Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-c9gpj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-09T00:12:57.189Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Post-Historical Dance Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2014

Larry Lavender
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Since the early years of the twentieth century it has gradually come to pass that virtually anything, anything at all, can be considered a work of art. A sliced up cow can be art, and so can a pile of bricks or a hole in the ground. In the domain of dance, a choreographer having difficulty creating a dance work may, for example, simply walk onstage and describe for the audience how her work might have looked had she completed it. Or she can list the work in the concert program with an explanation that it will not be performed because it does not actually exist. The most advanced theories of art in circulation today would, without hesitation, confer the status of art upon either of these options as easily as upon an actual dance.

How did it come to be that such things as these could be art? The quick answer is that it is one of the legacies of aesthetic modernism to have made it possible for virtually anything to be art. As Thomas McEvilley explains:

To be art is to be called art, by the people who supposedly are in charge of the word—artists, critics, curators, art historians, and so on. There is no appeal from the foundation of usage, no higher court on the issue. If something (anything) is presented as art by an artist and contextualized as art within the system then it is art, and there is nothing anybody can do about it. (1985, 289)

Type
Articles
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , Winter 2000 , pp. 88 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © Congress on Research in Dance 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Banes, Sally. 1994. “On Your Fingertips: Writing Dance Criticism.” In Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism, 24–43. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Battcock, Gregory, ed. 1966. The New Art: A Critical Anthology. New York: E. P. Dutton.Google Scholar
Battcock, Gregory, ed. 1968. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Battcock, Gregory, ed. 1973. Idea Art. New York: E. P. Dutton.Google Scholar
Belting, Hans. 1987. The End of the History of Art? Translated by Wood, Christopher S.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bürger, Peter. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Burgin, Victor. 1986. The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Post-Modernity. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International.Google Scholar
Carroll, Nöel. “The Philosophy of Art History, Dance, and the Sixties.” In Experimental Dance in the 1960s. Edited by Banes, Sally. Forthcoming.Google Scholar
Clark, Toby. 1997. Art and Propaganda. New York: Harry N. Abrams.Google Scholar
Croce, Arlene. 1979. Afterimages. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Croce, Arlene. 1994/1995. “Discussing the Undiscussable.” The New Yorker, December 26/January 2.Google Scholar
Crow, Thomas. 1996. The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc.Google Scholar
Danto, Arthur. 1964. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy LXI: 571–584.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Danto, Arthur. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Danto, Arthur. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Danto, Arthur. 1997. After the End of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Danto, Arthur. 1998. “Learning to Live with Pluralism.” In The Wake of Art. Edited by Horowitz, Gregg and Kuhn, Tom, 81–96. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association.Google Scholar
Davies, Stephen. 1991. Definitions of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Denby, Edwin. 1949. Looking at the Dance. New York: Curtis Books.Google Scholar
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee Books.Google Scholar
Dickie, George. 1979. “What is Art?: An Institutional Analysis.” In Art and Philosophy. Edited by Kennick, William, 82–95. New York: St. Martin's Press.Google Scholar
Fisher, Philip. 1991. Making and Effacing Art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Foster, Hal. 1996. The Return of the Real. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Fowkes, William. 1981. A Hegelian Account of Contemporary Art. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, David. 1975. “It's About Time.” The Drama Review 19, no. 1: 43–52.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Clement. 1966. “Modernist Painting.” In The New Art. Edited by Battcock, Gregory, 100–111.Google Scholar
Greenberg, Clement. 1971. “Counter Avant-Garde.” Art International 15: 16–19.Google Scholar
Haapala, Arto, Levinson, Jerrold, and Rantala, Veikko, eds. 1997. The End of Art and Beyond: Essays after Danto. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.Google Scholar
Hart, Lynn M. 1991. “Aesthetic Pluralism and Multicultural Art Education.” Studies in Art Education 32, no. 3: 145–159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herwitz, Daniel. 1993. Making Theory/Constructing Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Jones, Amelia. 1998. Body Art: Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Juno, Andrea, and Vale, V., eds. 1991. Angry Women. San Francisco: RE/Search Publications.Google Scholar
Kaprow, Allan. 1966. Assemblages, Environments, Happenings. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.Google Scholar
Kaprow, Allan. 1993. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kauffman, Linda. 1998. Bad Girls and Sick Boys. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krieger, Murray. 1981. Arts on the Level: The Fall of the Elite Object. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
Lane, John. 1996. A Snake's Tail Full of Ants. Foxhole, England: Green Books Ltd.Google Scholar
Lang, Beryl, ed. 1984. The Death of Art. New York: Haven Publishing Corporation.Google Scholar
Lavender, Larry. 1995. “Understanding Interpretation.” Dance Research Journal 27, no. 2 (fall): 25–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lavender, Larry. 1996. Dancers Talking Dance. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics Publishers.Google Scholar
Lavender, Larry. 1997. “Intentionalism, Anti-Intentionalism, and Aesthetic Inquiry: Implications for the Teaching of Choreography.” Dance Research Journal 29, no. 1 (spring): 23–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mashek, Joseph, ed. 1975. Marcel Duchamp in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
McEvilley, Thomas. 1999. Sculpture in the Age of Doubt. New York: Allworth Press.Google Scholar
McEvilley, Thomas. 1985. “Art in the Dark.” In Theories of Contemporary Art. Edited by Hertz, Richard, 287–305. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.Google Scholar
Meyer, Ursula, ed. 1972. Conceptual Art. New York: E. P. Dutton.Google Scholar
Morgan, Robert. 1998. The End of the Artworld. New York: Allworth Press.Google Scholar
O'Dell, Kathy. 1998. Contract with the Skin: Masochism, Performance Art, and the 1970s. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Osborne, Harold. 1980. “Aesthetic Implications of Conceptual Art, Happenings, Etc.” British Journal of Aesthetics 20, no. 1: 6–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piccolomini, Manfredi. 1992. Changing Modes of Originality in Art. Wakefield, NJ: Hollowbrook Publishing.Google Scholar
Schneider, Rebecca. 1997. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1981. “On Women” (1852). In Essays and Aphorisms. Translated by Hollingside, R.J.Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Shusterman, Richard. 1992. Pragmatist Aesthetics. Cambridge: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Tormey, Alan. 1971. The Concept of Expression. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Vattimo, Gianni. 1988. “The Death or Decline of Art.” In The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modem Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Walton, Kendall. 1979. “Categories of Art.” In Art and Philosophy. Edited by Kennick, William. New York: St. Martin's Press.Google Scholar
Weintraub, Linda, ed. 1996. Art on the Edge and Over. Litchfield, CT: Art Insights Inc.Google Scholar
Wollheim, Richard. 1980. Art and its Objects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar