A THEORY OF ART This page intentionally left blank A THEORY OF ART KAROL BERGER NEW YORK OXFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2000 Oxford University Press Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kaula Lumpur Madrid Melborne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris Sao Paulo Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Copyright © 2000 by Oxford University Press Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Parts a and b of chapter 4 originally appeared in The Journal o fMusicology 12(4) Fall 1994, pp. 407-33. © 1994 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berger, Karol, 1947- A theory of art / Karol Berger p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-19-512860-5 1. Arts—Philosophy. 2. Aesthetics. 3. Poetics. I. Title. BH39.B393 1999 700'.1—dc21 98-47060 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 42 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For my three ladies, Anna, Trine, and Zuzia . . . sonst bin ich verloren! This page intentionally left blank PREFACE "This poet came from a country where the universal ugliness and vulgarity both- ered him even more than the criminal tyranny," writes Czeslaw Milosz about a fellow exile from Utopia, Joseph Brodsky.1 Anyone who experienced the long, gray, Brezhnevite winter of the 1960s and 1970s in Moscow, Warsaw, or East Berlin will immediately see how exactly right this observation is. But how is this possible? How could ugliness bother one to such an extent that it would influ- ence one's moral and political decisions? How could it push one onto the road which ends with exile? Have we not learned that the aesthetic and the ethical are two separate realms? And if there is no exit? Primo Levi describes how in Auschwitz a recollection of a few lines from Dante, the words of Ulysses to his crew ("Consider your origin: you were not made to live as brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge") afforded him a rare moment of exaltation: "As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am. "2 Levi was too sober a participant not to observe that much of the time a cultivated man was at a disadvantage in the Hobbesian world of forced labor and barrack life. And yet, the recollected verses "made it possible for me to re-establish a link with the past, saving it from oblivion and reinforcing my identity."3 Can poetry save lives, then? The questions of the kind that Milosz 's and Levi's observations raise lie at the origins of this book. What, if anything, has art to do with the rest of our lives, and in particular with those ethical and political issues that matter to us most? And will at least some of the art created today, under the more clement skies, meet this most exacting criterion of value and offer any help when recollected by those drowning in some future deluge? Philosophical theorizing about the arts is almost as old as philosophy itself. viii PREFACE Its most distinguished examples, respectively ancient and modern, are Aris- totle's Poetics and Hegel's Aesthetics. Some of the best philosophers have con- tributed to the discipline of aesthetics since it was established in the middle of the eighteenth century (Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dewey, Heidegger come readily to mind) and the discipline continues to flourish today (with such prac- titioners on both sides of the Atlantic as Danto, Gadamer, Goodman, Ricoeur, Scruton, and Wollheim, among others). While my book belongs to the broad family of philosophical art theories, a combination of three factors distinguishes it from the other books in the field known to me. First, ever since Plato philosophers have been much exercised by the ques- tion of what art is, have felt impelled to take on the problem of getting art's on- tological status right, of finding a way to distinguish art from other entities. One way or another, this is still the guiding task of most philosophical work on art done today. (Arthur C. Danto, for instance, writes: "In my view, the question of what art really and essentially is ... was the wrong form for the philosophical question to take. . . . [T]he real form of the question should be .. .: what makes the difference between a work of art and something not a work of art when there is no interesting perceptual difference between them?"4) I do not think that the task is unimportant (and, in fact, devote chapter 1 to it), I just think that one should not stop with it, that there are more interesting tasks ahead of us. We might want to say, in effect, Let's not worry too much about the ontological sta- tus of this object, let's even concede in advance that it is art. What really matters is what happens next (the question I pick up in chapter 2): even if we grant to this object the status of art, we still do not know whether and why we should bother ourselves with it. And to know this should be much more useful to us than to know how to distinguish art from other entities. In short, I am trying to shift the focus of aesthetics to the question, What should the function of art be, if art is to have a value for us? Second, unlike most philosophers today, who define art primarily in terms of either poetry or painting, I tend to privilege music (without, I hope, doing grave injustice to either literature or visual arts). My musical focus is particularly clear in chapter 3, where the questioning acquires a more explicitly historical charac- ter than elsewhere in the book. The reason for this focus is my conviction that music represents the central features and dilemmas of the social and historical situation of art today in a particularly radical, acute, and clear fashion. Thus the diagnosis of chapter 3 might be profitably read against the background of the current Parisian debate concerning the crisis of contemporary art, a debate con- ducted almost exclusively with reference to the visual arts.5 Third, the range of the questions I ask is not limited to those traditionally asked by writers on aesthetics, but also includes issues in poetics and hermeneutics. The two areas of inquiry that all too often ignore one another, the aesthetics of philosophers and what literary scholars now grandly call Theory, are here brought together. The question asked in the chapters devoted to poetics (chapters 4 and 5) is, Given the functions of art identified above, how does art fulfill them? In PREFACE ix other words, while aesthetics is about the aims of art, poetics is about its means: it attempts to show what the world represented in an artwork should consist of if it is to fulfill its functions. In chapter 4 I identify the elements that constitute an artworld, then in chapter 5 I show how these elements may be formally arranged. Finally, the chapter devoted to hermeneutics (chapter 6) asks, Given the aims and means of art identified above, how should art be interpreted? In short, my book differs from other books in the field in that it shifts the focus of attention from the question of what art is to the question of what art is for, it argues that music offers the best insight into the contemporary situation of the arts, and it combines aesthetics with poetics and hermeneutics. The book ad- dresses a heterogeneous audience, not only philosophers, but also literary schol- ars, art historians, and musicologists, and not only academics, but also profes- sional artists as well as art lovers—in sum, anyone with a serious interest in the arts. This varied potential audience accounts for several stylistic, generic, and disciplinary features of my text. Stylistically, I have attempted to keep the text free of technicalities and write in relatively plain English, without dumbing it down in any way. Generically, the text falls somewhere between a scholarly trea- tise and an essay: while I do not ignore other writers in the field and quote from them all too copiously, my main concern is to develop my own position rather than to demolish the arguments of my predecessors. And the disciplinary iden- tity of the book is deliberately vague: it inhabits the no-man's-land between the philosophy of art, literary theory, art theory, and musicology. I have been fortunate to be able initially to test various ideas developed in this book in conversations and seminars conducted with a number of friends and col- leagues over the last decade or so and I mention some of these occasions here with gratitude. Andrzej Rapaczynski and Wojciech Karpiriski will find in these pages echoes of the discussion conducted intermittently in the museums and gal- leries of Italy, Paris, and New York. I have learned more about the nature of poetry from Stanislaw Barariczak and Adam Zagajewski than from many a learned tome. The late Carl Dahlhaus was most generous with his time during my year in Berlin and was as dazzling and inspiring as a conversation partner as he was as a writer. Like so many others, I have derived great benefit from the Faculty Seminar on Interpretation which John Bender and David Wellbery so ably di- rected at Stanford. Similarly useful were several faculty seminars for literary scholars, art historians, and musicologists organized at the Stanford Humanities Center by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. I have benefited also from the discussions that accompanied the conference on music reception which I co-directed with Michal Bristiger at the Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna and the colloquium on music and narrative which I co-directed with Anthony Newcomb at the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities of the Uni- versity of California at Berkeley and the Humanities Center of Stanford Univer- sity. The generous sponsorship of these events by the institutions just mentioned