I
nterestingly enough Danto actually foresaw in 1981 the possibility of Emin’s own bed being presented as a work of art. In discussing Rauschenberg’s and Oldenburg’s beds and their relationship to Plato’s bed in the Republic and to real beds, Danto fantasizes about the fictional artist J, who exhibited his own bed as a work of art thereby going the full distance in closing the gap between art and reality, as he puts it (Danto 1981, 12–13). The artist J., says Danto, “constituted his bed as Bed and transfigured it into art” (Danto 1981, 133), but since the appearance of the bed would not have changed in the least, the metaphor of transfiguration is out of place. If J’s constitution of his bed as Bed had been successful his bed would have undergone a change in status; it would have been removed from the everyday world into the artworld, not by transfiguration but by being constituted by the artist, or the critics, or the theorists, as the case may be, as a work of art. As Tracey Emin put it, “This is my bed.If someone else installs it, it’s just dirty linen, if I do it, it’s art” (Evening Standard 12 September, 2000).
It seems to me that the only transfiguration that occurred in regard to Warhol’s Brillo Box and Emin’s Bed is the transfiguration of the figures on the price tag on the materials of Warhol’s box and Emin’s bed. Warhol’s Brillo Box, signed by Warhol and authenticated by the Warhol authenticating board, was sold at Christie’s in New York in 2010 for over 3 million dollars
(https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/andy-warhol-1928-1987-brillo-box-3-5371695-details.aspx), and Emin’s My Bed, now on permanent loan at Tate Britain, was bought by a German businessman and art collector in 2014 at Christie’s in London for over 2,5 million pounds (van de Walle 2017).
“There is transfiguration for you”, as Humpty Dumpty might have said.
I offer these reflections, which form part of a more extended farewell to Danto, as a tribute to Arto, wishing him success and satisfaction in investigating untransfigured aesthetic phenomena in the years to come.
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marKus Lammenranta