David Carrier

Walter Pater's "Winckelmann"

In his recent book, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault, Alexander Nehamas presents an original provocative argument. He contrasts two conceptions of philosophy philosophy as a theoretical discipline concerned to offer arguments; and the interest of Socrates, Montaigne, and also (so he argues) Nietzsche and Foucault in the art of living. The philosophers of the art of living...consider the self to be not a given but a constructed unity....When the work is finished...the elements that constitute the individual produced are all part of an orderly, organized whole (AL, 4).2 Building on his Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Nehamas claims that constructing a self is both a literary and philosophical accomplishment (AL, 2-3). It is a philosophical accomplishment because it requires holding views about philosophical issues. And it is a literary accomplishment because the connection between those philosophical views is not only a matter of systematic logical interrelations but also, more centrally, a matter of style (AL, 3). I want to test Nehamass claims by applying them to a writer he does not discuss in The Art of Living. Walter Paters Winckelmann, the last essay in his The Renaissance, sets the life of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in an account of the rebirth of antiquity in France and Italy.3 Pater develops views about philosophical issues using a literary structure I will reconstruct. As there is currently great interest in Paters work, Nehamass argument offers an original way of understanding that writers arguments. What separates Nehamas from his colleagues who treat philosophy as a theoretical discipline is concern for the literary dimensions of expression of philosophical ideas. Do philosophers make claims that can be paraphrased?

Artforum, Andy Warhol, and the Art of Living: What Art Educators Can Learn from the Recent History of American Art Writing

When around 1980 I began writing art criticism, Artforum was much concerned with historical analysis.l When presenting the work of younger painters and sculptors, it seemed natural to explain artists accomplishments by identifying precedents for their work. Much of my criticism published in the 1980s presented post-formalist accounts of abstract painting. Seeking precedents for the painting I admired, I looked to the history of art. But such pleas for the value of tradition were doomed. Commentators preaching the values of tradition lost out to the writers emphasizing a break with the past. Much of interest for art education can be learned by studying the history of this very influential, small circulation journal. Only in retrospect did the urgency of this felt need for a break with the past become apparent. The history of responses to Abstract Expressionism suggested a different way of thinking about moments of change. Harold Rosenbergs conception of action painting implied that Pollock broke dramatically with the past. Clement Greenberg, by contrast, in a famous phrase said: I do not think it exaggerated to say that Pollocks 1946-1950 manner really took up Analytic Cubism from the point at which Picasso and Braque had left it...in their collages of 1912 and 1913.2 Greenbergs counterintuitive analysis, asking us to see very different looking paintings as essentially similar, had prevailed. So it was not unreasonable to expect that after Greenberg, concern with tradition would remain important. But that was not what happened. Demand for a break with the past often carries political overtones. Historians debate whether the French Revolution broke with the past, or merely developed trends of the old regime. The idea of a complete break with tradition can seem attractive, but of course such dramatic ways of thinking underestimate real continuities. Struggle among post-Greenbergian artwriters to define a new critical paradigm mimics conflicts among artists to define the

The Beauty of Henri Matisse

Because beauty has for a long time now been politically incorrect (at least among certain influential critics and academic historians) the art of Henri Matisse has recently suffered from a kind of benign neglect. His goals were luxury, calm, and voluptuousness, not social critique. He painted female nudes, and was preoccupied with artistic tradition. Celebrated in his own lifetime, he died a rich man. Matisses famous identification of the work of art with a good armchair is another provocation. His paintings, after all, are very expensive armchairs. Liberated from any vital connection with everyday life, they often seem merely escapist. In her recent book, On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry remarks, Matisse never hoped to save lives. But he repeatedly said that he wanted to make paintings so serenely beautiful that when one came upon them, suddenly all problems would subside. That some of Matisses paintings succeed in being serenely beautiful seems selfevident to Scarry, to me, and to a great many other art lovers. What is perhaps worth exploring at greater length, however, is precisely how Matisses paintings succeed in achieving their unfashionable goal. What is it that makes the work of Matisse so serenely beautiful? To start, consider The Painter and His Model (1918-1921), made just after his move from Paris to Nice. Like other works from this period of his career, this picture raises special problems, even for many commentators who admire his earlier experimentation. At the left, we see the painter working on a canvas of a nude. Expression, for me, Matisse wrote, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face.2 Like most of his models, this one appears expressionless. She poses at the center of the picture, beneath a window that admits the light filling the room. A flowering palm, a symbol of fertility, is the only object visible from the world outside the studio. Leaving behind his family and the luxury of his Paris home, Matisse lived and worked in a small room like this one. The entire picture is filled

Rosalind Krauss, David Carrier, and Philosophical Art Criticism@@@Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to beyond Postmodernism

Preface Introduction: The Rise of Philosophical Art Criticism In the Beginning Was Formalism The Structuralist Adventure The Historicist Antiessentialist Definition of Art Resentment and Its Discontents The Deconstruction of Structuralism Afterword: The Fate of Philosophical Art Criticism Index