As Thierry de Duve has put it, whenanything visual can be called art ...

*t+he sentence this is art is a

con-vention. Historical knowledge alone is required to make and judge art,some intellectual interest for
the logic of Modernism, some strategicdesire or interest to see it further extrapolated and tested on
mere insti-tutional grounds. Art fades into art theory.
22
This leaves unasked the questions of who is authorized to do the calling, andhow an object or action
arrives at the point where the convention of art can acton
it.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

p121. George Dickie produced his own institutional theory ten years later, but its lesser contact with
the actualworld of art, in favor of an elaborated analytic-philosophical apparatus, has con-demned it to
a complete lack of inuence outside of professional aesthetics.
5
Theplace that Danto has achieved in the art world, meanwhile, is due more to hiswriting as a critic than
to his strictly philosophical work.Among artists, the divorce of art from aesthetics took its conceptual
shape forthe most part not in opposition to academic philosophy but in reaction to theformalist
criticism of Clement Greenberg and his followers.
6
Greenbergsideas, descended, as Lawrence Alloway once pointed out, from nineteenth-century
aestheticism,
7
had closer forerunners in German anti-aestheticconceptions of the 1920s and 1930s, when partisans of
photography drew sharpdistinctions between the essences of different media, reserving for painting (in
thewords of Moholy-Nagy) the elementary means of color and plane, asopposed to naturalistic
representation.
8
In his essay Avant-garde and kitsch,published in 1939, Greenberg presented art-for-arts opposition to
utility as theidea of arts opposition to the commercial culture of industrial capitalism. LikeTheodor
Adorno, who similarly (but more convincingly) traced his thinking tothe aesthetics of Kant, Greenberg
located arts signicance in its autonomy, itsfreedom from determination by nonartistic ends and its
governance by its ownhistorically evolving principles.
9
Only an emphasis on aesthetic quality couldkeep art alive as an alternative to the market-oriented
culture of capitalism. Inlater writings, Greenberg identied the practice of aesthetic autonomy with
theexploration by each artistic medium of its specic nature. The nature of painting,specically, was
reduced in his thinking to the pristine atness of the stretchedcanvas on which areas of color could be
laid. The modernist assertion of the
p122. value of the artwork in its own right, and not just as a representation of somebeautiful or sublime
reality, became a focus on the expressive resources of themedium, not in order to express ideas and
notions, but to express with greaterimmediacy sensations, the irreducible elements of experience.
10
In this way Greenberg set a domain of
aisthesis
in opposition to what hereferred to as literature, or verbalizable subject-matter, insisting on the gulf
between visual art and language. He invoked Gotthold Lessing as a precursor,but while Lessings 1766
Laocon
located a fundamental distinction betweenpoetry and visual art not only in the narrative capacity of the
former but also inwhat Lessing held to be the greater abstractness of linguistic signs, Greenberg saw
language (outside of modernist poetry) as transparent in relation to subject-matter and viewed the
opacity of its medium as basic to visual art, whosecharacter exhausts itself in the visual sensation it
produces.
11
Concern withmedium, as opposed to subject, or even expression, had made abstraction of supreme
importance in modern art, in which the autonomy of the aesthetic thusbecame, in painting at least, the
substance of art itself.In Nature of abstract art, published two years before Avant-garde andkitsch
but written as a contribution to the same discussion among politicallyminded artists and writers that
Greenbergs essay would enter, Meyer Schapiroargued that despite both appearances and the beliefs of
artists and critics, thepretended autonomy and absoluteness of the aesthetic present in its purest
formin abstraction was a myth. Here as elsewhere in art, he observed, formal con-struction is shaped
by experience and nonaesthetic concerns.
12
And indeed theabsence of literature in what Greenberg called modernist painting reallymeant not
the lack of reference other than to the formal conditions of the work,but just the absence of
representation (or denotation). Nonetheless, Greenbergsformulation corresponded sufciently to
fundamental features of the artistic eldas it evolved with the success of American abstract art in the
postwar period tohave inuence, positive and negative, on critics and artists for several decades.The
concept of artistic eld is borrowed from the writing of Pierre Bour-dieu, who denes a eld of
cultural production as a system of relations among aset of agents and institutionsin the case of the art
system, these include artists,dealers, critics, collectors, art magazines, and museumsconstituting the
site of struggles for the monopoly of the power to consecrate works as culturallyvaluable, in which the
value of works of art and belief in that value are continu-ally generated.
13
Such elds may be characterized in terms of alternative
p123.
positions, embodied in individual and group styles (like Pop, Minimalism, andColor Field painting) and
championed by competing critics, collectors, curators,and gallerists. While the 1950s saw the artistic
eld, as Raymonde Moulinobserves, roughly divided between the seemingly opposite positions of
abstrac-tion and representation, succeeding decades produced, in the United States,an artistic eld
with no normative aesthetic.
14
Nonetheless, the rise to globalprominence of an American avant-garde style, Abstract Expressionism,
keptalive earlier conceptions of modern art based on the autonomy of the artistic actand the associated
high cultural value of abstraction, even while the commercialand political success of the new American
art was undermining the idea of anecessary conict between advanced art and the dominant
culture.Thus literature in Greenbergs sense remained absent from Minimalism,which tended to
restore the emotionalism and sublimity of Abstract Expression-ism both by emphasis on such formal
matters as scale and the nature of materials and by a new attentiveness to physical and social context.
But the workof artists like Frank Stella, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, and DanFlavin, using
such devices as shaped canvases, colored three-dimensional sur-faces, nearly at assemblages, and
colored light, pointedly crossed the boundarybetween painting and sculpture that Greenberg had both
dened and insistedon as primary for quality modernist art. Critic and art historian Michael Fried,in 1967
evidently a disciple of Greenbergs, explicitly recognized in Minimalismthe staking-out of a competing
positionboth of production (and sales) and of critical promotionin the artistic eld. This
enterprise, as he put it, seeks todeclare and occupy a positionone that can be formulated in words,
and in facthas been formulated by some of its leading practitioners, a feature that distin-guishes it
from modernist painting and sculpture and also marks an importantdifference between Minimal Art ...
and Pop or Op Art.
15
The struggle for cul-tural value could be waged as a conict of theoretical categories.The Greenbergian
emphases on opticality and quality as central to mod-ernism were clearly among the targets aimed
at by Robert Morriss 1963notarized Statement of Esthetic Withdrawal:
p124. The undersigned ... being the maker of the metal construction entitledLitanies ... hereby
withdraws from said construction all esthetic qual-ity and content and declares that from the date
hereof said constructionhas no such quality and content.
16
The thought implicit in this declaration was expressed at characteristicallygreater length by Joseph
Kosuth in his text of six years later, Art after philoso-phy: It is necessary to separate aesthetics from
art. Since art once had animportant decorative function, any branch of philosophy that dealt
withbeauty and thus, taste, was inevitably duty bound to discuss art as well. Out of this habit grew
the notion that there was a conceptual connection between artand aesthetics, which is not true.
17
The basis for such ideas is the post-1900 displacement of the conceptualcenter of art from reference to
the world to the artists creative vision, to anemphasis on the artists act, not properties of the object it
produces, as denitiveof that objects artistic status. It was, of course, Marcel Duchamp who rst
drewthe radical consequences of this emphasis, in his work after 1912 and in expla-nations of it as
involving an attempt to escape the rule of taste by the use of mechanical techniques and the artistic
recycling of readymade objects.
18
Onceany object chosen by an artist can be art, he claimed, art is no longer aesthetic that is, effective
through its perceptual propertiesin nature. In a 1961 lectureon his invention of the readymade as an
art form, Duchamp emphasized thatthe choice of these Readymades was never dictated by esthetic
delectation.This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same timea total
absence of good or bad taste.
19
This statement is questionable: not only is the distinction between choice andthe exercise of taste far
from clear, Duchamps choices in fact exemplify a consis-tent (and specically modernist) set of formal
interests.
20
But the readymadeundoubtedly involved a shift in the concept of taste from the expressive action of a
uniquely gifted individual tolet us saythe design decisions of an informedconsumer. This change
Duchamp expressed as a desire to get away from the
p125. physical aspect of painting and to put painting once again at the service of themind. This
meant, for instance, that the title was very important,
21
as part of a general emphasis on the role of language in establishing the signicance of anartwork, a
language no longer employing the vocabulary of aesthetics.As Thierry de Duve has put it, whenanything
visual can be called art ... *t+he sentence this is art is a con-vention. Historical knowledge alone is
required to make and judge art,some intellectual interest for the logic of Modernism, some
strategicdesire or interest to see it further extrapolated and tested on mere insti-tutional grounds. Art
fades into art theory.
22
This leaves unasked the questions of who is authorized to do the calling, andhow an object or action
arrives at the point where the convention of art can acton it. It also treats as an outcome of artistic
decision-making what was in realitya more complex social development. This included changes in the
marketing of art, to be discussed later, and the decisive entrance of art into the expanding embrace of
academic institutions. At a time when the center of art educationmoved from craft skills (centered
traditionally on techniques of representation) toan awareness of current artistic activities and a
readiness to participate inthem,
23
art theory, long inherent in the self-consciousness of modern artisticpractice, crystallized out of the
discourse of artists, critics, and art historians(later incorporating elements of francophone and -phile
literary theory) as anexpression of the institutional autonomy of art as an academic discipline.
Schoolaesthetics was left behind, reecting philosophys character as (in Kosuthswords) an academic
subject with no real social life and no cultural effect.
24
Despite the central role played by language in Conceptual artworks, in addi-tion to the ood of words
that accompanied them in the form of theory,literature in Greenbergs sense remained paradoxically
absent here. Kosuthsaccount of Conceptualism is remarkably like the formalism he
vociferouslyattacks, describing artworks as analytic propositions providing no informationabout the
world outside art but asserting only that they
are
works of art.Despite Kosuths insistence that Conceptualism had abandoned imagery fora form of
philosophizing, and such critical claims as Benjamin Buchlohs scien-tistic celebration of the
precision
with which these artists analyzed the place and