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your theory of art will collapse.” While I can hardly claim the philosophical acumen necessary to verify Kripke’s theory, which is that proper names are such insofar as they have reference and not because of any meaning they may also possess, what is clear is that de Duve fails to show that the word “art” could possibly be such a thing, and yet his theory does not collapse. Why is art not a proper name? One could cite a number of reasons, all from within de Duve’s own argument, but here I will adduce just one: because, as he says, “aesthetic judgments are always comparative, even though it would be useless to try to say precisely what they compare.” A moment’s though will suffice to remind is that Peter, Paul, or Harry, Catherine, Fanny, or Valerie are not, as such, subject to comparison: we “baptize” something as art taking into account our understanding of the tradition of art, but although we may sometimes say, “Funny, you don’t look like a Valerie,” we are embarrassed to have done so because we know that being Valerie has nothing to do with resemblance to, critique of, or any other relation to other individuals with the same name. Proper names are not bestowed through judgment. As Walter Benjamin puts it: “The names [parents] give do not correspond—in a metaphysical rather than etymological sense—to any knowledge, for they name newborn children.” The reason de Duve’s theory does not, nonetheless, collapse is because what he wants to get at with this notion of the proper name is something important and until now inadequately conceptualized: the moment of impassioned judgment in which one declares, “Now this is art,” or, perhaps, inversely, “This has nothing to do with art.”
De Duve’s fumble over Kripke, and the unimportance of that fumble for the substance of the book, tells us that, although he uses philosophy brilliantly but often awkwardly, Kant After Duchamp is not a work of philosophy. De Duve calls himself, rather, a historian. This is a title that Molly Nesbit, for one, has denied him, however. As evidence, she offers de Duve’s crucial interpretation, in his chapter on “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” of Duchamp’s readymade in the form of an inscribed metal comb—peigne in French. De Duve understands the readymades punningly, and peigne not only means “comb”; it is also a subjunctive form of the verb peindre, to paint: it implies, for de Duve, “qu’il peigne” (let him paint!) or, better, “que je peigne” (I ought to paint; if only I could paint). But Duchamp, Nesbit says, always avoided any use of the word Peigne to designate this object; as a title, she tells us, it is a later accretion.
If Nesbit is right—and no more than I am philosopher enough to argue with Kripke am I historian enough to want to argue with her—then de Duve has some serious explaining to do. Not that his theory (here, that “the readymade is to art in general what the tube of paint is to modern painting”) would necessarily fall apart without the word peigne, but he would have to produce a convincing account for the absence of the word. This might not be so difficult—so studious an avoidance begins to seem significant in itself, like Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark in the night—but failure to do so would severely undermine de Duve’s position. Still, de Duve’s account can be said to be historical in basis precisely because it is more likely to stand or fall on such historical particulars than on its philosophical treatment of concepts.
De Duve is more Hegelian than Kantian precisely because, to the extent that philosophy does come into his purview, it is always embedded in a story. What art was, what art is, what art will be are not necessarily the same but can be seen as undergoing a historical development. Aesthetic judgment once took the form of a statement like, “this is beautiful”; subsequently, according to de Duve, it took the form, “this is art”; something different, he gives us to understand (because “art was a proper name”), must be in the process of emerging. Perhaps because of this philosophical historicism, Kant After Duchamp provides—for the first time, to my knowledge—a genuine intellectual meeting place for practitioners of art, of art criticism, of art history, and of philosophical aesthetics, though this possibility comes only at the price of some severe challenges. Will philosophers, for example, be willing to undertake the fine-grained examination of actual artistic activity that would give their discipline a more concrete content? Will historians become more searching in their treatment of the concepts that organize their field? Will it suit artists and critics to become any less simply opportunistic in their use of ideas on the one hand and facts on the other?
Clement Greenberg Between the Lines constitutes a sustained footnote to Kant after Duchamp—to the big book’s acknowledgments, in fact, where we read of de Duve’s first encounter with Greenberg, at the latter’s Central Park West apartment, which led not to a theoretical discussion but with an exchange of judgments: Warhol vs. color field painting. “A few years later,” de Duve continues, “we had our theoretical discussion—in public—but that’s another story,” the story that is told in Clement Greenberg Between the Lines. I suspect that some readers, rendered faint of heart by the 460 pages of small print in Kant After Duchamp, will turn to the smaller book in hope of gleaning something of de Duve’s position without having to work quite as hard at it. That would be unfortunate. Kant After Duchamp is a book that concerns everyone who cares about modern or contemporary art; Clement Greenberg Between the Lines concerns only those who care about the right reading of Greenberg (even if that means anyone who has been convinced of the importance of that by having previously read Kant After Duchamp).
There are a number of reasons why that right reading would be important. One of the most interesting, and one that intersects most significantly with Kant After Duchamp, has to do with its bearing on de Duve’s opening question: “is artistic emotion textually transmissible?” It’s not just that both books are full of arrestingly original and cogent arguments, but that those arguments exist not, primarily, to prove a point, but to communicate a feeling. In Kant After Duchamp De Duve does not attempt, for example, to demonstrate that Fountain is central to modern art, but rather to unfold the complex of feeling (a feeling, to be sure, informed by a great deal of learning and thinking) that would place Fountain, like it or not, at the center of one’s internal organization of the field. In the book on Greenberg, he does not want to prove that Greenberg had a good eye or a good theory, but to show the interrelation of his feeling for Greenberg’s writing with that for Jackson Pollock’s painting.
Speaking of Greenberg’s early reviews of Jackson Pollock, de Duve laments, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read anything similar (or wrote anything similar, I admit).” I myself would have wished to see from de Duve more day-to-day criticism of new art; I remember asking him for that some time in the late 1980s, when I was editing an art magazine, but the bait was not taken. Although de Duve once wrote an excellent essay on Robert Ryman (it’s in his book Essais Datés I: 1974-1986) his explication of the work of a young French artist, Sylvie Blocher, and (in a collection of essays, Du Nom au nous), on the grand old man of Canadian art, Michael Snow, show a strange refusal of Greenbergian incisiveness: these are, unfortunately, fairly typical ventures of an academic into the contemporary scene, lumbering and over-elaborated, however learned; and in the case of Blocher, the reproductions suggest that work in question was hardly worth the chin-pulling. And yet the critic comes into play when the historian’s at work. In Du Nom au nous, “Vox Ignis Vox Populi,” a remarkable essay on the controversy surrounding the $1.76 million purchase by the National Gallery of Canada of Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire, is witty, profound, and totally comfortable in connecting past and present: everything we want criticism to be.
Almost as good is de Duve’s essay for the Phaidon Press monograph on Jeff Wall. As a compendium of reproductions, this volume is more redundant than is usual with the series, since images of his work are already widely published, but its selection of Wall’s writings and interviews (including a new one with Arielle Pelenc) is useful, and while the essay by Boris Groys is disappointing, de Duve’s contributes something new to the literature on this artist. De Duve’s title—“The Mainstream and the Crooked Path,” echoing ones like “The Universal and the Singular,” “The Generic and the Specific”—immediately announces it to be a sort of sequel to the essays in Kant After Duchamp. But it’s still a refreshing surprise to read an essay on Wall in which Greenberg is more important than Walter Benjamin, and Cézanne more central than Manet (though neither Benjamin nor Manet is given short shrift). Although de Duve’s history has its questionable moments here—he concedes far too much to the myth of photography’s cataclysmic effect on 19th century painting—he finally succeeds in wresting the content of Wall’s work away from the social history of art. De Duve does not acknowledge the Mexican artist Yishai Yusidman’s understanding of Wall’s work as representing a sort of salonization of the avant-garde, but his discussion of Wall’s Diatribe, 1985, as a “politically correct but aesthetically unconvincing work” shows how the tendencies Yusidman decries are indeed present in Wall’s work, but as a problem Wall has elsewhere overcome. Among the signal features of de Duve’s style is his ability to modulate between an impressive forthrightness—how many of us would be willing to say, for example, that Cézanne solved a problem for which Poussin has produced no more than an “expedient”—and an almost sibylline reticence, as in what seems to be a tactful demurral about Wall’s recent ventures into a digitalized “grotesque.” Only his willingness to assume considerable familiarity with the existing literature on Wall gives the essay a last whisper of scholasticism.