抄録
Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” (1967), one of the most important texts in late twentieth-century art criticism, opens with an epigraph from Perry Miller’s Jonathan Edwards (1949) and closes with the sentence “Presentness is grace.” Several readers of “Art and Objecthood” have noticed that its final sentence is related to the epigraph in some way, but few have tried to elucidate the relationship between the two. There are three probable factors at play here. First, the name Jonathan Edward has often evoked images of a fire-and-brimstone Puritan preacher, which can be detected in early reactions to “Art and Objecthood.” Second, though Perry Miller helped change such images, the readers of Fried’s text have paid little attention to Miller’s and his followers’ breakthroughs in Edwards studies. Third, since “Art and Objecthood” does not clarify the relationship among the concepts of “presentness,” “conviction,” and “grace,” its interpreters (including Fried himself) have often misrepresented either Edwards or Edwards’s concept of grace. The purpose of this essay is to examine these three factors and provide a better understanding of “Art and Objecthood” through a reflection on the historical and discursive context of its epigraph. Moreover, this essay critically evaluates the proposition “Presentness is grace,” utilizing Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of “presentness.”
