CHAPTER 5: The crisis of art and digital art — an introduction to Art History
Introduction:
The notion of art has been in crisis for a long time.
It is common to hear empty definitions of what art is, and this is because we no longer believe that art should be tied to a fixed and predetermined meaning. You can understand this in phrases like “art is subjective”. If art is subjective, then anything can be art and there is no consensus on what art is.
The history of 20th century art, in fact, is the history of the crisis of the concept of art itself. In this short text, I intend to address a little bit of this crisis and how it relates to the moment we are experiencing in the current conjuncture of digital art and the rise of NFTs.
The art crisis:
The end of the 19th century was marked by a prolific artistic environment among Enlightenment thinkers. Theories about art have multiplied as never before.
This art was also marked by the advance of Europe over the rest of the world and, consequently, with the knowledge of other forms of art and the advent of the museum. The Europeans understood themselves as the “best” and the “civilized” in the world, as they conquered peoples from other continents and colonized them. At that time, the notion of modernity was consolidated. But what is modern? It is something that is new and better. Something that has a touch of curiosity, while the past and the foreign become exotic, when compared to the current.
In this sense, we see the advent of the museum. The museum, the home of the muses, is where works of art are gathered for contemplation. The European individual now has a different relationship to art than Western history had before. In Greece and Rome, art was the object of religion and state. The statues of Alexander the Great were deified. Statues of Athena or Zeus were manifestations of their divine powers and not just an “ornament”, something to be admired by the cunning and skill of the sculptor — if he managed to do such a work, it was because he was also touched by the muses (the deities of the art par excellence). Thus, the work of modern art becomes an object of conceptual contemplation. The relationship with past works of art becomes one of historical distancing and reflection of the individual’s own place in the midst of world history.
This is the announcement of the “end of art” that Hegel produces at the end of the 19th century and that art theorists and artists will follow throughout the 20th century. It is from this diagnosis that art is conceived as purely conceptual, a new way of understanding and making art, which produced abstract art and many other ways of contemplate it.
The consequence of the End of art:
Several art theorists and artists started from the diagnosis of the end of art, in which the “fine arts” die and “philosophical art” is born. Why is this art philosophical? As it passes through the concept, it can only be appreciated as a reflective process of the individual who contemplates art and art itself inserted in the medium discussed about art.
Some theorists who followed this line criticized the political process in which art was inserted in a reproducibility — that comes from artistic technologies such as photography, the recorder and the cinema.
Now art could be captured and reproduced industrially so that its authenticity and originality would be lost, just as the Ford industry produced its cars in a continuous process.
This new art form would bury art as a new process — some theorists were optimistic (like Walter Benjamin) and others pessimistic about the end of art (like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer).
The emergence of abstract painting and pop art is an indication of a new way of making art, a new form that escaped the clutches of technical reproducibility. In this sense, contemporary art wanted to break the old paradigms of what art would be. Think of Marcel Duchamp with his potty, or Andy Warhol with his canned product.
Performance also emerges as a new art medium, as well as graffiti, spray art, stencil, graphic art and other forms of art, which seek to merge or completely escape from the systematic artistic mode arising from 20th century capitalism.
A new art concept:
Starting with the conceptions of the theorists of the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century: Artur Danto and Giulio Carlo Argan. These theorists seek to understand and explain the new concept of art that emerges after its traditional “end”. Pre-20th century art is certainly dead, but that doesn’t mean that art is completely dead. I do not venture into a discussion of what art is in a universal way, but we can and should think about what art means today, especially with digital art in full swing — the objective of this series of texts: to clarify what NFTs are for us from Yung Pixels (YP).
Argan agrees with the crisis in 20th century art: a problem related to art criticism, that is, something produced by the critics themselves. The work of art becomes “explained” by the critics. This “explanation” is an offshoot of some judgment and every judgment is a value judgment, which implies that all art is fundamentally formed from values. These values are not values formed intrinsically by art, but by the system of culture in force in which the artist is inserted. Thus, art would not have its essence from itself, but from an articulation of other social values and there is not something inherently conceptual in the work to be explained.
Art — and NFTs are extensions of these ideas — , is, therefore, a social manifestation and can only be understood from the means of relationships. Arthur Danto takes a closer look: the more one explores the interpretations, senses and aesthetic experiences of a work of art, the more solid this work is. The degree of “artisticity”, what Danto comes to call “aboutness”, varies according to the social relations that that art generates. However, we could ask ourselves: van Gogh never had his works valued while he was alive, so does this mean that what he was doing was not art? Of course yes! What must be taken into account is that the concept of art is open: people at the time of van Gogh did not recognize the artistry of his work, but the future recognized it and that is why we quote his name — if it were not the case, he wouldn’t even be remembered as an artist and that’s because people from van Gogh’s time had a different concept of art.
So, we believe that these ideas say something to us about the nature of digital art: art can be everything, but it is fundamentally a web of interconnected relationships. In this sense, what else indicates a web better than the internet (network)? Perhaps, the end of 20th century’s art is marked by the birth of another art, an art that starts from technology and for technology; fundamentally a technology that is not only an instrument of social relations, but that is born from them.
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