Diarmuid Costello

On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts

274 I would like to acknowledge the support of a Leverhulme Trust research fellowship while working on this paper, versions of which were given at the 2005 Photography Theory Symposium in Cork and the 2006 annual conferences of the United Kingdom Association of Art Historians, the British Society of Aesthetics, and the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. I would also like to thank Jim Elkins, Michael Fried, Stephen Melville, Stephen Mulhall, Joel Snyder, and an anonymous referee for their comments on earlier drafts, and Claire Bishop, Dominic Rahtz, David Raskin, and Daniel Sturgis for their assistance with images. 1. James Elkins, ‘What DoWeWant Photography to Be? A Response toMichael Fried’,Critical Inquiry 31 (Summer 2005): 941; hereafter abbreviated ‘W’. SeeMichael Fried, ‘Barthes’sPunctum’, Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005): 539–74; hereafter abbreviated ‘B’. The book to which Elkins refers is provisionally titledWhy PhotographyMatters as Art as Never Before. It has been widely previewed; in addition to various lectures and ‘B’, Fried has published short papers on Thomas Demand, JeffWall, and Luc Delahaye (‘Being There’,Artforum 43 [Sept. 2004]: 53–54; ‘Without a Trace: The Art of ThomasDemand’,Artforum 43 [Mar. 2005]: 198–203; and ‘WorldMergers’, Artforum 44 [Mar. 2006]: 63–64, 66, respectively). It was also the source of his 2005 Lionel Trilling On the Very Idea of a ‘Specific’ Medium: Michael Fried and Stanley Cavell on Painting and Photography as Arts

Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts

How might philosophers and art historians make the best use of one another’s research? That, in nuce, is what this special issue considers with respect to questions concerning the nature of photography as an artistic medium; and that is what my essay addresses with respect to a specific case: the dialogue, or lack thereof, between the work of the philosopher Stanley Cavell and the art historian-critic Rosalind Krauss. It focuses on Krauss’s late appeal to Cavell’s notion of automatism to argue that artists now have to invent their own medium, both to provide criteria against which to judge artistic success or failure and to insulate serious art from the vacuous generalization of the aesthetic in a media-saturated culture at large. Much in the spirit of ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, paying attention to the medium is once again an artist’s best line of defence against the encroachment of new media, the culture industry, and spectacle. That Krauss should appeal to Cavell at all, let alone in such a Greenbergian frame of mind, is surprising if one is familiar with the fraught history of debate about artistic media in art theory since Greenberg. Cavell’s work in this domain has always been closely associated with that of Michael Fried, and the mutual estrangement of Fried and Krauss, who began their critical careers as two of Greenberg’s leading followers, is legendary.

Danto and Kant, Together at Last?

Danto and Kant: for anyone who has followed debates in either the theory or the philosophy of art over the last 40 odd years, this has to look like a very odd couple. Indeed, ‘The Odd Couple’ might have served equally well as a title for what follows: an attempt to show how much Danto’s and Kant’s aesthetics have in common, counter-intuitive as that may sound; and, within the context of this broad commonality, to offer a comparative analysis of the merits of their respective accounts of our relation—both cognitive and affective—to works of art. Given that art since the 1960s is widely thought to pose particular problems for aesthetic theories of art (such as Kant’s), to which various forms of cognitivism in the philosophy of art (such as Danto’s) have been offered as solutions, I intend to conduct this comparison on artistic terrain with which Danto (but not Kant) would be naturally associated—to see whether Kant’s aesthetics withstands the challenge. That Danto’s theory speaks to contemporary art hardly bears saying; his ontology was conceived in order to meet the challenges posed by art after modernism— but Kant and contemporary art? According to current consensus, the value of Kant’s aesthetics for the theory of art was tied to the fate of formalism, with which it is widely regarded (at least outside Kant scholarship) to have sunk.

III“But I Am Killing Them!” Reply to Charles Palermo and Jan Baetens on Agency and Automatism

1. Automat, Automatic, Automatism—Again In its summer 2013 special issue entitled “Agency and Automatism: Photography as Art since the Sixties,” Critical Inquiry brought together a small group of philosophers, art historians, and a leading photographic artist to assess the roles typically assigned to agency and automatism in understanding recent photographic art. Doing so, we hoped, might advance the theory of photography in ways that discipline-specific reflection in either field had not. Charles Palermo, in his wide-ranging response to the issue as a whole, takes exception to my critique of Rosalind Krauss’s conception of automatism and to what I have to say about that idea more generally (see Diarmuid Costello, “Automat, Automatic, Automatism: Rosalind Krauss and Stanley Cavell on Photography and the Photographically Dependent Arts,” Critical Inquiry 38 [Summer 2012]: 819–54). Jan Baetens, in his more narrowly focused reply, objects to what I take on trust from Rosalind Krauss’s account of the photonovel. Though I do have something to say about both in my original article, I have much more to

Introduction: Photography between Art History and Philosophy

The essays collected in this special issue of Critical Inquiry are devoted to reflection on the shifts in photographically based art practice, exhibition, and reception in recent years and to the changes brought about by these shifts in our understanding of photographic art. Although initiated in the 1960s, photography as a mainstream artistic practice has accelerated over the last two decades. No longer confined to specialist galleries, books, journals, and other distribution networks, contemporary art photographers are now regularly the subject of major retrospectives in mainstream fine-art museums on the same terms as any other artist. One could cite, for example, Thomas Struth at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (2003), Thomas Demand at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) (2005), or Jeff Wall at Tate Modern and MoMA (2006–7). Indeed, Wall’s most recent museum show, at the time of writing, The Crooked Path at Bozar, Brussels (2011), situated his photography in relation to the work of a range of contemporary photographers, painters, sculptors, performance artists, and filmmakers with whose work Wall considers his own to be in dialogue, irrespective of differences of media. All this goes to show that photographic art is no longer regarded as a subgenre apart. The situation in the United Kingdom is perhaps emblematic of both photography’s increasing prominence and its increased centrality in the contemporary art world over recent years. Tate hosted its first ever photography survey, Cruel and Tender, as recently as 2003, and since then photography surveys have become a regular biannual staple of its exhibition programming, culminating in the appointment of Tate’s first dedicated curator of photography in 2010. A major shift in the perception of photography as art is clearly well under way.