University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository Philosophy Faculty Publications Philosophy Fall 1994 Go Figure! Refiguring Disfiguring Gary Shapiro University of Richmond, gshapiro@richmond.edu Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/philosophy-facultypublications Part of the Modern Literature Commons, and the Philosophy of Language Commons Recommended Citation Shapiro, Gary. "Go Figure!" Philosophy Today 38, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 326-33. doi:10.5840/philtoday199438319. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Philosophy at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact scholarshiprepository@richmond.edu. GO FIGURE! REFIGURING DISFIGURING Gary Shapiro In The Gay Science Nietzsche imagines a madman rushing into the marketplace to announce the death of God. It is mad, we might say, to take this death so seriously, and this is certainly the reaction of the traders, who think that this is old news and want nothing so much as to make their profit for the day; they don't want to be distracted from the fluctuations of the Dow Jones average by this mad intruder. What is perhaps maddest of all in the madman's words and acts is not the news that God is dead (they've heard it all before) but his claim that the death is still going on, that we have still to learn what it is to lose the center, that the smell of the corpse has perhaps not quite reached us yet, and that we might very well respond on an artistic or aesthetic level, as he does, by singing requiems to the dead God. In his extraordinary book, Disfiguring,' Mark Taylor bursts into the marketplace of the contemporary artworld by bringing together the idea of the death of God with that of the death of art. In the artworld prices of Van Goghs, Monets, and Warhols go up and down; the glossy journals like Art in America chronicle these values discreetly and contain prospectuses for investments, whether in the form of actual advertising or in the pieces pushing the latest artist or style, or looking for hidden value in an old one. In this marketplace the death of God is also, it seems, old news, so that the attacks of the religious right on a Mapplethorpe or a Serrano should be considered from the standpoint of the marketplace: as interferences with the process of fundraising or the rise and fall of artistic reputations. Here, as Taylor points PHILOSOPHY TODAY 326 out, everything is "currency," both in the sense of what is contemporary and of what is the medium of exchange. Andy Warhol's images, apparently going on to infinity, of dollar bills, bring the two senses together nicely. To intervene in this apparently seamless web in which the business of art is transacted, Taylor proceeds by arguing that there is an implicit, sometimes explicit, theological dimension in the artworld itself, and that it is God's corpse that we smell in the Museum of Modern Art, or Soho, or in the pages of October. The death of art, which is sometimes rumored in these places (not that it could ever interfere with business), will tum out to be part of God's prolonged death agony and decomposition. Taylor's story of twentieth century art (perhaps we should call it post-Nietzschean art) is neither conventionally modernist nor postmodernist. The leading modernist narrative, as articulated by Clement Greenberg, sees modernism, like Kant's philosophy, as aiming at making a strength of its own limitations and conditions, the flatness of the canvas playing a role analogous to that of the forms of sensible intuition and the categories of the understanding. But Taylor rewrites the modernist quest for purity, showing that much of it is iconoclastic; seeking to eliminate all specific images, it disfigures for the sake of a purified frame, as in the paintings of Malevich and Reinhardt, or a structure devoid of ornament, in the buildings of Le Corbusier and van der Rohe (that these goals cannot so easily be obtained is also part of Taylor's story). Modernism turns out to be a form of negative theology, with roots both in FALL 1994