This is the first book to address in detail the relation between art and Object-Oriented Ontology (hereafter OOO), in the wake of a number of earlier publications on the topic.¹ For the purposes of this book, “art” means visual art, though the principles developed here could be exported – mutatis mutandis – to any artistic genre. What ought to make OOO’s relation to art of especial interest to the reader is that this new philosophy treats art not as a peripheral subfield, but as the very heart of our discipline, as in the well-known OOO call for “aesthetics as first philosophy.”² But what does it mean for aesthetics to serve as the basis for all philosophy, and why would anyone accept such an apparently deviant thesis? To develop these questions is the purpose of this book.

The title Art and Objects was recommended by an editor at Polity, and I could hardly refuse such a straight-to-the-point suggestion. Nonetheless, it could lead to one of two possible misunderstandings. The first is the verbal similarity of the phrase “Art and Objects” to the titles of two other works that lead in different directions from my own. One is Richard Wollheim’s 1968 book-length essay Art and its Objects, a lucid piece of analytic philosophy not discussed directly in the pages that follow. The other similar title, no doubt more familiar to readers of this book, belongs to the provocative 1967 article “Art and Objecthood” by Michael Fried. This latter coincidence is more important, since Fried unlike Wollheim has had a significant impact on my thinking about artworks. Nonetheless, our respective uses of the word “object” have precisely the opposite meaning. For Fried, “object” means a physical obstacle literally present in our path, as he famously complains in the case of minimalist sculpture. For OOO, by contrast, objects are always absent rather than present. OOO’s real objects – as opposed to what we call sensual objects – can only be alluded to indirectly; they never take on literal form, and need not even be physical.

That brings us to the second and broader misunderstanding to which the title of this book might lead. Positive talk of “objects” in an arts context is often assumed to mean praise for mid-sized durable entities (sculptures, statues, glassworks, easel paintings) at the expense of what seem to be more free-form art media (performances, happenings, transient installations, conceptual works). In a OOO setting, however, “object” has a far broader meaning than solid material things. For the object-oriented thinker, anything – including events and performances – can count as an object as long as it meets two simple criteria: (a) irreducibility downward to its components, and (b) irreducibility upward to its effects. These two types of reduction are known in OOO as “undermining” and “overmining,” while their combination – which happens more often than not – is called “duomining.”³ OOO holds that nearly all human thought involves some form of duomining, and tries to counteract it by paying attention to the object in its own right, apart from its internal components and outward effects. This is admittedly a difficult task, since undermining and overmining are the two basic forms of knowledge we have. When someone asks us what something is, we can answer either by telling them what the thing is made of (undermining), what it does (overmining), or both at once (duomining). Given that these are the only kinds of knowledge that exist, they are precious tools of human survival, and we must be careful not to denounce these three forms of “mining” or pretend we can do without them. Yet my hope is that the reader will come to recognize the parallel existence of forms of cognition without knowledge that somehow bring objects into focus, despite not reducing them in either of the two mining directions.

Art is one such type of cognition; another is philosophy, understood in the Socratic sense of philosophia rather than the modern one of philosophy as a mathematics or natural science manqué. As I wrote in “The Third Table,” art has nothing to do with either of the famous “two tables” of the English physicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington: one of them being the physical table composed of particles and empty space (undermining), the other the practical table with distinct sensible qualities and the capacity to be moved around as we please (overmining).⁴ For precisely the same reason, the celebrated distinction of the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars between the “scientific image” (undermining) and “manifest image” (overmining) cannot do productive work for us.⁵ Instead, art like philosophy has the mission of alluding to a “third table” that lies between the two extremes of cognition recognized by Eddington and Sellars. Already, those familiar with Fried will see that art in the OOO sense entails the exact opposite of the literalism that he associates with objecthood, though this is a mere difference in terminology that does not yet run counter to Fried’s core principles.

It is well known that the OOO program emphasizes objects considered apart from their relations, which cuts against the grain of today’s relational fashion in philosophy, the arts, and nearly everywhere else. By “relational” I mean the notion that an artwork (or any object) is intrinsically defined by some sort of relation with its context. In philosophy these are called “internal relations,” and OOO upholds the counter-tradition that takes relations to be external to their terms: so that, in all but exceptional cases, an apple remains the same apple no matter the context in which it occurs. Now, to consider an object apart from its relations obviously sounds like the well-known “formalism” in art and literary criticism, which downplays the biographical, cultural, environmental, or socio-political surroundings of artworks in favor of treating such works as self-contained aesthetic wholes. In this connection, I have written some admiring things about the long unfashionable Greenberg, who deserves the title “formalist” despite his own resistance to the term.⁶ We will see that the same holds for Fried, who is also a formalist in my sense despite his ongoing displeasure with that word. Robert Pippin’s complaint that “there persists a myth that Fried’s work is ‘formalist,’ indifferent to ‘content’” certainly hits the mark, but only if we accept Fried and Pippin’s definition of formalism as denoting indifference to content.⁷ It is true that no one should accuse Fried of suppressing the content of paintings in the way that Greenberg usually does, but I will claim that there exists a more basic sense of formalism than this.

Given OOO’s emphasis on the non-relational autonomy or closure of objects from their contexts, it is no surprise that there has been some wariness toward object-oriented thought in those aesthetic quarters where formalism is in low repute, even among those who feel sympathy for us on other grounds. Claire Colebrook, the prominent Deleuzean, worries aloud that OOO literary criticism will merely amount to a continuation of formalist business as usual.⁸ My friend Melissa Ragona at Carnegie-Mellon University reacted as follows when I first posted the cover of this book on social media: “Excellent move from the old days of discussing Clement Greenberg to Joseph Beuys!”⁹ Some months earlier, the Munich-based artist Hasan Veseli had interrupted an otherwise positive email to express the following reservation about my past writings on art:

My art friends and I can’t understand why you go on and on about Greenberg, although we do get your point (background, flatness). In retrospect it feels that his writings were already assigned an expiration date at the time that he wrote that stuff (probably because of his problems with subject matter, making art just a formalist exercise). Notable critics, from today’s perspective, are the likes of Rosalind Krauss, David Joselit, Hal Foster, Arthur Danto …¹⁰

In my continuing fondness for Greenberg, I am outnumbered in the art world by his detractors. Nonetheless, I would respond by saying that there are perfectly good reasons to “go on and on” about him, even if his theories seem linked with a kind of art that lost its cutting-edge prestige a half century ago, and even if some of his theories can be shown to be wrong. The issue, as I see it, is that formalism was at some point simply denounced and abandoned rather than assimilated and overcome, as some literary critics have also argued in their own field.¹¹ A similar thing happened in philosophy to another theory that stressed the isolation of autonomous things: the unloved doctrine of the thing-in-itself beyond all human access. Here we have crossed into the long shadow of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose three great Critiques sounded the formalist keynote in metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, respectively. We will see that Kantian formalism, conveniently centered in his recurring term “autonomy,” consists of an intriguing combination of breakthroughs and deficiencies. Until the deficiencies are addressed and assimilated rather than circumvented by makeshift means, such as the vacuous claim that autonomy is inherently “bourgeois” or “fetishistic,” there is a risk that philosophy and the arts – their fates more closely linked than is commonly believed – will continue to amount to little more than an ironic contempt for formalist claims.¹² I hold that this is exactly what happened in the first post-formalist philosophy (better known as German Idealism) and a century and a half later in post-formalist art. In both cases, important new possibilities were gained that had been foreclosed to formalism, but an even more crucial breakthrough was lost. One of the broadest claims of this book is that there will be no further progress in philosophy or the arts without an explicit embrace of the autonomous thing-in-itself. Moreover, we need to draw the surprising theatrical consequences of this point, despite Fried’s understandable wish to banish theatricality from art. David Wellbery restates Fried’s position with wonderfully flamboyant rhetoric:

The (essentially ‘theatrical’) instigation of a frustrated yearning, a vertiginous sense of transport toward the never-to-be-achieved completion of an additive series, elicits a form of consciousness that is essentially non-artistic. Thought, work-internal differentiation, lucidity, and selfstanding achievement are sacrificed for the sake of the frisson of a mysteriously agitated, portentous emptiness.¹³

Let us all stand united against “mysteriously agitated, portentous emptiness” – though I still find much of aesthetic value in Richard Wagner’s operas, which Wellbery seems to detest. The idea of theatricality defended in this book is not that of histrionic melodrama.

I took up these themes in 2016 in Dante’s Broken Hammer, a book whose first part is devoted to the Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri, and whose second part challenges the thought of that most un-Dantean figure, Kant.¹⁴ As mentioned, autonomy is perhaps the most central of Kant’s terms, unifying as it does the chief insights of all three of his Critiques. His metaphysics features the unknowable thing-in-itself, unreachable in any direct fashion; opposed to this noumenal thing is human thought, structured according to our pure intuitions of space and time and the twelve categories of the understanding.¹⁵ Each of these realms is autonomous, even if Kant speaks in contradictory fashion of the thing-in-itself as cause of the world of appearance, an inconsistency on which the master was hammered by his first wave of converts.¹⁶ In ethics, Kant’s commitment to formalism is openly declared.¹⁷ An action is not ethical if it is motivated by any sort of external reward or punishment: whether it be fear of Hell, the desire for a good reputation, or the wish to avoid a bad conscience. An act is ethical only if performed for its own sake, in accordance with a duty binding on all rational beings. Stated in technical terms, ethics must be “autonomous” rather than “heteronomous.” Contextual subtleties play no role in Kant’s ethics: in his most famous example, lying cannot be justified even when done with the best of intentions and yielding the most admirable results. Indeed, context is what must be rigorously excluded for an act to count as ethical at all.

This leads us to Kant’s philosophy of art, another triumph of formalism, even if he does not use that exact word in this portion of his philosophy.¹⁸ Beauty must be self-contained in the same manner as ethical actions, unrelated to any personal agreeableness. Here as in his ethics, what is at stake for Kant is not the art object, which cannot be grasped directly any more than the thing-in-itself, and cannot be explained at all in terms of criteria or literal prose descriptions. Instead, beauty concerns the transcendental faculty of judgment shared by all humans, which serves as the guarantor that anyone of sufficiently developed taste ought to agree on what is beautiful. The same holds for our experience of the sublime, whether it comes in the “mathematical” version of something infinitely large (the nighttime sky, the vastness of the sea) or the “dynamical” version of something infinitely powerful (a crushing tsunami, the discharge of a nuclear weapon). Here once more, Kant holds that the sublime is really about us rather than the apparently sublime entity, since the crucial feature of the sublime is that it overpowers our finite selves with an experience of infinite magnitude.

Nonetheless, Kant mixes two very different senses of formalism in a way that is fateful, in the negative sense, for modern philosophy and art theory. The important kernel of truth in his ethics should be clear enough: an action whose purpose is to gain rewards or avoid punishment is not really an ethical act, though we can never be entirely sure that any given act is free of ulterior motives. From here it is a small step toward recognizing the substantial truth of his aesthetics: an artwork is not beautiful just because it happens to please or flatter us in the manner of, say, Augustus Caesar reading Virgil’s fulsome praise of his dynasty in the Aeneid.¹⁹ Nonetheless, I hold that Kant is overly specific in his claim as to what must be separated from what in order to establish autonomy. For him as for nearly all modern Western philosophers, the two primary elements of reality are human thought on one side and everything else (a.k.a. “the world”) on the other, and it is these two realms in particular that must be prevented from contaminating each other. In my opposition to this sentiment, I follow the French philosopher Bruno Latour’s interpretation of modernity, in We Have Never Been Modern, as the impossible attempt to isolate and purify two distinct zones called human and world.²⁰

At any rate, if the main problem with Kant is his formalist obsession with separating humans from everything else, we know which great figure in intellectual history resembles him least: that would be Dante, who wishes not to separate humans from world, but to fuse them together as tightly as possible.²¹ Dante’s cosmos is famously composed of love, in the sense of someone’s passion for something: whether it be good, bad, or downright evil. The basic units of reality for Dante are not free autonomous subjects, but amorous agents fused with or split from the targets of their various passions, and judged by God accordingly. This is the sense in which Kant is the perfect anti-Dante: someone who promotes cool disinterest in ethics as in art, since to do otherwise would meld thought with world when, according to Kant, these two must be kept separate at all costs.

In his admiring critique of Kantian ethics, the colorful German philosopher Max Scheler looks very much like a twentieth-century Dante for philosophy. While Scheler insists Kant is right that ethics must be self-contained and not just a tool to attain certain “goods and purposes,” he remains skeptical toward what he calls the “sublime emptiness” of Kant’s call to universal duty.²² Scheler’s alternative model displays at least two salient features missing from Kant’s theory. In the first place, ethics is less a matter of duty internal to human thought than an assessment of the things that one loves and hates, whether properly or improperly: an ordo amoris or rank order of passions.²³ In the second place, Scheler finds Kant’s ethics too sweepingly universal, since any given person, nation, or historical period has a specific ethical calling that belongs to it alone. More generally, Scheler’s theory entails that the basic unit of ethics is not a thinking human in isolation from the world; rather, the unit of ethics is a compound or hybrid (the latter is Latour’s term) made up of the human ethical agent and whatever they take seriously enough to love or hate. Ethical autonomy thus gains a new meaning: no longer a clean separation of humans from world, but that of any specific human–world combination from all that surrounds it. Note that this does not amount to a regression into what the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has concisely termed “correlationism”: a type of modern philosophy that focuses on the correlative relationship between thought and world, while denying us the right to speak of either in isolation. For one thing, both humans and the objects they love remain independent of their relations, since neither is fully exhausted by them. And more importantly, the ethical relation between human and object is itself a new autonomous object whose reality cannot be fully grasped by either of these elements or by any external observer. The real embraces us from above no less than eluding us below.

The relevance to art of this ethical detour will now perhaps be clear. It had seemed to me until recently that there was no Schelerlike figure in the arts to critique Kant’s aesthetics on analogous grounds. But it now seems clear that Fried is the man for the job. True enough, his concept of “absorption” seems to perform the basically Kantian labor of keeping us at a distance from the artwork through the preoccupation of its elements with each other, resulting in a “closure” that ensures their obliviousness to the beholder. Yet even in Fried’s account this is true only for a number of French painters of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anti-theatrical tradition – as theorized by the philosopher Denis Diderot – along with certain trailblazing forerunners such as Caravaggio.²⁴ For it is Fried himself who has shown that, no later than the work of Jacques-Louis David, it becomes increasingly difficult to read any painting as straightforwardly theatrical or anti-theatrical – and that in the crucial career of Édouard Manet, the need for a painting to face and acknowledge rather than negate and close off the beholder becomes unmistakable.²⁵

In aesthetics no less than ethics, Kant insists on the separation of disinterested spectators from the objects they contemplate. It is noteworthy that Greenberg and Fried do it the opposite way from Kant, by asking us to focus on the art object while subtracting the human side of the equation. This can be seen in Greenberg’s rejection of Kant’s transcendental approach to art in favor of something closer to Humean empiricism and, of course, in Fried’s vehement if qualified distaste for theatricality.²⁶ What Kant shares with Greenberg and Fried is the assumption that autonomy must mean one very specific autonomy in particular: that of humans from world. This probably explains Fried’s unease with such recent philosophical trends as Latourian actor-network-theory, the vital materialism of Jane Bennett, and OOO itself, all of them committed in different ways to a flattening of the Kantian human–world divide.²⁷ The analogy in aesthetics for Scheler’s anti-Kantian ethics would be the view that the basic unit of aesthetics is neither the art object nor its beholder, but rather the two in combination as a single new object. Despite Fried’s probable hostility to such a notion on anti-theatrical grounds, we will see that he comes surprisingly close to adopting it in his historical work. Though I will end up endorsing something much like the theatricality that Fried condemns, this by no means ruins the autonomy of the artwork, since the compound entity made of work and beholder is a self-contained unit not subordinate to any external practical or socio-political purpose. This admittedly strange result will require that we jettison a number of typical formalist principles in aesthetics, though mostly not the ones that post-formalist art has seen fit to abandon. At the same time, we will be led to some new and important considerations for philosophy.

Chapter 1 (“OOO and Art: A First Summary”) gives an overview of OOO aesthetic theory, which conceives of art as activating a rift between what we call real objects (RO) and their sensual qualities (SQ). This will return us to the long unfashionable phenomenon of beauty, which we grasp by contrast with its eternal enemy: not the ugly, but the literal. An examination of metaphor is the easiest way to see what is wrong with literalism, though metaphor also turns out to have a particularly clear theatrical structure, and this has important implications for the sphere of visual art no less than for literature.

Chapter 2 (“Formalism and its Flaws”) offers a more detailed tour of Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The goal of this chapter is to pin down the strengths and weaknesses of that foundational book of modern aesthetics, which in most respects remains unsurpassed. I will claim that despite abundant discussion of that book, the basic principle of Kant’s aesthetic theory has been ignored more than overcome; for this very reason, it continues to draw us back into its midst, like a black hole capturing fugitive satellites. Among other things, I will claim that Kant’s distinction between the beautiful and the sublime does not hold. There is in fact no such thing as the sublime, assuming we follow Kant in defining it as the absolutely large or powerful. As Timothy Morton has shown in Hyperobjects, there is something deeply anthropocentric about absolutes and infinities: which Kant might be the first to admit, given his surprisingly human-centered interpretation of the sublime.²⁸ Infinity has recently returned to philosophy in the works of Alain Badiou and his student Meillassoux, through their intriguing shared debt to the transfinite mathematician Georg Cantor.²⁹ Yet I am inclined to agree with Morton that very large finite numbers are of greater philosophical interest than infinity. Certain kinds of beauty can provide an experience of gigantic finitudes without making an ultimately impossible passage to the non-existent sublime, which is replaced in OOO by the notion of the “hyperobjective.”

Chapter 3 (“Theatrical, Not Literal”) considers the work of Fried, the most significant living figure in the formalist tradition despite his own continuing rejection of that term. I will claim that Fried’s critique of literalism is uncircumventable, though he uses “literal” in a more restricted sense than OOO. Any art that ventures too close to the edge of the literalist crater must find some way to avoid it, at the risk of its dissolution as art: this is the major problem faced by Dada, though not – I will argue – with its supposed brother Surrealism. But whereas Fried pairs literalism with theatricality, I hold that the two are polar opposites. Indeed, we avoid the literalist destruction of art in no other way than through the theatricality which alone brings art to life. There is the added complexity that for Fried theatricality is not something that can be straightforwardly avoided, given that there is no art without a beholder. Nonetheless, when speaking as a critic of contemporary art, “theatrical” remains Fried’s adjective of choice for works that fail to impress him, and I do not follow him in this usage.

In Chapter 4 (“The Canvas is the Message”) we turn to Greenberg, focusing on the limitations specific to his powerful way of thinking. Turning away from an increasingly academic tradition of illusionist three-dimensional painting, the modernist avant-garde had to come to terms with the essential flatness of its medium: that of the background canvas. This shift to the flat background has at least two consequences. The first is Greenberg’s consistent denigration of pictorial content, which he tends to dismiss as mere literary anecdote that continues to suggest an illusion of depth. The second, seldom if ever noted, is that the flatness of the canvas background medium is also treated as a oneness devoid of parts. On the latter point Greenberg has much in common with Martin Heidegger, that tainted but central philosopher, who often ridicules the surface of the world and its various visible entities as “ontic” rather than ontological. Heidegger also shows a nagging reluctance to conceive of Being as pre-dispersed into numerous individual beings, whose multiplicity he tends to portray as merely the correlate of human experience. It is Greenberg’s version of this prejudice that prevents him from grasping the importance of pictorial content.

Chapter 5 (“After High Modernism”) considers several of the most prominent ways in which the High Modernism championed by Greenberg and Fried has been rejected. I will focus here on those who do not play a significant role in other chapters of this book. Something should first be said about Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg, two of Greenberg’s contemporaries, often portrayed as his rivals. I then turn to the more recent figures T.J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, and Jacques Rancière; though of necessity my treatment of each figure can only give a rough indication of where my views differ from theirs.

In Chapter 6 (“Dada, Surrealism, and Literalism”) we turn to Greenberg’s puzzling assertion that Dada and Surrealism are both forms of “academic” art. The problem with treating both movements in the same way is that, although they remain broadly linked in cultural history as overlapping currents of irreverent opposition, by Greenberg’s own principles they lead in opposite directions. While the Surrealists retain the traditional medium of nineteenth-century illusionistic painting in order to call our attention to astonishing content, Duchampian Dada offers the most banal content imaginable (bicycle wheel, bottle rack) in an attempt to challenge our sense of what counts as a valid artistic object. Using an analogy from Heidegger’s philosophy, I argue that Dada and Surrealism are diametrical opposites in how they go about dismantling literalism, while arguing further that they are not radical departures from the history of Western art.

Chapter 7 (“Weird Formalism”) concludes the book. First, we consider the present state of art as surveyed by one well-informed observer: Hal Foster. Second, given that the most unusual claim of the first six chapters is that beholder and work theatrically constitute a new, third object, this chapter asks what the implications of this idea might be. As for the term “weird,” it is no empty provocation, but a technical term drawn by OOO from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. Weird formalism is a kind that pertains neither to the object nor the subject, but to the unmapped interior of their union.