How Art Became What It Is

Part III: And Then Suddenly Everything Was Art

At some point in the twentieth century, visiting a museum became dangerous. Not physically—at least, usually not—but intellectually. Until then, one could rely with reasonable confidence on the artwork being the thing hanging in a frame, standing on a pedestal, or otherwise signalling from a distance: please regard me with a certain degree of reverence. Then bottle racks, urinals, soup cans, cardboard boxes, fat and other objects suddenly appeared—things one would normally expect to find in shops, storerooms, kitchens or lavatories. Ever since, one of the peculiar pleasures of contemporary exhibitions has been the uncertainty as to whether the fire extinguisher is merely a fire extinguisher or perhaps an installation about the institutionalised anxiety of late-capitalist humanity. It is best not to touch anything, just in case.

At first glance, this appears to confirm precisely what critics of modern and contemporary art are fond of claiming: Suddenly, anything can be art. The sentence is rarely intended as an expression of delight. If everything can be art, the objection goes, does the term not lose all meaning? If a painting by Rembrandt is art, but so is a standard commercial urinal, what difference remains between them? And why is the urinal in the museum not only art but possibly considerably more expensive than its identical sibling at the railway station? The value of the material is unlikely to explain the difference in full. That, however, would already lead us into the art market, which will have ample opportunity to make itself look suspicious in the next part.

The more philosophically interesting question is this: What has to happen to an object for us to regard it as art? It is precisely here that one strand of the development that fundamentally altered our conception of art in the twentieth century begins.

Duchamp: When Making Is No Longer the Decisive Factor

More than a century ago, Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) had already begun to cause considerable disturbance to the traditional idea of the artwork. With his so-called readymades, he selected industrially manufactured everyday objects and placed them within an artistic context. The most famous example is Fountain from 1917, an inverted urinal submitted to an exhibition under the name “R. Mutt”. The decisive point was precisely not that Duchamp had demonstrated exceptional virtuosity in the manufacture of sanitary ceramics. The urinal already existed. The artistic act lay in its selection, naming and displacement into a different context.

This changed a fundamental question. Faced with a traditional painting, I can ask: How did the artist paint this skin? How was the space constructed? How does the composition work? Duchamp forces a different question upon us: Why is this particular thing, in this particular place, supposed to be art? Craft does not therefore disappear from art, but it loses its role as a necessary precondition. Artistic practice can now also consist of selecting, relocating and placing an object within a different field of meaning.

Yet this still does not fully explain why a urinal in a museum can be art while its identical sibling at the railway station remains a sanitary fixture. And, as already noted, the difference in price can hardly be attributed solely to porcelain quality and flushing performance. One could make matters easy by saying: one of them is in a museum. But museums possess no sacramental power by which everything crossing the threshold is instantly transubstantiated into art. Otherwise the contents of the museum cloakroom would surely rank among the greatest untapped collections of our age.

I encountered a particularly vivid example of how much more complicated the relationship between everyday object, craftsmanship and art can become in Ferrara.

Bertozzi & Casoni: Rubbish That Is Not Rubbish at All

In a gallery in Ferrara, I saw works by Bertozzi & Casoni, and at first what I saw was mainly rubbish. Crumpled paper, eggshells—some apparently still containing remnants of egg—discarded objects and the remains of consumption and meals. Things, in other words, that normally trigger the cultural reflex to reach for the rubbish bin rather than enter a museum. Only on closer inspection did it become clear that hardly anything was what it appeared to be: the objects were made of ceramic, with a technical precision made all the more astonishing by the fact that this enormous effort had been devoted to reproducing things that seemed utterly worthless. For decades, Bertozzi & Casoni have indeed worked with hyperrealistic ceramic representations of eggshells, paper cups, waste and other remnants of everyday life; their connection with Ferrara and the MLB Maria Livia Brunelli Gallery there is well documented. (Sperone Westwater)

We are suddenly faced with two almost opposite artistic strategies. Duchamp takes an actual industrially produced everyday object and changes its status without making it himself in the traditional sense. Bertozzi & Casoni do almost the reverse: they take things that look worthless and discarded and recreate them, with immense craftsmanship, in an entirely different material. With Duchamp, it remains comparatively easy to say, “I could have put that in a museum.” With Bertozzi & Casoni, the objection becomes more difficult. Anyone capable of making a broken ceramic eggshell that I initially mistake for a real broken eggshell may reasonably expect a certain respite from the assertion that any child could do it.

And yet both strategies lead to the same question: Where, exactly, is the art? Apparently it does not reside in craftsmanship alone, since Duchamp’s readymade largely dispenses with it. Nor does it reside in the object itself, since outside its artistic context the urinal remains a urinal, while Bertozzi & Casoni’s rubbish is not even rubbish. Evidently, the status of an artwork emerges from a more complex relationship between object, production, decision, context, meaning and history.

This also provides a useful counterargument to two equally convenient judgements. The first is: “Art is only art when exceptional craftsmanship is visibly present.” Duchamp makes that definition difficult. The second is: “No one involved in modern art knows how to do anything anymore.” Bertozzi & Casoni dispose of that objection with a ceramic eggshell. The art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries did not abolish craftsmanship. It merely ceased to regard craft as the only valid admission ticket.

Beuys: Is It Art—or Can It Be Thrown Away?

With Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), the problem becomes even more delightful, because an artwork actually reverted to being something another person considered fit for disposal. In 1982, Beuys placed several kilograms of butter in a corner of a room at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. The work that later became famous as the Fat Corner remained there. A few months after Beuys’s death, it was removed by a caretaker in 1986 and ended up in the rubbish. Beuys’s student Johannes Stüttgen claimed ownership of the work; its destruction led to a legal dispute that eventually concluded with a payment of 40,000 Deutschmarks. The frequently repeated story of the cleaner who failed to understand art is therefore not quite accurate in the case of the Fat Corner—although the essential point remains intact. (DIE ZEIT)

For our question, the story is almost too perfect. The material had not changed. Butter remained butter. To Beuys and those who knew its artistic context, it was a work of art. To the person who removed it, it was evidently something that no longer belonged on the wall. And the 40,000 Deutschmarks demonstrate, incidentally, that the difference between butter and Beuys butter cannot have been exclusively philosophical. More on that, as promised, in the next part.

Beuys is also associated with what is probably his most frequently quoted sentence: “Every human being is an artist.” This, too, is often understood as though Beuys had abolished every question of quality: if everyone is an artist, then everything is art; and if everything is art, we can declare the hobby room a museum and end the discussion. What he meant was more demanding. Beuys’s expanded concept of art and his idea of social sculpture applied creative capacity not only to the production of traditional artworks but also to human action and the shaping of social relations. The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen accordingly explains his social sculpture as the idea that people can participate in shaping society through creative action. (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen)

“Every human being is an artist” therefore emphatically does not mean: Everything every human being produces is automatically good art. Extending the possibility of creative action does not abolish judgement. Every person can act creatively. Every person can also continue to produce astonishing nonsense. Democratising possibility and guaranteeing quality are two very different things.

Duchamp and Beuys thus opened the question of what art can be very widely indeed. But for the philosophically most inconvenient version of the problem, we need a stack of detergent boxes.

Warhol, Danto and the Philosophical Soapbox

In 1964, Andy Warhol (1928–1987) exhibited his celebrated Brillo Boxes. These were not simply cartons taken from a supermarket, but wooden objects printed or screen-printed with the familiar branding, made to resemble the industrial packaging of Brillo soap pads. The Museum of Modern Art accordingly describes his Brillo Box (Soap Pads) of 1964 as a wooden object made with polyvinyl acetate and screen-printing ink. (The Museum of Modern Art)

The American philosopher Arthur C. Danto (1924–2013) saw Warhol’s Brillo works at New York’s Stable Gallery in 1964. His foundational essay The Artworld appeared that same year. In Warhol’s boxes, Danto recognised a problem far greater than Pop Art: What distinguishes an artwork from an ordinary object when the two are visually almost—or entirely—indistinguishable? Using the Brillo Box as his example in The Artworld, he made clear that the visible properties of an object are not sufficient. To understand something as art requires a context of art theory, art history and an “artworld”: a world of artistic discourse. (University of Helsinki)

This marks a decisive shift. Faced with a painting by Velázquez, I may argue at length about meaning and quality, but I will not normally doubt that what stands before me is a painting. With Warhol, that certainty is no longer sufficient. A package and an artwork can resemble one another so closely that colour, shape, material and size can no longer provide a complete explanation. The question changes from “What does art look like?” to “What makes something art under particular historical and theoretical conditions?”

Danto’s concept of the artworld is easily misunderstood. It does not simply mean that a gallerist exhibits something, a curator nods, and the philosophical business is concluded. That would be less a theory of art than institutional magic. What matters is that a work can become intelligible within a particular art-historical situation. Warhol’s Brillo Box would not have been the same artwork in 1664. Without Duchamp, without modernity’s engagement with representation and abstraction, without the world of commodities, advertising and mass culture, the gesture would not have been the same. Art does not arise outside history.

At first, this may sound like an imposition: now, apparently, one is expected to know something before understanding art. Yet it was never entirely otherwise. A medieval altarpiece does not reveal itself completely if I know nothing of Christian iconography. If I do not know who Judith is, I initially see a woman bringing a man to a decidedly unpleasant end. Art has never been wholly independent of context. The twentieth century merely made it impossible to ignore that context may be more than an additional aid to understanding: it may be an essential part of what allows a work to be apprehended as art in the first place.

And Then Danto Declares Art to Be Over

Or at least, that is what it sounds like at first.

Danto later developed these ideas into his famous thesis of the “end of art”, set out in detail, among other places, in After the End of Art from 1997. Naturally, he did not mean that after a particular date no more paintings, sculptures or installations were to be produced. Art production continued and, as we know, continues with considerable persistence. What had ended, rather, was a particular narrative of art history: the idea that art necessarily advances in a directed progression from one stage to the next and must eventually attain a particular form.

This brings us back to the first two parts of this series. In Vasari’s account, art progressed through Giotto and the Renaissance towards the perfection of Michelangelo. In modernism, history could be told—as it was by Greenberg, for example—as though painting’s increasing concentration on its own conditions led inexorably towards abstraction. Such stories have a direction. One style follows another because it supposedly solves a problem the previous one had not yet overcome.

After the transformations of the twentieth century, Danto no longer saw any such binding path. Figuration can exist alongside abstraction, conceptual art alongside painting, photography alongside installation, minimalism alongside narrative abundance. No style automatically retains the historical right to declare its predecessor obsolete. In this sense, art is post-historical: not without history, but without a single binding narrative that determines which style must come next. Warhol’s Brillo Box was so important to Danto precisely because it demonstrated that the outward appearance of an artwork no longer reveals the supposed destination at which history has arrived. (post at MoMA)

For artists, this initially represents an immense liberation. Unfortunately, liberation is often more exhausting than it looks in the brochure.

Hans Belting: Perhaps Art History Itself Is the Problem

At almost the same time as Danto developed his ideas, the German art historian Hans Belting (1935–2023) approached a related question from a different direction. In 1983 he published Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?—The End of the History of Art?—notably with a question mark. Belting was not suggesting that art historians should close their university departments or that everything had now been said about Renaissance painting. Rather, he challenged the traditional assumption that the history of art could be narrated as a single, coherent and directed development. The book was first published by Deutscher Kunstverlag in 1983 and was subsequently revised and disseminated internationally. (WorldCat)

This matters because art history is not simply art’s past. It is a way of selecting, arranging and narrating that past. As soon as we place Giotto, Masaccio, Leonardo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Manet, Picasso and Pollock in a sequence, we have already made decisions. We have established connections, omitted others and constructed a story from countless images that existed simultaneously. That story may be exceedingly useful. It is not, for that reason, a law of nature.

The classical narrative functioned particularly well so long as one concentrated on certain European traditions and described art history as a succession of styles: Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and so forth. Even that order was always more complicated than it appears in concise school textbooks. In a globalised art world, the notion of a single main road becomes untenable. Different cultural traditions, media and historical experiences coexist and influence one another. It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the idea that there is one central carriageway of art history while the rest of the world waits patiently on the slip road for permission to merge.

Perhaps the difference can be described in this way: the traditional grand narrative of art history resembles a road. One begins somewhere, travels through various periods and eventually arrives in the present. Danto and Belting transform that road into an immense network. The past does not disappear when a new branch develops. It remains available. Artists can go back, choose side routes, connect different traditions and continue working at points that an earlier linear narrative had long since declared obsolete.

This Is Rather Convenient for Me

For my own photographic practice, this development has a decidedly practical consequence. I deliberately engage with art history, with Art Deco photographers, with František Drtikol, expressive dance and historical scripts. In the second part, I also described why a centuries-old subject such as Judith can interest me just as much as a forthcoming homage to the aesthetics of gum printing, even though I intend to create that effect by digital means. Within a strictly linear conception of art history, one could construct a fairly simple reproach: all of that has already been done. Art has moved on.

But where, exactly, has it moved on to?

If Danto is right about pluralism, no style retains the power of historical necessity to declare itself the only one appropriate to the present. A photograph can respond to Drtikol today and still be a contemporary photograph. A painter can return to figuration after abstraction without thereby driving backwards through art history. A photographer can quote a Pictorialist visual language despite the existence of Photoshop. A story thousands of years old can be taken up again in the present without the calendar suddenly turning backwards.

To be contemporary does not necessarily mean to look optically new. What matters is what a work does today with its historical form. This is not a general amnesty for nostalgia. Danto absolves no one of the task of doing something of one’s own with one’s influences. If I merely produce a poor copy of Drtikol, it remains a poor copy, even if every volume of modern art philosophy is piled beside it. If I digitally simulate the aesthetics of gum printing, one must still be allowed to ask why I am doing so and whether anything interesting emerges from that displacement in time.

But a historical reference is not backward simply because its source is old. Conversely, a work is not progressive merely because nobody understands what can be seen in it.

On the whole, that strikes me as progress. Although, as we established in the first part, progress is a word best not left unattended when art is involved.

If Everything Is Possible, Is Everything Equally Good?

This is probably the decisive point: No.

The fact that almost any object, medium or form can, in principle, become art does not mean that everything automatically becomes good art. The question “Can this be art?” is not identical to “Is this good art?” A urinal can be art. It does not follow that every urinal is art. A heap of rubbish can become part of an artwork. With Bertozzi & Casoni, even something that looks like rubbish can be made from ceramic with the highest degree of craftsmanship. A piece of fat can possess meaning within the context of a work by Beuys. None of this creates a general cultural obligation to catalogue every poorly cleaned kitchen corner as a matter of art history.

Expanding what art can be does not abolish evaluation. It makes evaluation more complicated. With traditional painting, we can apply relatively familiar criteria: composition, command of materials, draughtsmanship, colour and representation. These criteria remain meaningful there. Faced with a readymade, however, they are of limited use. Other questions must be asked: Is the displacement interesting? Does the idea work? Does the context genuinely alter my perception? Is the concept substantial? Is this particular object necessary, or could any arbitrary object serve exactly the same purpose? And does the idea retain any strength once the eight-page catalogue essay has briefly been set aside?

This is not a dismissal of conceptual art. Quite the opposite. If the concept forms an essential part of the work, we are entitled to demand that the concept be good. A poor idea does not improve merely because three neon tubes and a theoretical text have been substituted for a badly painted picture. Anyone who refuses to make craftsmanship the central criterion of quality gains freedom—but not automatic quality.

The comparison between Duchamp and Bertozzi & Casoni demonstrates this particularly well. One position shows that art can dispense with traditional craft production. The other shows that the highest degree of technical virtuosity can remain wholly relevant within contemporary art. There is no longer only one path along which quality must prove itself.

That is liberating. And exceedingly inconvenient.

Freedom Means Having to Decide

So long as an age believes in a necessary direction of development, the artist at least possesses a certain orientation. One supposedly knows where the journey is going. After Danto, that convenience disappears. If abstraction is not automatically more advanced than figuration, a new technique not automatically more significant than a historical one, and concept not automatically more intelligent than craft, then the supposed direction of history can no longer be relied upon.

New does not automatically mean good. Old does not automatically mean obsolete. Technically difficult does not automatically mean significant. Conceptually complicated does not automatically mean intelligent. And a place in a museum still does not oblige me to be enthusiastic.

I rather like this situation. It requires us to ask of every work what that particular work is trying to be. A documentary photograph may operate according to different criteria from a conceptual installation. From a work substantially based on a historical aesthetic, I can demand a conscious engagement with that history. From a work whose entire meaning lies in its concept, I can demand that the idea justify the effort. And from a technically virtuosic work, I may still expect more than proof that its maker has mastered the material.

Perhaps this is the real consequence of the fact that suddenly almost everything can be art: the criteria do not disappear. What disappears is the assumption that the same criteria must apply to everything.

That, however, is by no means the end of the matter.

For if no style is automatically the historically correct one and almost any medium can in principle become art, the next question arises immediately: Who decides which of it matters?

And Who Decides What Remains?

Museums do not possess unlimited space. Galleries do not represent every artist. Critics do not write about every exhibition. Collectors do not buy everything. Universities teach certain artists regularly and others scarcely at all. Some works are restored, reproduced, published and researched. Others disappear. Some names enter the canon, others survive in footnotes, and a great many end up nowhere at all.

If art history is not a natural ranking and no stylistic mechanism automatically selects the most “advanced” works, that selection must take place somewhere else. People and institutions make decisions. Museums, galleries, academies, curators, critics, publishers, collectors and markets all help determine which artists become visible, which works circulate and which prices emerge.

This brings us back to a question from the first part. Standing before Filippo Lippi’s frescoes in Spoleto, one can experience how an artist who was famous and sought after in his own time may, centuries later, have largely disappeared from general memory outside circles with a particular interest in art history. The question can now be formulated more precisely: How is this memory created in the first place?

Why does one work hang in a museum while another remains in storage? Why is one artist written about and another ignored? Why does a urinal in a sanitaryware shop cost a certain sum, while a historically canonised readymade commands a price at which presumably no one seriously discusses the value of the material anymore? How are meaning, cultural rank and, ultimately, economic value produced?

And above all: who possesses the power to take part in that production?

This leads us to Pierre Bourdieu, to cultural and symbolic capital, to museums, galleries, critics, collectors, the market and the canon—and to a potentially uncomfortable realisation:

Art history is not written by artworks alone.

That will be Part IV.