On willful objects

Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life, by Arthur C. Danto, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005; 384 pages, $27.

What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, by W.J.T. Mitchell, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005; 380 pages, $35.

Several times in his new collection of reviews, essays and lectures, Arthur C. Danto revisits the epiphany he had in 1964 upon seeing one of Andy Warhol's "Brillo Box" works. Perceiving no major visible difference between Warhol's construction and an ordinary scouring pad container, he inferred that Western art had profoundly changed: art was no longer evolving along traditional stylistic lines but had jumped the tracks into philosophy, where it would challenge viewers with problems we might parapharase as "if two things look exactly alike, then how can one be art and the other not art?" or "what is the relationship between art and life?" The latter is the question that nominally threads together the articles Danto has gathered under the title Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life.

The trouble with Danto's revelation is that it is just not true that the difference between a Warhol Brillo Box and an ordinary Brillo box is imperceptible or negligible. A viewer with no special training can easily see that one is a neat wooden construction bearing a design of silkscreened paint while the other is a cheaply printed, corrugated cardboard box. One would let this pass if Danto delivered on his promise to interpret art in ways notably distinct from the usual: that is, if he acted as a philosopher discovering ideas, problems and implications to which traditional critics, whether by training or inclination, remain oblivious. A long-tenured professor of philosophy at Columbia University as well as the art critic for the Nation magazine, Danto frequently invokes Plato, Hegel, Heidegger and other philosophical luminal: ies. But his art criticism is more like than different from a traditional critic's. He extensively describes artworks, he relates and compares them to other artworks from the past and the present, and he plausibly interprets symbols and metaphors.

Moreover, the artists and exhibitions he chooses to write about are just the ones you'd expect a mainstream New York art critic to pick--Damien Hirst, Barbara Kruger, Paul McCarthy and Gerhard Richter among contemporary artists, plus major historical shows like those devoted to Leonardo's drawings and Barnett Newman's paintings. Danto's opinions rarely stray far from the New York artworld's evaluative consensus about his subjects. A teacher as much as a critic, he writes gracious, lucid, jargon-free and often highly informative prose. His passage on Matthew Barney's use of Masonic symbolism should be required reading for anyone who has been perplexed by that puzzling artist. But for the already informed reader, Danto's criticism lacks the excitement of a strongly idiosyncratic, contrarian or otherwise unexpected point of view.

Indeed, Danto's favorite critical tenet seems oddly outdated. The idea that institutional context determines what art is and so art can look like anything, and even appear indistinguishable from the objects and activities of ordinary life--as in Fluxus art, to which he devotes a chapter--is taken for granted by most artists, critics, curators and teachers. Given the vast quantity of bad art that has been made lately in the name of bridging the art-life gap, it would be much more interesting to hear something else--like maybe a knowledgeable argument in favor of the autonomous, unmistakably artistic object.

Perhaps because he is a philosopher, Danto is interested above all in artworks as "embodied meanings," whereas W.J.T. Mitchell is concerned with a less intellectual and possibly more primitive experience of visual objects. In his exceptionally provocative new collection of essays, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images, he explores the psychology of our relationship to images: not how they can be cognitively mastered but how they often seem to have magical lives of their own, affecting us as like conscious beings with their own desires, feelings, fantasies, demands and intentions.

Mitchell brings to bear on his subject a formidable amount of theory--Freudian, Marxist, feminist and on and on--and applies it productively and often entertainingly to the whole field of visual culture, including newspaper photographs, TV commercials, racist caricatures and works of fine art. He has a kaleidoscopic mind, and although he writes clearly by academic standards, it can be exhausting to keep up with each turn of the lens.

Ordinarily we are led to think that only people from cultures less developed than ours believe that pictures and handcrafted objects have inner lives. Our modern orthodoxy takes the artwork to be inanimate; it may express or represent the feelings of the artist or cause certain feelings in the viewer, but to think that the picture has feelings of its own would be regarded as worse than silly. It may not seem strange to say that a painting of an isolated house by Edward Hopper (my example) expresses sadness and loneliness, but it would be weird to claim that the painting itself is sad and lonely, somehow longing to be consoled or befriended. Yet, for Mitchell, that might just be the best way to account for the uncanny feelings a viewer has in the presence of such a picture. To relate to pictures as though they were sentient and willful would mean to cultivate something other than the usual skills of connoisseurship or scholarship. It would mean to develop greater receptivity, an ability to listen, so to speak, or, as Leo Steinberg put it in a passage approvingly cited by Mitchell, "to feel along with" the work as much as to see it and grasp its meaning.