Philosophical Review

The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art by Arthur C. Danto

Review by: Guy Sircello
The Philosophical Review, Vol. 98, No. 2 (Apr., 1989), pp. 268-273
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2185294 .
Accessed: 28/06/2014 10:30

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Duke University Press and Philosophical Review are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to The Philosophical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.120 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:30:45 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BOOK REVIEWS

fact would become manifest, triggering economic motives and leading to

an exodus from the country.
In order for this type of explanation to work, there must be areas of
activity where economic motives are the only ones that are likely to cause a
change of behavior and it must be that if economic motives are activated,
then they have some effect on what people do. But those will often be
reasonable assumptions and it is worth paying attention therefore to the
type of explanation in question. That explanation belongs within the in-
terpretive framework, for while it is not itself a belief-desire explanation,
it does not suppose the operation of anything but interpretive factors.
And yet the explanation holds out the possibility of theory, for it suggests
that we may be able to abstract from the hurly-burly of everyday reasons
and identify a high-level explanatory pattern in certain areas of human
behavior. It is a pity that it goes unconsidered here.
I have not tried to do justice to the many detailed discussions in this
book, particularly the discussions in which the differences between various
sorts of interpretive account are relevant. I do not have space to cover
them, and I suspect in any case that they are of more interest to non-
philosophers.

PHILIP PETTIT
Australian National University

The PhilosophicalReview, Vol. XCVIII, No. 2 (April 1989)

THE PHILOSOPHICAL DISENFRANCHISEMENT OF ART. By ARTHUR

C. DANTO. New York, N.Y., Columbia University Press, 1986. Pp. xvi,
216. $25.00.

This book presupposes, continues to develop, and builds upon a view of

art that Arthur Danto worked out, more or less, in The Transfigurationof
the Commonplace(Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1981). The
main line Danto pursues in the present work, which is a compilation and
expansion of eleven talks the author has presented over the past few
years, has several major segments: (1) artworks are distinguishable from
things that are not art solely with respect to some "interpretations" that
constitutethem as art (p. 23); (2) these constitutive interpretations are given
and/or conditioned by art-historical contexts; (3) anything whatevermight
(in some possible art-historical world) be an artwork and, indeed, might be
any number of different artworks (given enough different art-historical
worlds). Theses (1) through (3) are brought over into the present book
from The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,with the slight modification

268

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.120 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:30:45 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BOOK REVIEWS

that in this book Danto stresses more explicitly the constitutiveeffect of

art-historical interpretations on art (ibid.). New in the present book is the
idea that (4) modern art has itself (in its development) come to the point of
recognizing the truth of (3). Therefore, (5) art history has ended, for art
has turned into its own philosophy; but art, in so turning, renders itself
obsolete (it "dies") and gives way to philosophy, which then develops the
insight that modern art history has culminated in. The philosophy that art
has brought us to is, unsurprisingly, Danto's own. Danto further claims
that this whole "story" of art is (6) a "reenfranchisement" of art meant to
counteract the "disenfranchisement" art has suffered at the hands of "phi-
losophy" (p. xv). Danto's (apparently) summary explanation of what he
means by "disenfranchisement" is (7) that philosophy has claimed either
that art is "ephemeral" or that art does what philosophy does, but less well
(pp. xiv-xv). Danto even has a suggestion about why "philosophy" has so
disenfranchised art: "we may wonder," he says, whether (8) the disenfran-
chisement comes out of a "fear" of a "deep metaphysical danger" that
philosophers sense in art (p. 12).
The chief impressions that this book makes are, first, that its main ideas
are, like those of The Transfigurationof the Commonplace,highly interesting
and stimulating and, second, that they are, to a far greater degree than in
the earlier book, skimpily and confusingly developed. Part of the reason
for the latter impression is, no doubt, the original character of the constit-
uent essays-lectures delivered at different times, on different occasions,
and to different kinds of audiences. However that may be, the stimulation
value of Danto's ideas is not high enough to pay for the debt he leaves to
exposition and argumentation. For as primafacie interesting as those ideas
are, they are developed so poorly that they do not even begin to be con-
vincing.
Take, for example, the eponymous thesis (7) about the disenfranchise-
ment of art. Danto seems determined to accuse all philosophers of disen-
franchising art. So, although his chief disenfranchised is Plato, and it is
Plato to whom his thesis (as expressed in his Preface) most clearly applies,
when he discusses Schopenhauer, who affirms of art precisely what Plato
denies of it, namely, that it expresses (Platonic) Ideas, this affirmation is
taken by Danto as yet another example of disenfranchisement. To make
this point, Danto ignores his previous (and later) statements of the disen-
franchisement thesis (as stated above) and comes up with another one:
Schopenhauer'sdisenfranchisement consists of ignoring the artistic "me-
dium." A similar shift in the disenfranchisment thesis is made in Danto's
discussion of Kant. Kant, according to Danto, disenfranchises art by
making it irrelevant to human "interests." What Danto ignores here is
that, from Kant's point of view, to make aesthetic judgments a function of
human interests might indeed be to "ephemeralize" the former, because

269

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.120 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:30:45 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BOOK REVIEWS

for Kant nothing is more ephemeral than most human interests. One of
Kant's motives, in insulating art from interest, is precisely to universalize
the aesthetic feeling. None of this saves Kant in Danto's eyes, for Danto
simply uses another interpretation of "disenfranchisement"; Kant's posi-
tion is an instance, says Danto, of the view that alleges that art "makes
nothing happen." (Of course, this view of disenfranchisement hardly fits
the case of Plato, for whom art indeed "makes things happen"-very
often the "wrong" things, to be sure, but only if it is the "wrong" sort of
art.)
There thus seem to be for Danto at least four distinct ways of "disen-
franchising" art-no matter what Danto says in his attempts at summary:
alleging art's "ephemerality," ignoring its medium, saying it "makes
nothing happen" and claiming it does what philosophy does, but poorly.
These are not the same; they may be connected, but Danto certainly
doesn't try to argue that they are. So-what finally is this thing that "phi-
losophy" has tried to do to art? By generalizing from Danto's statements,
the best I can come up with is this rather vague idea: philosophy alleges
that art is not, in the whole scheme of things, very important and is not,
especially, as important as philosophy; and these allegations, furthermore,
are not true to the reality of art.
But what makes Danto's presentation of the idea of disenfranchisement
even more frustrating is that after stating that his own enterprise is aimed
at reenfranchising art, Danto himself disenfranchises art in his own theses
about the death of art. Those theses imply precisely that art does poorly
what philosophy can do better. For it is one of Danto's main ideas that
although art can point out and recognize the notion that anything what-
ever might be a work of art and the notion that interpretations constitute
it as art, only philosophy can developthese ideas; and that is why, of course,
art annihilates itself and turns into its own philosophy. Danto's own disen-
franchisement of art is made, as far as I can tell, without the slightest sense
of irony. To be sure, Danto does mention, very casually, in an introduc-
tion to the essay "The End of Art" that his thesis "represents one form" of
the disenfranchisement of art (p. 81). But we are never told which state-
ment to take seriously-the admission that his own theory of the history
of art is a disenfranchisement of art, or the statement that the book in
which the latter occurs is an attempt to reenfranchise art.
All of this is very odd, but the oddest thing yet about Danto's book is
that it constitutes-or could reasonably be held to-a profound disen-
franchisement of art of a sort Danto does not mention and only barely
suggests in his thesis (8) above. For what could be the "deep metaphysical
danger" that "philosophy" might, Danto darkly speculates, suspect in art?
Danto does not say, but I submit that it could be the suspicion that art
gives us access to a level (or type, or ground) of reality to which philosophy

270

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.120 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:30:45 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BOOK REVIEWS

either has no access, or has access only mediated by art and that philo-
sophy therefore is subordinate to art in precisely that area that philosophy
(including, significantly, Danto's own philosophy) thinks of as its proper
domain, the discrimination of levels of reality. This latter kind of thesis
has been maintained by several modern philosophers-in particular, and
I think originally, by Schelling. This philosophical view (or family of
views), moreover, could not be interpreted as a disenfranchisement of art
on any reading of "disenfranchisement." Now it is important to mention
such a philosophical view in a discussion of Danto's book, first, because
Danto seems oblivious of it, even though it is construable as a salient coun-
terexample to his disenfranchisement thesis and, second, because Danto's
own art-historical thesis about the death of art ignores or misinterprets
precisely those strains in modern art that might plausibly be said to exem-
plify, roughly speaking, Schellingian views of art. In so doing, Danto's
art-historical thesis arguably becomes, from a Schellingian point of view, a
disenfranchisement of art: it fails to accord to art its genuine nature as the
(sole) experiential route to a truer, or higher, or more fundamental re-
ality.
The suggestion I am making here is that the real meaning of Danto's
art-historical thesis about the end of art is that it is a (probably unwitting)
attempt to disenfranchise art in a far more "aggressive" and "vicious"
(Danto's terms) way than Danto himself has recognized in himself or in
other philosophers. Interpreting Danto's end of art thesis in such a way,
furthermore, could account for some puzzling facts about Danto's exposi-
tion of his thesis: (a) the thesis is stated very obscurely and possibly inco-
herently; (b) Danto makes no attempt to make an empirical case for what
is, after all, an empirical thesis; and (c) on the face of it, the thesis is grossly
false.
In Danto's clearest and most detailed statement of that thesis he says
that in recent art ". . . what we see is something that depends more and
more upon theory for its existence as art . . ." and that in this history ". . .
objects approach zero as their theory approaches infinity, so that virtually
all there is at the end is theory, art having finally become vaporized in a
dazzle of pure thought about itself . . ." (p. 111). The conceptual problem
with this thesis is how to interpret a feature, which Danto spent a book
arguing is definitive of art, as a feature that can obtain of art in degrees.
What can it mean to say of twentieth-century art, which like all art de-
pends for its existence as art upon theory, that some of it depends upon
theory more and some depends less? The second problem is to under-
stand precisely how, quite apart from the problems it presents for Danto's
definition of art, some earlier twentieth-century art depends less on theory
and how some later twentieth-century art depends more on theory. For
Danto states his thesis in terms of art's progressalong a single parameter

271

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.120 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:30:45 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BOOK REVIEWS

over the last several decades. Yet Danto makes no attempt whatsoever to
analyze that progress, to sketch out its stages, or even vaguely to indicate
what conditions the succession of art movements would have to satisfy in
order to conform to his thesis. Prima facie, in fact, such a progression
would not seem to obtain. For Danto's thesis would seem to hold much
more clearly of an artist like Marcel Duchamp, working early in the cen-
tury, than for Mark Rothko, working decades later. (It is no accident, of
course, that Duchamp is a "favorite" of Danto's and that he bases a great
deal of his whole analysis of art upon problems that he believes Du-
champ's art raises.) On the other hand, it is also true that certain kinds of
so-called "conceptual art" in the present and very recent past would seem
to conform to what Danto sees as the end point of art (where the "object
approaches zero . . ."). Yet, whereas such conceptual art can legitimately
be seen as carrying on, and looking back to, certain strains in Pop Art and
Dada, it is probably a gross error to see such art as progressingalong the
same parameteras all other forms of twentieth-century art.
For there is a very powerful strain in twentieth-century art, which has
not failed to affect even such cerebral artists as Duchamp and Warhol, but
which finds its centers elsewhere. This is the strain I would call, for want
of a better or more standardized or widely recognized term, "secular spiri-
tuality."' This strain, while not excluding reflection on the nature of art,
definitely subordinates that to more "meditative" concerns, which, fur-
thermore, seem to carry "metaphysical" claims about a higher plane of
reality that are of a far different order from the metaphysical claims that
Danto is interested in, viz., claims about how art differs from non-art. A
very selective list of the artists in whom this strain is dominant would in-
clude Malevich, the very late Monet, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman,
Rothko, as well as John Cage in music and Merce Cunningham in dance.
Such artists are, with respect to both their intentions and their achieve-
ments, much more in tune with a Schellingian view of art than with a
Dantoesque view. And to assimilate such art to the cerebral superficialities
of (some) conceptual art, as Danto's thesis tries to do, is to attempt one of
the grander disenfranchisements of art in Western philosophy, a kind of
disenfranchisement, furthermore, that Danto's book avoids even recog-
nizing.

'This element has only begun to be explored in modern art. In fact, the only
attempts I know to do so have been MauriceTuchman's 1986 exhibit at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, "The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting
1890-1985" and the 1988 exhibit at UCLA'sFrederickS. Wight Art Gallery"Vi-
sions of Inner Space:GesturalPaintingin ModernAmericanArt"curatedby Merle
Schipper and Lee Mullican.These shows make clear, however, that the conceptof
the "spiritual"in modern art is in very considerableneed of further clarification,
refinement and articulation.

272

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.120 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:30:45 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
 BOOK REVIEWS

Danto at one point in this book denies that his own writing is literature.
He admits it may be literary in manner or quality, but denies that it is art
or literature. For literature, he says, embodies what it is about (pp.
181-182). To embody, furthermore, is not simply to exemplify, though
Danto leaves the reader to guess the difference. My guess is that for a
work to embodysomething, say an idea or an activity, is for that work to be
informed through and through with that idea or activity, for that idea or
activity to be the very motivating core of the work. In these terms, then, I
think Danto is being too modest about his own book; The Philosophical
Disenfranchisementof Art is, in Danto's own terms, clearly a work of litera-
ture: it embodies what it is about.

GuY SIRCELLO
Universityof California, Irvine

The PhilosophicalReview, Vol. XCVIII, No. 2 (April 1989)

DERRIDA AND THE ECONOMY OF DIFFERANCE. By IRENE E. HARVEY.

Bloomington, Ind., Indiana University Press, 1986. Pp. xv, 285.

This book argues that Derrida's writings are an important philosophical

contribution. The project is carried out in several ways: Derridean decon-
struction is first compared with Kantian critique. Deconstruction is then
explicated by a discussion of Derrida's early discussions of Saussure and
Husserl. Derrida's central notions of writing and differencee," are then
explicated. Part of this explication compares Derrida's views with those of,
among others, Heidegger, Levinas, Hegel, Freud, and Husserl. The book
is admirable in its project and accurate in many of its claims. The author
has a good understanding of Derrida's thought and its relations to other
continental philosophers.
Helpful commentary on Derrida is a difficult undertaking. The discus-
sion must explicate analyses which claim that all of the explicating terms
are inappropriate, since the presuppositions of the applicability of those
terms are being challenged by these very analyses. It must describe argu-
ments in a text in which the standards of good argument are among the
very items being questioned. Derrida's work, which claims that the very
language he writes embodies the conceptual scheme of the same "Western
Metaphysics" that he challenges lends itself, to paradoxical formulations.
Much of what the expositor says seems to need to be qualified, retracted,
and denied.
Derrida-explication thus puts a special burden on the expositor, who is
tempted to wax paradoxical and to clog the text with qualifying clauses

273

This content downloaded from 91.238.114.120 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:30:45 AM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions