Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [141]
Modernism, in terms of artistic representationalism, began in the 1880s when photographs and later movies could depict reality better than any painting in terms of realistic representation. For many artists and art critics, art became a means of representing how artists interpreted reality or expressed a reality that can’t be represented mimetically. Such a concept of art opens the door for many types of nonrepresentationalist art movements (e.g., Dadaism and Cubism).
Until the emergence of pop art in the sixties, the future of art (at least in the United States and those non-U.S. art communities influenced by the New York art scene of the fifties) was abstract expressionism, as practiced by the New York School of painting in the fifties. Representatives of abstract expressionism of this time period included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell. It seemed as though abstract expressionism had “defeated” the remaining remnants of realism in painting by the fifties, hence supplanting the over six hundred years of Renaissance paradigms in painting where artworks were evaluated by how well they realistically represented someone or something.
Danto contends that the pop art movement had ended the modern period of the visual arts and hence thwarted the future envisioned by abstract expressionists and modern art theorists such as Clement Greenberg. Moreover, the pop art movement ended art history itself; it did so by teaching people that there is no overarching purpose to art. That movement taught us that the nature of art had nothing to do with better embodying any particular purpose. Of course, this means that no art form or art movement is better than any other. What is left for art and artists after the end of art history is an endless permutation of movements and styles.
When it comes to the philosophy of art, Danto is a historicist and essentialist with respect to the concept of art.10 Danto is confident that there are necessary conditions that, when combined together, are sufficient for an object to be a work of art. Two of these necessary conditions are (1) that an object must have content, or be about something, and (2) the content expressed by that object is embodied using material mediums. Yet, Danto thinks that we have not been able to formulate a definitive list of these necessary conditions due to the historically indexical nature of the arts. For example, pop art as a style of painting was not imaginable for artists living in the thirteenth century. Indeed, according to Danto, the very idea of being an “artist” was not imaginable in the thirteenth century. Yet pop art is a recognized style of painting today because we live in a historical and sociocultural milieu where Cubist paintings are recognized as legitimate artworks.
When we examine Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street from the standpoint of Danto’s historicist and essentialist philosophy of art, we can better appreciate just how important historical and social context is to determining whether (and when) an object can be interpreted to be a work of art. And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street was originally not recognized as being a legitimate children’s picture book. Twenty-seven publishers rejected the manuscript that eventually became the book during the winter of 1936–1937.11 Many of the characters in this book appeared to be unpolished, in fact almost unfinished; sketches and doodles of mythical childhood creatures playing with frumpy people. It took one of his Dartmouth classmates, Mike McClintock, introducing him to the president of Vanguard Press, James Henle, and an editor of that press who later became its president, Evelyn Shrifte, to find a receptive publisher.12 Once Vanguard Press decided to take a risk and publish Dr. Seuss’s unconventional children’s picture book, some critics acknowledged that Dr. Seuss had written and illustrated a legitimate