Kimmelman again, on art as the marketing of sensibility

Ancient Greeks, the historian David

Freedberg reminds us in The Power of Images, used to chain

statues to prevent them from fleeing, while Buddhists in

Ceylon believed that a figure in a painting could be brought

to life once its eyes were painted.

Call it aura. Art always has had to do with aura———

spiritual aura in the past, individual aura in modern times-

and this applies not just to visual art. Religious music, for

example, was written to express piety and honor the church.

Court music was composed to compliment the king. But in

the modern era, secular symphonies arrived. What were they

supposed to celebrate? The temperament of the composer.

As the pianist Charles Rosen has written, pure instrumental

music came to have “its own law, its own reason for existing:

it [was] produced by the artist not for a purpose but because

he must——out of an ‘inner necessity”’ Which is to say that the

new musical artist sought to make a living by selling his

soul———his individual sensibility.

For visual artists, this sensibility came to be most com-

monly measured by touch. The Industrial Revolution, providing

machine-made objects to the masses, distinguished touch

even further as a virtue. “The artist’s touch became the basis of

aesthetics and connoisseurship,” as Arthur Danto has put it.

And it was against this backdrop that Marcel Duchamp

bought his machine-made objects like shovels and urinals,

signed them, and declared them art, and thereby did more

than just question traditional standards of beauty; he chal-

lenged the prestige of the handmade. Duchamp was upend-

ing the notion of art as an object of physical and material

distinction, individually put together. It was a short step

from the urinal to Duchamp’s bottling of Paris air and call-

ing the “empty” bottle a sculpture. If bottled air were art, the

only question left was, What was art not?