By Monica Seiceanu and Santiago Olábarri Oriol, coordinators of Opium Philosophie - International Letter 1 Today, neither the disappearance nor the devaluation of artworks can bear witness to its proclaimed death. Artistic production has perhaps only increased, enlivened by the chants of its funerary orators. Yet, the very character of the works—their indistinguishability from quotidian objects, their incomprehensibility—is a sign of a transformation. We have an underlying understanding of the purpose of the question concerning the death of art, just as much as of the paradox, it emphasizes. From Malevich’s well-known The Black Square or Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup, to Tracy Emin’s My Bed, we see that Adorno’s statement that “[i]t is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore” holds in place. Together with its status in society, not in the auction house or the museum, art might have perished. But what is it that once no longer present, makes us postulate the death of art? To address this question, it is not only paramount to determine what precisely caused art’s demise but also to determine what art itself might be, its definition: in order to affirm that it no longer exists, we should first be able to say what it ever was. According to Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics, art should correspond not to a certain standard of natural beauty (since beauty, as Hegel understands it, is to be found in art and not in nature), but to humanity’s spiritual needs; art shouldn’t reflect a certain image of reality, but the freedom of our spirit. In the ancient world, art was doing even more than that: the ancient people didn’t have a clear and determined conception of spirituality (which is to be seen, for example, in the indetermination of their religions), and this made it easy for their artistic creations to surpass that vague conception. The historical point of perfect correspondence between art and spirituality is represented by the Greek civilisation: they had both a determined set of gods and evolved artistic practices, and Hegel especially finds that ancient Greek sculpture represents an absolute form of beauty. However, history did not stop there. In the By Monica Seiceanu and Santiago Olábarri Oriol, coordinators of Opium Philosophie - International modern era, art was able to depict the glimmer of gold and man’s subjectivity with more ‘resolution’ and freedom than ever before, yet its content had become prosaic. That freedom could no longer be expressed within the frame of the canvas. In Hegel’s words, art ‘no longer affords us the satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it’. This, according to him, is a sign of the end of art: not in the sense that people are no longer creating anything, but in the sense that those creations are no longer able to accomplish their function. We have thus reached a dead point of art, and humanity should rather turn to religion and philosophy in order to preserve its spiritual freedom. But what if we don’t accept Hegel’s definition of art as a means to sensuously express spirituality? Will we arrive at the same conclusion if we only focus on the artistic practice itself? In After the End of Art, Arthur Danto expresses his belief that art ended in the sixties – this period was particularly marked by the emergence of the problematic movements of pop art, minimalism, and conceptualism. Nevertheless, Danto doesn’t make the claim that art itself has died, but rather that the history of art has ended: we can no longer recognise a specific artistic era by some rigid characteristics. Art’s life no longer depends on feeding on its tradition and current works of art should instead be viewed as post-historical. Jean Baudrillard, who agrees with Danto on the dating of the ‘unlucky event’, writes in Towards the Vanishing Point of Art: ‘All of the art’s disappearance, and thus all its modernity is in the art of disappearance’. In a time where everything has already been done in art, including its own disappearance, what is there left for us to do? Yet, Baudrillard tells us, we cannot give in to this disappearance and because everything has already been accomplished, we are condemned to reproduce what is already done. To return to the beginning. It seems that together with the coexistence of modern life and art in a dangerously peaceful and commercialized relationship, art is persistently found to be dead. How is this possible? Is the question of art’s death merely one concerning its By Monica Seiceanu and Santiago Olábarri Oriol, coordinators of Opium Philosophie - International definition? And, if we accept the consequence that Hegel’s proclamation of art’s historical necessity was also fundamentally a guarantee of its contingency, is it then the task of philosophy to define art? What, if any, is the task of philosophy at the sight of art’s corpse? Eva Lín Vilhjálmsdóttir – King’s College London Letter 2 Prima facie art does not seem to be dead. We are surrounded by it almost every day. In the first open letter, Seiceanu & Oriol point to a paradox: art appears to be more vigorously alive today than ever: permeating our modern everyday lives, but there is something about art that seemingly has lost its inherent shimmer, making us postulate its death. The theorists that postulate art’s end yearn for a time long passed, where art had a better defined and delineated role within societies and histories. Hegel, thinking back to a time where art represented spirituality in a perfect equilibrium of expression and spiritual freedom. Danto, longing for a time where one could characterize art according to the specific factors that it possessed. Baudrillard, pining for a time when art could genuinely be original. The common thread running through all arguments is the past. The current cannot succeed at recreating what was done in the past and, therefore, its future is condemned. With this worry comes a thought about one of the most persistent ideas in art theory: the seeming impossibility of defining art. The concept of art is not static, and it never was - it is a skewed view of the past. Drawn to account for the possibility of a rational linear progression of what art could be and should become. It is not a pretty picture of the evolution of artistic expression, spiritual enlightenment, or original innovation in light of the more nostalgic theories of art. Thus, when art has become something that does not fit the philosophers’ linear picture: consumable objects or experiences, the philosophers or theorists cry out that art is dead. The death of the definition of art seems to be a legit worry. The objection “that is not art” has ceased to be valid, everything and nothing has, therefore, become an art. The definition of it is so broad that there is no definition. Art history, however, seems to be a continual sequence of artists breaking the bounds of the definition of art: expanding the question of method and meaning as with impressionism and readymades. How can it be then that the death of art connects inherently with the non-conformity of the ideas of the theorists themselves? The questionable and commercialized coexistence of art and modern life seems to be straying away from something that should be essential to art. That is, the possibility of separating art from other non-art objects, according to Danto, one can do so through theory. Eva Lín Vilhjálmsdóttir – King’s College London Morris Weitz, in his The Role of Theory in Aesthetics questions the art theorist project of defining and delineating the concept of art. He finds the search for a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be defined as art problematic. Art is an open concept according to Weitz, and he states that: “the very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes and novel creations, makes it logically impossible to ensure any set of defining properties. We can, of course, choose to close the concept. But to do this with “art” or “tragedy” or “portraiture,” etc., is ludicrous since it forecloses on the very conditions of creativity in the arts.” He expounds his view by referring to Wittgenstein’s ideas about language-games from his Philosophical Investigations. We should shift our questions from what is art to how do we use the concept art? How is the word ‘art’ used in language? We should not look for the last and final definition of art but for how artworks resemble each other, looking for family resemblance. We could find some paradigm cases of art to use as a measuring stick, but that is not all-encompassing. Furthermore, Weitz mentions two ways of elucidating the usage of the concept of art. On the one hand, there are descriptive usages; when we describe something as 'art' which is analogous to describing something as a chair. The descriptive questions entail what we do when we might find similar conditions, properties that are present in most artworks, rather than necessary conditions for a work of art to be considered art. On the other hand, evaluative usage such as “is this good art?” concerns how we praise a work of art as a work of art, what conditions constitute an excellent work of art? In his view, these usages of art are often confused, and this creates problems for the definition of art. Weitz’s clarification is, however, not bulletproof since it is from 1956, and one could say that the descriptive usage no longer applies. If we can, in the year 2020, use the word art for anything, we have to rethink the open concept of art. If taken this way, theories of art are saved from pointlessness or inanity. Diving into the use of the concept of art, therefore opens up a whole world of possible ‘living’ definitions of art, definitions that are ‘forthcoming’. The end of art is, according to my reading of Weitz, a false view of art: it entails looking at art as a closed concept, defined logically, which is impossible since art is an empirical concept. Is it the task of philosophy to define art? On Weitz’s view, yes – but in a different sense than before. Art might be more active than ever because of the false idea of sufficient and necessary conditions of art have been uncovered. The musician does not have to be a virtuoso, and visual art Eva Lín Vilhjálmsdóttir – King’s College London doesn’t have to be completely original to be exceptional; Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills are a good example. The worry now is, if we define art as a synthetic/empirical concept that is continuously changing, and adapting to the use of the concept it is, consequently, contingent. If everything can at some point be art, has art ended? Is it parallel to postulating arts death? Or are we merely thinking of it in the wrong way? M.O.A Chaudhry Letter 3 I thank Pauline Jäckels and Santiago Olabarri Oriol 1) I respond here to Eva Lín Vilhjálmsdóttir, framing my response through speculative theses. Where these theses have found elaboration, my language had not yet failed me. Their elaboration stopped when it did fail me. 2) I place art on the level of mind-dependent reality . Geistig. Basically, art needs minds around. 3) Hegel also ‘declared’ the end of history. Here might well lie the implicit possibility of breaking free from its shackles. 1. There is Only the Will Have Been To begin, I shamelessly abort, distort, truncate, interrupt, mould, parody, and use ideas from myriad sources to ‘give birth’ to this idea here. I ‘explain’ it further in the following manner: let us take the Hegelian proposition of the Owl of Minerva, and a beautifully succinct (although seemingly not beautiful at all in its own self) summation of Hegel’s idea of Geist by Reza Negarestani: “geist...essentially a picture of a necessarily deprivatized mind predicated on sociality as its formal condition of possibility” (Negarestani 1). To limit this, and to delineate it into clarity: there are objects of mind-independent reality - of which, arguably, philosophy need not speak on the level of their mind-independence beyond the delineation of the same, and perhaps cater to them only on the level of their mind-dependent perceptibility. There are, on the other hand, objects not of mind-independent reality, of which, only after the fact of their truly having been, can something of them be stated. Let us suggest, maybe no more than suggest, the social constitution of mind-dependent meaning, further to which, perhaps the only certainty is that there is only the will have been. We do not know what will have been ‘art’ by the time the next ‘declaration’ of its ‘end’ is proclaimed and promptly misunderstood. We do not know what will have been ‘art’ by the time a declaration of the same lives up to all of its semantic and signifying promise and potential. As mind-dependent, it may well be ‘killed’ and ‘resurrected’ ad infinitum. 2. Perhaps it is Necessary that a Void Precede Any Future Nomination and Delineation of Art Vilhjálmsdóttir: “The worry now is, if we define art as a synthetic/empirical concept that is continuously changing, and adapting to the use of the concept it is, consequently, contingent.” M.O.A Chaudhry I propose that we take the following idea to mull over: perhaps we do not, in fact, know, how the role of contingency might be restricted and delineated at this moment in time. And if we do not know, and never have, except along the lines of the has been... And if we cannot speculate without paying our respects to the category of the will have been... No worries. A rule from Frank Ruda’s Abolishing Freedom: “there is no there is” (Ruda 171). This ‘impossibility’, as Ruda terms it, might well be what allows for determinate moves out of deadlocks that have occupied and made the categories they occupy ossified in their scattering and the 'untraceability' of their truths. A certain groundlessness is the only ground, a “there is no there is” that is a repeated “there is no there is”. Once before creation (after the exhaustion of what preceded it), and then once before creation (after the exhaustion of what preceded it). First as farce (spirit coming to know itself within a certain worsening (Ruda 108)), then an impossibility (I do not even know what to place here). Void. Without any grounds, a chance then to gamble upon any future nomination and delineation of art. 3. We Do Only Come to Make (of Everything) What We Will Vilhjálmsdóttir: “If everything can at some point be art, has art ended? Is it parallel to postulating art’s death? Or are we merely thinking of it in the wrong way?” In response: In this infinitude I am too All in all Infinitely often existent Everyone at once Everyone at once All at once All in all (In der Unendlichkeit Bin ich auch Alles in allem Unendlich oft vorhanden Alle auf einmal Alle auf einmal Alles auf einmal Alles in allem) - ‘Alles in Allem’, Einstürzende Neubauten M.O.A Chaudhry Make of it what you will. We will make of it what we will. The moulding and shaping of what we intend to make of things/everything might be a truly difficult matter. If everything can at some point be art, it precisely has not ended... After all, there is only a lot of art, a glut of art. And everything, although it is a lot, is nevertheless more than a lot: here, the principle of sufficiency does not seem to exhaust the (in)variable in question. Yet, despite this, the totality is, has been, at one point will have been. In the nomination of the question which guides this speculation, are we thinking in the wrong way, as Vilhjálmsdóttir asks? I answer only a not truly unrelated question in turn: if we are thinking of it in any way along the lines speculatively proffered here, I wager that we are enabling art, resurrecting it. Nomination, genealogy, diagnosis, and/or prognosis have less to do with the matter than the offering of an impossible groundless ground, having ‘stepped onto’ which, the only thing a practitioner might reasonably do is detach their specific practice from any ‘salutary’ ‘values’ and foundations, and then, ‘merely’ carry on. As mind-dependent, ‘geistig’ , there is no essential, eternal concept of art, except this very one: as mind-dependent, ‘geistig’ , there is no essential, eternal concept of art. As Ruda suggests in ‘“First as “Politics”, Then as “Art”’, only by assuming the impossibility of something of the sort, might something of the sort actually emerge, only by thinking that “there will never be any true art” (Ruda 20) could there, perhaps, be true art for the locus of the will-have-been, putting to rest, for whatever stretch of time, the question of its end or death. Zoia Belova Letter 4 Urban dictionary defines “art is dead” as the statement that the attempt to convey meaning through representation has run its course, and cannot be improved upon, only repeated like a ritual in a vain attempt to recreate the original feeling of “novelty”. But if something has run its course then it means it’s finite and all the “vain attempt to recreate the original feeling” will be bound to fail because there’s nothing to run anymore. As M.O.A Chaudhry writes in his letter “A certain groundlessness as the only ground, a “there is no there is” that is a repeated “there is no there is”.” Can art be ever finite? Or is it only our brain’s representation of the world? So, if the world still exists then the art which represents the world in our heads should last till the end of the world? But we see the world through our eyes and, what’s more important, through our consciousness. Our consciousness, our mind, our perception is not the world itself, it’s how we see it. So, the reality exists beyond our mind, despite it. And if the art is only the representation of our own world, the world of the artist, or the world of the society, then if these worlds stop existing, art will disappear together with them? But if the art is infinite, then it will live despite the disappearance of certain minds and mindsets. Maybe some people think that art is dead because the perception of certain people in the past is already dead. But what is the new perception? Is it possible to recreate something or create something new, would it be counted as the recreation of the old art because of using that has already been used? There’s a saying: “All new is overlooked old”. Is it considered dead because it’s something remade from the past in a different way? But if the perception of art has changed over the years because people’s mindsets have changed over the years, then for every generation of art the previous art should die and the new one should be born? When Malevich draw “Black Square” in 1915, did he kill expressionism and gave birth to suprematism? When Van Gogh created “The Starry Night”, did he kill realism and gave birth to post-impressionism? Or did he kill impressionism too? Is the new art killing old art when it gets born? Again, art is divided into new or old, modern or classic, impressionism or cubism only in our minds. We categorize the explicit flood of art into something we can understand. The nature of art is differentiated by categories, but can it be? Can we understand something we don’t understand how gets created by categorizing it into ages or periods? The characteristics of time will always leave their footprint on the works of art but does it make art timeless or stuck in a certain time period? As Mr. Chaudhry writes “if we are thinking of it in any way along the lines speculatively proffered here, I wager that we are enabling art, resurrecting it”. If we’re in charge to resurrect the art, who’s in charge to kill it? If art is alive only because of our perception of it through consciousness, can we kill it in the same way? Even the best cognitive scientist and psychotherapists don’t know how ideas and thoughts arose in the mind of Rachmaninov or Picasso, people don’t know how music or poems get born, they just do. And if it’s a subconscious process, then how can we make art dead or alive consciously? We’re trying to put everything into a box of understanding. Some people have a bigger box, some people have a smaller one. But in the end, they all are boxes, not the space with an infinite number of stars and planets. If we categorize, differentiate, and try to explain everything in our life, including art, we lose the ability to extend our boxes. If we consciously see art as an object or a material or a thought, we might restrict the subconsciousness to create something we can’t even understand. Art is dead if we can’t understand it? Or when we can’t understand art anymore, it’s because art is dead? To explain the physical features of a human being, for example how the brain neurons work or how psychosomatic pain causes health problems is not enough for understanding it. Creating the universe of our own reality with our own rules doesn’t mean that this reality is real and it’s supposed to be this way. Trying to kill or resurrect art doesn’t make it dead or alive, it is dead or alive in the mindset of the person who tries to do so. We will kill the art only if we want to, but even then, it will be alive through someone else’s consciousness. The new will kill the old only in someone’s consciousness, but will resurrect the old through the new in someone else’s. Art is not dead until we won’t stop trying to extend our mind boxes to the stars. Dermot Cudmore Letter 5 Art is an activity, not a collection of works. Western art history may have ceased or deceased, due to some inner contradiction, or because everything that needs to be expressed has been expressed, or through any other fancy mechanism of your choosing, but the artistic-drive is as vital to our specieslife as it ever was. I cannot comment on art outside of that history, as like most of those within it, I know nothing else. That western art history is dead says nothing about what lies outside of it. Art is not contingent. It cannot be unlearnt or expire. Like Barnett Newman, by not being a philosopher, is able to state more elegantly: ‘Man’s first expression, like his first dream, was an aesthetic one. The speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness, and at his own helplessness before the void’. In the banalest acts, humans transfigure their external world. As Dewey writes, ‘The man who poked the sticks of burning wood would say he did it to make the fire burn better, but he is nonetheless fascinated by the colour drama of change enacted before his eyes, and imaginatively partakes in it.’ That transfiguring potential does not disappear because Warhol exhibited packaging. Art history is not art. While art history might be finite, art is infinite, as Z. Belova argues in the previous letter. Have I evaded the question and stated the obvious? Yes. So, let me treat the question on its own terms, or in the terms, it is usually taken, and talk of art as a history of works. But perhaps I can answer the question on my own terms yet. Heidegger believes that ‘experience is the element in which art dies’. When we start treating art as particular works that do or do not, or which ought or ought not, trigger certain mysterious reactions, when we aestheticize art, it dies. Heidegger claims that Baumgarten invented Aesthetics in 1735, and soon after philosophers connived to displace the philosophy of art in favour of it. When art serves merely to create a rush to the head, imagination served with crushed understanding, it has become ‘a matter for pastry cooks’. It no longer provides ethical guidance or orientation, no longer has cultural or historical significance, and is exchangeable for other ‘experiences’. The aestheticization of artworks suppresses the art-instinct and relegates it into an act among others, a product to be purchased, or a hobby to partake in. When art becomes a collection of artworks, ‘art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from...the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing and achievement. (Dewey)’ At best, artists can engage in private artistry with personal significance, and hide it from the world which calls it kitsch or masterpiece. They have nothing to add to a finite narrative that has ended, and there are no rituals for their creations to anchor or elevate. Artworks may have lost such cultural significance whilst retaining it for individuals. But art only has a half-life if it exists in one mind and not the other, as Z. Belova reassures us it can. Individuals can suck out the personal meaning from the parched works of history, marching through busy museums to get their fix, but they cannot contribute to it. The public art domain has now exhausted the finite possibilities leftover from the aestheticization of art. Undying art can reanimate the corpse of art-history. We can reinstate our communal need for art and align it with our basic human drive. We must allow those basic human drives to take hold of the common sphere. We must make portable statues and allow others to freely reposition them someplace else. Art can once more triumph, even in the decadent, self-obsessed, post-industrial, post-modern, postpost, moribund, X Æ A-12, West. We might imagine Hegel, even now, calling for art to rise again. But was he not the first, or the loudest, to say it never could? Yes, but Hegel left some open doors in the footnotes and crevices of his manuscripts. And he was bound to do his duty and tell us that everything had ended perfectly and rationally, even if it had not. For Hegel, art gradually disintegrates into philosophy, as our need for self-understanding rids itself of a sensuous form ill-suited to the task. Dermot Cudmore But what if our self-understanding changes? We would not know if it had. We need someone to tell us that something is over before we know it ever started. We can leave that to the philosophers of the future. Now, the artists must create the need for further philosophizing. Do we possess so good a self-understanding that artistic imagination may not yet pull us to a higher state? Would Hegel not admit today that we do not understand ourselves perfectly? When new art expresses a new form of human self-understanding, philosophy can later interpret it. By releasing our art-instinct back into the communal sphere, we can achieve this. Even adopting Hegelian truths, where an end is possible, let alone the infinite possibilities most people think likely, there is a future for art. Nietzsche calls for an affirming nihilism in those discontented with a demystified, godless world. To avoid the fate of the last men, who never have to make hard choices, he tells us we must create value. Is that possible? We have done it before. We are dying to do it. It will require great artistry, not great philosophising. We should let the artist guide the philosopher. By remembering, as Newman implores us, that the first human was an artist, art can be reclaimed from the aestheticians, and we can avoid the fate of the last men. Nietzsche’s word: ‘Become who we are – human beings who are new, unique, . . . who give themselves laws, who create themselves!’ Ben Houlton Letter 6 Is art dead? If so it surely haunts us from beyond the grave. The relativist notion that art can be anything, and that it is simply a means of mere expression is violence to the term itself. We have many perpetrators of this crime; artists themselves are guilty of discussing their own craft as if they shape and re-shape the boundaries of art with ease. I am not trying to deny artistic creativity here, for this should be held in the greatest esteem, and anyone who tries to make art is surely noble in their attempt to do so. Having said this, what Heidegger reminds us is that for art to fulfil its role it has to work. The question we are really asking here then when engaging with the death of art, is can the artwork still work? In the world of a ‘revaluation of all values’, this role is much more flexible and ambiguous than it has been previously, making this question harder to answer. We have to separate this question from the value judgements we have when discussing a work of art. Whether the artwork is good, or bad, is not of relevance when discussing if the artwork works. For example, one could hardly dispute that Andy Warhol is an artist who has created works of art. His artworks can hardly be addressed using concepts embedded in aesthetics; in fact, we may find Warhol’s work generally disagreeable. Is it not, however, that Warhol’s artworks are formidable because they bring us so close to the truths of our world? Two of the philosophers that Dermot mentioned, Hegel and Heidegger can give us an indication as to why some works work, and others do not, without resorting to conceptions of classical aesthetics, such as the beautiful. Ben Houlton It is fair to say that for both Hegel and Heidegger, a work of art in some way or another reflects the society that it is a product of. For Hegel, when the work of art is working it is instructing us in how we should live, and making us feel like we have a place in the world. When society becomes too complicated, art loses this purpose. In Hegel’s account, society was too complex for art by the later part of the eighteenth-century. Art then has to be supplemented by the philosophy to work. Many call this Hegel’s ‘Death of Art thesis’, as art becomes unable to work in its own terms. Heidegger’s hypothesis is different. The idea of an instructive purpose is somewhat different for Heidegger, and less to do with the Hegelian hypothesis of a ‘progressive enlightenment’. I will briefly state what I think the necessary conditions are for artwork to work for Heidegger. These are the conditions that create the possibility for artwork to work. The first of these conditions is a society that has a more or less unified way of understanding itself. Later philosophers such as Michel Foucault talk about this in terms of ἐπιστήμη (episteme). Heidegger suggests that through history there have been different epochs of ‘being’ in the West. He calls this the ἀλήθεια (Aletheia) of being, which is the way that different societies in historical periods understand the world. The Christian medieval world would have a teleological understanding of nature for example, and a way of behaving that corresponds to this. Perhaps closer to home is the typical modern way of being, which is associated with maturity and rigour, reflected by the shift in the sciences, and the work of philosophers such as Immanuel Kant. Although this is an extremely crude way of putting it, one could talk about this as the ‘mainstream’ way that society understands itself. There are Ben Houlton of course those who fall through the cracks and, as Foucault later demonstrated, this understanding often has a lot to do with types of power and its relations. According to Heidegger, Ἁλήθεια is opened up by a historical event or a series of transformative events. The medieval Christian way of being is overturned by the event of the sixteenth-century scientific revolution. The ἀλήθεια of a certain epoch proliferates from the event, which serves as the ground that an epoch builds from. Parallels have been made by various Anglo-American interpreters between this idea and the theory of the ‘Structure of Scientific’ revolutions, posed by Thomas Kuhn. This is where scientific research builds from a paradigm experiment until anomalies are exposed and the ground changed, leading to a ‘scientific revolution’. The event, and the ἀλήθεια that it opens up, provide the ground for the artwork to work. For Art to work, according to Heidegger, it has to be able to reflect this unified way of being and show one how to act in the light of it. Here, the work of art does not have a duty to bring the subject to a higher understanding. In fact, when the artwork works it acts like a light the shines on ‘mainstream’ understanding, in a way that demonstrates the values that it holds. In turn, people ‘mirror’ something displayed in the work. This mirroring could take the form of what people value, or how they behave. This way of mirroring ‘mainstream understanding’ and thus showing people how to act in the light of it is a sufficient condition for an artwork to work. One can perhaps now see why Warhol’s artworks work. Warhol’s art reflects a great deal about the world we live in, which Heidegger would call the ‘technological’ world. The work of Warhol fits the distinct slogan ‘minimum expense, maximum yield’, which is the antithesis of Ben Houlton the modern idea of painting. The technique in the case of Warhol is replicable many times over and can be mass-produced. He is an extremely efficient artist in this regard, which is something that the ἀλήθεια of our time reflects strongly. Instead of handcrafted chairs, built after a specific technique was learnt, the ‘mainstream’ chairs that we use are simply those that are the quickest and cheapest to make. We also treat ourselves in this manner; it is common rhetoric that one should be flexible about one’s options, by acquiring a set of skills, which in turn produces an increasingly homogenized way of living, as if we are massproducing ourselves into the most efficient and flexible creature to fit society’s demands. It is exactly this understanding that Warhol brings to light. Warhol’s mass-produced works crush the modern idea of the aura of the experience of a unique work of art. To state the problem in a rather clichéd way, the shift that is depicted here is one from the idea of a work of art being the means to a singularly unique experience, which prevailed in the modern understanding of aesthetics, to one where the work of art reflects a mass-produced, homogenized experience. Avoiding value judgments of whether art today is somehow regressive, or progressive, is crucial. I am not trying to express the doctrine, presented by philosophers such as Jurgen Habermas, that we should simply get ‘back to the enlightenment’. Although drastically oversimplified, hopefully now one can see what the necessary and sufficient conditions for an artwork to work are: an event has to open up a specific ἀλήθεια of being, and this has to be reflected in the artwork, and thus the work allows a ‘mainstream’ understanding to be mirrored by the society that it is a product of. We can therefore see that the Ben Houlton possibility for artwork to work is still available in our world. In fact, since the globalist free trade machine continuously homogenizes lifestyles, diverse cultural practices will only be stamped out more. From this one can see that a unified understanding will only become more common. Although this leaves the possibility for art in our world, for philosophers such as Heidegger the work of art cannot create true change. Perhaps, as Dermot suggested, the creative act can be embraced in a different way than it has been in what we have called art, and create the possibility of a change in the way we understand the world. Vivek Bhadra Letter 7 The meditation on the subject ‘death of art’ has been consternating and the thoughts, paradoxes, conclusions that emerge during the process are perennial. Hence, this letter touches upon some aforementioned concerns that show, when pondering the death of art. To begin, Ben in the previous letter quotes ‘The relativist notion that art can be anything, and that it is simply a means of mere expression is violence to the term itself’. I shall take this further, Roland Barthes in his essay quotes ‘The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior... His only power is to mix writings [...] in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.’ Currently, concerning the ‘art’ as/of ‘writing’ and the ‘author’ as the ‘artist’. If we contemplate on the popular notions of ‘art as an imitation’ and ‘expression’, we realise that imitation and expression are distinct. Whereas, an artist can be considered a ‘master technician’. To enumerate, it may be said that an artist has a ‘skill’ in imitation and this ‘skill’ is a part of their own ‘expression’. Furthermore, if we consider this ‘expression’ as ‘creativity’, the only thing that remains unaddressed is the Heideggerian question of ‘origin of the art’. For instance, when we look at Monet’s ‘Impression, sunrise’, it is on a basic level, an imitation of sunrise and this imitation is a result of his creativity leading to a particular style that he is skilled in, i.e. impressionism. Furthermore, we could draw parallels between the sunrise as ‘anterior’ and impressionist skill might be taken as ‘mix writings’ as Barthes would put it. Who also then is the artist? If art can be anything and it is also simply an expression, then perhaps the sunrise is an art itself and a ‘master technician’ Monet thus depicts this in his impressionistic painting. Even though painting and writing are two different art forms, they are still on the basis of ‘expression’. Yet again, this is not a question of the creativity of an artist but rather the creation itself. Heidegger argued that the origin of artwork, the ‘essence’ of art is not in the artist or the process but he believed that the ‘creation’ itself was the essence. Can ‘creation’ be termed as the artist? Now, delving into the foundation of art as a concept and where it may end. Descartes in his second mediations claims ‘I have now learned that bodies themselves are perceived not, strictly speaking, by the senses or by the imaginative faculty, but by the intellect alone’. If we take a rationalist view, throughout centuries art has been defined and redefined but this very ‘defining’ is what gives the concept of ‘art’. To add to this premise, for Heidegger art must be a “thing”. As a result, let us take ‘art’ strictly as ‘bodies-themselves’ or a ‘thing’ that is in our sensuous experience something extrinsic and defined or given meaning by our rational or a mind. This very chain of thought implies, ‘art’ is dependent on humans for definition, creation, and lastly to create a criterion to call something art. This dependency shows that maybe art is finite and it may reach a determined end. Likewise, art theory too relies on the artwork for its emergence and so, forms a ‘chain of dependency’. The chain of dependency here can go as follows, humans having on Hume’s account an ‘impression’ of something they experience sensuously-the ‘idea’ in mind-the imitation, expression in their work-calling it art-people then experiencing this ‘impression’, having ‘ideas’ Vivek Bhadra and then writing them in the form of art theory. Perhaps, there is too much pressure on the meaning, emergence, theories of art and maybe we should just say, “art for art’s sake” (the meaning for this here is a literal one and not what it means historically from the slogan). To continue on Ben’s premise, will an artwork work when it is made for the ‘sake’ of itself? Perhaps, it can if the artist decides to show ‘mainstream understanding in a way that demonstrates the value it holds’ as Ben mentioned in the previous letter. Additionally, this premise has also been argued against by Georg Simmel in his Essay on Art and Aesthetics. Simmel says, “works of art show themselves to be phenomena we can articulate into various elements…For once the elements have been removed from their original oneness in each another, they now differ essentially…this is the contradiction Art for Art’s sake...” Simmel here conveys that artwork can be articulated into various forms and can be canvases, images, sculptures, etc. Once the ‘elements’ have been taken out from their ‘original oneness’ i.e. their original state, for instance, sunrise into a painting, a difference has been created essentially between the two, and art is no longer for the ‘sake’ of itself. Art has been derived and there is a sense of permanence to it, we can also say the same for writing about art, which also an ‘element’ that has been articulated from the mind and taken out for critical assessment from the ‘oneness’ of the artwork. We cannot just stop writing about art either as writing too is an expression as mentioned before, an expression, opinion of the artwork and then one could also write what someone may have written prior to them and this shall go on. To conclude, the death of art as a subject consists of some or more of these concerns and gives rise to even new ones. As far as death goes, we can suggest the aforementioned dependency of art which may cause the concept of ‘art’ to end with humanity. However, for now, this cycle of creation, writing about that creation, etc. seems to be constant and as society has gotten more complex, new art forms have been given birth to, for instance, music and films. Art as mentioned by Ben can no longer create true change but it is still art and I shall now rest this on a bittersweet claim by Hegel “we can only hope that art will rise ever higher to perfection, but never again will it fully satisfy our need to come to grips with what and who we truly are”.
