Catch and Release

My last column yielded a kind of editorial statement from The New Inquiry -- and then, in response to that, a note from Geoffrey Kruse-Safford on where aesthetic categories belong in the ongoing cultural conversation.

So a good week, all in all. But I need to clarify something. In regard to the column, Geoffrey writes:

Scott praises Warhol's mimesis, yet also cites without criticism a review of one of his early short films that calls Warhol out for nihilism.

Actually I don't really praise it so much as emphasize it. Or rather, to be more precise, note how Danto emphasizes it -- in part because this stress intrigues and puzzles me given Danto's larger argument, which is that Warhol's work is the End of Art in some more or less Hegelian sense.

It is the point in art history at which the problem of what constitutes the artwork, or the artworld, is posed in a radical way that exhausts the question while exploding the range of objects or practices so designated.

So says Danto, as I understand him. And this leaves us back at mimesis-gone-wild? A situation in which it becomes more or less impossible to distinguish between critique and celebration? What a long strange trip it's been. Was it worth it? I'm not sure. Danto's argument feels plausible but that is troubling.

So the fact that I then went on to quote -- without dissent -- a very negative commentary on one of Warhol's films (assessing it in a very un- or anti-Danto-esque manner) is, in large part, a matter of being awfully ambivalent about both the artist's work and the philosopher's interpretation.*

To begin to work out a lucid account of the terms of that ambivalence would require an essay, at least. With hindsight it feels like I have been avoiding that effort for about twenty years, ever since Phyllis Jacobson invited me to write something on postmodernism for New Politics. (My response was to go try to read every single thing published on the subject, which was impossible even in 1990.) The effort would also involve revisiting Sontag.

Oh hell, this is getting complicated. Anyway, it is good to have readers who catch the moments where you've tried to drive certain complications into hiding.

* Another aspect being that I try to explore the flexibility of the column form as such. The article on Warhol in an underground newspaper from 1966 came to my attention by chance as I was writing the piece. It wasn't research, just luck, that this happened. Likewise with the passage from Edmund White quoted near the start.

On the one hand, I do as much long-term planning as possible with respect to topic, subject, and method (interview, review. etc.) -- and any given column involves a lot of revision and rewriting. On the other hand, I do want to leave the process as open as possible, both to unanticipated developments and to the voice of someone besides the columnist.