Danto's Artworld from a Latin American Perspective — Epoche B2
Danto Was Not an Institutionalist: The Artworld, the End of Art and the Latin American Avant-Gardes Two charges, usually run together Arthur Danto is regularly described as the founder of the institutional theory of art and then criticised for Eurocentrism [1] . Both moves need care, and separating them changes the verdict. Danto was not an institutional theorist and said so [2] ; the theory that art status is conferred by an institution is George Dickie's [3] , and Danto rejected it [4] . What Danto held is that an object becomes an artwork by being interpreted under a theory [5] , and that interpretation is possible only against a history. That is a claim about meaning, not about authority. This note argues that the charge of parochialism lands, but not where it is usually aimed. Danto's definition of art survives contact with non-European practice unharmed. His historical thesis — that art has a single developmental narrative which reached its end — does not, and the Latin American avant-gardes are the case that shows why. If Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea are right in Inverted Utopias (2004 [6] ) that these movements were not delayed European ones but had their own problems from the start, then there was never one narrative to end. What Danto argued in 1964 Danto's essay 'The Artworld' begins from indiscernibles. Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and a carton from a supermarket stockroom can be alike in every visible respect, and one is art. No amount of looking will settle which. Danto's conclusion is that the difference is not in the object: To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry — an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld. Read carefully, the artworld here is not a committee. It is the body of theory and history that makes a certain interpretation available. Danto's later formulation, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), makes the point sharper: a work of art is about something, and it embodies the meaning it is about. Both conditions are properties of the work under interpretation. Neither is a matter of who has endorsed it. This is exactly where Danto parts from Dickie. On an institutional account, a work acquires its status by being presented within a practice, and the practice cannot be wrong about what it confers; Dickie's later formulation in Art and the Aesthetic (1974) makes the conferral explicit. On Danto's account an interpretation can be mistaken, because it can be false that the work is about what the interpretation says. Two curators may disagree about a work, and on Danto's view at most one of them is right. That is a substantial disagreement between the two theories, and it means the standard complaint against institutionalism — that it makes art status arbitrary and answerable to whoever holds the gallery keys — is not a complaint against Danto at all. Confusing the two positions has a further cost. It sends critics of Danto looking for evidence that his artworld excludes people, when the exclusion they should be looking for is temporal rather than social: a story with only one beginning and one end. Where the parochialism actually lives Danto's third commitment is historical and openly Hegelian. Art, on this picture, is a practice that gradually becomes conscious of its own nature; each phase poses a question about what art is, and the answers narrow until the question can be posed in a form only philosophy can answer. Warhol is the terminus. After that, in Danto's phrase from the 1984 essay and the later book After the End of Art (1997), art enters a post-historical condition in which no direction is mandated. The sequence Danto uses to establish this is one sequence: European painting from the Renaissance through Impressionism and Cubism to New York in the 1960s. The claim is not that this sequence happened, which is not in dispute, but that it is the narrative of art's self-understanding. That is the load-bearing historical assumption, and it is the one worth testing. The Latin American test Ramírez and Olea's argument in Inverted Utopias is that the avant-gardes of the River Plate and Brazil were not provincial versions of Paris and New York. Their emblem is Joaquín Torres-García's América Invertida (1943 [7] ), a map of South America drawn with the south at the top: not a joke about geography but a programme, of which his Universalismo Constructivo (1944) is the theoretical statement. Torres-García had worked in Barcelona and Paris and returned to Montevideo with a constructivism deliberately grafted onto pre-Columbian sign systems. The result was not European abstraction arriving late; it was a distinct problem — how a universal grammar of form could be built from a specific inheritance. The Brazilian case is more pointed still, because it produced philosophy. The Manifesto Neoconcreto (1959 [8] ), signed in Rio de Janeiro by Ferreira Gullar [9] , Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Amilcar de Castro and others, broke with the rationalist and mechanistic reading of concrete art. In the same year Gullar published his Teoria do Não-Objeto , the theory of the non-object: a work that is neither painting nor sculpture, which does not represent, and which is completed only in the viewer's engagement with it. Clark's hinged metal Bichos are the theory made in metal — they have no correct configuration until someone moves them. By Danto's own criteria this is an artworld in the full sense. There is a theory, published and argued for; there is a history it positions itself against; there are works whose status is unintelligible without it. What there is not is a stage in the Paris–New York sequence. Gullar's starting point was the phenomenology of embodied perception and a quarrel with Mondrian's rationalism, and its terminus was participation, not philosophy. What this does to the historical thesis If Ramírez and Olea are right, then by 1959 there were at least two developed arcs of artistic self-inquiry