la historiografía nacional e internacional.

2. Writing art history

‘Writing art history’ looks at how histories of art have been written in Europe and North America and the effect that this has had on the object itself and on the subjects of art history. Discussing the work of influential art historians Pliny the Elder, Giorgio Vasari, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Jacob Burckhardt, Ernst Gombrich, and Clement Greenberg, it introduces the expectations we have of art history as a chronological story about great Western male artists. Complementary to this gender bias is the impact of the writing of women art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Linda Nochlin. They have mapped out a different way of seeing and understanding cultural production and the social relationships expressed therein.

Manet: The Kant of Painting

This chapter illustrates how Immanuel Kant questioned the condition of possibility not only of this or that knowledge but of the frame of all possible knowledge that is in play in the notion of possibility itself. It talks about critique in painting that would consequentially consist not in painting something that would add painting to the already painted by painting, but rather in interrogating in painting how the painting that is possible is possible. The person who repeated the Kantian critical operation in painting, according to Clement Greenberg, is Édouard Manet. With Manet, the chapter describes the neutral vertical and horizontal spatiality of the canvas that the tradition erased by constructing a fallen pyramid remerges. It also mentions Manet's painting called “Music in the Tuileries” that privileges the strong lines and vertical axes that are represented by some trees.

Rok 1989 – wokół pojęcia modernizmu

The author argues that the significance of the year 1989 for Polish art was not determined by political changes, but by the rise of postmodernism. Until that moment, the term “modernism” usually referred in academic art history to Polish art at the turn of the 20th century. The concept of postmodernism brought to the Polish language a new meaning of modernism as simply modern art, and more precisely, as modern art defined by Clement Greenberg. That change made it necessary to draw a new map of concepts referring to modern Polish art, most often defined before by the concept of the avant-garde. In Mieczysław Porębski’s essay “Two Programs” [Dwa programy] (1949), and then, since the late 1960s, in Andrzej Turowski’s publications, the concept of the avant-garde was acknowledged as basic for understanding twentieth-century Polish art. The significance of the concept of the avant-garde in reference to the art of the past century in Poland changed after the publication of Piotr Piotrowski’s book of 1999, Meanings of Modernism [Znaczenia modernizmu]. Piotrowski challenged in it the key role of that concept – e.g., Władysław Strzemiński and Henryk Stażewski, usually called avant-gardists before, were considered by him modernists – in favor of a new term, “critical art,” referring to the developments in the 1990. In fact, critical art continued the political heritage of the avant-garde as the radical art of resistance. The author believes that such a set of terms and their meanings imposes on the concept of the avant-garde some limits, as well as suggests that scholars and critics use them rather inconsistently. He argues that concepts should not be treated as just label terms, but they must refer to deeper significance of tendencies in art. He mentions Elżbieta Grabska’s term “realism,” also present in the tradition of studies on modern Polish art, and concludes with a postulate of urgent revision of the relevant vocabulary of Polish art history.