On Thursday one of the panels I attended was "Painting and Plurality: Schisms, -Isms, and the Difficulty of Definition." Barry Schwabsky was the discussant. Most of the talk focused on the problems of pluralism, of contemporary painting as winking, self-conscious pastiche, of most young painters' heavy reliance on irony and self-parody--the usual stuff.

Robert Mertens from the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, presented a paper on corporatism in art. Mertens is a big fan of John Ralston Saul's book, The Unconscious Civilization. Here's a taste of what he had to say:

[Corporatism produces] not wisdom or goodness, but cleverness. The currency of corporatism is that of power, secrecy, efficiency, accounting, competition--but above all, certainty. Its systems are constructed from the assumption of correctness. It focuses on managerial methods, and rewards productivity over creativity...It assumes that all functions are alike and can be subjected to universal managerial standards.

Like Arthur Danto, Mertens seems fond of Hegel; he spent some time talking about art as a sort of midway point between nature and reason. But Mertens definitely isn't a fan of Danto's formulation of the art world. In his essay, "The Art World Revisited: Comedies of Similarity", Danto concludes that whether or not an object can be considered a work of art depends upon the "discourse of arguments"--historical explanations generated by the jostling of people engaged in the field of cultural production. Whether or not something is or isn't fine art is decided by a set of explanations, and those explanations relate to one another historically.

Mertens doesn't like this. He described Danto's vision of the artworld as a closed system dependent on the verdicts of specialists and experts--a result, then, of corporatism in the arts.

This is exactly the opposite of how I've always thought of Danto's essay. The discourse requires participation and a baseline of understanding of the terms involved. But that participation happens at many levels, and is directly opposed to what Danto calls the "institutional theory of art"--the idea that museum professionals impose art judgements and hierarchies by fiat, and that those judgements are infallible, immutable.

Danto talks about Warhol's Brillo Box, and how it came to be considered art. In that story, in 1965, Dr. Charles Comfort, the director of the National Gallery of Canada, declares that the work isn't art. Yet Danto, a philosopher trying his hand at writing criticism, and Warhol, a graphic designer who decides he wants to be a famous artist, prevail.

There's definitely something unnerving about the idea that art requires explanations--and that almost no other factors will assure correct judgements. Yet those explanations aren't set. Like history, they form a fluid dynamic, shifting, uncertain, subject to revision. Again, to me, this seems hopeful, and makes participation in the conversation important, meaningful.