Post-Historical Dance Criticism

Abstract

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. 1 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) The process of universalizing the category of art-a process that dismantles the Kantian notions that have given shape to Western aesthetics for two centuries-accelerated in the 1960s, but goes back at least as far as Duchamp's introduction of the "ready-made" in 1913. It was Duchamp who, on theeveofWorldWarl, coined the term "anti-art" to signal his rejection of both the pervasive aesthetics of the time and the burgeoning commodity culture of art. As a result, the dominant theory of art today is what is termed the "institutional theory," the basic tenets of which are that art is not a particular kind of thing and does not perform any particular function. Instead, objects and events of all description may be designated as art by those operating on behalf of various artworld institutions. 2 But what does all this mean for art? Art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto offers an insightful (and much-discussed) answer to this question. Since 1964 Danto has wondered aloud about the development and decline of aesthetic modernism, and since the early 1980s he has argued that its chief legacy is to have brought about the end of art. In

Moths, candles and fires: examining dance as creative practice research in a Master's degree

“…Such cultural pluralism can lead to an 'anxiety over evaluation' for dance (Banes, 1994, p. 43), particularly in tertiary institutes (Lavender, 2000). It can also present dilemmas for artist/researchers who are interrogating dance heritage from outside a modern or postmodern artistic paradigm.…”