T
he Transfiguration of the Commonplace, was, Danto admits, in a sense a celebration of Pop art, which he interpreted as “a transfiguration of the commonplace”, Warhol’s Brillo Box being “Brillo box transfigured”. Pop art, he claims, “was the transfiguration of the everydayworld” (Danto 2013e, 668). Clearly, the notion of transfiguration plays an important role in his account of art although it does not enter his definition of works of art as symbolic expression embodying their meanings (Danto 1992, 41). Transfiguration has, however, a role to play in constituting an object as a work of art. An object is, he says, a work of art only under an interpretation, where the interpretation is a “sort of function that transfigures” the mere thing into a work (Danto 1981, 125).
Warhol’s Brillo Box has been important to Danto’s philosophy in a way that Duchamp’s readymades never were because “[i]t entered my life and thought and transformed them both”, as he explains (Danto 2012, 309).
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is the record of such an existential encounter with art. He appropriated the title from Muriel Spark’s novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), where one of the characters, Sandy Stranger, who becomes Sister Helen of the Transfiguration, wrote “an odd psychological treatise on moral perception”, entitled “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace” (Spark [1961] 2000, 35). Danto’s “revelatory moment in art” came when he went to the Stable Gallery on Manhattan in 1964 and saw Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964). Here was, at last, he says, “a philosophical question raised from within the art world” (Danto 1994, 6), that is, the question as to why Warhol’s Brillo Box is a work of art whereas a Brillo box in the supermarket isn’t. The answer, Danto claims, cannot be in terms of the perceptual properties of the Brillo Box in the gallery and the Brillo box in the supermarket. The eye, says Danto, “is incapable of determining the answer to this question” (Danto 1994, 6). The eye is of no value whatever, he says, when it comes to distinguishing art from non-art.
If the Brillo Box is a work of art, it is a work of art in virtue of the prevailing theories and opinions in the artworld, the artworld being “an atmosphere of theory and of historical beliefs, relative to which things get constituted artworks” (Danto 1994, 7).
What is so special about Warhol’s Brillo Box that so fascinated and impressed him, and what is the challenge to the philosophy of art that it presents? Warhol painted stacks of plywood boxes to resemble the cardboard cartons of Brillo scouring pads. The Warhol Brillo Box resembled the commercial Brillo box, but was not as Danto noted in his
original article, “The Artworld” (1964, 580), totally indiscernible from the commercial Brillo box. Warhol’s box(es) had been silk-screened by hand whereas the text on the ordinary boxes had been machine printed. A closer look at Warhol’s box and the commercial ones designed by the artist James Harvey would have revealed these minute differences between them.
Danto’s point, however, is that the art status of the Warhol box is not due to any perceptible differences between his Brillo Box and the ordinary Brillo box. The commercial boxes could have been made out of plywood, and Warhol could have made his box out of cardboard without the Brillo Box ceasing to be art, Danto claims. The more general point is, that a definition of art in Danto’s view cannot be based on any perceptible properties of the works, but rather on certain relational and contextual properties. Danto’s discussion of perceptual properties seems, however, to privilege the visual arts, and casts doubt on the generality of his conception and his definition of art (Carrier 2012, 236).What are the perceptual properties of literature and architecture, we may well ask?
Danto’s many critics and commentators have discussed and argued about most aspects of Danto’s philosophy of art offering thorough and thoughtful criticisms of his views, but very few have treated Danto’s notion of transfiguration at length. Several conferences and collections of essays have been devoted to Danto’s philosophy of art (Haapala et al. 1997; Carrier 1998), and more recently, Danto and his Critics (Rollins 2012) and The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto (Auxier and Hahn 2013). The surprising thing is, given that practically every aspect of Danto’s philosophy of art has been examined, nobody, or, almost nobody, has questioned the adequacy and relevance of Danto’s notion of transfiguration and its use as a metaphor in regard to art. The only exceptions are to my knowledge two essays by Christel Fricke (one co-authored with Steinar Mathisen) in rather inaccessible publications (Fricke and Mathisen 2008 and 2010; Fricke 2008/9), and the present essay.
The very title, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, of Danto’s first book in the philosophy of art, suggests according to Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins, “the centrality of religious images” in his philosophy of art. “Terms and concepts from theology”, they claim, “are also central to Danto’s account [of art]” (Solomon and Higgins 2012, 182), likewise Richard
Shusterman, who claims that “the metaphor of art as transfiguration”
is of central importance in Danto’s philosophy of art (2012, 252). Danto declares himself a totally non-religious person, although he believes that
“the concepts that come out of religion are just astonishing” (Maes 2017, 78); apparently he has in particular the biblical notion of transfiguration in mind. Many critics take, like Maes in his interview with Danto, his talk of transfiguration at face value, for Maes claims that Tracey Emin and Carl Andre “are still transfiguring commonplace objects into art” (Maes 2017, 72).
In his “Replies to Essays”, in Danto and his Critics, Danto underlines that he has been impressed by the extraordinary degree to which Christianity is imbued by the most abstruse kind of essentialist Greek metaphysics. He finds the fusion of “Greek essentialist metaphysics and Jewish historicism”
irresistible and apparently of great value not only in the philosophy of art (Danto 2012, 310).
The title of Danto’s first book in the philosophy of art, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, is indeed catchy and suggestive as everyone interested in contemporary philosophy of art knows about the book, but very few realize the import of the term “transfiguration”.