D.O.A. (Danto, Warhol, Derrida)

The case is open and shut. Clearly, it was a frame up. Yet this tells us nothing, or next to nothing. As much as this will be a tale of the lucidity of modern art and of philosophy’s insightful illumination of the logic of artistic innovation, indeed of convergent if competing aspirations to ideality, it will be, in a certain fashion, a murder mystery: tracking the mutual implication of death-dealing clarifications and turning on the death of the subject, the end of art, and la nature morte. None of which remain reposed in their authoritatively pronounced passing. Thus this will be a ghost story of sorts: a tale of haunting, of survival and mutilation, of ruins and remnant forces, hence of undischargeable debts. Our main subject, if indeed there is one, and our frame, if we can speak of only one, will be complicity. “The guilt context of the living.” In this open and shut case, which is as much fiction as argument and example, complicity is all-embracing.