Actor Training in Anglophone Countries: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

argued, but they did so by making people see ordinary objects differently. Duchamp exhibited a snow shovel. He did not frame his writings and exhibit them. This point brings me to an aspect of Danto’s analysis that underlies much that is said in the conversations but is never made explicit. One of the major implications of the break that Duchamp and Warhol introduced was to question the relationship between art and craft. I mean by craft the complex power to make, to fashion objects out of raw material. The British sculptor Antony Gormley once described making as “physical thinking” (I saw this comment at an exhibition of his works at the Tate Britain gallery in 2018). But the sort of conceptual art that followed in the wake of the separation of artworks and aesthetic criteria opened the field of art to artists who had no talent for making things from paint or clay. On one level that opening of the field of artistic practice to new forms and styles is consistent with the history of human creativity. If art is the highest and freest expression of that creativity then it can never remain confined to a few canonical forms. On the other hand, one might worry that too wide an opening of artistic practice to include anything anyone recognized as an artist decides to present as art threatens Danto’s definition of artworks as “embodied meanings.” As he says: “Formalism cannot define art. You need meaning . . . and embodiment” (62). If both sides are essential, then the collapse of the sensuous materiality of artworks into ideas would prove to be a loss for art and the human sensorium it enlivens and challenges.