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A Companion to Arthur C. Danto
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A Companion to
Arthur C. Danto
Edited by
Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gilmore, Jonathan, editor. | Goehr, Lydia, editor.

Title: A companion to Arthur C. Danto / edited by Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr.
Description: Frist edition. | Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2022. |
Series: Blackwell companions to philosophy | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021009894 (print) | LCCN 2021009895 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119154211
(hardback) | ISBN 9781119154228 (adobe pdf) |
ISBN 9781119154235 (epub) | ISBN 9781119154242 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Danto, Arthur C., 1924-2013--Criticism and interpretation.
Classification: LCC B945.D364 C66 2022 (print) | LCC B945.D364 (ebook) | DDC 191--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009894
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009895
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Prefaceviii
Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr
Notes on Contributors x
Introduction: Five Pieces for Arthur Danto (1924–2013) In memoriam 1

Lydia Goehr, Daniel Herwitz, Fred Rush, Michael Kelly, and Jonathan Gilmore
1 Roquebrune, 1962 15
Ginger Danto
2 Boundaries Crossed 18
András Szántó
3 Writing with Style 26

Arturo Fontaine
4 Sartre, Transparency, and Style 33

Taylor Carman
5 Nietzsche and Historical Understanding 42

Robert Gooding-Williams
6 Pragmatism between Art and Life 51

Richard Shusterman
7 Danto on Dewey (and Dewey on Danto) 59

Casey Haskins
8 Thought Experiments: Art and Ethics 68

F. M. Kamm
9 A Normative Perspective on Basic Actions 76

Carol Rovane
10 Cognitive Science and Art Criticism 85

Mark Rollins
Contents
11 Perception93
Sam Rose and Bence Nanay
12 The Anthropology of Art 103

David Davies
13 The Birth of Art 112

Whitney Davis
14 The End of Art 124

Georg W. Bertram
15 Representation, Truth, and Historical Reality 132

Frank Ankersmit
16 History and Retrospection 143

Noël Carroll
17 Action in the Shadow of Time 152

Adrian Haddock
18 The Sixties 162

Espen Hammer
19 Criticism and the Pale of History 170

Gregg M. Horowitz
20 Postmodernism and Its Discontents 180

David Carrier
21 Shakespeare and the Repetition of the Commonplace 190

Rachel Eisendrath
22 Engaging Henry James: The Metaphorical Perspective 199

Garry L. Hagberg
23 Literature, Philosophy, Persona, Politics 207

Richard Eldridge
24 Moving Pictures 216

Fred Rush
25 Photography and Danto’s Craft of the Mind 223

Scott Walden
26 Transfiguration/Transubstantiation 233
Sixto J. Castro
27 Embodiment and Medium 240

Tiziana Andina
28 The Style Matrix 248

Sondra Bacharach
vi
Contents
29 Disenfranchisement 256
Jane Forsey
30 Definition 263
Karlheinz Lüdeking
31 Danto and Dickie: Artworld and Institution 273

Michalle Gal
32 Danto and Wittgenstein: History and Essence 281

Sonia Sedivy
33 Censorship and Subsidy 292

Brian Soucek
34 Amnesty International and Human Rights 301

Emma Stone Mackinnon
35 Random Noise, Radical Silence 309

Marlies De Munck
36 Mad Men and Pop Art 317

Sue Spaid
37 Vija Celmins: Nature at Art’s End 326

Sandra Shapshay
38 The Meaning of Ugliness, The Authority of Beauty 336

J. M. Bernstein
39 Feminist Criticism: On Disturbatory Art and Beauty 345

Peg Brand Weiser
40 Beauty and Politics 355

Matilde Carrasco Barranco
41 Public Art: Monuments, Memorials, and Earthworks 363

Gary Shapiro
42 On Architecture 373
Remei Capdevila-Werning
43 Aliveness and Aboutness: Yvonne Rainer’s Dance Indiscernibles 381

Kyle Bukhari
44 Arthur and Andy 389

Daniel Herwitz
45 Letter to Posterity 397

Arthur C. Danto
Index404
vii
Preface
JONATHAN GILMORE AND LYDIA GOEHR
This Companion was conceived following the death of Arthur Coleman Danto in 2013.
Its long-standing gestation owes something to the process of commissioning articles,
but more deeply reflects our desire, as its editors, to wait a while, to let his death be
mourned and his influence be reflected upon. The volume stands apart from the already
impressive collections of essays on Danto’s life and work, edited by Randall Auxier and
Lewis Edwin Hahn (in 2013), by Mark Rollins (in 2012), and by Daniel Herwitz and
Michael Kelly (in 2007). (The many contributions outside America to Danto scholar-
ship should also be noted.) The contributors to the present volume, renowned scholars
and emerging new voices, were tasked to offer short, essayistic interventions, suggestive
of the style in which Danto himself excelled. As Danto borrowed the long-standing idea
for his own philosophical outlook: style makes the person just as it renders unique an
art work and a thought. The contributions to this volume have not been written there-
fore as parts of a systematic or unified whole, nor to cover every aspect of Danto’s exten-
sive oeuvre. Instead, with an often-revisionary aim, they capture what the writers—with
their unique perspectives—found most compelling. This collection thus truly serves as
a companion to a thinker who much enjoyed the wit, eclecticism, variety, and tensions
between alternate philosophical methods and traditions. It takes paths that Danto
sometimes more tiptoed than trod with well-made steps: into, for example, architecture,
dance, and film. Constructed and composed with the marvelous assistance and the
refined critical perspectives of Jonathan Fine and Elizabeth Benn, the companion offers
a contrapuntal accompaniment to reading Danto, but not, we insist, a substitute.
In his astonishingly capacious intellectual life, Danto wrote on violence in the works
of George Sorel, Nietzsche, Sartre, Buddhism, action theory, the history of analytical
philosophy, and the philosophies of language, perception, and mind. It was, however,
his philosophies of history and art that, in his lifetime, were taken up the most vigor-
ously. If one hears the name Danto, one responds: ah yes—his analytical theory of nar-
rative/historical sentences and his Hegelian thesis for the end of art! And then–how
possibly could one make the two stand together? His lifelong attempt to weave Anglo-
American, analytical and so-described continental approaches to philosophical
thinking, produced fascinating antagonisms, perfectly reflective of the post-War, Cold
War, and East-West struggles of the early decades of his long career in the academy.
Likewise, his voracious reading in social and cultural history allowed him to assume an
overall humanistic perspective and range of views often at odds with the quarrels of
self-proclaimed modernists and postmodernists.
viii
Preface
Danto liked to recall his accidental introduction to questions in the philosophy of art,
when, at the last minute, he was invited to speak at a meeting of the American
Philosophical Association. The result was what was to become his enormously influen-
tial essay of 1964, “The Artworld.” The accidental character of his address regarded
his engagement only with the philosophy of art, not with the arts themselves. Early on,
he was a highly-accomplished and ambitious lithographer and printmaker, a period
from which many works remain and have recently been exhibited (as readers will learn
from his daughter Ginger Danto’s essay in this volume). After his death, an extraordi-
nary number of those prints, plus paintings and drawings, were found covered in dust
on the top of a cupboard in his apartment on Riverside Drive.
Why he turned from art-making to reflecting on art is of course a question that
demands a more complex answer than his favored quip, that he did it “for the money.”
To be sure, he found stability in his tenure as a professor of Philosophy at Columbia
University. But it was as a theorist, critic, and commentator on the arts, writing for The
Nation magazine, in which he discovered his métier and passion. Writing everyday with
unwavering joy, he held to the belief that he had never had the same thought twice. A
voracious reader of fiction, he showed how even a rigorous and perspicuous
philosophical exposition can possess the style of a literary art. His most influential writ-
ings bear the impress of profound changes between the 1960s and the 1990s in art
practice, the market, museums, audiences of art, and the role of critics and connois-
seurs as guides and gatekeepers. But this body of work also responded to tumultuous
changes in society at large in those decades, as we see in his reflections on human and
civil rights, public values, dreams of democracy, racism, feminism, and censorship.
Many of the essays here offer thoughtful commentaries on these more political and
social issues. Danto’s engagement with living artists of his own day allowed him to
breathe in the atmosphere to which he appealed as defining what art essentially is. He
belonged very much to his century, in ways—following his philosophy of history—that
time continues to tell.
ix
Notes on Contributors
Tiziana Andina is Professor of Philosophy at University of Turin, and author of Arthur

Danto: Philosopher of Pop.
Frank Ankersmit is Emeritus Professor for Philosophy of History and Intellectual
History at Groningen University. He writes on representation in the writing of history
and in political and aesthetic representation.
Sondra Bacharach is an Associate Professor and Head of Programme in Philosophy
at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Recent research about street
art has appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics and The Monist.
Georg W. Bertram is Professor of Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin, and
author of Hegels “Phänomenologie des Geistes.” Ein systematischer Kommentar and Art as
Human Practice. An Aesthetics.
J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School
for Social Research. Among his books are: The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant
to Derrida and Adorno, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late
Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury.
Peg Brand Weiser is Laureate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona
and Emerita Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Indiana
University. Editor of Beauty Matters and Beauty Unlimited, her most recent work focuses
on the perception of athletes’ bodies and female agency.
Kyle Bukhari is a dance researcher, educator, and performer, and visiting faculty at
Sarah Lawrence College.
Remei Capdevila-Werning, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Texas Rio Grande Valley, is author of Goodman for Architects and several essays in the
philosophy of architecture, aesthetics, and preservation.
Taylor Carman is Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, and author of Heidegger’s
Analytic and Merleau-Ponty; and coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty.
Matilde Carrasco Barranco is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Theory of Arts
in the University of Murcia (Spain). She works on the relation between aesthetics, and
beauty, and contemporary art theory.
David Carrier taught philosophy in Pittsburgh and art history in Cleveland. He writes
art criticism for Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic.
x
Noël Carroll teaches philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York and is the author most recently of Humour: A Very Short Introduction and Classics
in the Western Philosophy of Art.
Sixto J. Castro, Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Valladolid, is author of En
teoría, es arte, Filosofía del arte: El arte pensado, and Teología estética.
Ginger Danto, the youngest daughter of Arthur, is a writer and lives in North Florida.
David Davies is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. His books include Art as
Performance; Aesthetics and Literature and Philosophy of the Performing Arts.
Whitney Davis is George and Helen Pardee Professor of History and Theory of Ancient
and Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley. His trilogy on visual culture
is A General Theory of Visual Culture, Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from
Prehistory to Perspective, and Space, Time, and Depiction.
Marlies De Munck, philosopher and journalist, teaches at the University of Antwerp
and the Royal Conservatory in Ghent. Her recent publications include: Why Chopin
didn’t want to hear the rain; The Flight of the Nightingale: A Philosophical Plea for the
Musician; Nearness: Art and Education after COVID-19; and I See Mountains as Mountains,
once again.
Rachel Eisendrath, author of Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in
Renaissance Ekphrasis and Gallery of Clouds, is Tow Associate Professor of English and
chair of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Barnard College.
Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor Emeritus of
Philosophy at Swarthmore College, lectures now at the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville. His most recent books are Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher and
Images of History: Kant, Benjamin, Freedom, and the Human Subject.
Arturo Fontaine is a Chilean novelist and professor of philosophy at University Adolfo
Ibáñez and University of Chile. His latest novel is La Vida Doble: A Novel.
Jane Forsey teaches philosophy at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. She is the
author of The Aesthetics of Design and coeditor (with Lars Aagaard-Mogensen) of two
volumes of essays, On Taste and On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges.

Michalle Gal is a senior faculty member in the Unit of History and Philosophy, Shenkar
College. Her recent books are Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics: A Formalist Theory and
Introduction to Theory of Design.
Jonathan Gilmore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The CUNY Graduate Center
and Baruch College. His most recent book is Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and
Other Creatures of the Mind.
Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Her most recent book, ded-
icated to Arthur Danto, is Red Sea–Red Square–Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story.
Robert Gooding-Williams is the M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor
of African-American Studies and Professor of Philosophy and of African American and
African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Zarathustra’s
xi
Dionysian Modernism, Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics
and In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America.
Adrian Haddock is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, following an
Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Research Fellowship at the University of Leipzig. His
most recent publication is “The Wonder of Signs,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.
Garry Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at
Bard College. His most recent book is Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical
Language, and the Composition of Selfhood.
Espen Hammer is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. His most recent book
is Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe.
Casey Haskins is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purchase College, State
University of New York. His current book project is on the history of the debate over
autonomy in modern aesthetic theory.
Daniel Herwitz is Fredric Huetwell Professor at the University of Michigan. He has
written widely in aesthetics, culture and politics, including his early book, Making
Theory/Constructing Art, which placed Danto’s philosophy and criticism within the
avant-gardes of culture and science.
Gregg M. Horowitz is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pratt Institute. Previous
publications on Arthur C. Danto include The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the
Ends of Taste, co-written with Tom Huhn.
F. M. Kamm, Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University, is
the author of works in ethical theory and practical ethics, most recently The Trolley
Problem Mysteries and Almost Over: Aging, Dying, Dead.
Michael Kelly is Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He
is the Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, President of the
Transdisciplinary Aesthetics Foundation; and author of A Hunger for Aesthetics:
Enacting the Demands of Art and of Iconoclasm in Aesthetics.
Karlheinz Lüdeking taught history and theory of art at the University of the Arts in
Berlin until he retired in 2017.

Emma Stone Mackinnon is Assistant Professor of the History of Modern Political Thought
at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College. Her work on political
theory and the history of human rights has appeared in Political Theory and Humanity.
Bence Nanay is BOF Professor of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp and Senior
Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University. His books include Between
Perception and Action, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception, Aesthetics: A Very Short
Introduction, and The Fragmented Mind.
Mark Rollins is Professor of Philosophy and in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-
Psychology Program Program at Washington University in St. Louis. His publications
include Mental Imagery: On the limits of Cognitive Science, Danto and His Critics, and
“What Monet Meant: Intention and Attention in Understanding Art.”
xii
Sam Rose teaches at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Art and Form and
Interpreting Art.
Carol Rovane is Violin Family Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. In
addition to articles spanning many areas of philosophy, she has authored two books:
The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics and The Metaphysics and
Ethics of Relativism.
Fred Rush is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and author of
Irony and Idealism and On Architecture.
Sonia Sedivy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her
recent work includes Beauty and the End of Art, Wittgenstein, Plurality and Perception
and, as editor, Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy Kendall L.
Walton.
Gary Shapiro is Tucker-Boatwright Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, Emeritus,
at the University of Richmond. His writings include Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art
After Babel; Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying; and
Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics.
Sandra Shapshay is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College & the Graduate Center
(CUNY); her recent publications include: “What is ‘the Monumental?”, “Contemporary
Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime,” and Reconstructing
Schopenhauer’s Ethical Thought: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare.
Richard Shusterman is Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities at
Florida Atlantic University. His books include Pragmatist Aesthetics, Body Consciousness,
and The Adventures of the Man in Gold: A Philosophical Tale, based on his work in
performance art.
Brian Soucek is a philosopher of art and professor of law at the University of California,
Davis. His recent articles on law and aesthetics, including “Aesthetic Judgment in Law”
and “The Constitutional Irrelevance of Art,” are available at http://ssrn.com/
author=1828782.
Sue Spaid is author of five books on art and ecology, including The Philosophy of
Curatorial Practice: Between Work and World. Recent philosophical papers address urban
farming, biodiversity, wellbeing, hydrological justice, degraded lands and stinky food's
superpowers.
András Szántó writes on art and serves as a cultural strategy adviser to museums,
cultural and educational institutions, and commercial enterprises worldwide; he is the
author, most recently, of The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues.
Scott Walden’s research and practice in photography focuses on the intersection bet-
ween the philosophies of art, mind, and language. He has received multiple grants and
prizes for his work.
xiii
Introduction: Five Pieces for Arthur Danto
(1924–2013) In memoriam
LYDIA GOEHR, DANIEL HERWITZ, FRED RUSH, MICHAEL
KELLY, AND JONATHAN GILMORE
Life with Art
Lydia Goehr
Arthur Danto once told me that having been born on the first day of the year (the year
was 1924) he felt obliged to do something important. When I asked him what I should
then do having been born on January 10th, he replied, “obviously not as much as me.”
He did do something important. He stands as one of the four giants of the Anglo-
American tradition, with Stanley Cavell, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Wollheim, who
together rearticulated the terms for how philosophers should think about the arts as
part of a broad philosophical vision each had of the world. Danto held his so-described
“analytical philosophy of art” as “of a piece” with his analytical philosophies of history,
action, and knowledge. Before achieving world renown for his philosophy of art, he was
much admired as a philosopher in these other domains. At first, when writing on art, he
intended to write a work titled The Analytical Philosophy of Art to match several of his
previous books. But very quickly he found himself turning away from this bland title to
one indicative of the transfiguration in his thought that would allow him to escape
some of the restrictions of a philosophy to which, however, he remained lifelong

devoted. He found a way to enhance analytical philosophy, to bring it to life by engaging
in a mode of description, in perfectly crafted and entirely illuminating detours, that
would result in his being recognized as the leading philosophical critic of the art, most
especially of his own times. With similar conviction, he imported themes he variously
drew from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Sartre – he wrote monographs devoted to the latter
two – and from a Zen Buddhism whose teachings he experienced at Columbia University.
Of his more than thirty books and hundreds of articles and art-critical pieces, his book
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace marked a turning point in the philosophy of art
A Companion to Arthur C. Danto, First Edition. Edited by Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
and in the life of a man whose nickname happened also to be Art. Although he never
wanted philosophically to overcome the gap between art and life – everything about his
thought was aimed at preserving the difference – he lived his life in the pathways of art
with a transformative joy and optimism. He turned what others experienced as night-
mares – and there were plenty in the twentieth century to choose from – into dreams for
a better human condition liberated from the political and speculative tyrannies of a
world that, in different ways, he regarded over, ended, and out of date.
When I first met Arthur, it was on a bus in Sweden, over thirty years ago. The bus
was transporting a whole host of eminent philosophers to a conference on the theme of
intentionality. Why I was on the bus is irrelevant to the story. But pertinent was the fact
that I had just begun my studies in the philosophy of music and finding myself sitting
“next to Arthur Danto” gave me the chance to describe the paper I was writing on the
relevance of Kripke’s thought to music. Arthur listened with the utmost charity,
although little, he later told me, inspired him. But he also told me that he never forgot
this encounter. Getting to know him later, I realized that he forgot few persons, that
nearly every meeting was special to him in some way. He found something to admire
whatever the age or status of his interlocutors.
My next encounter afforded me an opportunity to describe Arthur Danto in public.
It was the year, if my memory serves me right, that I offered the history I had written
of the American Society for Aesthetics to the Society at their annual meeting. Coming
from England, I was naïve about many things to do with America. So when I read in
preparation for my speech that Danto was “the art-critic for the Nation,” I assumed
that meant that he was akin to “the Poet-Laureate of the United States” (for I did not
know then of the magazine to which he would contribute for many years.) So this is
how I described him. The audience laughed, but when I learned of my mistake, I was
pleased that I had imported a suitably honorific content into what otherwise would
have been a true but bland description. My descriptive leap perfectly fitted Danto’s
theory of narrative sentences as developed in his philosophy of history, and it equally
well suited a person who really did become in America the poet laureate of the philos-
ophy of art.
When twenty years ago I came to teach at Columbia, I became very close to Arthur,
although this doesn’t mean that he was always content with my approach to aesthetics.
On one occasion, he remarked that my gaze was far too focused on Europe and that I
should open my eyes to the world around me – by which he really meant New York. And
so, reading between the lines, I began to write about his work, American to the core,
although still in deliberate juxtaposition with the work of a German aesthetic theorist,
Adorno, in whom I retained a devoted interest. For a decade, I worked tirelessly on
Danto and Adorno, even to the point of naming these two figures as one: AdorDanto
(and by then I really did adore Danto). My intellectual project was difficult for many
reasons, but for this reason in particular: that whereas Adorno felt like a figure of the
past, having died in 1969, Danto was very much alive and living next door. Because I
wanted to get his views right, it became all too easy for me to call him or pop over to his
apartment and ask him what he had had in mind when writing this or that. One morn-
ing, he called me on the telephone to tell me that although he was willing to talk to me
about everything else in the world, I should, in writing my book, treat him as I was
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treating Adorno, as unavailable as far as his intentions were concerned. Since I knew
Danto was an intentionalist, my first response was to laugh and my second to wonder
whether he was offering me a telephone version of the intentionalist fallacy – that all
the intentions I needed to know were there to be read from his work, so no telephone
call was needed in addition. Finally, however, I came to understand something else: that
though Arthur was an intentionalist, intentions had been the last thing he had ever
really appealed to in interpreting the art of his contemporaries. Much more, he had
drawn on facts of friendship and, more importantly, on “being there” in the right place
and time – as he was there to see those Brillo boxes, which, stacked up on the gallery
floor, allowed him to take a final stock in his philosophy of art. More even than becoming
an eminent critic of contemporary art, he became a storyteller of his life with artists
whose company he so much enjoyed. To be an intentionalist might be the stance of the
philosopher, but how this translated into an art criticism was never as obvious as Danto
sometimes claimed it was. When I finished my book, Danto said almost immediately
that he did not recognize his views. I told him that it served him right, that he should
have been more forthcoming on the telephone. He laughed and reminded me of how
intentionality had been the way our long friendship had begun.
At Columbia, each year and for many years, I offered a year-long, graduate aes-
thetics course, a survey that was nicknamed “From Plato to Nato.” Nato was, of course,
Danto, who generously agreed to come to the last class to present his work. The stu-
dents sizzled with excitement when he appeared, even to the point where one very
sweetly came up to me after class and said, “Oh Professor Goehr, it was so nice to meet a
real philosopher face to face.” That Danto was the real thing was true; that he was the
culmination of a long road that had begun with Plato was also true; he even, in his
early life as a woodcut artist, produced an image that uncannily depicts Socrates as
Arthur himself would later look. Artistic depiction always, he argued, transfigures.
Even if I was a little miffed by not even being a candidate, in this student’s view, for entry
into the philosophical-world, I blamed myself for offering a syllabus that rendered all
the philosophers I taught almost indiscernible in appearance. So, as years passed by, I
increasingly stressed the teaching to which Danto was most committed, that in the face
of indiscernibility, don’t be taken in merely by what you see: work out wherein the dif-
ferences between things lie. For then, things that look the same will no longer stub-
bornly be assumed to be the same sort of thing. And when we come to understand that,
so many more ways of appearing will be granted entry into the hallowed halls, be they
the halls of philosophy or of art.
In the last months, weeks, and days before Arthur’s death, I spent many hours in his
company. Often we turned to opera as a medium for communication. I would take my
IPad over to his apartment and play him arias from operas. He recalled having heard
many of the great singers, but above all, he told me, he loved Amelita Galli Curci. On
one of these occasions, Arthur began to sing, in perfect Italian, the opening love duet
from La Bohème. The last piece he had read by me was an essay on this opera set into
comparison with the red squares with which he had begun his book The Transfiguration
of the Commonplace. Not able to hear very well anymore, he watched me listening to the
aria and began to describe what he was seeing. He saw me not as listening but as singing
to him. I did not know that this would be the last image he would ever have of me and
me of him. Two days later, he received the first copies of a book for which he had been
waiting a long time: the book that was his life and work, produced by the Library of
Living Philosophers. A few hours later, he lost consciousness with the joy of knowing
that he had left his world in good order and that he would meet again the friend with
whom he had spoken every day for sixty years, Richard Kuhns. Not the belief but the
image I have of Art and Dick now again taking a walk somewhere each morning in
deep conversation is a comforting one in this time of mourning the loss of two friends
who meant so much to me and so very much to each other.
Danto was born the year Puccini died. I had always wanted to write about them both
together, which is what I have recently been doing and will continue to do. My book is
not about endings and new beginnings, but about beginnings, first lines, which is where
Arthur always was, given the excitement with which he woke each day to write. A year
or so ago, he called me one morning when writing his last book, What Art Is, to tell me
that he had suddenly understood something that he had never understood before: why
Warhol with his Brillo Box was so central to him in allowing him as a philosopher to
know what art essentially is. I did not dismiss his thought as repetitive; on the contrary,
I thought back to how he had begun his Transfiguration with a red square that had been
described by the philosopher who had so famously reversed the terms of repetition.
Danto’s last thought about art had all the freshness of spring. He named the thought a
wakeful dream. He had the ability to look at something so profoundly familiar – almost
commonplace – as though he were looking at it for the very first time. His work now
stands before us, asking always to be read anew, filled to the philosophical brim with the
spirit of Art.
Figure 1 Danto, “Socrates in a Trance” 1962 detail. Reproduced with permission of Lydia
Goehr.
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In Memoriam, Arthur Danto
Daniel Herwitz
Arthur Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1924 and grew up in Detroit. He
served in the military during the Second World War, driving trucks in North Africa and
Italy. “I had a really great time,” he told me, making me wonder if anything at all could
not, given his fascination with life, turn into an adventure. After the war, he studied Art
History and Art at Wayne State then in Paris, becoming a printmaker of significance, a
maker of images in the manner of German Expressionism, woodblocks with figures artic-
ulated in a chaotic swirl of lines, barely discernible in the intensity. At a certain moment
in the 1960s, he took the decision to give up art, believing his work out of step with the
Zeitgeist. This decision was made on philosophical grounds and without regret, for
Arthur was already a philosopher dedicated to thinking through the conditions through
which object, performance, and gesture may become art, spinning a theory as intricately
inventive as any work of avant-garde art. He had taken the decision to continue at univer-
sity and gotten a PhD at Columbia, and after a brief stint working in the philosophy of
science turned to aesthetics. He was to spend most of the rest of his working life in the
classrooms, galleries, and museums of New York, ending up Johnsonian Professor of
Philosophy at Columbia while also serving as art critic for the Nation magazine.
It is well known that Arthur’s eureka moment on the road to Damascus took place at
a West 58th Street gallery, the Stable Gallery, where he witnessed an exhibition of over-
sized Brillo boxes by Andy Warhol. Offered in play as a way of blurring the distinction
between industrial and fine art, Arthur transformed Warhol into a philosopher in gel
(one who wore his gel lightly). In Arthur’s view, Warhol’s boxes became revelations of
the conditions that turn ordinary, real things into works of art. These conditions could
not be anything visual since the box in the supermarket was (more or less) visually iden-
tical to the one in the gallery, but only the one was fine art. The man in dark glasses and
a wig had hit on, with Arthur’s prompting, Leibniz’s problem of indiscernibility: that
what makes two virtually identical things different in kind has to be something hidden
and abstract. That something, Arthur argued in the Journal of Philosophy in 1964, could
only be a background of shared theory: a set of concepts constructing terms for the box
in the gallery to “make a statement” to the art world. Warhol could press the limits of the
art world (with a supermarket box) and get away with it only because these concepts, at
a moment of performance art, abstraction, and pop, were in place. Not that Warhol’s
gesture was without controversy. Many took Warhol’s antics to be the attention-grab-
bing of a drugged-out denizen of the Velvet Underground whose pasty skin bespoke the
need for a sunlamp if not a two-week vacation in Miami Beach. But the very fact of con-
troversy proved (to Arthur) that the concepts were in place to allow for the argument.
It only remained for Arthur to articulate all the philosophy he believed implicit in
Warhol’s gesture, and thus to complete a long history of avant-garde experimentation.
On his reading of the avant-gardes they had always been in the project of self-discovery,
which Warhol then brought to completion. Who needed to make expressionist wood-
cuts when the true thrust of art history had ended up in his lap?
Great aestheticians often stake new philosophy on the art of their time: Roger Fry on
Cézanne, Richard Wollheim on British figurative art, Friedrich Nietzsche on Wagner (till he
got burned). Arthur’s double was Warhol. When he published his theory of art in the Journal
of Philosophy, no one knew what to do with it, exactly in the way no one knew how to take
Brillo Box. Arthur’s thinking was ahead of the game. Utterly dedicated to making a contribu-
tion to philosophy, he did so in the manner of an avant-garde artist, riding the curl of history
and finding it on the streets of New York. It is not fortuitous that the book he would publish
after his work on the art world in 1964 would be Nietzsche as Philosopher, which similarly
befuddled the New York philosophical world, a world, which at that time believed Nietzsche a
freak if not a Nazi. What followed was an endless litany of works in philosophy and art criti-
cism, each filled with dazzling insight and unforgettable philosophical twists.
When he became a critic for the Nation magazine in 1984 (a post he held until 2009),
postmodernism was in high swing; he became its most imaginative theorist. Having
completed the project of self-discovery, Arthur believed (in a Hegelian manner) that art
history was completed, freeing art to pursue a prism of new possibilities in the manner
of a thousand flowers blooming. This was, in fact, what was happening in the New York
art world, where the intense anxieties of the art historical movement (whose military
quarters were the Cedar Bar) were giving way to a kind of populist individualism with
each artist free to experiment with any style for any reason, composing paintings in
which German expressionism meets Italian Mannerism, Abstraction reacquaints itself
with the human figure and Duchamp turns into a TV serial. This efflorescence was
tailor-made for Arthur’s abundant generosity; he could be free to like everything or at
least find everything fascinating. Not that he was without complaint. In an essay in The
Nation called “The Painting of Importance,” Arthur bemoaned the new high serious-
ness whose point seemed to be to make a work of art seem important rather than be it
by carrying the aura of deep meaning and struggle with form while in fact bespeaking
no message at all other than size and a lot of scratching on the surface and a deep title
taken from the Second World War. Certain bad boy artists of the 1980s he chided as
adolescents, the kind who come out of their bedrooms in the American suburbs only to
tell their parents to stuff it and return to their television sets (now they would be insult-
ing each other on Facebook). He had the pulse of America just as he had the pulse of
art. But he never ceased to be cheerful, for he found each twist in the inscrutable pattern
of life a new surprise, giving him something new to think about. The worst thing in life,
to twist the words of Warhol, is not having anything to think about.

Arthur’s big mind was a generous one. He welcomed serious thought from all quar-
ters, whether it criticized him or not. I had in 1992 submitted a book for publication
that criticized parts of his work, and when he read the manuscript, he wrote to me:
“Rather than duking it out, what can I do to help you get this book published.” Two
years later, I was coming out of a shop somewhere on the Eastside when I ran into him
hurrying to a lecture. His warmth was unmistakable. Not ten seconds after he greeted
me, an artist who had been living in Italy sauntered by and was bear-hugged. Arthur
immediately introduced this man to me, at which point a third stopped to pay respects,
and Arthur said, “Three wonderful people on one day.” When we were seated at the
same table with a famous Indian artist after an exhibition at New York University in
1985, the artist went on about painting a canvas ninety-six yards long. “Couldn’t you
make it a hundred?” Arthur asked, with dry cheerfulness.
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It is not often that a philosopher can achieve a central role in the precipitation of
culture and in the most cosmopolitan way. It is not often that a philosopher can move
effortlessly through various genres of writing, and with such suave, effervescent prose,
prose that inevitably finds a philosophical twist to art, and an art to the way philosophy
can be imagined. It is less often still that such a person can be loved, really loved by so
many. Arthur was what the Greeks call “great-hearted.” He filled the room while leav-
ing ample space for others. The room is bare without him.
Figure 2 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.
Remembering Arthur Danto
Fred Rush
I came to Columbia for graduate work in philosophy in 1989. My plan – if one could call
it that – was to concentrate on the areas of ancient philosophy, German philosophy, and
the philosophy of art. The last bit, the philosophy of art, was something I was unsure
about. I had pursued a musical career with some seriousness after college, and my
undergraduate course in philosophy had concentrated on what was at the time the
central concern in analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language. It would not have
occurred to me to connect contemporary philosophy with art. Philosophy and art were
utterly distinct for me; I would not have wanted to sully one with the other.
The degree to which I was open to the philosophy of art was due to having picked up,
pretty much at random, a copy of Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace from
a bookstore in Atlanta. What commenced as a cautious, half-hearted read developed into
an avid one, and I saw for the first time how one might do something exciting and inno-
vative in aesthetics. Still, I did not arrive in New York entirely convinced. I did not meet
Arthur until my second year in graduate school. He taught a seminar called, I believe,
simply Topics in Aesthetics, which I discovered, in practice, meant “read a book with
Professor Danto.” The course consisted entirely of discussing the philosophical issues
raised by a book (of Arthur’s choosing) and writing up a paper on some topic covered. I
do not remember what book we read that term. I have retained an impression that it was
not very good, but that didn’t matter because what I found out was that the book was just
a prop for Arthur to discuss his own views. That was much more exciting, of course!
Arthur was what Harold Bloom calls a “strong reader,” and his somewhat impetuous and
even impertinent style was a chance, in essence, to talk with Arthur about Arthur – about
his work. He held forth, seamlessly integrating great chunks of his own aesthetics with
both historical views and real-world examples from the visual arts against which one
might test the theory. I remember writing a too-long paper on the connection of seman-
tics and ontology in Arthur’s view as I understood it. I hesitated to turn it in. It contained
a number of objections, which I thought he might take to be snotty and superficial. The
paper, in fact, was the model of politeness, but I thought that he might not like being
objected to (as some philosophers do not) and especially not if the source of the objection
was a puny graduate student. So, I showed the paper to Sidney Morgenbesser, with whom
I had worked a fair amount, and he thought it was OK. So I turned it in and held my
breath. As it turned out, Arthur thought they were pretty good objections to some theory,
just not to his theory. This was a jovial result for him; he thought it a good effort on my
part but that I had misunderstood his views at what he took to be a crucial turn in the
argument.
Some things never change. In our last philosophical exchange, this time in print, he
still thought I misunderstood what he was driving at. In the intervening years, Arthur
had been a co-supervisor of my dissertation, supported me vigorously in getting my
career off the ground, gave visiting lectures at the places I taught, and we met many,
many times at conferences, at bars, over meals, and at his apartment on Riverside Drive.
With my good friend Lydia Goehr, whom Arthur deeply admired and loved, I visited him
two days before he died. But the misunderstanding abided.
Arthur resisted my characterization of his view that artworks embody their meaning
as a form of social expressivism. I considered this not a criticism at all. The expressivism
I had in mind was bound up with what I took to be a Hegel-inspired social externalism
about the meanings of artworks, to which I took Arthur to be fully committed. I thought
and still think that Arthur’s aesthetic theory both conceptually and historically com-
bines the two major trains of thought that preceded his own account, representation-
alism and expressivism about content, but in a way that transforms both strands. This
faintly Kantian taxonomy appealed to him as a matter of philosophical historiography,

but I believe he thought that bringing his views too close to expressivism implied that
his account was psychologistic. He preferred a formal way of putting his point that he
loosely modeled on Frege’s account of concepts as functions, a formulation that he
made in his blockbuster essay “The Artworld” and in altered form in Transfiguration. But
Transfiguration had the power it did because it substantially fleshed out the internal
structure of his views, and I was concerned that the structure did not cohere quite the
way he thought, especially if one took as canon law his rather minimal formal defini-
tion of a work. Arthur’s formal side liked to express his view that “interpretations con-
stitute artworks,” by construing interpretation as a “function” that “mapped”
art-content onto physical objects. But to my mind this did not rule out an important
sense in which a work might be said to express interpretation through content. His
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connection of content to concepts such as “point of view” and “metaphor” in the later
chapters of Transfiguration seemed to me to offer an account of expression, not of art-
ists’ intents through works perhaps, but certainly of the art itself. He came to call this
embodiment, but I could not see the difference between that and, coupled with the idea
of an artworld and its “atmosphere of theory,” the sense of expression I took to be part
of his debt to Hegel. In the end, I guess I thought that the formula Arthur used to repre-
sent the relation of interpretation to work was more gesture than substance, a nod to
the way analytic philosophy was done in the day but not really much more.
Was Arthur right that I misunderstood his views? Perhaps. Was I right that social
externalism was a part of the view? Perhaps. Arthur’s own character was not to belabor
disagreement. There was his definitive shoulder shrug, not dismissive but reconcilia-
tory: if we disagreed, so what? The reason I detail the disagreement and its unsettled
nature is that it tokens something deeper, I have come to think. In his letters to Wilhelm
Fliess, Freud asserted that projection is a process in which one takes negative traits of
oneself that are difficult to accept and recognize as such and ascribes them to another
in order to both make criticism of the trait possible and reduce anxiety. Subsequent psy-
choanalytic theory has refined this Freudian understanding somewhat but retains the
emphasis on the negative character of what’s projected. This seems too restrictive, for
there are plenty of cases where projection operates in tandem with positive self-assess-
ment. Projection of positive qualities can be a function of wanting others to be like one-
self or oneself to be like others. Where the other person is someone one finds deeply
admirable, even lovable, that seems especially plausible. What my and Arthur’s dis-
agreement about the internal structure of his aesthetic views meant, why I kept coming
back to those views and wanting to make sense of them in what I took to be their own
terms, was about more than simply settling something philosophically. After all, was I
really saying to Arthur: look, I understand your views better than you do?
Perhaps part of what Arthur taught me was the importance of letting go.
Philosophical disagreement is not so important finally; it is subservient to imagina-
tion and intellectual depth. Sometimes disagreements are productive, sometimes
not. And sometimes they are productive for a while and then peter out. The value in
letting go is to be able to start over again someplace else, someplace where the
philosophical imagination operates with more impetus and range. That Arthur
could treat his own work that way, as something he was willing to let go of, expressed
a deep trait in him. I know that I must, in time, let go of Arthur, but that has always
been a difficult thing to do.
Working with Arthur C. Danto
Michael Kelly
I first met Arthur in person when I was being interviewed in 1986 for the Managing
Editor position at the Journal of Philosophy at Columbia University (he was President of
the Journal). The second, informal interview took place at the December annual meet-
ing of the American Philosophical Association, held that year in Boston. Arthur sug-
gested that we meet at the Institute of Contemporary Art, located at the time next to a
fire station on Boylston Street. When I arrived, Arthur was talking to a few friends, so I
waited, thinking we would be meeting alone. But he called me over and introduced me
to Nelson Goodman and Richard Wollheim, who were standing in front of a contempo-
rary work on paper by David Salle. If Goodman was wondering when the work was art,
if it were, and if Wollheim was closely seeing in the work hoping to discern it as what-
ever the artist intended it to be, Arthur was mischievously disinterested in making any
aesthetic judgment of it, though he was already an art critic for The Nation. He was
instead trying to understand what could account for the work’s ontological status as
art. It embodied meaning, he divined, even if the meaning it embodied were largely to
provoke vexing questions about art among some of the world’s leading experts at the
time. Whether good or bad, Salle’s work corroborated Arthur’s definition of art as
embodied meaning, to which he added “wakeful dreams” as a third criterion in his last,
recently published book, What Art Is.

I worked closely and fortunately with Arthur for sixteen years. In the long run, how-
ever, he ruined my life as an employee, and I told him this because he was so generous,
judicious, and respectful that I came to expect similar treatment everywhere else I have
worked since leaving Columbia. If I have not found it in other employment situations,
and if I have not developed the same leadership qualities on my own, both are less a
criticism of others, myself included, than confirmation of how special Arthur was in
this regard. Should there be an afterlife, Arthur should be president, even if work is not
required.
At the same time, Arthur had an uncanny, enviable ability to deflect any criticism
of his philosophy, and perhaps of his person too. While he could seem aloof in doing
so, he was really returning the criticisms to the senders, cleverly inviting them to think
instead about their own ideas. Any such exchange with Arthur was an opportunity,
10
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hopefully characterized by wit and erudition on the interlocutor’s side, too, for each
person to become clearer about her ideas, not simply as one’s own but as ideas. This is
perhaps why Arthur did not have many, if any, students in the typical academic way
that a prominent philosopher might foster students to develop and sustain his the-
ories. Rather, he encouraged independent thinking, which was his gift as a teacher
and friend.
Turning back to art, it is still hard to forget the image of Arthur, forty years old,
standing amidst the stacks of Brillo pad, Delmonte peach, Heinz ketchup, and other
cartons in the Stable Gallery in April 1964, where he famously had his epiphany
about art. None of it made any sense to him as art, though he was a relatively suc-
cessful practicing artist, making wood-block prints in an expressionist or mannerist
style while also teaching philosophy at Columbia. He stopped making art roughly
around the time of the Stable show, I believe, for he decided he could no longer con-
tinue doing both art and philosophy. Why did he choose philosophy? Because more
than art alone, philosophy enabled him to make sense of the art that did not make
any sense. But first, since he determined that no existing definition or philosophy of
art could explain why Warhol’s Brillo boxes were art when their supermarket equiv-
alents were not, Arthur had to discover a new definition, which he somehow found
in those boxes and which anchored his essentialist philosophy of art for forty-nine
years, and beyond.
Arthur is and will remain exemplary, as a philosopher and critic, because of the way
he understood the intimate relationship between philosophy and art, and especially
because of his insistence that the philosophy of art be calibrated to contemporary prac-
tice, and not just to Warhol’s or Salle’s work. Whether or not people agree with Arthur’s
philosophy of art, they should appreciate that he worked harder than anybody, perhaps
ever, to correct philosophy’s tendency to disenfranchise art because it allegedly steals
our attention and diverts us from truth. He always believed, despite the postmodern
turn in culture contemporaneous with his Stable epiphany, that philosophy’s ultimate
goal was still truth. But he also thought that at times it could not achieve that goal
without art. After all, knowing the essence of art is a way of knowing truth, and, he
argued, this truth is revealed only by art, though it then had to be articulated by philos-
ophy. It turns out that art discloses something about the nature of truth, and not just in
relation to art, for truth is truth.
Like Baudelaire and Hegel, a fusion of writer and thinker Arthur embodied in
many ways, he believed you could find the universal truth about art only in its con-
temporary embodiments, for that is where such truth lives. That is also where Arthur
lived, and where we will always find him, playfully and generously philosophical
as ever.
11
ACD, In Memoriam
Jonathan Gilmore
There are many current accounts of Arthur Danto’s intellectual itinerary and his cele-
brated place within the worlds of art criticism and philosophy. I wish to offer a sense, partial
of course, of what he was like to those who knew him closely. When his friend and former
colleague Richard Wollheim died, Danto told me of his vexation that, in his substantial
autobiography Germs, Wollheim described only his personal development, largely within
psychoanalytical parameters. But Danto wanted to know how Wollheim the philosopher,
not Wollheim the man, came into being. Danto might have taken comfort in knowing that
to distinguish these two dimensions in himself might not have been possible. Who he was
as a philosopher was hardly distinguishable from who he was as a person.
His philosophical fame came from analyzing the transformation instantiated in
works of art – those of Pop and Fluxus, the music of Cage, and the dance of Cunningham
– that took as its substance everyday objects, sounds, actions, and the like. That began as
early as 1964 in his essay “The Artworld,” in which he quaintly referred to a certain
“Mr. Andy Warhol,” a figure whom few among his philosophical audience would have
heard of or, had they heard of, would have taken seriously. With that essay, and the
philosophical and critical writing that followed, Danto initiated a revolution in the theo-
retical reflection on the arts, a revolution in which philosophers once again began to ask
the truly grand questions about art – about its essence and its history – themes that were
foresworn by an earlier generation of philosophers allergic to metaphysical speculation
and wary of attributing any great cognitive significance to “mere” aesthetic forms. His
range and concreteness of examples gave vividness to his discussions – a kind of flesh to
spirit – not often found in the anemic Anglo-American tradition in aesthetics. But, more
significantly, in grounding his thought in the history of art and its contemporary mani-
festations, he gave aesthetics a demonstration of the philosophical payoff that the phi-
losophy of science came to enjoy after it recognized that expert knowledge of the sciences
and their histories serves not just as coloration in developing idealized models, but in
analyzing the very concepts – say, that of species – that are central to philosophical
theories.
Danto’s major systematic work of aesthetics was the Transfiguration of the
Commonplace, a title he borrowed from one appended to a non-existent book mentioned
in a real book by Muriel Spark. But it might as well have been the name of a commonplace
book in which he inscribed his principles for how to respond to others. For anyone who
had Arthur as a teacher learned that his default approach was to excavate what might
be even a minor part of one’s work if it had some value or depth, and show how that
was what the work as a whole was really about – transforming lead into gold, or at least
a richer metal than what one started with. Responding to a paper I once wrote for him,
he said that the first twenty-four pages amounted to no more than superficial philos-
ophy of science, but after that, it was the best philosophy of art he had read in a long
time. The paper was only twenty-nine pages! And anyone who went from being his stu-
dent or admirer to his friend, as I did, learned that this is how he treated people as well
12
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– finding whatever was good in them, however implicit or accidental, and deciding that
it was that which defined who they really were. This would remain a purely external
redefinition if it weren’t that one wanted, when in Danto’s company, to be one’s best
self, and sometimes found that one could.
But the ordinary things, of which he described the transfiguration into indiscern-
ible artistic counterparts, were meaningful to Danto in their own right, and not, as to
ironists, only as a form of slumming. In responding to my primitive Italian with his
“soldier’s Italian” and an account of the trouble it caused him in polite society, he
described with real passion how, when serving in Italy in the Second World War, he
would avidly await each installment of a British comic strip about a young intelli-
gence officer named Jane whose misadventures inexplicably but reliably left her
partially disrobed (this was the 1940s). After I sent him a book with reproductions
from the series, he described the reverie he was sent into while reading it, now more
than a half a century later. But that sort of thing was never just one thing for Danto,
the way it might be for someone who thought cultural ephemera couldn’t sustain
any substantial reflection. We once shared a long train ride and discussed watching
the nightly reruns of Seinfeld. I thought, at least in this art form, I’m as much of an
expert as him – until, after a long pause in which he adopted a characteristic inward
focus, he turned to me and said, “You know, it really is the closest thing our age has
to the commedia dell’arte tradition.”
It was sometimes said of Danto, with admiration or consternation, that he saw the
world as it should and could be, not as it was. It would imply too volunteerist a perspec-
tive to say that he chose to adopt this perspective, but he certainly recognized having
it, blaming it on being been born on January 1st, in which, he said, “Each year opens
on a new page, for me as well as for the world.” In truth, Danto’s way of seeing the
world was as essential a feature of his identity as any other might be. He suffered, and
he suffered with you, and his optimism was not held blithely. Instead, it represented in
some ways a moral stand, one no doubt a source of frustration to those who wanted
him to share in their cynicism, however, warranted that might be in academic locales.
For me, and I’m sure for many others around him, his attitude, his exemplary being,
was a source of strength: a goad to think, when possible, beyond what was currently a
source of pain; and not to curse the world even if one was right to curse one small part
of it. And his cosmopolitanism and earthiness, and his profundity as a philosopher,
made that stance credible, when it might have seemed an artificial conceit in others.
Although he engaged in the ruthless disputation required of professional philoso-
phers, where expressing too much agreement with another’s argument is a form of
discourtesy, Danto was contemptuous of the academic déformation professionnelle of
taking pleasure in snide and cavalier criticism. False sophistications and too-clever-by-
half arguments made him impatient. Yet he delighted in wit, even at his expense, as
when he was told by a graduate student of a somewhat deconstructive bent that the
indefinite article in the subtitle of his book – “a philosophy of art” – appeared to betray
a false modesty.
Danto didn’t believe in an afterlife and took some comfort in knowing, he said, that
the end really was the end. But, of course, one keeps in one’s mind an image of those we
lose. When turning older, he embraced the observation that he and Socrates shared a
13
physiognomy, and he showed me from time to time pictures that friends sent him of
busts of the ancient philosopher that made the comparison highly credible. But I con-
tinue to think of him through another set of images, those painted several years ago by
his wife, the artist Barbara Westman. In these, she has represented the two of them as
Adam and Eve in the Garden. And there he is, with grey beard and bald pate, dancing,
kissing, and otherwise cavorting with his partner, while beasts of the kingdom some-
what quizzically look on. Danto beamed with pleasure when showing these images to
visitors, a pleasure that declared the great happiness he found in his life with Barbara,
and the happiness, I think, of the figure by which he is represented in that Eden.
Acknowledgment
These essays were originally published in the American Society for Aesthetics Newsletter
33.3, which is available on the ASA website: https://aesthetics-online.org. Photography
by Lydia Goehr.
14
1
Roquebrune, 1962
GINGER DANTO
My sister and I were little. We rode in the scratchy backseat of a mustard-colored Citroën
sedan. No seatbelts. It was 1962, the south of France. The countryside was raw, the
villages small and closed, the only sign of life smoke coming from the chimneys.
Grandmothers were home cooking. Men were in the fields.
For my father’s first sabbatical year from Columbia University, my parents settled in
the tiny, sloping village of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, probably because of the house,
that had not just a kitchen with a terrace and a view of the sea, but a spare upper room
where my father could write. It was the Côte d’Azur before it was the Côte d’Azur. Life
was slow, simple. Celebrities were still only interested in the yachting playgrounds of
Monaco and Monte Carlo.
My father was by then keen on philosophy: it was his subject as an academic, the
analytical his trade as a professor. But art and art making still held sway from his forma-
tive career as an artist of moderate success in our hometown of New York City. That was
where he made woodcuts, in the apartment where we grew up, with the dusty perfume
of woodchips everywhere littering the floor, splashes of ink on the wood panels and
sheets of luminous rice paper for printing, rolled and ready for use.
He didn’t have any of this when we traveled, however, much less a studio. Just a blue
black Olivetti and a battered briefcase, the same one he carried around on campus. But
among the books and manuscripts was invariably a sketchbook, or a portfolio of

Sennelier paper, with somewhere a bottle of ink, a pen, and a set of watercolors.
Reading my father describe his early life as an artist, particularly his famous
discussion of giving it up, I was surprised to see him say categorically that he never used
color. Or that color didn’t interest him. That his medium was all prints, all black and
white.
Certainly, the woodcuts were his signature and what afforded a certain income,
beyond his professor’s salary, that he admitted “meant a lot.” But when we traveled as a
15
Ginger Danto
young family as we did summers as well as sabbatical years, to France and Italy and
parts of New England, my father went beyond drafting mere sketches, in pencil or pen
and ink, to filling these with color—dots and dashes of light, luminous pastel—pale
washes of color reminiscent of the very Cezannes that in their ultimate perfection even-
tually closed the door for him, he said, to ever making art again.
I remember the reflex he had when we would stop somewhere for lunch, of taking
out his sketchpad, and while my mother unpacked a picnic of salads in little waxed
paper boxes from the local épicerie, with the requisite baguette and log of sweet butter,
he would sit and make a study of whatever scenery we found ourselves in. Or, if that
proved uninspiring, he would ask one of us to pose, and in my infinite ennui as a child
more interested in playing with my stuffed animals than sitting perfectly still, I suffered
there on some rock or bench as my father sketched and squinted and I must say—
smiled—until we were both released by the communal call to eat.
He worked very fast; it was my sister Elizabeth who remembered this, who at age ten
or eleven accompanied him around Rome in the afternoons to this or that architectural
site for what my father called “analytical sight-seeing.” As the resulting architectural
pen and ink effigies were not leisurely studies but rather attempts to interpret
16
Roquebrune, 1962
information drawn from books by Janson and Rudolf Wittkower, the Columbia art
historian who became a close friend, and whose “Architectural Principles in the Age of
Humanism,” my father wrote in his 2013 intellectual autobiography, “had the greatest
philosophical influence on me of anything I had read about art.”
In this exhibit there are other edifices, notably Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quatro
Fontane, where the artist was interested in the convex and the concave. “The idea that
it was something invisible that gave structure to the visual turned me around com-
pletely in my way of looking at art,” my father wrote later on, recalling these epiph-
anies, that for him had echoes in Oriental philosophy, for example, and that occurred on
these repeated Roman excursions in the footsteps of the Baroque.
What I remember is that once he was home – whether the ramshackle villa in
Roquebrune or the apartment in Rome – he disassembled his road sketches of fresh ink
or swaths of color, leaving them to dry on some surface that would soon enough be
reclaimed for more domestic use: the maid’s ironing, somebody’s homework, a meal or
an evening glass of wine shared with my mother.
In an essay written to accompany an online exhibit of his woodcuts established
several years ago by his alma mater, Wayne State University, my father wrote of his oeu-
vres: “I had no interest in just making art, I wanted them to enter life, and hang on
other people’s walls. I wanted them to be a part of life.” And so they are, decades later,
courtesy of CAFA and a dedicated consortium of colleagues, to be seen by people from
all over the world, a thousand miles from where their life began.
The essay is reprinted with gracious permission from CAFA, Beijing, China. CAFA
published a catalog on the occasion of its 2014 Arthur Danto symposium and exhibit.
17
2
Boundaries Crossed
ANDRÁS SZÁNTÓ
1 Times Square
There is a pedestrian island in front of the Marriott Marquis Hotel, in Times Square,
between 45th and 46th streets. After recent design upgrades and the elimination of
vehicle traffic, it is a far more welcoming place than it was in the late summer of 1988,
when I arrived in Manhattan from Budapest to pursue a PhD in sociology. It so hap-
pened that my first accommodations in New York, provided by the City University’s
Graduate School and University Center, were in a single-room-occupancy building a
stone’s throw from the square, on West 44th Street. Some of my neighbors were former
prostitutes. The neon signs in Times Square – still made of neon back then – would
paint red spirals on my white walls at night.
The overpowering visual and cultural landscape of Times Square fascinated me. A
whole universe of sinister and sublime surprises awaited me steps from my front door.
The aforementioned pedestrian island, I soon learned, was not just any island. It was
part of a site-specific artwork. A mysterious drone emanated from underneath the
metal grille covering its triangular surface. The sound arose from somewhere deep
below, like an invisible sonic tower, comingling with the cacophony of taxi honks,
subway screeches, and all the human clamor of the “Crossroads of the World.” Once
you caught on, it was impossible to tune out its mood and mind-altering presence.
The installation, titled Times Square, had been designed for that spot by an exper-
imental composer and percussionist named Max Neuhaus (1939–2009). The sound
sculpture, as the artist called it, had been running more or less continuously since
1977, under the care of the Dia Art Foundation. Together with a fellow student, I set
about documenting it. We interviewed a homeless man who lived on top of the work,
seemingly oblivious to its presence. We met a woman who came there often to
meditate. We asked tourists what they thought about the sound as a form of public
18
Boundaries Crossed
art. We filmed pedestrians from rooftops. When we were done, we presented our
work at a v isual-anthropology conference in Amsterdam, in a documentary film
titled Sound from the Ground.1
It was armed with a videocassette copy of Sound from the Ground that I entered Arthur
Danto’s office for the first time, in 1991. I had since transferred to Columbia University,
where I was working on a dissertation about art galleries and the transformation of the
visual-art world into a modern cultural industry. The only hitch was, few of my profes-
sors in the sociology department knew much about art or its institutions and markets.
It made sense to walk over to Philosophy Hall to seek out the advice of Arthur C. Danto.
He was, after all, the man who coined the term artworld. And he was part of that world.
At the peak of his powers as a teacher, theoretician, and critic, Danto was an intellec-
tual rock star. A frequent presence in Manhattan’s glittering art scene, he had achieved
an aura of public fame that is rarely attached to academics. As a 27-year-old student at
the time, it took some nerve to knock on his door.
Arthur had just published an essay about Neuhaus in The Nation, where he famously
held the art-critic post formerly occupied by Clement Greenberg. In a characteristic
switching of gears from “mere” criticism to something deeper and more profound, he
described Neuhaus’s sound sculpture as “a portable tabernacle, a bubble of sacral space
encapsulated in midtown life, which flows unheedingly around it, save for those
attracted as a momentary congregation” (Danto 1991). I was confident that my docu-
mentary would claim his interest. Not only was it about an artist he cared about, but it
directly probed the categorical distinction between art and the ordinary world – Arthur’s
driving preoccupation in the field of aesthetics. What better example of his “transfigu-
ration of the commonplace” could one find than an artistic intervention that elevated
Times Square, in all its grime and decrepitude, to a sacramental shrine?
Times Square was precisely the kind of art Arthur relished thinking about. It was
about boundaries: between the traditional and the modern, the familiar and the tran-
scendent, the aesthetic and the everyday. Such boundaries were for him always both
philosophical and political, and he demonstrated exceptional skill in pinpointing them
and explaining why they were relevant. He was, in this sense, a virtuoso of scrutinizing
boundaries. As a person, he was fond of stepping over them.
2 Opening Doors
I became, as far as I know, Arthur’s last graduate student. He helped guide me into the
art world conceptually, and also by opening doors in a practical sense, using his connec-
tions. Arthur approached his duties as a dissertation adviser with a light touch and in a
spirit of avuncular generosity. He steered clear of the confrontational approach that
some feel compelled to adopt in such circumstances. I got the feeling that he was some-
what bemused by sociology, a young discipline that operated on a more mundane plane
than his own. But he was more than willing to come along for the ride.
In a way, I set out to pick up where Arthur had left off, to drill into the layers that his
theoretical inquiry left untouched. For me, the art world was not a mental construct,
but a living-breathing site of human and organizational interactions. As a sociologist,
it behooved me to ask how, as an empirical matter, the transfiguration of the
19
ANDRÁS SZÁNTÓ
commonplace actually happened – as a product of the daily functioning of real-world

institutions. It was clear to me that a key site of this organizational alchemy was the art
gallery, where values were nurtured in a dual sense. It was in galleries that the first
rough version of art history was written, much as newspapers have been said to have
drafted the first version of our collective history. And it was in galleries that art, for
better or for worse, intertwined with commerce. The value of each work would now be
reflected in a sometimes exceptionally high price, which in turn denoted the artwork –
in the currency of the marketplace – as belonging to a class apart from ordinary things.
Arthur encouraged this investigation and took evident pleasure in crossing over to
another discipline to see a world that fascinated him from a different point of view.
Approaching the art world as a social scientist rather than as a philosopher led me to
different conclusions than Arthur’s, which, I believe, were complementary rather than
contradictory to his. For example: from where did contemporary art’s limitless plu-
ralism derive? In Arthur’s view, the relevant dynamics, here as elsewhere, were lodged
in ideas. They were philosophical. At the risk of oversimplifying his position, he argued
that a series of erasures over the course of the twentieth century had removed all previ-
ously necessary conditions placed upon art and led, step by step, to a final reckoning in
Andy Warhol’s 1964 Brillo Box installation – the first work to directly, and at the right
time in the flow of history, tackle the question of what distinguishes a work of art from
an ordinary thing. The defining question of art having been reached, any compelling
reason to move in any particular direction was rendered moot, according to Arthur’s
theory. Discourse fractured in a thousand equally legitimate directions, “art having
finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself, and remaining, as it
were, solely as the object of its own theoretical consciousness” (Danto 1997, 31). Art
had dissolved into a sea of open possibility. The show would go on, unshackled from his-
torical prerogatives, but without a binding narrative. This was Danto’s so-called “end of
art.”
But could ideas by themselves wreak such havoc? For me, puncturing the boundary
of what Arthur termed the “post-historical” era in art was a sociological event as much
as a philosophical one. It had to do with the shattering of the tradition-bound confines
of the art world, which for all sorts of complicated reasons had been trapped, like a fly
frozen in amber, in a latticework of premodern sociological relations. The 1960s seem
quaint in our eyes now, but this was the time when the art world was beginning to turn
into a much larger and culturally and economically integrated, national and interna-
tional entity. Growth and commercialism went hand in hand. The shared discourse that
had hitherto bonded the small, informal community of art-world denizens, and
provided a matrix of common understandings and a relatively clear sense of historical
direction, was starting to evaporate.
Big, complex, market-driven systems are pluralistic by nature. They splinter into
niches and sub-niches – so many lagoons in the wider ocean. Think of a dinner table.
Eight people can easily maintain a shared conversation. Once you have a dozen or more,
they pair off and cluster. Different conversations sprout up at each end of the table.
Something similar was going on in the art world. Art galleries exacerbated this frac-
turing. The gallery system responded to growth by multiplying in numbers, rather than
by scaling in size. Big fish didn’t eat the little fish. The little fish multiplied. By the 1980s,
what had been a handful of Manhattan galleries had given way to hundreds, each one
20
Boundaries Crossed
a microcosm of its own. Countless more were taking part in a burgeoning global art
conversation. This metastatic complexity, and the resulting discursive opacity, was an
evolving sociological condition that was catalytic to the onset of aesthetic pluralism. Or
so I argued.
In short, for me, the story of the art world was, above all, a parable of modernization:
of the agony and ecstasy, the losses and gains, of what it means to grow into a mature,
highly organized, transactional industry. I think Arthur saw this as an interesting sub-
plot on the margins of his deeper and wider macro-narrative. We spent many hours as
well talking about the art world’s micro-dynamics. Here, too, Arthur was inclined to
leave the details to others. He was famously reticent about being linked to an institu-
tional theory of art. Nonetheless, as a former artist, he took a keen interest in the
day-to-day functioning of galleries and the art market. Galleries, after all, did the work
of filtering the universe of artists and artworks, elevating some to wider attention and,
if all went well, inscribing the lucky few into the permanent art-historical record.
Arthur and I had fun unpacking just how this accreditation of cultural legitimacy hap-
pened – how certain galleries and gallerists achieved the authority to do this work, and
how, through each individual exhibition, and the unfolding chain of gallery exhibitions
and sales over time, certain artists and objects were woven into the enduring narrative
of art.
Crossing over into the sociological realm led to another adventure, involving a pair
of Russian émigré artists, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid. The two had made
boundary crossings central to their lives and to their art collaboration. As proponents
of a kind of Russian pop art, they thumbed their noses at the Soviet state, which they
had left behind, continuing their gadfly projects in America, where they found a mea-
sure of success. Komar and Melamid convinced Arthur to advise them on their
ongoing undertaking, whereby populations of entire countries would be polled about
their tastes in art. Did you know that blue is the favorite color of all but one country?
Komar and Melamid painted “most wanted” and “least wanted” images based on the
findings of each survey. They decided that after having polled lay populations, it was
time to study the experts. So they sent questionnaires to the membership of the
American Society for Aesthetics. I was asked to organize the survey and write the
report.
In the winter of 1996, Arthur and I went to Montreal for the society’s annual
conference. We presented our findings in a “town meeting” discussion. The session was
memorialized in a conference report, which, based on my analysis of the survey data,
pointed out that “apparently the society waffled about a number of questions, refusing
to commit itself unconditionally and non-contextually to questions of taste.”2
Accordingly, on my urging, the artists had summarized the survey conclusions pictori-
ally around the theme of equivocation. They produced a diptych composed of a larger
and a smaller image, reflecting the aestheticians’ lack of commitment on the matter of
painting size. “When the ‘most wanted’ and ‘least wanted’ paintings were arranged by
the artists with one directly above the other and a thin metal band separating them,”
the society’s publication recorded, “they exactly approximated the shape of an ordinary
refrigerator.” It was just the sort of intellectual merriment that Arthur loved. It required
a sense of humor and a willingness to go where others in his position might not feel
appropriate going.
21
ANDRÁS SZÁNTÓ
3 Today’s Art World
My dissertation research involved interviewing the artists and employees of three

leading New York galleries. Being connected to this process allowed Arthur to indulge
in his journalistic fascination with the art world. He was far from a disengaged observer
of the scene. He loved going out. He loved parties and enjoyed eating in restaurants. He
relished fraternizing with artists, collectors, curators, and gallerists. Those who knew
him were aware that philosophy and his late-blooming career as a critic, in the end,
allowed him to enter the innermost sanctum of the art world in a way that his own
abandoned project as an artist did not. The subway ride from Broadway and 116th
Street to downtown represented another boundary crossed, the one between Arthur’s
day job in the ivory tower and the raucous art scene where his soul, I believe, more com-
fortably resided. His capacity for moving effortlessly between those disparate realms set
him apart from many of his peers, who were either hopelessly incapable of grasping the
codes and fashions of the art world, or were no less hopelessly imprisoned by them.
Art criticism was for Arthur largely a way of practicing philosophy by other means,
but it grew into something more. He was keenly aware that his ideas had an impact. He
took credit for giving expression to a predicament in which art found itself in the latter
part of the twentieth century. It was a situation he had helped to raise to a certain level
of consciousness. But having helped usher in an anything-goes pluralism, he also
provided an antidote to it: his criticism. Art criticism was a means of demonstrating
how to cope with the bewildering, even paralyzing freedom of a contemporary art no
longer pinned down by conventions of form, taste, or subject. It was a way of keeping
up an appetite in a supermarket of art where the aisles were stocked with every conceiv-
able type of expression. It was easy to lose one’s hunger for the new in the midst of this
cornucopia. The solution was keen attention to what the eye can see, coupled with a
Zen Buddhist-like big-hearted generosity in framing a response to an encounter with a
work of art.
In the fall of 1994, Arthur and I took a walk around the downtown galleries. We
stopped in on an exhibition by the photographer Andres Serrano. If memory serves cor-
rectly, it was his Budapest exhibition, at the Paula Cooper Gallery. The topic was of
particular interest to me, because some of the images were apparently taken in my
Budapest apartment, which I had rented to an American friend, who had allowed
Serrano to use it as a set, or so I was told. Walking through the exhibition with Arthur
provided a lifelong lesson in how to look at art. Serrano was no longer the wunderkind
celebrated and scorned for his 1987 Piss Christ. In my mind, his recent depictions of
nudes and corpses were cheap shots. As I walked through the show, I complained to
Arthur that I found the work exploitative. Arthur had a roundly different response. After
taking a long look, stopping deliberately in front of each picture, he launched into an
exegesis on medieval pictorial conventions, pointing out analogies in Serrano’s work to
which I had been utterly blind. We might as well have been viewing two different exhibi-
tions. What Arthur brought to the act of seeing art was a full awareness, a willingness
to engage the sum of his empathy and erudition. He later confided that he would almost
never write about art he didn’t like. Panning art was cruel and a waste of time.
22
Boundaries Crossed
One can’t help but wonder, though, what Arthur would make of today’s art world.
The market has continued to boom beyond all expectations. Ideas and critical debate
often take a back seat to prices. Excitement about art’s interactions with popular culture
has been overtaken by anxiety that the art world is turning into a minor outpost of the
entertainment industry. This is the post-historical art world in its full efflorescence.
Despite all that, my guess is that the bling and glam that surround today’s art scene
aren’t what would rattle Arthur. The 1980s and 1990s art world that he documented
and lived, after all, was plenty commercial, especially compared to what he had seen
back in the 1950s. I think what would irk him is the well-nigh impossibility of making
any historic breakthroughs.
Not long before Arthur died, the curator and writer Hans Ulrich Obrist and I con-
ducted a series of interviews with him, which offered a window into his thinking late in
life. “I’m not excited about the current moment, I must say,” Arthur allowed, near the
end of our conversations. “The amount of liberation that’s available to artists today is
unbelievable,” he went on. “But I think about moments like when Philip Guston, in
1970, at the Marlborough Gallery, was showing the Ku Klux Klan figures, and people
said, ‘This is not art!’ And de Kooning comes over and gives Philip Guston a hug and
tries to reassure him that it’s art, while everyone else was saying that it wasn’t.”3
The blessing and the bane of our current moment in art is that there are no longer
any lines to cross. All the rules have been shattered. All the parameters and perimeters
have been blurred. Anything can be art – and no one wrote with more poignancy about
this vexed situation than Arthur. His great fortune was to have lived at a time when
boundaries were still there for the crossing, when it was still possible to say, “This is not
art.” But along with the liberating evaporation of boundaries comes an inescapable
melancholy about their absence. On balance, Arthur had exquisite timing. Ennui was a
small price to pay for bearing witness to art’s epic turning point.
4 Art History Ended in My Garden
As should be clear by now, it is impossible for me to write about Arthur Danto without
touching upon our personal friendship, which outgrew our intersecting professional
interests. We shared a lot, beyond our love of art and our interesting birthdays – January
1, set apart by four decades – and names that rhymed.

On a sunny May afternoon in a Los Angeles garden, years after I first knocked on his
office door, Arthur delivered a speech at my wedding – a speech that was subsequently
published in an essay titled “Philosophers and the Ritual of Marriage” (Danto 2008,
7–14). In what must have come as a surprise to some of the assembled, he canvassed
the history of philosophy to search for an answer to a question that my future wife –
who by happenstance had studied philosophy – and I had posed to him in preparation
for the ceremony, namely: Why would two free individuals, unencumbered by custom,
economics, or religion, enter a binding relationship of a kind that marriage represents?
Socrates, Leibniz, Kant, and of course, Hegel were among those cited. The essay is rarely
quoted, so I share the gist here:
23
ANDRÁS SZÁNTÓ
Even as an Aristophanic whole, engaged in a Odyssian form of the connubially connected

life, wedding is a social act, fraught with meanings. We want most immediately to give
those we love – family and friends – a symbolic participation in our evolving condition –
and the ceremony of wedlock transforms the company into symbolic union with ourselves.
It is an acknowledgement that we do not because we cannot in the end live for ourselves
alone. It admits some wider relevant society into our happiness, and creates through cere-
monial enactment an entity larger than ourselves (Danto 2008, 13).
True to form, Arthur made the essay another opportunity to opine about boundary
lines that fence off the ordinary from that which is more meaningful. In any event (as
Arthur would say in moments of transition like this), the wedding was not the end of
our story. A closeness developed between our families. Arthur and his wife, Barbara,
took a keen interest in our children, which is how we learned that the Johnsonian
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University had considered opinions on
each of the Harry Potter novels, which he had eagerly read.
What continues to link us even after his passing, in the most tangible way, is Arthur’s
former weekend house, in Brookhaven Hamlet, Long Island. He was deeply attached to
this hideaway, which he had bought for a song in the early 1970s. It is where he wrote,
voted, and thought. He even worked to help the area get a historically protected desig-
nation. He developed friendships with people in the neighborhood, including scientists
from the nearby Brookhaven National Laboratory. He took walks to the Carmans River
Estuary, at the end of the street, and on sunny days would drive out to the ocean beaches
at Smith Point Park. For some reason, my wife and I were entrusted with the care of the
modest cottage for periods of summertime house-sitting. When Arthur’s physical
condition frayed as he reached his eighties, it was no longer feasible for him to use the
house, and he offered it to us to buy. The house and its garden have since become the
anchor of my own family. Much of what is good about our lives happens there. It is
where we feel we are “an entity larger than ourselves.”
Arthur had converted a garage on the property into a writing studio. He installed a
skylight and hung a Chinese print. This is where he wrote some of his most seminal
works, including The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and various texts in which he
put forward his theory of “the end of art.” The humble shed was a launching pad for
ideas that left a lasting mark on our world. I take occasional delight in telling my friends
that art history, so to speak, ended in our garden.
Notes
1 Stephen Sifaneck, who passed away in 2013, at age 46, was my collaborator on the
documentary.
2 American Society for Aesthetics, “1996 Annual Meeting.” At http://aesthetics-online.
org/?page=report1.
3 András Szántó and Hans Ulrich Obrist, interview with Arthur Danto. Unpublished
manuscript.
24
Boundaries Crossed
References
Danto, Arthur C. 1991. “Max Neuhaus: Sound Works.” The Nation, March 4.
———. 1997. “The End of Art.” In After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History.
Princeton, NJ.
———. 2008. “Philosophers and the Ritual of Marriage.” In Think, a Periodical of the Royal
Institute of Philosophy, 17–18.
25
3
Writing with Style
ARTURO FONTAINE
Danto had style, a good style. When I make this aesthetic judgment, I’m sure I am right,
although justifying my claim is another matter. We cannot define what good style is, yet
we know it when we see it. Danto was engaged with questions of style all his life, as a
philosopher and as an art critic. The last chapter of his book The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace is devoted to metaphor, expression, and style. It is as if his whole explora-
tion of the concept of a work of art culminates with his reflections on the nature of
style. Hemingway said he had tried 39 versions of the final words of his novel Farewell
to Arms. Asked why by Paris Review interviewer, George Plimpton, his famous response
was: “getting the words right.” As a novelist myself, I’m absolutely sure that whether a
page has life or not is a question of finding the right words. Why is style so crucial?
When I say that Danto had also a distinctive style – as I hope my samples of his writ-
ings will show – this does not mean that he wanted to erase the frontier between philos-
ophy and literature. Philosophy is concerned with truth in an altogether different way
than literature is, and Danto believed it important to maintain this distinction. Derrida’s
alleged proposal – to read philosophy, the whole history of philosophy as literature – is,
as Danto wrote, like visiting “a museum of costumes we forget were meant to be worn”
(Danto 1986, 160).
Danto began with Buffon’s classic dictum (1753): “style c’est l’homme même” –
style is the man himself. How did Danto interpret this dictum? Let us turn to an example
of visual art: Lichtenstein’s “Portrait of Madame Cézanne” (1963) reproduces Erle
Loran’s diagram of Cézanne’s famous painting of his wife. Loran’s diagram, included in
his book, Cézanne’s Composition, attempts to show the geometric structure of the
painting using lines, arrows, and vectors. Visually, says Danto, Lichtenstein’s picture
and Loran’s diagram are roughly the same. However, the former is a work of art and the
latter only a diagram. Why?
Danto used this example to distinguish between a straightforward representation – a
diagram – and a picture that is about a diagram (Danto 1981, 141ff). Lichtenstein’s
26
Writing with Style
artwork is about the way Cézanne painted his wife. In other words, Lichtenstein was
presenting with a certain ironic distance, how Cézanne looked at the whole world,
namely, as geometric figures, as diagrams. Even his wife was seen in this fashion.
Lichtenstein’s canvas, according to Danto, tried to inspire a certain critical attitude
toward this “geometrizing vision.”
Danto’s main point, however, was that works of art, in contrast with mere represen-
tations, use the means of representation so as not to exhaust what one is communi-
cating in what is being represented. His suggestion was that “in addition to being about
whatever they are about, (artworks) are about the way they are about” (Danto 1981,
148–149). Style has precisely to do with “the way” artworks “are about whatever they
are about.” So, Cézanne’s apples, thanks to his style, are not just about apples, but about
apples as seen by Cézanne. This is how we need to interpret Buffon’s dictum.
Danto further believed that “style has to be expressed immediately and spontane-
ously.” He thought style was visible to others and invisible to the self, like “my face is
visible to others but not to myself ” (Danto 1981, 206). I don’t think Danto got this
right. Style is not at all immediate and spontaneous. Take Flaubert: “One has to read, to
meditate, to think always about style. … Patience and constant energy are required”
(Flaubert, 13/13/1846).1 His letters show how much he struggled to achieve the style
he was aiming at. Or Hemingway: “Since I started to break down all my writing … and
try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very diffi-
cult…” (Hemingway 1964, 132). Hemingway’s style was not spontaneous but the
result of a conscious and sustained effort.
Flaubert wrote that “style is only a way of thinking” (Flaubert 1859). What Danto
said of Lichtenstein’s “Portrait of Madame Cézanne” is a sample of Danto’s style as a
philosopher. Style is not something added to what the work of art reveals, so to speak,
but it is part of the revelation. As Nussbaum asserts, “style makes itself a statement”
(Nussbaum 1990, 7). Danto’s thesis about style is analogous to what Proust wrote in À
la recherche du temps perdu: “style … is not a question of technique but of vision.” Proust
believed that style “is a revelation” of “the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world
appears to us.” Thanks to art we have “as many worlds as there are original artists” and
each one sends us “his special radiation” (Proust 1927, 254). Danto was a good reader
of Proust; I remember him quoting from Proust’s novel very often in his seminars. This
was when he was writing The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
Danto draws his idea of style (Danto 1981, 163) from Frege’s notion of Färbung
(coloring). Frege also uses the word Beleuchtung (shading). Dummett calls this aspect of
language, “tone.” (Dummett 1973, 2, 84) The difference between terms like “perspira-
tion” and “sweat” or “dog” and “cur” or “horse” and “steed” turns more on their tone
than on either their sense or their reference. Tone draws on with subjective associa-
tions, “the mood,” the “feeling” of the hearer or reader or the “atmosphere” of a poetic
language or “aura” (Frege 1892a, 1892b, 1897, 1906a, 1906b, 1918). Tone allows
and prevents substitutions, say, between “dog” and “cur.” At the same time, Danto rec-
ognized that insofar as “Färbung” for Frege was a “dismissive” term, it little helped us to
understand what style is or why it matters (Danto 1986, 136–137). But if style for
Frege was only a matter of tone, for others it bore on sense (Kortum 2013), allowing it
to bring cognitive import to subjective associations which, I think, was Danto’s real
intention.
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Arturo Fontaine
A work of art is “about something” and an embodiment of that aboutness. There is

nothing in the object itself that makes it an artwork. It is our gaze, our way of looking
at it from the point of view of the concept of art: what makes it art. This is, roughly,
what Danto meant. If an object is seen as a work of art, it requests an interpretation,
and this means one has to deal with the material embodiment of the work. For
Danto, as for Adorno, interpretation is essential. Adorno considered works of art as
“enigmas” or “question marks,” awaiting “their interpretation.” Interpretation sus-
tains the “demarcation line between art and non-art” (Adorno 1970, 124, 128). Danto
writes that “the question of when is a thing an artwork becomes one with the question
of when is an interpretation of a thing an artistic interpretation” (Danto 1981, 135).
His extensive art criticism focuses, then, on the way artworks are about.
For Danto, to interpret is “to grasp the metaphor that is always there” (Danto 1981,
172). Metaphors and style are not only present in artworks. Moore, Wittgenstein, Quine
had style. Romeo sees Juliet as the sun; Benjamin Franklin saw George Washington as
the sun. In fact, at the very end of the Constitutional Convention – presided over by
Washington – Madison reports hearing the following conversation: “Whilst the last
members were signing it (the Constitution) Doctor Franklin looking towards the
President’s Chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to
a few members near him, that painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a
rising from a setting sun. I have, said he, often and often in the course of the Session,
and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the
President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I
have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun” (Farrand 1911,
648). Franklin’s witty remark had style, but he did not, with his analogy, thereby create
an artwork. The presence of a metaphor and the demand for interpretation are insuffi-
cient to draw the demarcation line between art and not-art. Danto knew this by deliv-
ering necessary but not sufficient conditions for something to be art.
Danto loved Chardin. Proust wrote that Chardin “brings together objects and people
in these rooms that are more than an object, and even than a person, perhaps, being
the scene of their existence” (Proust 1895, 20). Diderot wrote about Chardin’s
“handling” as “so magic.” Danto saw “acts of transfiguration … of the commonplace.
Transfiguration is not much of an improvement on magic,” he explained, “but at least
it gives us a model: Christ appears to his disciples as transfigured.” But then he insisted
that the religious analogy would not lead us to understand “how by means of paint and
varnish” Chardin achieved his “miracle” (Danto 2005, 37).
A painting by Chardin, “Still life with plums” (ca 1730),2 says all it has to say with
forms and shades, and with brushstrokes. We see the brushstrokes as some plums, the
one closest to the viewer perhaps overripe and about to split open, a half-empty bottle of
red wine, a simple glass with water and two baguettes. The bottle and a baguette are
partly seen through the clear glass and water. All rests on a thick, wooden, humble
table. The brushstrokes are not just brushstrokes: they are more to make the bottle of
wine, the plums, the glass, the bread, and the worn-out table. The scene expresses a
certain mood. Common objects are transfigured by the artist’s gaze. We see an entire
way of life. Here is the “magic,” how he creates the feeling of being at home in this
world, a feeling of love in the way he looks at these things.
28
Writing with Style
If the “I” is not another object of the world, but rather a point of view, and artworks
show “the world as given” by the “I” of the artist, then through artworks the “you” of
the spectator, listener, or reader undergoes a transfiguration and becomes, up to a point,
the artist’s “I.” For Danto, “the greatest metaphors of art” are those in which “the spec-
tator identifies himself ” with the character. Reading Anna Karenina, I see myself as
Anna and “to see oneself as Anna is in some way to be Anna.” To see “one’s life as her
life” is an experience that changes one’s life (Danto 1981, 172–173). It is not enough
for me to look at the world alone from my window. Great works of art reveal aspects of
the world that enlarge my own perspective. Chardin’s vision changes my perspective.
The revelation of Chardin’s artwork springs from those brushstrokes. Thanks to this
partial and momentary metamorphosis, I see the plums and, partly through glass and
water, the fat and half empty bottle of red wine and the baguettes from Chardin’s first-
person point of view. For that to happen, personal style is a must. In this particular
painting, you look at the brushwork and you see traces of the movement of Chardin’
hand. The pulse and touch of the dead artist’s hand is still there, present and immediate.
Danto’s deep criticism of R.B. Kitaj in this context is telling. The meaning is not
incarnated in the paintings themselves; Kitaj wanted for us to be guided by the autobio-
graphical “prefaces” that accompanied his works. His “Self-Portrait as a Woman”
(1978) shows a woman naked outdoors and we are expected to see her as a portrait of
the artist. To see this you must read the title and the catalogue texts, because “typically
… the paintings are assigned meanings without anything happening to the painting as
viewed” (Danto 2000a, 130). Contrary to Chardin’s work, what the painting is about
was not fully painted. Kitaj’s painting is an artwork, but it is powerless.
Hegel claims that in a work of art “meaning” and “appearance” ought to be “pene-
trated by one another” (Hegel 1835, 93). He believes that aesthetic judgments are
about “the appropriateness or inappropriateness” of “content” and “means of presen-
tation” (Hegel 1835, 11). This is largely Danto’s approach – the aesthetic failure of
Kitaj’s “Self-Portrait as a Woman” is precisely a consequence of the lack of connection
between the meaning and its material embodiment. A work of art ought to be “a piece
of visual thought” (Danto 2013b, 165). “Prefaces,” external words, don’t do the job
painting is supposed to do. When explanations are more interesting than the artwork
itself, the artwork fails.
Consider Danto’s comments on a painting by Rothko. Given its abstraction, simplicity,
and absolute dependence on the nuances of pigments, it is extremely difficult to trans-

late the artwork into words. That is a good thing. “The rectangles, in ‘Untitled’ (1960)
share no boundaries. … So what does being close to them reveal? The amazing edges of
the rectangles, and the way underlayers of paint reach through the rectangles to give a
sense of translucency. These forms are not pure red and pure black, as they appear from
afar. The extraordinary beauty is due to the way the edges of the forms appear to pene-
trate and to be penetrated by the ground color of the paintings; and to the way the
undercolors flicker through the surface colors. These animate the forms as well as the
colors through irregular pulsations of light” (Danto 2000b, 341). Rothko thinks with
his colors. As opposed to Kitaj’s “Self-portrait as a woman,” where the meaning has not
been integrated with its brushwork and remains external to it, Rothko’s thinking
appears in and through his painting of colors and forms. And what about the meaning?
29
Arturo Fontaine
Does this painting have one? “Beauty,” simply, so claims Danto, is “the meaning of
Rothko’s work” (Danto 2000b, 342).
We do make aesthetic judgments and expect others to share our point of view. We
comment on a film’s poignant dialogues, the elegant design of a chair or a fork, the nos-
talgic sadness of a nocturne, the balance of a building’s façade, the magnificence of the
sea as it rises and explodes into foam against a rock, and so forth. When we express
these judgments we invite someone else to share in our experience. Aesthetic judgment
transfers an aesthetic experience. Yet are the judgments ever final? Being drawn from
interpretation, do they ever exhaust an artwork’s meaning? Often what comes after
gives a different value to works that were produced before: impressionism changes the
way in which Velázquez’s paintings are seen, Picasso makes us see African masks from
a new outlook. Danto suggests that artworks are like events in how they “derive their
importance from what they led to.” Nevertheless, his interpretation of artworks remains
tethered to the artist’s intentions, restricting, in my view, the scope and potential
meaning of artworks (Danto 1986, 44, 1997, 75; 2013a, 15 and ff; 2013c,
386–387).
Hegel wrote that an artwork is “essentially a question, an address to the responsive
breast, a call to the mind” (Hegel 1835, 71). One could say that style similarly is a sort
of address, an invitation to another person. Good writing summons the reader to expe-
rience the text in a certain way. Danto’s own style was an invitation, almost intimate, to
engage his enticing and entertaining way of thinking. There is something contagious
about it. In reading Danto, his voice continues to resonate. His writing creates the
impression that he is speaking and simply registering his thoughts and imaginings as
they come. “He allows his prose to wander and invites the reader to wander with it,”
observed Christopher Sartwell (Sartwell 2013, 711). Often, in the midst of rigorous
conceptual analysis, he introduces amusing and telling fictional characters.
“Testadura,” is a favored example, “a plain speaker and noted philistine,” who could
only see Rauschenberg’s “Bed” as a real and dirty bed, or the drips of paint given to
plain sight.
When Danto addressed abstract expressionism, he talked about the paintings them-
selves, but he also captured a certain Tenth Avenue atmosphere of the times. He wrote
of a canvas itself describing
a rotation through ninety degrees from its vertical position on the easel to its horizontal
position on the floor, which the painter crouches over like a frog-god. But the drip is also
evidence for the urgency of the painting act, of pure speed and passion, as the artist swings
loops and eccentric arabesques across the surface, sending up showers and explosions of
spatters. And since he merely executed the will of the paint to be itself, the artist had
nothing of his own to say. This went with that studied brutishness of the Dumb Artist
exemplified over and over again in the artworld of the time by really quite intelligent men
and women who pretended to a kind of autism, and went around in clothes so splashed
with paint that the very costume was an advertisement for the closeness between the artist
and his work (Danto 1981, 109).
I have quoted this passage at length to show Danto’s gift as a writer. The painter is a
“frog-god,” who with the “studied brutishness of the Dumb Artist” fills the canvas with
30
Writing with Style
splashes and drips of paint. This ironic passage is very much in the spirit of Lichtenstein’s
“Brushstrokes” or Rauschenberg’s “Bed” and their allusions to Pollock’s drip painting.
The reader enjoys the wit and spontaneity in Danto’s style, a style where often the risk
and adventure reveal the daring on his part to take unfamiliar philosophical paths.
Style is part of our everyday life. A living room may be decorated in a modernist style,
but also with a personal flair or touch that stands out against the background of a prev-
alent style. People dress and adorn their bodies, says Hegel, because of the need to alter
the external world. The human being recognizes himself as such, as free, as a person, by
altering the world. The world modified by human activity may be like a fingerprint of
the self and, therefore, may allow self-recognition. The human being is always striving
through different activities ultimately “to make this foreign world for himself,” because
otherwise “he is not being at home in it” (Hegel 1835, 31, 98). Art is an attempt to mold
and mark and humanize the external world, and so is style. Language is public, and
when we recognize someone’s style, it is because the writer has impressed his first-per-
son perspective into the material of language, thus making a home in it, a home the
reader may also inhabit.
Style, as I have stressed, is not a mere container of something totally alien, namely,
meaning. But here, too, as Danto well knew, translation of words and language, is a
deep problem. Proust, as translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, is the same and not the
same Proust who wrote in French. Following Quine, a skeptic of synonymy, one
might say that “what matters is likeness in relevant aspects” (Quine 1953, 60). Danto
has a pithier thought: “Try writing about Proustian jealousy with Hemingway sen-
tences” (Danto 1981, 197). But if meaning is fused with the style of the writer, what
is captured better by writing about Danto’s style than reading Danto without any
companion at all?
Notes
1 My translation of “Il faut lire, méditer beaucoup, toujours penser au style…on arrive à faire
des belles choses à force de patience et de longue énergie”.
2 Danto does not comment on this painting by Chardin.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1970. Aesthetic Theory, newly translated and edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor,
1997. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, Eight Printing, 2005.
Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. 1753. Discours sur L’Style. http://www.athena.
unige.ch.5.
Danto, Arthur C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
———. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, forward by Jonathan Gilmore. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
———. 1997. After the End of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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———. 2000a. “R.B. Kitaj.” In The Madonna of the Future, 123–131, edited by Arthur C. Danto.
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
———. 2000b. “Rothko and Beauty.” In The Madonna of the Future, 335–342, edited by Arthur
C. Danto. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
———. 2005. “Chardin.” In Unnatural Wonders, 36–43, edited by Arthur C. Danto. New York:
Columbia University Press.
———. 2013a. “My Life as a Philosopher.” In The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, The Library of
Living Philosophers, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 2013, Vol. XXXIII,
3–70. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
______. 2013b. “Reply to Gerard Vidal.”In The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto,The Library of Living
Philosopher, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin, 2013, Vol. XXXIII 162–167.
Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
———. 2013c. “Reply to Lydia Goehr.” In The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, The Library of Living
Philosophers, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 2013, Vol. XXXIII, 382–
388. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
Dummett, Michael. 1973. Frege. Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Farrand, Max, ed. 1911. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. II. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2011. http://oll.libertyfund.org.
Flaubert, Gustave. 13 December 1846. Correspondance, à Louis Colet. http://www.flaubert.
univ-rouen.fr.
———. 15 May 1859. Correspondance, à Ernest Feydeau. http://www.flaubert.univ-rouen.fr.
Frege, Gottleb. 1892a. “On Sinn and Bedeutung,” 151–171.
———. 1892b. “On Concept and Object,” 181–191.
———. 1897. “Logic,” 227–250.
———. 1906a. “Introduction to Logic,” 293–298.
———. 1906b. “Letter to Husserl, 1906,” 301–307.
———. 1918. “Thought” 325–345. In The Frege Reader, edited by Michael Beaney. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Reprinted 2000.
Hegel, G.W.F. 1835. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Arts, Vol. I, translated by T.M. Knox. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1975. Reprinted 2010.
Hemingway, Ernest. 1964. A Movable Feast. New York: Vintage Classics.
Kortum, Richard D. 2013. Varieties of Tone. Frege, Dummett and Shades of Meaning. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Nussbaum, Martha C. 1990. Love’s Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Proust, Marcel. 1895. Chardin and Rembrandt, translated by Jennie Feldman. New York: David
Zwirner Books, Ekphrasis, 2016.
———. 1927. In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VI, Time Regained, translated by C.K. Moncrieff revised
by Terence Kilmartin and T.J. Enright. London: Vintage Books, 2000.
Quine, W. V. 1953. “Meaning in Linguistics.” In From a Logical Point of View, by W.V. Quine,
47–64, Second, Revised Edition, 1961. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963.
Sartwell, Crispin. 2013. “Danto as Writer.” In The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, The Library of
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717. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
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4
Sartre, Transparency, and Style
TAYLOR CARMAN
In 1975 Arthur Danto published a short, mostly expository little book titled simply
Jean-Paul Sartre. It offered an overview of Sartre’s philosophy, emphasizing but not
focused exclusively on Being and Nothingness, a tome that, despite its being at times
“repetitious and portentous,” Danto considered “a masterpiece” (1975, x). Though a
relatively minor work in Danto’s corpus, Jean-Paul Sartre is impressive in several ways.
For one thing, it was written at a time when American philosophy departments were
most sharply (and counterproductively) divided between the analytic mainstream and
(what was then just beginning to be called) Continental philosophy. Danto was ahead of
his time in dismissing that “ideologized division” as “silly and destructive” (1975,
xii–xiii). In an admirable effort to translate Sartre’s technical vocabulary and rhetorical
style into a recognizably Anglo-American idiom, Danto gave his chapters twin titles:
each features a Sartrean term followed by a phrase or phrases more recognizable to ana-
lytical theorists of language, mind, knowledge, action, and morality. The gesture is less
sharply polemical than the title Nietzsche as Philosopher, but the ecumenical intention is
the same (Danto 1975, xii). In neither case, Danto insisted, would the innovations of
professional philosophy refute or discredit the thinker; on the contrary, the tools of
analysis turn out to articulate their ideas in surprising and fruitful ways.
More significant than Danto’s rising above professional parochialism, however, is the
way he traces the key elements of Sartrean thought while at the same time elaborating
his own views on the nature of philosophy, linguistic and pictorial representation, and
above all, art. Danto was an original thinker, and like all creative readers of the history
of philosophy he invariably heard in those who caught his attention echoes, faint or
raucous, of his own thoughts.
What did Danto find in Sartre that was useful to his own conception of meaning,
representation, and artistic style? And how, though without saying so, did Danto resist
33
Taylor Carman
Sartre and his categories, endorsing instead a concept of style put forward by Sartre’s
sometime philosophical friend and rival, Maurice Merleau-Ponty? Danto admired both
thinkers, but never (to my knowledge) commented at any length on their differences, as
they unfold for example in Merleau-Ponty’s essays on literature and painting.
Early in the Sartre book Danto hints at, but stops short of asserting, a partial conver-
gence of Sartre’s early conception of art and literature, expressed in the novel Nausea,
as enjoying “a specially privileged sort of reality” (Danto 1975, 30), with his own
account of artworks as things inhabiting a unique ontological domain, a category
articulated by “an atmosphere of artistic theory,” which he calls the artworld (1964,
580). On the last few pages of Sartre’s novel, Roquentin dreams of writing a novel of his
own, a kind of ideal (non)entity that might justify his existence precisely by transcend-
ing existence, escaping the muck of contingency, floating “behind the printed words,
behind the pages … above existence,” like the jazz song he hears beyond the sound com-
ing from the scratchy record playing on the phonograph (Sartre 1964 [1938], 178).
Danto scoffs at this “hyperaesthetic, precious view of art and artistic creativity”
(1975, 31), but he takes the metaphysical point: artworks are not real things exactly;
they are not ordinary objects with extraordinary “aesthetic” properties added on.
Staircases in fictions have no determinate number of steps (unless specified), nor is a
song quite the same thing as the sounds one hears when one hears the song. This is very
like saying, as Danto does elsewhere, that even if Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box had been
qualitatively identical to actual Brillo boxes – indeed, if Warhol had simply put actual
Brillo boxes in the gallery, instead of the wooden, silkscreened facsimiles he manufac-
tured – they would still be, thanks to the “atmosphere of theory” surrounding them,
works of art and not just (plain old) Brillo boxes. Like persons, which are not, pace
Descartes, mere combinations of minds and bodies, artworks are “irreducible to parts of
themselves, and are in that sense primitive” (Danto 1964, 576). Persons and artworks
belong to a category of things distinct from ordinary objects, and for this reason Danto
acknowledges the plausibility of Sartre’s view, “as a matter of ontology” (1975, 31).
That allusion, however, that hint of an affinity between Sartre’s early notion of the
ideality (or virtuality) of art and literature and Danto’s theory of artworks as consti-
tuted by their participation in the artworld, comes and goes in the opening chapter of
Jean-Paul Sartre without explicit discussion. More significant are Danto’s occasional ref-
erences, in this book and elsewhere, to the mature ontology of Being and Nothingness, in
particular the distinction between “being-for-itself” (être-pour-soi), which describes the

negative reflexive relation in which consciousness stands to itself, and “being-in-itself”
(être-en-soi), the being of things constituted positively by their objective properties. The
distinction is a refined version of what is more commonly known as the difference bet-
ween subjectivity and objectivity, or the inner and the outer, and it lies at the heart of
Sartrean existentialism. It also runs parallel to one of Danto’s central insights: that art-
works externalize and concretize “styles” or ways of seeing the world that in their
original, naive occurrence necessarily remain transparent to those whose styles and
perspectives they are.
How far does Danto’s theory of artistic style run parallel to Sartre’s ontological cate-
gories? To find out, we need to define a few more terms. To say that human conscious-
ness exists pour-soi is to assert that its structure consists in its prereflective, “nonthetic”
awareness of itself, which Sartre distinguishes from the explicit “thetic” knowledge one
34
comes to have of oneself qua object. Sartre calls the latter connaissance de soi, the former
conscience (de) soi – the parentheses around the de forestalling any suggestion of divi-
sion or duality, since the self at this primitive level just is (that is, coincides with)
immediate consciousness (of) itself. This unified “prereflective cogito,” as Sartre calls it,
precedes and makes possible psychological and otherwise empirical self-knowledge,
which is on all fours with our knowledge of others. For what I can say of myself qua
object, others can as easily say by referring to me by name or in the third person: “He is
happy” says of me what I say when I report that I am happy, but “He is sorry” says less
or other than what I say when I express my regret by apologizing. To apologize is not just
to say but to show that one is sorry. And just as Wittgenstein (1958, 66) proposes that
“I” should therefore be understood as having two cases, subjective and objective – for
avowals and ascriptions, respectively – so the pour-soi has two aspects, what Sartre calls
transcendence and facticity. The transcendence of consciousness is its direct relation to a
world beyond or external to itself, a relation that is at once a reflexive relation to itself.
The facticity of consciousness, by contrast, is its quasi-objective aspect, its inescapable
exposure to the consciousness of others, as well as to itself from a reflective, t hird-person
point of view.
Although Sartre is not entirely consistent on this point, it is crucial to his system that
the aspectual or perspectival distinction between transcendence and facticity not be
conflated with the ontological distinction between pour-soi and en-soi. Facticity is not
the brute objectness of the en-soi, but rather one of the essentially personal dimensions
of the pour-soi. Or better, it is consciousness qua object in the grammatical sense of
accusative, or target of awareness, not the metaphysical sense of (mere) thing with prop-
erties. Our facticity is our third-person presence to ourselves and others – but the person
in the phrase “third-person” is crucial: encountering someone, even in an objectifying
way, whether in love or in hate, desire or contempt, is fundamentally unlike encoun-
tering an inanimate object. Sartre sometimes talks as if we are doomed to regard each
other as either radically incommensurable, inscrutable subjects or just brute things,
inert flesh. But any inclination to that kind of literal reification could only yield a bizarre
caricature of interpersonal relations, for in real life we experience ourselves and others
not as brute stuff, but as vulnerable, sensitive, exposed to one another’s awareness. My
primitive sense of others, Sartre famously says, is an acknowledgment of them not as
objects in my world, but as subjects: they see me. The so called problem of other minds
can therefore never be a real epistemic problem, for my knowledge of others has always
already been shaped by my apprehension of their apprehension of me. Doubt neces-
sarily comes too late. Moreover, arguably the deepest insight in Sartre’s account of our
being “for others” (le pour-autrui) is precisely that the only objectivity consciousness has,
or can have, is the external surface it presents to the consciousness of another. Without
other persons in my world, my own consciousness would be so transparent as to be
invisible, even to myself – like Schopenhauer’s eye that does not see itself. The ethical
and epistemological implications of Sartre’s phenomenology of “the look” (le regard)
are profound, but the metaphysical picture framing it must be kept firmly in view: onto-
logically speaking, others are not and cannot be mere things (en-soi) for my gaze, nor
am I or can I be a mere thing (en-soi) for theirs.
The “nothing” in Being and Nothingness thus refers to the ontological subjectivity of
the pour-soi as such, but also to the practical and epistemic transparency of our
35
Taylor Carman
transcendence toward the world. To say that consciousness is nothing is to say that it is
never the kind of something that can be defined simply by its positive objective prop-
erties, but we are also each of us nothing in a more refined sense, namely, that however
we might be described from a third-person point of view – whether in physical or
psychological terms, as embodied agents, as creatures or persons with thoughts and
feelings – all such factical attributes necessarily fall short of and at the same time pre-
suppose the immediate relation we have to ourselves when we have the world itself
directly in view, that is, when we are transparent to (and in a certain sense, absent from)
ourselves. Sartre’s notion of transcendence is thus akin to G. E. Moore’s claim that
sense experience is “diaphanous,” so that, for example, “when we try to introspect the
sensation of blue, all we can see is the blue” (Moore 1993 [1903], 41). Gareth Evans
argues that the same is true of belief: if someone asks me if I think there will be a third
world war, “I must attend, in answering him, to precisely the same outward phenomena
as I would attend to if I were answering the question, ‘Will there be a third world war?’”
(1982, 225).
Sartre’s notion of consciousness as a nothingness is the topic of the longest chapter
in Jean-Paul Sartre, but it also figures prominently in Danto’s discussion of artistic style
in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. What makes something an artwork? Danto
insists that it cannot be a peculiar kind of aesthetic property visible in the object, just as
real (i.e., ordinary) qualities are visible in real (i.e., ordinary) objects. Nor can the artistic
character of a work of art lie in its semantic content, that is, in what it says or means, on
analogy with the meaning of a sentence. Semantic theories of art are especially implau-
sible when we try to transfer the putative transparency of consciousness to the way in
which artworks manage to have the kind of meaning they have. What Danto calls the
“transparency theory” of art – a mimetic theory that figured prominently in Renaissance
discourse surrounding unified linear perspective and techniques for capturing the
reflection of light in metal, glass, and the human eye – is the idea that artworks aspire
to the inconspicuousness of a pure medium, like a lens or a window through which we
see the world. On this theory, Danto says, “the artwork is the message and the medium
is nothingness, much in the way in which consciousness is held, by Sartre for instance,
to be a kind of nothingness. It is not part of the world but that through which the world
is given, not being given itself ” (1981, 152). Like consciousness in its prereflective tran-
scendence toward the world, such a medium of artistic representation would achieve
“pure diaphaneity” (1981, 157), having no properties of its own beyond those of the
objects exhibited through it.
Danto rejects the transparency theory as inadequate to how we talk about art and to
artistic practice. Even the finest achievements of geometrical perspective and optical
realism, after all, are nothing like actual illusion or trompe-l’œil (1981, 158). Nor do
artworks simply mirror or reproduce the qualities of the things they represent. A painter
might depict a blue sky with blue paint, but she might use yellow or green. Moreover,
there is an obvious distinction between beautiful images of things and images of
beautiful things: consider Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, Caravaggio’s
paintings of biblical beheadings, and William Eggleston’s radiant color photographs of
parking lots, lawn furniture, and abandoned gas stations.
For Danto, an artwork is not a mere representation, with a particular kind of content
(1981, 168). An artwork is constituted not by its aesthetic qualities or its semantic contents,
36
but by something like rhetorical tropes, particularly metaphor. Metaphors are philosophi-
cally interesting not just because they exceed literal language, but because they stand
outside the realm of ordinary meaning altogether. It is not that they say something esoteric,
but that what they say is so manifestly inadequate to, even in a kind of tension with, what
they allow us to see, feel, and understand. Content, then, at least as philosophers and lin-
guists use that term, is the wrong place to look for the essence of art. Echoing a familiar
theme from traditional aesthetic theory, Danto reminds us that “it is crucial to distinguish
the form of a representation from the content of the representation” (1981, 172). A statue
of Napoleon wearing a toga, sandals, and a laurel wreath could be the depiction of an actual
(though unlikely) episode in real life, one that might have been a rhetorical gesture on
Napoleon’s part. But that statue would not be the same as Eugène Guillaume’s 1859 sculp-
ture Napoleon Ier, législateur, which is not a depiction of a rhetorical gesture but is itself a
rhetorical gesture. Indeed, the two statues would not be the same even if they were qualita-
tively indistinguishable. As its title hints, Guillaume’s sculpture is not the image of something
metaphorical, but a metaphorical image. Metaphors, whether verbal or pictorial, do not
merely say or mean something peculiar in content; they “transfigure” what they present or
refer to, even when they do so by means of content they share with nonmetaphorical expres-
sions. Though it might be the same proposition, “Juliet is the sun” said by Romeo is not
“Juliet is the sun” said by someone who has mistaken her for a giant ball of gas. For Danto,
“every metaphor is a little poem,” indeed “metaphors are minor works of art” (1981, 189).
That is somewhat hyperbolic. Not all rhetoric is art. In addition to transfiguring their
subjects, artworks draw attention to the way they do so; they exhibit the style in which
they represent what they represent. What is style? Danto begins by drawing an analogy,
in Sartrean terms, between historical periods and individual persons:
Each has a kind of interior and an exterior, a pour soi and a pour autrui. The interior is
simply the way the world is given. The exterior is simply the way the former becomes an
object to a later or another consciousness. While we see the world as we do, we do not see
it as a way of seeing the world: we simply see the world. Our consciousness of the world is
not part of what we are conscious of (1981, 163).
A style, historical or personal, is a kind of “global coloration,” something like what

Frege calls the subjective Färbung in contrast to the objective content of a proposition.
Consciousness colors reality, but in a way ordinarily invisible to consciousness itself,

just as the tint of sunglasses vanishes as one acclimates to them on a sunny day.
What is transparent to me, however, is opaque to others. What do they see, that I do not,
in the idiosyncrasies of my appearance and behavior? “The term style derives etymologi-
cally from the Latin term stilus – a pointed instrument for writing,” Danto tells us, and adds.
It is as if, in addition to representing whatever it does represent, the instrument of rep-

resentation imparts and impresses something of its own character in the act of repre-
senting it, so that in addition to knowing what it is of, the practiced eye will know how
it was done.
We may thus reserve the term style for this how, as what remains of a representation
when we subtract its content – an algorithm licensed by the contrast between style and
substance enshrined in usage (1981, 197).
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Taylor Carman
In this same spirit, Danto cites Buffon’s observation that style is the man: “it is the
way he represents the world, minus the world,” so that the style-inflected “qualities of
the representation do not penetrate the content” (1981, 198). Style is also character-
ized by “the absence of a mediating knowledge or art,” and here Danto appeals again to
the transparency of consciousness – beliefs, for example, being “transparent to the
believer; he reads the world through them without reading them. … Thus the structure
of my beliefs is something like the structure of consciousness itself, as viewed by the
great phenomenologists,” notably Sartre (1981, 206). Style, then, is “those qualities of
representations which are the man himself, seen from the outside, physiognomically,”
qualities that “are not commonly given to the man whose representations they are: he
views the world through them, but not them.” Moreover, “to be his style they have to
expressed immediately and spontaneously” (1981, 207).
Here I think we need to distinguish artistic style from mere innate or spontaneous
character. Kierkegaard reminds us that, like style according to Danto, “character is
something engraved,” the Greek χαρακτήρ meaning stamp, mark, or distinctive feature
(Kierkegaard 2001 [1846], 69). It is visible primarily if not exclusively, Sartre says,
from a third-person perspective, whereas my primary relation to myself is the trans-
parent egolessness in which, strictly speaking, I do not appear to myself at all.
Prereflectively, I am (literally) nothing but my transcendence toward the world; it is only
in my encounter with others that I am (so to speak) robbed of my self by their gaze,
which captures me in my visible aspect, in my facticity. What is crucial in this is pre-
cisely the fact that what the other sees is no mere image or shadow of my true self, but
me. Or, to indulge the analogy for a moment, if my self is like an image or shadow pre-
sent to others, Sartre says, it is the “hidden side of the cards” they hold, “a shadow that
is projected on to some moving and unpredictable material, such that no system of
cross-references could allow us to calculate the distortions resulting from these move-
ments” (2018 [1943], 359). The analogy with images and shadows is necessarily mis-
leading, however, for the force and significance of the other’s gaze is precisely that it
penetrates me, touches me to the core: I am vulnerable to it because there is no separa-
tion between what the other sees and the self I know myself to be. As Sartre insists, “it
really is a question of my being, and not my being’s image” (2018 [1943], 359).
But this doesn’t get us very far, either toward a theory of art or toward a plausible
phenomenology of interpersonal experience. Sartre and Danto agree that artistic style
and expression differ essentially from mundane character and meaning. Artworks are
not just immersed unreflectively in their styles the way in which, for instance, linguistic
accents go unnoticed by the speakers of a common dialect. Instead, they make their
own styles manifest by revealing the way in which they reveal what they reveal. It is
this manifestness of style, Danto says, that the transparency theory of art fails to
capture:
It is to this coloration that the attributes of style and expression attach, and it is again this
coloration that the transparency theory cannot account for. It is part of the representation
without being part of the reality, and the transparency theory has no positive room for that
difference. … It is as if a work of art were like an externalization of the artist’s conscious-
ness, as if we could see his way of seeing and not merely what he saw (1981, 164).
38
Since Danto’s thesis is that the essence of art is to cast things under aspects that
effect a kind of “metaphoric transfiguration” of their subjects (1981, 168), he cannot
be suggesting that artists or artworks themselves are as blind to the styles animating
them as people normally are to how they look when they walk, or how they sound when
they laugh. On the contrary, he says, what is distinctive of artistic style is not its mere
outward aspect, the inscribed character of unreflective habit, but rather its manifest
presence in the expressive dimension of the work. What is
interesting and essential in art is the spontaneous ability the artist has of enabling us to see
his way of seeing the world – not just the world as if the painting were like a window, but
the world as given by him. … The greatness of the work is the greatness of the representa-
tion the work makes material (1981, 207, emphasis added).
What constitutes a work of art as a work of art is not style per se, then, but its explicit-
ness, its manifestness, its expressive presence or materialization in the work. And that
expressive capacity cannot just be a natural or spontaneous effect available only to observers
standing at a historical or personal distance from the works, for it lies at the heart of the
artistic achievement. This is why Danto locates the essence of art at “the point of intersec-
tion between style, expression, and rhetoric,” adding that “the concept of expression is the
most pertinent to the concept of art” – in a word, “art is expression” (1981, 165).
This is where the inadequacy of Sartre’s categories, both in themselves and as conceptual
tools for Danto’s theory, becomes clear. By his own admission, Sartre’s favored argumenta-
tive technique was to invest heavily in sharp categorical distinctions where common sense
and philosophical refinement are inclined to see complexity and ambiguity. Just as there
can be no tertium quid between being and nothing, neither is there middle ground between
pour-soi and en-soi, consciousness and world, transcendence and facticity, self and other,
freedom and causality, poetry and prose. Such stark dichotomies, however, leave no room
for the phenomenon of manifest style and artistic expression, which according to Danto con-
stitute the essence of art. Sartre, notwithstanding his early flirtation with the dubious
notion of literary and artistic works inhabiting a transcendent sphere beyond the
contingency of existence, cannot make sense of an expressive manifestation of style that is
neither subjective and transparent, hence invisible to itself, nor objective and opaque,
hence estranged in its facticity. Artworks are, for Danto, a blend of transcendence and fac-
ticity, of expressive spontaneity and, as it were, engraved character. They are inscriptions,
both act and object. But that blend, that middle or unified whole, is what Sartre’s categories
are designed to suppress and exclude in phenomenological analysis.
Among the phenomenologists Danto admired, Merleau-Ponty is the one whose reflec-
tions on art come closest to his own insight that artworks express, by making materially
manifest, ways of seeing the world. Merleau-Ponty did not anticipate Danto’s account of
artworks inhabiting the discursive-cum-ontological space of the artworld, nor did he pro-
pose anything quite like Danto’s thesis that art involves the deployment of rhetorical
tropes, in particular the transfigurative power of metaphor. But that is in part because
Merleau-Ponty was not asking the Socratic question that inspired Danto (as it did
Heidegger), namely, What is art? His question was instead, What is painting? It wasn’t paint
itself that he was interested in, of course, but images. What makes a picture a picture, as
39
Taylor Carman
opposed to a sign, a symbol, an idea, a thought? What Danto and Merleau-Ponty share is
a concept of expression that Sartre’s categories exclude as a matter of principle.
Like literary works, Merleau-Ponty argues, paintings can be said to have a kind of
voice. Indeed, the art of painting, like all art, whether it trades in images or in words, is
defined by “the phenomenon of expression” (1993 [1945, 1952], 71). Life itself, he
even says, is saturated with expression, hence style. Though language can be analyzed
as a system of signs, we experience it as opening us onto a world. Speaking and forming
images are both ways of evoking, referring, revealing, rendering visible. The writer’s
task, Merleau-Ponty says, is to apprehend and make the world manifest through lan-
guage, and in this respect, “his procedure is not so different from the painter’s” (1993
[1945, 1952], 82). Spoken language is “simply the highest point of a tacit and implicit
accumulation of the same sort as painting. … Like a painting, a novel expresses tacitly”
(1993 [1945, 1952], 113). Literary language bears a “halo of signification” comparable
to “the mute radiance of painting” (1993 [1945, 1952], 114–115). In addition to the
explicit, articulate language of words and sentences, “there is a tacit language, and
painting speaks in this way” (1993 [1945, 1952], 84).
Merleau-Ponty’s argument was in part a reply to the essay, “What Is Literature?” in
which Sartre had drawn a sharp distinction between writing and art, prose and poetry.
Whereas language is an instrument for disclosing facts about the world, painting merely
uncovers the appearance of particulars: “The painter is mute” (1988 [1948], 27).
Sartre’s distinction was not between linguistic and pictorial representation, but bet-
ween denotation and decoration: “The empire of signs is prose; poetry is on the side of
painting, sculpture, and music” (1988 [1948], 28–29).
Merleau-Ponty rejects Sartre’s crude dichotomy by insisting, first, that visual art-
works never merely display, but also speak (so to speak) of the things they show, and
second, that no language, no matter how artless or prosaic, is wholly styleless, a mere
transparent signifying instrument or medium. Pictorial and linguistic expression both
embody ways of seeing. Even ordinary seeing and hearing are imbued with a character:
“perception already stylizes” by means of an “inner schema,” a “system of equiva-
lences” that coordinates one’s grip on things and allows the world to reveal itself as
coherent and intelligible (1993 [1945, 1952], 90–91). For example.
Our handwriting is recognizable whether we trace letters on paper with three fingers of
our hand or in chalk on the blackboard at arm’s length, for it is not a purely mechanical
movement of our body … but a general power of motor formulation capable of the trans-
positions that make up the constancy of style (1993 [1945, 1952], 102).
Perception itself already has expressive significance, for the body itself brings a style
of comportment to its apprehension of what it perceives: “if expression recreates and
transforms, the same was already true … of our perception of the world before painting,
since that perception already marked things with the trace of human elaboration”
(1993 [1945, 1952], 96). We find ourselves with unique and individually recognizable
ways of walking and talking, and artistic expression is a further deliberate refinement
of those spontaneous dispositions: “For each painter, style is the system of equivalences
that he sets up for himself ” (1993 [1945, 1952], 91). The cultivated body schema of
40
the artist is a kind of second nature, a set of acquired yet spontaneous skills, which
come to feel natural though they are products of years of effort and practice. Carving
out a unique artistic style, over and beyond one’s everyday personal way of moving and
speaking, is like learning a second language. Merleau-Ponty therefore refers to “the
painter’s labor and study, that effort that is so like an effort of thought and that allows
us to speak of a language of painting” (1993 [1945, 1952], 92). If painting is a lan-
guage, it is a language learned with reference to the more primitive means of expression
inherent in ordinary perceptual behavior.
By recognizing artistic expression as an extension and refinement of the already inher-
ently stylized nature of ordinary perception and speech, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that
human experience and understanding do not have the rigidly dualistic character that
Sartre describes in his distinctions between pour-soi and en-soi, transcendence and facticity,
prose and poetry. Danto, I believe, found Sartre’s conceptual apparatus useful, but only up
to a point. By drawing attention to the extremes of subjective and objective, transparency
and opacity, spontaneity and character, Sartre cast indirect light on what falls between
those extremes, namely, the manifest style of expressive works that transfigure what they
disclose by, in Danto’s words, “externalizing a way of viewing the world” (1981, 208). But
how is such a thing possible? Crucial to Danto’s formula is precisely that the (so-called)
“externalization” accomplished in works of art cannot just be the reification and alienation
of a (so-called) “internal” point of view, but must manifest or disclose a “way of viewing the
world” in its – always already – outward, worldly aspect. World is not outside, perspective is
not inside. In describing art as imbued with meaning – as rhetorically inflected, metaphor-
ically rich, transfigurative – Danto recognized the worldly context of significance that
Sartre’s categories indicate only negatively, and so threaten to render unrecognizable.
References
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61(9): 571–584.
———. 1975. Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Viking.
———. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Evans, Gareth. 1982. Varieties of Reference. Edited by John McDowell. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Kierkegaard, Søren. 2001 [1846]. A Literary Review. Translated by Alastair Hannay. New York:
Penguin.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1993 [1945, 1952]. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Edited and
Translated by Michael B. Smith. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Moore, George Edward. 1993 [1903]. “The Refutation of Idealism.” In Selected Writings, edited by
T. Baldwin. London: Routledge, pp. 23–44.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1964 [1938]. Nausea. Translated by Lloyd Alexander. New York: New
Directions.
———. 1988 [1948]. “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays. Translated by Bernard Frechtman.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 2018 [1943]. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Translated
by Sarah Richmond. London: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. The Blue and Brown Books. New York: Harper & Row, 2nd edn., 1960.
41
5
Nietzsche and Historical Understanding1
ROBERT GOODING-WILLIAMS
In the “Acknowledgements” to Nietzsche as Philosopher: Expanded Edition (2005), Arthur

Danto explains that the book’s first edition grew out of an essay he wrote at the invita-
tion of Paul Edwards to contribute an article on Nietzsche to A Critical History of Western
Philosophy (1964), edited by D.J. O’Connor.2 Danto penned the essay in Rome where,
having just moved there from the south of France, he had completed a draft of his first
major book, Analytical Philosophy of History (1965).3 In exchange for shortening his
contribution to O’Connor’s volume, Edwards offered Danto a contract to write a mono-
graph on Nietzsche. Danto finished the manuscript in the summer of 1964, and both
Nietzsche as Philosopher and Analytical Philosophy of History were published the follow-
ing year.
Lydia Goehr has remarked that “Nietzsche hardly makes an appearance” in Analytical
Philosophy of History (Goehr 2007, xxxviii). It is true, however, that Danto’s philosophy
of history “makes an appearance” in the initial edition of his Nietzsche book and in a
series of essays on Nietzsche that he wrote between 1965 and 2005 – essays subse-
quently appended to the book’s “Expanded Edition.” Danto invokes his philosophy of
history to authorize a reading of Nietzsche that, I shall argue, his philosophy of history
nevertheless undermines.
In Danto’s view, Nietzsche’s books, no less than his thoughts and doctrines, have a
disjointed, even disparate appearance that Danto attributes to Nietzsche’s aphoristic

and essayistic literary style, as well as to an abrupt and impromptu method of composi-
tion that knew nothing of the “architectonic feeling for structure” evident, say, in
Kant’s writings (Danto 2005, 1–4). This appearance notwithstanding, Danto purports
to find in Nietzsche’s writing a coherent, systematic structure pivoting around the idea
of philosophical nihilism – the thesis that there is in the world “neither order nor
purpose, things nor facts, nothing there whatever to which our beliefs can correspond”
(Danto 2005, 12, 15). The point of Nietzsche as Philosopher, he tells us, is to reconstruct
that structure: to show how Nietzsche’s philosophical nihilism is linked to his other
42
NIETZSCHE AND HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDING
principal ideas, including his perspectivism, which holds that there are no facts, only
interpretations; his religious psychology, which explains the origins of our now conven-
tional morality; and his affirmations of life, which express his ideas about the
Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, and amor fati. Danto imputes the structural coher-
ence of Nietzsche’s thought to two factors.
One factor is the systematic, architectonic nature of philosophy as such, “which
imposes an external regimen upon its least systematic practitioners … philosophers are
systematic through the nature of their enterprise.” Danto’s point is not that Nietzsche
“intended his work” to exhibit structural coherence – indeed, Danto claims that he could
not have intended this, for “by his own admission” he was unaware of the system that
his writings embodied. Rather Nietzsche’s writings exhibit a coherent structure because
Nietzsche concerned himself with philosophical problems, and because “the problems
of philosophy are so interconnected that the philosopher cannot solve, or start to solve,
one of them without implicitly committing himself to solutions for all the rest.” Danto’s
Nietzsche was a system builder, for, “if only tacitly,” he submitted his thinking to the
demands of the philosophical “discipline,” “where there is no such thing as an isolated
solution to an isolated problem” (Danto 2005, 6–7).
The second factor is “the retroactive unification that historical understanding
imposes.” There is “doubtless continuity in any writer’s thought,” Danto proclaims,
“but in part the continuity is to be attributed to his readers who look back to the early
writings with the late ones in mind.” In consequence, his readers see his writings as the
author himself “could not have seen them when he wrote them, for he could not have
known his own unwritten volumes.” For Danto, according to his theory of narrative
sentences, historical understanding is a retrospective reconstrual of earlier events in
terms of later ones. Applied to the practice of textual interpretation, it is a retrospective
reading of earlier texts in terms of later ones. Thus, had a writer’s “later writings been
different, we should perhaps have been as forcibly struck by themes to which we are in
fact blind as we are by those we find so impressively precocious.” In sum, Danto ascribes
the structural coherence of Nietzsche’s writings no less to the unity-in-continuity
established through historical understanding than to “systematizing dynamisms” that,
he presumes, drive philosophical inquiry (Danto 2005, 7).
Before further considering the analysis of historical understanding Danto develops
in his Analytical Philosophy of History, let me note a difference between his use of the
idea of retrospective interpretation in his book on Nietzsche and that in the 1964
essay, “Nietzsche.” In the essay, Danto admits that, while “recent developments” in
analytical philosophy have enabled us to appreciate much in Nietzsche’s philosophy
that must have been obscure, “even to himself,” it would be “wrong,” from “the his-
torical point of view,” to represent Nietzsche as a “dispassionate, careful analyst.” In
other words, he grants that his attempt to reconstruct Nietzsche’s thought in the
spirit of (then) contemporary analytical philosophy is open to the objection that his
reading is likely to be anachronistic and thus to produce a misleading account of
Nietzsche’s thinking. To answer this objection, and “to remedy, in some measure,
whatever historical distortions a systematic treatment of [Nietzsche’s] thought might
entail,” Danto proposes “to support [his] interpretations of Nietzsche’s thoughts,
wherever possible, with his own words … by the device of ample quotation.” This
approach differs sharply from what he does in his Nietzsche book, where, unlike in
43
the essay, instead of flagging the concern that his interpretation was bound to falsify
Nietzsche, he used the idea of retrospective reinterpretation to authorize – to justify
– his claim to find structural coherence in Nietzsche’s thought. Reading the early
Nietzsche with reference to the later Nietzsche is, Danto seemed to believe, unobjec-
tionable, but reading him, early and late, with a view to the still later, mid-20th pre-
occupations of Anglo-American analytic philosophers invites the complaint of
historical distortion (Danto 1964, 386).
Danto’s answer to this complaint – his proposal to ground his reading of Nietzsche in
Nietzsche’s “own words” – finds an echo in the 1964 “Preface” to Nietzsche as Philosopher,
when he argues that presenting Nietzsche as systematic and analytic thinker is a matter
of “chart[ing] the changes in signification that his words sustain in their shifting from
context to context and back.” By observing this methodological dictum, Danto expressly
intends to treat Nietzsche as a philosopher, “whose thought merits examination on its
own,” independently of both the “strange personality” that nurtured his reputation as
an “intellectual hooligan” and the “special cultural circumstances” that occasioned his
notoriety as the “semicanonized proto-ideologist of Nazism.” “Only now and again,
when a special historical explanation is called for,” Danto remarks, “will I include bio-
graphical or historical information” (Danto 2005, xxiv–xxv).
By appealing to Nietzsche’s words and their significations, Danto purports to
secure his reading of Nietzsche, first, against the possibility of mistaking contempo-
rary philosophical preoccupations for Nietzsche’s philosophical thought (anachro-
nism), and second, against the possibility of mistaking Nietzsche’s mental life and his
use for political purposes (his personality and his semicanonization by the Nazis) for
his philosophical thought. To avoid these “mistakings” and the confusions to which
they might give rise, he resolves to record the philosophical content of Nietzsche’s
thought “on its own,” apart from its psychological causes, its reception by the Third
Reich, and the supposition that Nietzsche was an analytical philosopher avant la
lettre. In both “Nietzsche” and his 1964 “Preface,” Danto eschews historical under-
standing and suggests that Nietzsche’s words and their meanings objectively fix the
content of his thought. On Danto’s view, a philosophical reading of Nietzsche can
grasp his thought, while avoiding historical distortion and omitting to consider his
mental life and the impact of his ideas, by giving proper attention to those words and
meanings.4
In his Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto invents a character he dubs “the Ideal
Chronicler.” As Danto describes him, the Ideal Chronicler
knows whatever happens the moment it happens, even in other minds. He is also to have
the gift of instantaneous transcription: everything that happens across the whole forward
rim of the Past is set down by him, as it happens, the way it happens. The resultant running
account I term the Ideal Chronicle (hereafter referred to as I.C.). Once E [an event] is safely
in the past, its full description is in the I.C. (Danto 2007, 149).
The Ideal Chronicler is an ideal witness. Of any event, however, there is a class of
descriptions, comprised of so-called “narrative sentences,” under which the event
cannot be witnessed, even by an ideal witness. These descriptions, Danto writes, “are
necessarily and systematically excluded from the I.C.” (Danto 2007, 151).
44
Occurring most typically in historical writing, narrative sentences “refer to two time
separated events and describe the earlier with reference to the latter.” “Aristarchus
anticipated in 270 B.C. the theory which Copernicus published in A.D. 1543” is a nar-
rative sentence, for it describes Aristarchus’s accomplishment in terms of Copernicus’s
accomplishment hundreds of years later. This sentence could not appear in the I.C.,
because the Ideal Chronicler, while possessing a perfect knowledge of what transpires,
when it transpires, is blind to the future. Thus, he is incapable of grasping the signifi-
cance that a past event acquires when an historian, or a biographer, describes it in terms
of a later event with reference to which the past event could not have been described
when it occurred (Danto 2007, 164, 156).
Danto’s notion of a narrative sentence clarifies his idea that historical understanding
is retrospective; that it is a matter of assigning significance to earlier events in light of
later ones – thus, a matter of placing earlier events within a story we wish to tell. The
stories we tell, Danto emphasizes, vary with the “topical interests” of the storyteller –
imagine, for example, a biographer of a scientist less eminent than Copernicus who
described Aristarchus’s achievement as anticipating a theory the less eminent scientist
had published. There is something inexpugnably “subjective” and “arbitrary” about the
meaning historical description assigns to an event, for it depends on the storyteller’s
decision to relate a past event to one rather than another set of later events. As Danto
also recognizes, the storyteller can revise and complicate the significance she retrospec-
tively assigns to a past event when the passing of time and the advent of new events
affords her a new “temporal location” from which to write new narrative sentences that
alter our understanding of the past (Danto 2007, 8–15, 142).
In the spirit of Kantian critique, Danto shows that historical understanding is episte-
mically tensed and limited. Because historical understanding “describes … past events
with reference to other events which are future to them, but past to the historian,” it
finds its limit in our ignorance of the future. To be sure, Danto’s “analytical” philosophy
of history observes this constraint, but what he calls “substantive philosophy of his-
tory” ignores it. Substantive philosophies of history, like prophecy, presume a knowledge
of the trajectory of history as a whole, in light of which they assign significance not only
to past and present events, but to future events, which they treat as faits accomplis.
Denying our ignorance of the future, the prophet and the substantive philosopher of
history illegitimately claim to know what has happened before it has happened, which,
Danto suggests, is like claiming to know how the plot of a novel will turn out, and hence
what meaning retrospectively to assign to an early episode, before one finished reading
the novel for the first time (Danto 2007, 8–16; see, too, Goehr 2007, xli–xlii).
As we have seen, Danto attributes the structural coherence of Nietzsche’s writings
both to historical understanding and to the systematizing tendencies of philosophical
inquiry. It is striking, however, that he never reckons with the possibility that these
explanations are ill-matched, that they imply or support contradictory accounts of the
structural coherence, philosophical content, and variability of Nietzsche’s writing.
First, Danto’s explanatory appeal to the tendencies of philosophical inquiry implies
that Nietzsche’s writings enjoy a certain structural coherence due to the demands of
philosophical discipline, whereas his appeal to the unity imposed by retrospective inter-
pretation implies that such coherence belongs not to Nietzsche’s writings themselves
but to Danto’s interpretation of them. In a second, related vein, the appeal to Nietzsche’s
45
agency as a philosophically disciplined author supports the thesis that Nietzsche’s

words and meanings fix the structurally coherent, philosophical content that Danto
takes his writings to embody, while the appeal to historical understanding yet again
invites the thought that, due to the anachronism of his interpretation, Danto has read
that content into Nietzsche’s writings.
But perhaps Danto believed that the threat of anachronism, evident when we inter-
pret Nietzsche’s writings, early and late, in light of the mid-20th preoccupations of
Anglo-American analytic philosophers, was simply not present when he interpreted
Nietzsche’s early writings in light of his later ones. Such a belief would have been ques-
tionable, however, for it would have begged the question at hand, presupposing a
thematic continuity between Nietzsche’s “earlier” and “later” thought which, presum-
ably, historical understanding is tasked to establish. Absent that assumption, we would
be no less justified in entertaining the possibility that, for example, we risk distorting The
Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche’s first book, if we read it as contending with the perspectivist,
epistemological concerns of Beyond Good and Evil, one of his late works, than if we read
it as contending with themes external to Nietzsche’s oeuvre as a whole, for example,
with issues central to the linguistic turn in modern analytic philosophy.
Consider a third and perhaps more serious conflict between Danto’s alternative
explanations of structural coherence. On the one hand, Danto’s analysis of the system-
atizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry argues that these produced throughout
Nietzsche’s writings one invariant thesis – philosophical nihilism, according to Danto
– to which Nietzsche tacitly committed himself the moment he settled on a solution to
a particular philosophical problem. On the other hand, his analysis of historical under-
standing argues that the philosophical content and continuity produced through the
retrospective interpretation of Nietzsche’s writings varies with the topical interests and
temporal location of the interpreter. A further examination of this third conflict will
illuminate the central motivation driving Danto’s interpretation of Nietzsche.
Danto claims that reading an author’s earlier writings in light of his later efforts per-
mits us to interpret the earlier writings as precocious – that is, as anticipating the later
ones. In his essays on Human, All Too Human and Daybreak, Danto recurs to this claim.
Regarding the former, he holds that “the great philosophy to come highlights its antici-
patory passages for us,” allowing us to “read it as a first, tentative statement of one of
the great philosophical visions” (Danto 2005, 242–3). Regarding the latter, he claims
that “[t]he great Nietzschean formulations lay ahead: Eternal Recurrence, Will to
Power, Superman, Antichrist…Without the structural benefits of the whole system, it
would be difficult, as it would then have been impossible to appreciate [Daybreak] … as a
contribution to moral theory” (Danto 2005, 247). Remarking on two of Nietzsche’s
middle period books, Danto takes for granted that the point of reading these books in
the perspective of Nietzsche’s later writings is to see how they fit into the structured
system and vision that (he presumes) these later writings articulate, and so he neglects
to consider the possibility that such a reading could have been prompted by a different
concern, say, by an interest in cultivating a critique of the ideals shaping Nietzsche’s
later thinking (see, e.g., Abbey 2000). Or, alternatively, by an interest in gauging the
extent to which these or even earlier books anticipate the critique of modernity that
Nietzsche advances in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil (see, e.g.,
Gooding-Williams 2001). It is all the more striking, then, that Danto’s account of
46
historical understanding would have us acknowledge just this possibility – that reading
Nietzsche’s middle period and early writings in light of his later ones, with topical inter-
ests different than Danto’s, will yield several alternative accounts of the philosophical
content and continuity, or lack of continuity, characterizing Nietzsche’s thinking.
Because historical understanding varies with topical interest, it will not produce a
single, unvarying philosophical content of the sort that Danto attributes to the system-
atizing tendencies of philosophical inquiry.
In chapter 1 of Nietzsche as Philosopher, Danto tacitly entertains the thought that the
retrospective interpretation of Nietzsche’s writings may vary with the temporal loca-
tion of the interpreter. Specifically, he imagines that “texts so far undiscovered – may
one day turn up which will quite invalidate … [his] interpretation.” Here, Danto seems
to have in mind not only that writings written later than the works we presently possess
could unexpectedly turn up, but also that previously unknown texts, dating from ear-
lier phases of Nietzsche’s philosophical career, could suddenly come to light. Danto
alludes to the first possibility when he adds that “here and there … we find sketches and
projections for a final systematic statement of his [Nietzsche’s] philosophy. None of
these, to present knowledge, materialized” (Danto 2005, 8). Suppose, then, that before
his mental breakdown, but several days after he completed Nietzsche Contra Wagner,
Nietzsche had also completed his final masterpiece, entitled A Revaluation of All Values,
and that an enterprising archivist came across the manuscript text of this work in an
attic somewhere. The publication of this new discovery would obviously invite reinter-
pretations of Nietzsche’s early, middle period, and post-Zarathustra writings, which
would stem from their temporal location later than the temporal location Danto occu-
pied when he wrote “Nietzsche” and Nietzsche as Philosopher; that is, later (indeed, last)
in a timeline representing the chronology of the completion of Nietzsche’s published
writings. As the temporal location of an interpreter changes, her historical under-
standing may change; thus, were the temporal location of an interpreter of Nietzsche’s
writings to change, due to the discovery of a late magnum opus, her retrospective account
of the philosophical content of those writings could very well diverge from an earlier
retrospective account of that content. Because historical understanding tends to vary
with temporal location, it cannot be expected to produce a single, unvarying
philosophical content of the sort that Danto attributes to the systematizing tendencies
of philosophical inquiry.
It is quite puzzling that Danto dismisses the possibility that the discovery of a late
magnum opus could alter his interpretation of Nietzsche. For, again, he himself asserts
that had Nietzsche’s “later writings been different” – if by hypothesis Nietzsche’s later
writings were found to include a final masterpiece – “we should perhaps have been as
forcibly struck by themes to which we are in fact blind as we are by those we find so
impressively precocious” (Danto 2005, 7). Even more puzzling is Danto’s defense of his
dismissiveness:
[Nietzsche’s] message appears over and over again, so much so that from any random
sample of his writings the entirety of his philosophy can almost be reconstructed.
There is a theory that our memory is stored in protein molecules, of which in each of us
there is an immense number. These molecules have the remarkable property of idempo-
tency – of exactly reproducing themselves. According to the theory, the same messages are
47
stored in various places throughout the body, so that, should one part be destroyed, the
possibility remains that our memory will stand intact and will persist. The prodigality and
idempotency of the protein molecules might almost be taken as a providential piece of insur-
ance against the destruction of the self. Nietzsche’s extravagantly numerous, yet oddly
repetitive aphorisms, dealing with the same problems in much the same way, seem to me to
have had much the same result. New writings may be found and old ones restored, but it is
difficult to suppose that they will furnish us with a philosophy different in any essential
respect from the one we may find by carefully examining what we have (Danto 2005,
11–12, my emphasis).
Danto rejects the possibility that the discovery of a final masterpiece could prompt
him to repudiate his account of the themes central to Nietzsche’s writing, arguing that
just as the idempotency of protein molecules can be taken as a sort of providential guar-
antee – as a sort of insurance – against the destruction of the self, so too can the appar-
ently endless repetition of the same message in the writings we presently possess be
taken as a sort of providential guarantee against the possibility that any newly discov-
ered text might express an essentially different message. Although providence, here,
need not be divine, but simply the manifestation of good fortune, the effectively pro-
phetic implication of Danto’s assured tone and diction is clear: we more or less know in
advance the philosophical content of any newly discovered late writing, for that content
is guaranteed, in advance, by Nietzsche’s “oddly repetitive aphorisms.” Danto denies
that we can know how the plot of a novel will evolve before we finish reading it for the
first time, and thus what meaning retrospectively to assign to earlier episodes, yet his
idempotency argument suggests that we can confidently identify the basic philosophical
content of a not yet discovered, not yet read late magnum opus, and thus know what sig-
nificance retrospectively to assign, say, to Nietzsche’s middle period writings. Notice
that, while the idempotency argument cuts against the proposition that the philosophical
content of Nietzsche writings will vary with the temporal location of the interpreter, it
is consistent with the thesis that the moment Nietzsche settled on a solution to some
particular philosophical problem he committed himself to an unvarying philosophical
content – a thesis Danto echoes when he writes “that from any random sample of his
writings the entirety of his philosophy can almost be reconstructed.” Notice too that,
contrary to his admission that retrospective interpretation altered his readings of
Daybreak and Human, All Too Human, the idempotency argument implies that reading
early or middle period writings in light of the late writings we presently possess can be
no more illuminating than reading them in light of undiscovered, still to be read late
writings whose content we presume, for the meaning we discover in any late writing in
view of which we retrospectively interpret earlier work is destined to be but the reiter-
ated, mirror image of what we had already found in earlier writings.
I have suggested that Danto’s “idempotency” argument rules out the possibility that
the discovery of a late masterpiece by Nietzsche could yield a retrospective account of
the philosophical content of his writings that diverged from Danto’s account. Danto
means to persuade us that Nietzsche’s thought has an unvarying philosophical content.
But why? What motivates Danto to press this thesis?
My answer draws from the “Preface” to Nietzsche as Philosopher: Expanded Edition.
Recalling a group of Pearl River youths who, drawing inspiration from Nietzsche, went
48
on “a rampage of murder and brutality,” Danto characterizes Nietzsche as an “intem-

perate prophet” and a “dangerous” moral voice – figuratively, as a “Minotaur.” He adds
that, by reading Nietzsche as a philosopher, he means to turn Nietzsche’s arguments
“against themselves, to blunt his language,” thus, to construct a philosophical
“labyrinth,” in effect, an “anti-Nietzschean philosophy from within Nietzsche’s philos-
ophy itself” that would serve to confine and “disarm” the “rabid” Minotaur and to neu-
tralize the “vivid frightening images that have inspired sociopaths for over a century”
(Danto 2005, xiii–xviii).
Danto’s containment strategy might work, but only if it is reasonable to regard
Nietzsche’s writings as setting forth claims and arguments that have a fixed,
unchanging, philosophical content that an interpreter can identify, target, and pen
in without worrying that the animal he thinks he has trapped is to be found else-
where, or, perhaps, in more than one place or time. If we suppose, however, that legit-
imate interpretations of Nietzsche’s writings can proceed by means of historical
understanding, then the strategy makes no sense, for the philosophical content that
historical understanding attributes to Nietzsche’s writing will vary with the topical
interests and temporal location of the interpreter. Perhaps sensing this, and wanting
to deny to Nietzsche the Ariadne’s thread that would lead his thought out of a con-
structed labyrinth of philosophical systematicity, Danto insists that Nietzsche’s writ-
ings must always be the same, bound to enact a recurrence of the same, in order to
preclude the possibility of retrospective interpretations different than his own.5
Having adduced the idea of historical understanding to authorize his reading of
Nietzsche, Danto implicitly concedes that, due to its variability, historical under-
standing is in principle a threat to the frozen picture of Nietzsche’s philosophical
thought he wants to promote.
Notes
1 Thanks to Ed Casey, Dan Conway, Lydia Goehr and Jonathan Fine for comments.
2 All references to Nietzsche as Philosopher are to the “Expanded Edition.”
3 All references to the text of Analytical Philosophy of History are to the 2007 edition of
Narration and Knowledge, which was originally published in 1985, and which includes the
integral text of Analytical Philosophy of History.

4 Danto’s effort to separate the philosophical analysis of Nietzsche’s writings from both
author psychology and the study of the effects of those writings strongly echoes Monroe C.
Beardsley’s and William K. Wimsatt’s famous effort to separate the critical analysis of
poems from both author psychology and the study of a poem’s effects. See, in this connec-
tion, Beardsley’s and Wimsatt’s criticisms of the intentional and affective fallacies in
Wimsatt 1954.
5 In at least one place, Danto himself follows an Ariadne’s thread out of the labyrinth he other-
wise constructs around Nietzsche’s writing, and that is when he reads Nietzsche not as a
philosopher but as a therapist. There is an irony about this reading, however, for the Nietzsche
who emerges is not a Minotaur-like monster, but a thinker who, like the philosopher, Danto,
would turn his readers away from the temptations of prophecy and substantive philosophy of
history (see Danto 2005, 251–67).
49
References
Abbey, Ruth. 2000. Nietzsche’s Middle Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “Nietzsche.” In A Critical History of Western Philosophy, edited by Daniel
John O’Connor, 384–401. New York: Free Press.
———. 2005. Nietzsche as Philosopher: Expanded Edition. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2007. Narration and Knowledge, with a New Introduction by Lydia Goehr and a New
Conclusion by Frank Ankersmit. New York: Columbia University Press.
Goehr, Lydia. 2007. “Afterwords: An Introduction to Arthur Danto’s Narration and Knowledge.”
In Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge, with a New Introduction by Lydia Goehr and
Frank Ankersmit. New York: Columbia University Press, xix–lvii.
Gooding-Williams, Robert. 2001. Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Wimsatt, William, Jr. 1954. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington, KY:
University Press of Kentucky.
50
6
Pragmatism between Art and Life
RICHARD SHUSTERMAN
Arthur Danto’s relationship with pragmatism is unclear. He did his doctoral studies at
Columbia University’s Philosophy Department and then taught there for many years,
the same department that John Dewey first brought to prominence when he moved to
New York’s Columbia University from the University of Chicago in 1905. Although
Dewey’s pragmatism was still very much in the air when Danto studied at Columbia, it
was already being eclipsed by the analytic philosophy in which Danto subsequently
made his career, writing a series of books with titles such as Analytical Philosophy of
History, Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge, and Analytical Philosophy of Action before
taking up aesthetics, which was then and remains a marginal field for analytic philos-
ophy. Danto’s writings pay very little attention to pragmatist philosophy, including the
field of pragmatist aesthetics on which my text will focus. Although his work seems
very much opposed to key principles in pragmatist aesthetics, he helped to promote it,
partly by encouraging my own work in this field. Unlike some of his analytic colleagues,
Danto did not regard a turn toward pragmatism a departure from good philosophy. One
aim of the present essay is to express my debt to Danto and move beyond our important
differences to highlight what we share and thus what he shares with pragmatist
aesthetics.1
Danto was one of the three persons, along with Richard Rorty and Pierre Bourdieu,
who made my career in pragmatism possible, and thus helped to revive pragmatist aes-
thetics in the 1990s (Shusterman 2014, 13–32). Rorty convinced me to evolve from
the analytic linguistic philosophy of Wittgenstein and Austin to embrace the more
socially engaged philosophical perspectives of James and Dewey. He also encouraged me
to leave my tenured appointment in Israel and move to the United States where I would
be closer to pragmatism’s genius loci. Pierre Bourdieu, who first brought me to Paris in
1990 and introduced me to French intellectual life, convinced me that I needed to
understand the social context of language, culture, and art in a much more scientific,
complex, and conflict-conscious way than the way pragmatist and analytic
51
Richard Shusterman
philosophers (including Danto) explained these cultural fields. Bourdieu’s powerful

account of the social privilege underlying our notions of art and aesthetics provided
one of the key challenges that provoked me to formulate a pragmatist aesthetics that
democratically defends popular art and the pervasiveness of the aesthetic also in
non-elitist lifestyles. (It was Bourdieu who introduced my manuscript on pragmatist
aesthetics to Jerome Lindon of Minuit, who published it as L’art à l’état vif in 1992).
While Rorty’s debt to pragmatism is obvious, Bourdieu displays a complex relationship
to this style of thinking, sharing its emphasis on the concepts of practice and habit but
opposing its melioristic faith in revisionary theory.
Although never identifying with pragmatism, Danto inspired my vision of its aes-
thetics by showing how it was possible for an analytical philosopher to treat the most
current and controversial styles of contemporary art and culture through detailed and
sympathetic criticism of their concrete expression in particular works of art. Danto’s
celebration of Andy Warhol, along with his enthusiastic analyses of other contempo-
rary artists deeply influenced by popular culture, provided space and confidence for my
own writings on hip hop culture. Danto’s encouragement of my work was also quite
personal. While other senior colleagues disapproved of my study of rap. Danto enthusi-
astically supported it, writing a very generous blurb for the back cover of Pragmatist
Aesthetics, and, even earlier, encouraging me to go to Paris to write that book
(Shusterman 1992).
Despite his generosity toward pragmatist aesthetics, Danto opposes some of its key
views. The first important difference concerns Danto’s essential emphasis on a sharp
division between art and life, the artworld and the real world, or as he puts it in one
chapter title, between “works of art and mere real things” (Danto 1981, 1). Pragmatist
aesthetics instead seeks to soften or blur such divisions, rejecting a rigid dichotomy bet-
ween the contrasted terms without denying that their distinction can often be useful.
Affirming the intimate continuity between art and life, pragmatist aesthetics sees art as
an expressive emergence of the energies, forces, and experiences of life. As art depends
on life, so it also serves life, even when it has been pursued under the purist ideology of
art for art’s sake. If art had no use value for life–even if such use is mere pleasurable
diversion from ordinary practical value–then art’s persistent survival and transcultural
ubiquity seem hard to explain. If art depends on human life, then conversely human life
has evolved to survive by developing and deploying art’s cultural forms and meanings
to bring people together and inspire them with shared values, projects, and joys. Human
life has incorporated art’s communicative pleasures, imaginative visions, cultural sym-
bols, and social glue to make both our shared experience and our private moments more
satisfying. If life ultimately survives because we living creatures want to continue to
live, then art in its multiple forms and styles, high and low, contributes to the sense that
life is truly worth living by giving us experiences of deep meaning, value, and pleasure.
Besides this interdependence, art and life are also continuous in that art takes its mate-
rials, energies, meanings, and values from the manifold experiences we encounter in
the conduct of life, while conversely enriching life by giving it additional energy, mean-
ings, ideals, pleasures, and new modes of perception.
This reciprocal influence and continuity, however, does not mean that art and life
should be simply equated, that there is no point in distinguishing art from other areas
in life. The general context of life typically provides the background for foregrounding
52
the specificity of artworld art, just as the ordinary stream of everyday experience pro-
vides the background for the particularly intense experiences that we identify and
remember as a distinctively peak experience or as what Dewey called “an experience,”
emphasizing the article “an” to emphasize the special unity and distinctiveness of the
experience as characteristically aesthetic. Such experiences exist also outside the
boundaries of the artworld, and they display aesthetic qualities similar to those admired
in artworks. Indeed such experiences often inspire the creation of artworks by the
power of these aesthetic qualities.
Danto himself traced this “gap between art and life” (Danto 1981, 13) back to Plato
who distinguished imitative arts from reality to discredit artists as purveyors of illusion,
thereby to establish philosophy’s superior dominion over knowledge and virtue. The
fact that art represents the real does not, however, entail that it lacks reality or that its
representation is intrinsically deceptive. Practical and scientific forms of knowledge
also deploy representations to convey their truths. Similarly, though we can usefully
contrast appearance to reality in some linguistic contexts, the fact that an aesthetic sur-
face is an appearance does not entail that it is illusory, trivial, or devoid of meaning.
Dividing art from reality not only minimizes its cognitive value but also serves to
diminish art’s progressive powers for social action through its creative ideas and more
promising visions of social life. By ignoring art’s wide-ranging cognitive and social
potential, this division implies the essential “purposelessness” with which Kant influen-
tially defined the aesthetic (as “purposiveness without purpose”) and it inspires the
familiar perversions of the artist as anti-social dreamer and the true aesthete as frivo-
lous wastrel.
Yet Danto takes up the Platonic distinction between art and reality precisely to invert
its ontological valorization. Rather than being ontologically demeaned vis-à-vis ordi-
nary real things like beds or grapes, the artwork, for Danto, receives an ontological pro-
motion, while real objects, which may even be “like it in every obvious respect, … remain
in an ontologically degraded category” (Danto 1981, 5). Artworks are thus not simply
unreal; they instead partake of a higher ontological status than ordinary reality, one
requiring a special mental act of artistic interpretation. “The distinction between art
and reality is absolute,” Danto declares, linking this claim to Hegel’s elevation of art to
the realm of Absolute Spirit while real objects merely form “the Prose of the World”
(Danto 1992, 94 & 96). Art’s role is to “express the deepest thoughts” and convey “the
kind of meaning that religion was capable of providing” (Danto 1997, 188, 2000, x).
Pragmatist aesthetics, while insisting on art’s transfigurative and truth-disclosing
power, maintains that art’s transfigurative experiences and meanings are immanent in
this world. Such experiences are not a transition to a transcendent, higher world but
instead the deeper and more penetrating perception of ordinary realities that reveals
just how extraordinary the ordinary can be when properly perceived.
Another contrast between Danto’s approach and pragmatist aesthetics concerns the
definition of art. Like most analytic philosophers, Danto is preoccupied with defining
art, confessing “the philosophical aspiration of the ages, a definition which will not be
threatened by historical overthrow,” and he ingeniously seeks this by defining art in
terms of its own history and then claiming that this history, in an important sense, is
now over with “the end of art.” He argues that twentieth-century art, pursued as a
progressive inquiry into art’s essence, has evolved into the philosophy of art and,
53
Richard Shusterman
having reached the philosophical “understanding of its own historical essence,” has
reached its logical end (Danto 1986, 209 & 204). Art continues to be produced, even
though its history of progressive self-definition is over. It flourishes, instead, in its
posthistorical stage where radical pluralism now prevails: anything can be a work of art
if it can be interpreted as such in terms of the history of the artworld and its current
practices in which you can “do what you damned please” in making art (Danto 1986,
114–15).
Danto’s definition of art as a complex socio-cultural practice essentially defined by its
continuing history is an example of what I call a wrapper theory of art, and it may be
the best wrapper theory we can get (Shusterman 1992). In faithfully representing our
established concept of art and how art’s objects are identified, related, and collectively
distinguished, it best realizes the dual goals of wrapper definitions of art: accurate cov-
erage of art’s extension, that is, covering all and only things that have been, are, or will
be called artworks and thus compartmentally differentiating them from all other things.
Pragmatist aesthetics instead questions whether these goals have the great value that
philosophy’s intensive efforts to achieve them seem to assume.
In defining art as a practice defined by art-historical narrative, all substantive
decisions as to what counts as art are left to the internal decisions of the artworld as
recorded by art history. Philosophy of art collapses back into art history; so the actual,
momentous issue of what art is or should be gets reduced to a second-hand account of
what art has been up to the present. If it merely reflects how art is already understood,
philosophy of art condemns itself to the same reductive definition with which Plato
condemned art. It is essentially an imitation of an imitation: the representation of art
history’s representation of art. What purpose does such representation serve apart
from appeasing the old philosophical urge for theory to mirror or reflect the real, an aim
which has outlived the transcendental metaphysics of fixity that once gave it
meaning?
The theoretical ideal of reflection originally had a point when reality was conceived
in terms of fixed, necessary essences lying beyond ordinary empirical understanding.
For an adequate representation of this reality would always remain valid and effective
as a criterion for assessing ordinary understanding and practice. But if our realities are
the empirical and changing contingencies of art’s career, the reflective model seems
pointless. For here, theory’s representation neither penetrates beyond changing phe-
nomena nor can sustain their changes. Instead, it must run a hopeless race of perpetual
narrative revision, holding the mirror of reflective theory up to art’s changing nature
by representing its history.
Pragmatist aesthetics has a different way of understanding the definition of art. The
aim is not perfect extensional coverage or accurate reflection but an effort to improve
our experience of art by a definition that invites a change of perspective regarding art,
one that could lead to improved experience, partly by highlighting art’s special role in
the context of life. Dewey’s definition of art as experience, I have argued, is one such
definition. Experience is obviously hopeless as a wrapper definition of art because peak
aesthetic experiences exist outside of art, while many artworks fail to provoke the sorts
of strongly unified and pleasurable experiences that Dewey highlights as what the best
of art delivers. Defining art as experience, however, is very helpful in reminding us that
what is most rewarding in art is not the physical objects with which art is typically
54
identified but instead the experiences that those objects are used to express and provoke
(Shusterman 1992, 3–61, 1997). In the same way, in defining art as what I have
termed “dramatization” – that is, the placement of an object or event in a formal frame
to intensify its experience – I do not mean to preclude as art the many things dramatized
outside the recognized artworld, such as ritual and sports events. To dramatize means
both to stage something (to put something in a frame or mise-en-scène) and to intensify.
The idea of defining art as dramatization is to highlight the connection of background
frame, which includes the socio-historical context and institutions of art, with the
heightened interest or meaning of content that this frame intensifies (Shusterman
2001). In this way, a pragmatist aesthetics combines the two main currents of modern
aesthetics, supplementing the sociohistorical, institutional or context-based approach
well represented by Danto with a strong emphasis on the content of intense experience
that Dewey emphasized.
If art history’s crucial role in framing the creation and reception of artworks is one
of the key views that Danto shares with pragmatist aesthetics, then another is that this
history is one of developing change whose direction can be largely determined by the
creative efforts of artworld members. Danto’s long and admirable career in practical
criticism, as art critic for The Nation shows his recognition that art needs more active
care than mere wrapper definitions that simply reflect the status quo. Art history can be
made not only by the work of artists and critics, but also through the intervention of
theorists, whose views have traditionally been central to the creative and critical con-
text in which artists, critics, and art historians function. Consider, for example, how
Aristotle’s Poetics dominated centuries of dramatists and critics, or how Kantian ideas
of aesthetic imagination and judgment helped shape romantic poetry and justify mod-
ernist formalism. As Danto’s philosophical theories of art pervade his art criticism, he
exemplifies the pragmatic idea of putting theory into practice, while conversely using
practice to guide and inspire his theorizing.
Despite his insistence on the division of art and life and his consequent claim that
art’s history evolves autonomously through “its own internal development” (Danto
1986, 204) rather than through external influences, Danto eventually seems to share
pragmatism’s faith that art can make a significant difference to reality far beyond its
effects in the artworld. In his book on Andy Warhol, he claims, “Revolutionary periods
begin with testing artistic boundaries, and this testing then gets extended to social
boundaries more central to life, until, by the end of that period, the whole of society has
been transformed: think of Romanticism and the French Revolution, or of the Russian
avant-garde in the years of 1905 to 1915 and of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s slogan ‘Art
into life!’” (Danto 2010, 29). Many historians would argue, however, that the French
Revolution is what inspired Romanticism, and that the Russian avant-garde were them-
selves very much influenced by social transformations that predated the 1917
Revolution. But the key point to retain here is Danto’s recognition of the strong links
between art and life, even if he prefers to read the causality of these links only in one
direction.
I conclude with a topic that, on the surface, sharply divides Danto from pragmatist aes-
thetics but at a deeper level unites them. This topic is “the aesthetic” and its traditional
concern with pleasure and beauty. Danto has repeatedly insisted that the aesthetic is not
central to the philosophy of art because most artworks are not made primarily for
55
Richard Shusterman
aesthetic purposes of beauty or pleasurable “delectation.” As “art is philosophically

independent of aesthetics,” so he argues (citing Duchamp) that “delectation is the danger
to be avoided” (Danto 2013, 144 & 145). Rather than beauty and pleasure, “embodied
meanings” are what Danto regards as central to art; he even claims his definitional
“theory, in brief, is that works of art are embodied meanings” (Danto 2013, 149). Danto
essentially disregards the concept of aesthetic experience, focusing instead on interpreta-
tion as what is essential in art, not only for understanding an artwork but even for consti-
tuting it as such. Pragmatism, on the contrary, makes aesthetic experience central to our
understanding of art’s meaning and value. Although recognizing that many (or, in con-
temporary practice, most) artworks do not make beauty and pleasure their highest con-
cern, pragmatist aesthetics nonetheless affirms these qualities as having significantly
shaped art’s concept and history while also contributing to art’s value. Pragmatism like-
wise insists that beauty and pleasure are often realized through the embodied meanings
that Danto invokes as the essence of art. Danto assumes that the aesthetic deals only with
the sensory surface. But the fact that aesthetics derives its name from sensory perception
(and is concerned with such perception) does not entail that it is not equally concerned
with meanings, for meanings can be sensuously rendered and directly perceived through
our cultivated senses and sensibility, as when we directly see that a painting portrays the
crucifixion with the established meanings that scene conveys.
Although Danto rejects the pragmatist view that aesthetic considerations are important
for defining art, he ultimately converges with pragmatism’s affirmation of the aesthetic
(including beauty) as having a deeper and wider significance for shaping life and thought
more generally (Danto 2003). William James and Dewey argued that the fundamental
unity and direction of our thinking and action are determined largely by the implicit
aesthetic feel of things belonging together or flowing coherently in the right direction, in
what James famously called the stream of consciousness. As James claimed in “The
Sentiment of Rationality,” so Dewey argued in essays such as “Qualitative Thought” and
“Affective Thought” that logical thinking rests ultimately on a felt sense of relevance and
coherence (Shusterman 2011, 2013a, 49–68). Toward the end of the last chapter of his
final book, What Art Is, Danto enlists neither James nor Dewey to make this sort of argument
for the aesthetic, but instead invokes the writings of pragmatism’s originator, C.S. Peirce.
Peirce argued that aesthetics is, in a way, the most fundamental normative science,
ultimately grounding the norms of logic and ethics: for if ethics subsumed logic’s con-
cern with the good or right ways of thinking by being concerned with the nature of the
good or right, then the ethical norms of good and right are in turn subsumed or explained
by what is “admirable,” the nature of which is the subject of aesthetics, a science which
Peirce sometimes described as “axiagastics” or the science of “the admirable” (Peirce
1967, 40, 1998, 201). In arguing that “ethics rests… on aesthetics” (Danto 2013, 152),
Peirce further affirmed that a man’s ultimate ethical goal should be “to make his life
beautiful, admirable” (Brent 1993, 49). We should not conclude, however, that for
Peirce the quality of being admirable or aesthetically good is limited to beauty; instead it
can be found in any distinctively unified “positive, simple, immediate quality” emerging
from “a multitude of parts” (Peirce 1998, 201). This immediate quality has an affective
feel or mood; and such a mood provides the implicit, hidden background that shapes
what comes into the foreground of consciousness. Pragmatism, therefore, is essentially
a philosophy of feeling as well as of action (Shusterman 2012, 433–54).
56
Associating these “aesthetic qualities” of feeling with Heidegger’s formative notion of

“moods” that shape our thinking, Danto eventually even affirms their importance for under-
standing art, as he recognizes that artworks often “are intended to create moods, sometimes
quite powerful moods” (Danto 2013, 153 & 154). This recognition of art’s role in producing
powerful affect is precisely what motivates the pragmatist to make aesthetic experience a use-
ful concept for understanding art, for illuminating its motivations, consequences, and value.
Danto concludes, “What I admire in Peirce and Heidegger is that they have sought to liberate
aesthetics from its traditional preoccupation with beauty, and beauty’s traditional limitation
to calm detachment” (Danto 2013, 154). This is precisely the program of pragmatist aes-
thetics, whose pluralistic project also includes liberating aesthetics from its narrow focus on
the definition of artworld art, enlarging its scope not only to the qualities and meanings of
our natural and constructed environments and our wide-ranging products of design but
also to the qualities and meanings of the ways we shape our lives.
Why did Danto not come closer to pragmatist aesthetics and its program of bringing
art (and aesthetics) deeper and more pervasively into life by blurring the differences bet-
ween them? Part of the reason may be a personal one of temperament in doing philos-
ophy, as Danto himself suggests in one of our published exchanges. Discussing my
comparative analysis of his “Upper West Side Buddhism” with the aesthetic experiences
of my Zen training in Japan, Danto distances himself from what he calls “the existential
spirit that informed and continues to inform [my] philosophical quest, as well as [my]
life.” He immediately explains: “By this I mean a certain courage, an openness to risks
of a kind I would never have exposed myself to” (Danto 2012, 308). Because I admire
Danto as not only a brilliant but a courageous thinker, I would prefer to construe our
difference here in terms of his overriding preference for experience as mediated and
interpreted through art and philosophy in contrast to the greater openness and respect
for the import of immediate experience (which is always already mediated by our
cultural world and habits) that I share with classical pragmatism.
Notes
1 For the most detailed and recent discussion of my philosophical differences with Arthur Danto, see
Shusterman 2013b (that includes an afterword by Danto) and my contributions (“Art in a Box” and
“Art as Religion: Transfiguations of Danto’s Dao”) to the two different Blackwell editions of Danto
and His Critics (Rollins 1993, 2012). For an extended audiovisual encounter at the Tate Museum in
London, which also included the art historian Thierry de Duve, see http://www.tate.org.uk/context-
comment/video/contested-territories-arthur-danto-thierry-de-duve-richard-shusterman.
References
Brent, John. 1993. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, 49. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
–––––. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, 210. New York: Columbia University
Press.
57
Richard Shusterman
–––––. 1992. Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
–––––. 1997. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
–––––. 2000. The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Artworld. New York: Farrar, Strauss,
and Giroux.
–––––. 2003. The Abuse of Beauty and the Concept of Art. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
–––––. 2010. Andy Warhol, 29. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
–––––. 2012. “Replies to Essays.” In Danto and His Critics, edited by Mark Rollins, 2nd edn, 285–
311. Oxford: Blackwell.
–––––. 2013. What Art Is. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Peirce, Charles S. 1967. Manuscript Text in Harvard’s Houghton Library’s Collection of Peirce
Papers, Catalogued by Richard Robin, Item 1334, 40. http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/robin/
robin_fm/toc_frm.htm
–––––. 1998. “The Three Normative Sciences.” In The Essential Peirce, Vol. 2, 196–207.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Rollins, Mark. 1993. Danto and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell.
–––––. 2012. Danto and His Critics, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shusterman, Richard. 1992. Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Oxford, UK:
Blackwell.
–––––. 1997. “The End of Aesthetic Experience.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55(1):
29–41. Reprinted in Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the End of Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
–––––. 2001. “Art as Dramatization.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59(4): 363–72.
Reprinted in Surface and Depth (2002). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
–––––. 2011. “The Pragmatist Aesthetics of William James.” British Journal of Aesthetics 51(4):
347–61.
–––––. 2012. “Thought in the Strenuous Mood: Pragmatism as a Philosophy of Feeling.” New
Literary History 43(3): 433–54.
–––––. 2013a. “Affective Cognition: From Pragmatism to Somaesthetics.” Intellectica 60: 49–68.
–––––. 2013b. Chemins de l’art: Transfigurations du pragmatism au zen, avec une postface par Arthur
Danto. Translated by Raphael Cuir. Paris: Al Dante.
–––––. 2014. “The Invention of Pragmatist Aesthetics: Genealogical Reflections on a Notion and
a Name.” In Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics, edited by Wojciech Malecki, 13–32. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
58
7
Danto on Dewey (and Dewey on Danto)
CASEY HASKINS
“I couldn’t avoid Dewey’s influence,” Danto recalls in a 1990 interview about his early
years at Columbia, where he received his PhD and began teaching in the early fifties.
Dewey was a towering figure in the same department from 1905 to 1930. Danto goes
on:
[H]e was a big deal at the time. He’s getting to be a big deal again. But from the very beginning
I thought he was just awful, just muddy, like a preacher, portentous and uninteresting. I still
think a lot of that is true, but I think analytic philosophy enables one to see Dewey as one of
the main systems, a somewhat ‘holistic’ system. In Dewey as a writer, I don’t have much
interest and in this I am in complete disagreement with Rorty. I don’t see any structure in
him, while I have passion for the architecture of philosophical thought … I like connections
to be clear, and I like to see structures, whereas with Dewey it’s an unstructured world in
which you sort of move through a fog. … However … you can understand why he does it,
what the systematic reasons are, and if you take a sufficiently distant view of that you can
see that the lack of structure is one of the great historic alternatives to clarity. But it is not
the way that I would want to do philosophy. I’m something of an eighteenth-century person,
I really do see this as an ordered universe…. (Borradori 1994, 90–1).
Danto nowhere discusses Dewey or pragmatism at any great length, but he expresses
similar sentiments throughout his writings. One senses that Danto regarded Dewey as
a spectral presence that, in a field fueled by what William James famously called “clashes
of temperament,” is better ignored than frontally engaged. This particular clash is
interesting for the window it affords onto not only the careers of two singular thinkers
but also onto the evolution of American Anglophone philosophy from the early postwar
era to the present. Danto’s initial antipathy toward Dewey occurred amidst the shifting
currents within the field in the fifties. It may also, as his remarks above suggest, have
been rekindled by the Rorty-led neopragmatist revival of the 1970s and 1980s. In his
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CASEY HASKINS
1989 Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy, Danto accordingly
describes pragmatism as a philosophical system confusedly bent on bringing analyti-
cally healthy philosophy, rooted in a historically stable “cycle of positions,” to an end
(Danto 1989, ch. 5).
Yet there are also intriguing hints in Connections’ second (1997) edition of a further
shift in Danto’s thinking about philosophy as a whole that brings him programmati-
cally closer to Dewey than is evident in his earlier writings. More of this later. First, let
us look further at the sources of Danto’s reaction to the classical pragmatist of whom
he was the most critical but whose philosophy, at the same time, continues to offer a
powerful lens for a critical reassessment of Danto’s own views.
Danto’s early reaction to Dewey at first seems puzzling. Portentousness and preacherli-
ness aside, how could anyone find Dewey – who continues to attract new generations of
readers in multiple disciplines, from phenomenological philosophy of mind and cognitive
neuroscience to ethics, aesthetics, education theory, and ecophilosophy1 – uninteresting?
It helps here to recall the shifting matrix of intellectual coalitions, conflicts, and ideolog-
ical change that was American academic philosophy in the early fifties.
This was a time when no single movement – pragmatism, logical positivism, ordinary
language philosophy, or the kind of pluralistic history-focused study that gave equal
time to Anglophone and Continental philosophy – quite yet dominated the curricula of
leading departments, including Columbia’s. But the balance between what were earlier
dubbed “speculative” and “critical” approaches – with pragmatism cast as speculative
and analytical methods as critical – was clearly shifting in the latter direction. The ear-
lier dominant influence of Dewey’s “experimental philosophy” over the Columbia
department was waning. This was also a time of other dramatic ideological upheavals in
the United States that bore directly and indirectly on the viability of certain research
programs in philosophy and other humanistic disciplines. Increasingly, the embrace of
analytic methods for many philosophers (if not the methods themselves) itself came
increasingly to resemble an ideology – an ideology distinctly hostile toward such “uncrit-
ical” enterprises as Continental philosophy, Marxist theory, and pragmatism.2
Danto, whose interests embraced figures and ideas on both sides of philosophy’s mid-
century continental divide, never fully embraced the reigning analytic orthodoxy, even
while he thrived in its atmosphere. That said, why, more exactly, did he find Dewey’s
philosophy and style so unappealing?

Absent a detailed answer from Danto himself, his metaphilosophical metaphors, at
least, are suggestive. In contrast to Dewey’s muddiness and fogginess, he says above that
he prefers “architecture” and clear “structure.” In these connections, Danto had long
drawn inspiration from the ideal of analytical clarity he found in the writings of
Descartes, famous for his image of a building’s foundations as a metaphor for the con-
ditions of knowledge and certainty that philosophy aims to articulate. Actually, Danto’s
evolving metaphilosophical vision would turn out to be significantly unCartesian in its
denial of the formal demonstrability of virtually any large ontological or epistemolog-
ical thesis. But he would remain resistant throughout his career to the full fallibilist
implications of Dewey’s signature theme of the illusory and culturally situated
character of modern philosophy’s Cartesian “quest for certainty.” For Dewey and most
pragmatists, thought never stands still long enough to be unconditionally certain,
60
clear, or distinct. Intertwined with earthly bodily life in ways that render Cartesian
imagery of pilots and ships quaint and outmoded, thought’s central and normal char-
acteristics include phases of situation-specific indeterminacy and uncertainty along
with phases possessing the formal clarity of logic or mathematics. To this extent, what
Danto calls Dewey’s own “muddy” and “foggy” qualities here, along with his holism,
become Rorschach tests for dramatically different metaphorical pictures of human
thought’s relationships to embodiment and agency.
One vivid example of Danto’s own favored picture occurs in his recounting of
Chuang-Tze’s story of a butcher:
The king is watching the butcher, and the butcher with just one move makes the carcass
fall in pieces. The king says, “How do you do that? You don’t seem to put any effort into it.”
And the butcher says, “I studied Tao, and when you study Tao you know how things fit
together.”… [T]he butcher adds, “Between two bones, there’s an empty space, and the knife
goes into emptiness. When you put emptiness within emptiness, the knife never goes dull
and everything falls apart.” That’s what philosophy should be3 (Borradori 1994, 98–9).
This anecdote conveys Danto’s unpreacherly fondness for eighteenth-century-inspired

models of analytical clarity. It would have carried decidedly different meanings for
Dewey, whose relentless critique of such models was deeply informed by romantic
writers such as Wordsworth. (“Sweet is the lore which Nature brings/Our meddling
intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things/We murder to dissect.”)
Another of Danto’s images would likely have raised Dewey’s eyebrows even more.
Recalling the experience of writing his 1965 Analytical Philosophy of History, Danto
says that
The book ended with a discussion of what was called Methodological Individualism, the
idea that every statement about history is analyzable without remainder into conjunctions
of statements about the actions of individual agents. This position paralleled the program
that statements about physical objects are analyzable without remainder into conjunc-
tions of statements about sense data. … I had the sense of holding a problem in the muscles
of the mind, applying pressure the way a starfish applies pressure in opening a mollusk,
until the shell gives way and one sees what was inside (Danto 2013, 19).
Such methodological sentiments contrast vividly with Dewey’s. To think that a concept
of any complex phenomenon – of a complex historical event or of certain physical
objects, say – is analyzable “without remainder” into conjunctions of more basic con-
cepts or statements is to commit what Dewey called the “analytic fallacy.” A staple of
classical empiricism, this pattern of thought makes the mistake of artificially abstract-
ing selected aspects of a whole, historically and culturally, situated experience of inquiry
from an original context that includes some specific purpose of the original inquirers
(say, prediction and control) and then interpretively projecting them back onto the
description of the original situation as if from the beginning they possessed separate,
context-independent existences of their own (Dewey 1931).
As it happens, Dewey had himself, decades earlier, described a mind as “a sort of
biological thing with arms or tentacles reaching out everywhere, and when they get
appropriate food just fastening down upon it” (Dewey 1902, 334). This image
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CASEY HASKINS
condenses the argument of his seminal 1896 article “The Reflex Arc Concept in
Psychology,” which focused on the example of a small child curiously reaching for a
burning flame, and then upon touching it recoiling with newfound experience and
knowledge. Even such simple instances of intelligent behavior, Dewey maintained,
show that experience is not structured, contrary to an empiricist tradition that Danto
and many other analytic writers still embraced generations later, around an efficiently-
causal stimulus-response process in which brute sense data first trigger Lockean-style
ideas whose further molecular permutations appear in the understanding, and then
afford empirical knowledge. In his example, it is not the sensations from the reaching
activity that are properly regarded as explanatorily primary for understanding the
child’s behavior (along with its endless analogues throughout the realm of human
action). What occupies this role, rather, is the reaching itself, understood as an always-
already, future-directed, goal-seeking impulse whose sensorimotor and cognitive com-
ponents are inextricably bound together in a feedback-looping relationship between
the action’s larger and evolving environment. Thus even a little child turns out to be
capable of inquiry – Dewey’s term for the myriad ways in which humans seek fresh
integration with an environment that continually challenges them not simply to repre-
sent it abstractly but reconstructively to interact with it in the course of pursuing and
refining their desires.
Decades later, Dewey would use another suggestive metaphor in the “Nature, Life, and
Body-Mind” chapter of Experience and Nature, which remains a key text for discussions
of the metaphysical bases of embodied phenomenology and cognition. Here he com-
ments that
To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous
system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And
when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in
history, in a moving, growing, never finished process (Dewey 1925, 224).
In addition to emphasizing the emergent-naturalist theme of the ontological continuity

of cognitive and bodily processes, Dewey signals his process-philosopher’s rejection of
atomistic methodologies (“marbles in a box”) in a variety of traditional contexts,
including in classical empiricist and Kantian accounts of perception. Danto never

undertook to rebut this centerpiece of Deweyan experimental pragmatism in any detail
in his influential books of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Analytical Philosophy of Action,
Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge, and Analytical Philosophy of History. Why the
silence? One possibility – this is just a guess – is that, given how passé Dewey had become
for many analytic readers by then, Danto saw no need to pick a fight with a ghostly
opponent. And this all the more if that opponent’s philosophical system – as was sug-
gested by the metaphilosophical perspectivism which became central to Danto’s
thinking by the 1960s – had an inferential structure that he saw to be incommensu-
rable with his own. (But ghost-banishing is not, as later neoDeweyan turns in philos-
ophy and elsewhere would bear out, sufficient for ghost-busting.)
Be all that as it may, the above deep methodological differences also underpin the two
philosophers’ contrasting images of human action. Danto’s atomistic ontology allowed
62
him to argue, famously, that actions are tokens of a person’s bodily behavior possessing an
antecedent cause in an intentional state informed by impinging sensory stimuli. All of the
main components of an action, whether that action be, in Danto’s idiom, “basic” or “medi-
ated,” preserve a strict ontological discontinuity between the inner and outer aspects of
agency. Such thinking has no place in Dewey’s more teleological and emergent-naturalist
model of behavior. There, the neurosensory and cognitive strands of agency are organi-
cally interconnected in a way that defies assimilation equally to Cartesian interactionist
dualism and classical empiricism’s methodological dualism of concepts versus sensa (or
scheme versus content, in the idiom of Donald Davidson’s critique of “the very idea of a
conceptual scheme,” which Dewey anticipated and Danto fatefully ignored).
Dewey’s kind of emergent-naturalist model of intelligence presents, in effect, a third
alternative to the Cartesian/interactionist and more baldly mechanistic naturalistic
models that remained in place for many twentieth-century philosophers. Danto’s
long-standing resistance to certain aspects of that alternative would turn out not to be
entirely graven in stone. But to appreciate why, consider a couple more ways in which
he continued to picture Dewey’s philosophy as opposed to his own.
One large context for that opposition is Danto’s metaphilosophical perspectivism – his
view, articulated most fully in Connections, that all significant philosophizing occurs in
systems whose conflicts (unlike conflicts between propositions within such systems)
cannot be adjudicated in fully cognitive ways. Danto’s philosophy represents one such
supposedly settled system; Dewey’s, another. Danto further briefly describes his dis-
tance from Dewey by means of a distinction between two antinomically opposed stances
about the interrelations of mind, knowledge, and world that, in a familiar and rather
open-textured analytic-philosophical idiom, he calls internalism and externalism. In his
1968 Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge, Danto characterizes Dewey and other prag-
matists, along with Marxists, as internalists (Danto 168, 234). Three decades later, in
the “Internalism and Externalism” chapter in Connections, he revisits this basic dia-
lectic, this time with the meanings of the key terms reversed in keeping with shifting
analytical-philosophical usage. Descartes is now a prime specimen of what Danto
earlier called Externalism, now rechristened as Internalism. Dewey and classical prag-
matism are not explicitly mentioned, with Nietzsche (whom Danto had famously
described earlier as a proto-pragmatist) now slotted in as the exemplary Externalist.
Given the pervasive influence of Dewey’s organicist externalism within the

twentieth-century Anglophone canon, readers might wonder why Danto would here
once again ignore him in a book written in part, after all, as a polemical defense of
analytic philosophy’s methods against the imagined threats from pragmatism. My ghost-
banishing hypothesis may apply here yet again, but now with a further twist. Connections
offers a masterly, if unabashedly partisan, introductory overview of many key lower and
higher-order philosophical issues of the day. Danto makes no secret of his own internal-
ist sympathies, but he is dialectically street-wise enough to portray the internalist/exter-
nalist dialectic as possessing an antinomical structure, rooted in his deeper perspectivism.
To personally prefer one deep ontological or epistemological perspective over another,
Danto implies, is one thing; to give conclusive reasons in support of such tastes is another.
Like Dewey, he well understood (without going the entire pragmatist distance) that the
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CASEY HASKINS
second scenario of ideal certainty is a Cartesian fantasy. This is hardly the only respect in
which Danto’s late philosophy departs dramatically from that of Descartes.
Before we pursue the last point more fully, some discussion is in order regarding another
subject dear to both Danto’s and Dewey’s hearts and about which both wrote ground-
breaking books: art. (I will here be brief since other chapters in this volume focus more
fully on Danto’s philosophy of art.) It might at first seem puzzling that Danto all but
ignores Dewey’s Art as Experience through his many art-philosophical and art-critical
writings. Here again, we may have a case of ghost-banishing. In any event, The
Transfiguration of the Commonplace and such later books as After the End of Art:
Contemporary Art and the Pale of History and The Abuse of Beauty, as well as numerous
art-critical studies in The Nation and elsewhere, together project a decidedly non-Dew-
eyan vision of their subjects. At its core is Danto’s ahistorically essentialist definition of
a work of art as an “embodied meaning,” which is in turn rooted in his neoCartesian
model of knowledge as a subject/representation/world triangulation.
Contrast this with Dewey’s more anti-representationalistically framed approach to
the question of what is art. According to Art as Experience, a work of art is literally an
action and not a product. More exactly, it is a consummatorily charged form of the
organism/environment transaction that Dewey calls “an experience,” embodied (as are
all experiences for Dewey) in a stretch of intelligent behavior that resists reduction to
the kind of atomistically basic and molecularly mediated agency that is fundamental for
Danto. Everything in this argument, including its further emphasis on the felt qualitative
unity within all fully realized experiences in the arts and elsewhere, presupposes the
basic antirepresentationalist and enactivist analysis of intelligent behavior that is
central to Dewey’s mature experimental pragmatism.
Here the two writers’ temperamental clash along the internalist/externalist axis sur-
faces again. But it does so in a way possessing now more obvious normative stakes, espe-
cially amidst postmodern-era debates about the politics of recognition across various global
and cultural divides both within and without the artworld. A comparative reading of their
philosophies of art needs to keep in view the fact that whereas Dewey wrote in the heyday
of prewar high aesthetic modernism (Art as Experience appeared in 1934) and was cri-
tiquing that era’s philosophical art/life divisions from within, Danto, writing from a more
postmodern vantage point, was selectively reconstructing those divisions, historically
speaking, from without. There is little question, in any case, that Dewey would have viewed
Danto’s art product- and Artworld-centered, and visual art-privileging philosophy of art as
a sophisticated variant of what Art as Experience attacked as the modernist-era “compart-
mental” or “museum” conception of art. One also imagines Dewey being tempted, in view
of both Danto’s views about knowledge and his practice of generally using “art” inter-
changeably with “visual art,” to call Danto’s philosophy of art a spectator theory of its sub-
ject, in a double sense. For Danto’s theory makes the experience of the spectator – and
paradigmatically the spectator of canonically visual artworks, as distinct from the audi-
ences of other arts such as literature, music, dance, and cinema – more explanatorily
central than that of the creating artist, even while it also appeals epistemologically to a
version of what Dewey called the “spectator theory of knowledge.”4 For Dewey, there are no
spectators – in his epistemic sense of that term – of anything, given that all thought is both
intertwined with behavior and aspires to the condition of (remember his example of the
64
reaching child) inquiry. And all inquiry is internally bound up in the culturally and histori-
cally specific contexts he calls “situations,” which no form of representation can fully tran-
scend. (These also include political situations, such as that of modern democracy – another
major context for Dewey’s writings on philosophy and art.)
What, with all of this said, might future intellectual historians make of the tempera-
mental divide in the life of this philosophical odd couple? So far, it seems a wide divide
indeed. But Danto’s dialectical distance from Dewey on the landscape of recent philos-
ophy may well turn out, in the fullness of doxographic time, to be narrower than now
appears. Let me explain.
We saw that Danto early on cast his relationship to Deweyan pragmatism in terms of
an internalist/externalist dialectic. He regarded this dialectic as separating his own
methods decisively not only from Dewey but from pragmatism generally, and especially
from neopragmatists like Rorty and others who had come, by the Cold War years, to
perceive the more ideological forms of analytic philosophy as intellectually and socially
repressive. But in the Preface to the second (1997) edition of Connections, Danto also
takes a new stab at describing what he saw as the essential methodological tension in
contemporary professional philosophy. This time his candidate is not, as in Connections’
original 1989 text, internalism-versus-externalism; it is now atomism-versus-holism.
(These, again, are the two stances he had attributed to himself and Dewey, respectively,
in the interview I quoted at the beginning.) Rorty himself, tellingly, had invoked the
same two stances in his own account of Anglophone philosophy’s central fault line in
2007 (Rorty 2007). “The atomists,” Danto notes, “for the moment are on the run.”
Clearly, this is at least an allusion to the anti-Analytic rebellions mentioned above. The
remark also seems to gesture toward the sweeping late-twentieth century turn toward
holistic “complexity” within the human and natural sciences.
Might Danto also have been channeling the retreating atomist in himself? For here,
he hints for the first time at the possibility of a “third kind of system” whose elabora-
tion would inform the agenda for a possible sequel (never published) to Connections.
Such a philosophy would not (unlike, he says, most modern philosophy) model itself
on the natural sciences but would instead freshly address “what defines us as human
beings, or as ens representans” (Danto 1997, xix). He adds that this “is not a model,
clearly, which philosophers have greatly understood.” Such a third model would inter-
weave Connections’ closing Hegelian theme that we are social, self-interpreting spiritual
beings with a less atomistically reductive version of the idea, central to the post-posi-
tivist analytical culture of Danto’s early career, that we are also natural beings.
Coincidentally (or not, if you are a certain kind of Hegelian), this is an accurate brief,
as far as it goes, for the arguments of books like Robert Brandom’s Making It Explicit:
Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment and Terry Pinkard’s Hegel’s
Naturalism. These studies appeared toward the end of Danto’s career and helped prompt
certain dialectical shifts in conceptions of human rational activity that had previously
both defined and separated the two Anglophone traditions of analytic philosophy and
pragmatism. Even though Danto never substantially discussed that literature, his
remarks in Connections suggest a shift in his own later thinking paralleling a larger sea
change within mainstream analytic philosophy at the turn of the millennium. If
analytic philosophizing embodies, as Danto himself evidently thought, something like
65
CASEY HASKINS
Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit, it is not a stretch to suppose that the latter’s recent
movement ran, in the end, through Danto’s work as well.
This, if so, also suggests a shifting picture of Danto’s doxographic relationship to
Dewey. To that extent, there is a sense in which Danto both never walked back his lifelong
aversion to pragmatism and, to recall his remark with which I opened, never fully escaped
Dewey’s influence. This seems especially true if we view Dewey as one of many thinkers
who laid the groundwork for recent accounts of Hegel’s relationship to pragmatism and
naturalism. Analytic philosophy’s phenomenological development here also puts the lie
to earlier beliefs in its separation, as a “critical” enterprise, from other more “speculative”
enterprises such as pragmatism. Expressions like “pragmatism” and “analytic philos-
ophy” indeed don’t denote neatly compartmentalized natural or transcendental kinds.
They denote cultural kinds (although for an emergent naturalist like Dewey, all cultural
kinds are ultimately natural kinds, and vice versa). So understood, their history is as
much one of emerging hybridizations, syntheses, and “third models” as it is one of lower-
order clashes between what may initially appear to a given generation – as Dewey’s
externalism and Danto’s internalism initially appeared to Danto – as incommensurable
perspectives among which we can make only non-cognitive choices.
Intellectual prophecies are notoriously unreliable. But my guess is that the above-
described phenomenological movement in Anglophone philosophy will certainly con-
tinue to bear out Danto’s intimation of a “third model” – a development that Dewey, as
even the older neoHegelian Danto never acknowledged, already substantially pioneered
decades earlier. This movement also promises to encompass more radically transdisci-
plinary developments within this century’s intellectual networks that are receiving the
attention of many older-school philosophers only now.
Such observations begin to take the story of what Danto’s critique of Dewey and
Dewey’s reconstructed critique of Danto mean beyond what either envisaged. Their dis-
agreements were, as we have seen, deep and many. But dialectical encounters—even
hypothetical ones like mine here—can sometimes also bring new pieces of common
ground into focus. Danto ultimately turned out to share the spirit if not the letter of
Dewey’s thought that the full meaning of any action, conversation, or practice lies as
much in how it shapes the future as in its roots in the past and present. That thought
paves the way, dialectically, for another which increasingly frames the work of, among
many others, Hegelians, pragmatists, and analytic philosophers in this century. This is
that our always-unfinished contributions to the future ensure that no one will get the
last word about our connections to the world, even if nothing in the world could ever
matter more to philosophers than getting those connections right.
Notes
1 For a sense of the multidisciplinary breadth of recent interest in Dewey, see Fesmire (2019).
2 On the idea of an “analytic ideology,” see Bernstein (2010) and Rorty (1992).
3 Giovanna Borradori, ed., The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam,
Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, Macintyre, Kuhn (University of Chicago Press, 1994), 98-.
4 I further discuss how Dewey’s approach to understanding art and aesthetic experience differs
from those of philosophers (including Danto) who retained certain key transcendental and
66
representationalist commitments of traditional empiricist and Kantian-idealist aesthetics in

Haskins (2019).
References
Bernstein, Richard J. 2010. The Pragmatic Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Borradori, Giovanna. 1994. The American Philosopher: Conversations with Quine, Davidson, Putnam,
Nozick, Danto, Rorty, Cavell, Macintyre, Kuhn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 2013. “Intellectual Autobiography of Arthur C. Danto”, in Randall E. Auxier
and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds., 2013. The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto. Chicago and LaSalle, IL:
Open Court: 3–70.
––––. 1968. Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
––––. 1989 and 1997. Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy. Berkeley: University
of California Press.
Dewey, John. 1988. “Experience and Nature” (1925) in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Later Works of
John Dewey, vol. 1. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
––––. 1989. “Context and Thought” (1931) in Jo Ann Boydston, ed., The Later Works of John
Dewey, vol. 6. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press: 3–21.
Fesmire, Steven C., ed. 2019. The Oxford Handbook of Dewey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haskins, Casey. 2019. “Dewey’s Art as Experience on the Landscape of Twenty-First Century
Aesthetics.” In Fesmire, Steven C., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Dewey. Oxford: Oxford University
Press: 445–70.
Rorty, Richard. 1992. “Philosophy in America Today.” In Consequences of Pragmatism, edited by
Richard Rorty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 211–30.
––––. 2007. “Holism and Historicism.” In Philosophy as Cultural Politics, edited by Richard Rorty.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 176–83.
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8
Thought Experiments: Art and Ethics
F.M. KAMM
In the first section of this chapter, I consider Arthur Danto’s use of a particular thought
experiment to support his theory of art and Richard Wollheim’s discussion of it. In the
second section, I consider a comparable thought experiment about conceptual issues in
ethics. I then explore how ethics employs thought experiments to determine permissi-
bility of acts and whether thought experiments could comparably be used to determine
the merit of artworks. I finally consider Danto’s discussion of an ethical issue and how
his discussion compares with Wollheim’s views about art.
1 Conceptual Issues about Art: Danto versus Wollheim
A. Among the contributions for which Danto is known is his “Gallery of Indiscernibles.”1
It includes a set of imagined red canvases that cannot be distinguished from one another
on perceptual grounds. This, presumably, is not due to the limits of perception but
because they are identical with respect to perceptual properties. However, they have
different descriptions, which include (1) a painting of people drowning in the Red Sea,
(2) a landscape of Red Square, (3) a minimalist painting (perhaps “Homage to the Red
Square” by Josef Albers), (4) a canvas stretched and painted red by Giorgione that he
never used for a painting, (5) a stretched red canvas that “an egalitarian” artist finds
and submits as art and which is accepted as such. There are other indiscernible items
described by Danto outside this red canvas set that could inspire more red canvases,
such as (6) a canvas painted red by a child, and (7) the product of a puff of red paint
“miraculously” (and accidentally) forming another indiscernible canvas.
These imagined red canvases involve at least two representational artworks (1 and
2). These two canvases have different subjects but cannot be distinguished physically;
they could be perceptually mistaken for one another. There are also artworks that could
be mistaken for things that are not artworks (e.g., 1 and 4). These thought experiments
68
could be raised as counterexamples to the claim that (a) different artworks must be per-
ceptually distinguishable, and (b) artworks can be distinguished from non-artworks by
perceivable properties (introduced by artists). If these general claims were shown to be
false by the counterexamples, there would be at least some artworks that are not art-
works because of their perceptual properties alone. Assuming we could create
comparable indiscernibles with other perceptual properties that other artworks have
(e.g., fuzzy blue halos), if the thought experiments were successful counterexamples to
(a) and (b), they would show that perceptual properties are never sufficient to distin-
guish between what is an artwork and what is not.
B. Richard Wollheim has counterargued2 that something like (a) and (b) could be
“general truths” rather than necessary truths. The general truths, he thinks, are that
“objects … made with the broad intention of being works of art will stand out from
objects … not made with such an intention and works of art … made with different
specific intentions will stand out from one another” (p. 35). So the fact that (5) could be
accepted as an artwork does not function as a counterexample to a necessary condition
on art, and that a certain assumption can be transgressed in a particular case does not
show it could be universally transgressed. In addition, (i) Wollheim suggests that it
might not be possible to accept (5) as a work of art if the general truths he describes did
not hold (which seems to imply that it is necessary that certain truths hold at least gen-
erally) and (ii) he claims it is important that we would only “reluctantly” (p. 34) accept
this atypical item as an artwork.
Consider Wollheim’s claim about reluctance. Once the barrier is breached and one
atypical item is recognized as art, it may become increasingly easy to recognize other
atypical entities as works of art. This shows that one might have to distinguish the
particular content of general truths from the suggestion that atypical works of art
depend on works of art generally having the properties they lack. If many once-atypical
items get admitted to the “artworld,” it may no longer be true that the same general
truths hold, and while the formerly general truths may have been necessary at one
point for the then-atypical item to be art, they will no longer be necessary for other
items to be art (since the others may be judged relative to the “new normal”). I will later
return to Wollheim’s views to ask how they relate to possible positions in ethics.
2 Ethics and Indiscernibles
A. In this section, I consider how some thought experiments in moral philosophy do and
do not resemble Danto’s gallery of indiscernibles. Danto was concerned with conceptual
issues, for example, what is and is not an artwork. Perhaps the strictly comparable issue
in ethics would distinguish between events subject to moral evaluation (part of the
“moral world”) and perceptibly identical events that are not subject to moral evaluation
(not part of the “moral world”). For example, an act (e.g., moving the hand in a particular
way) might fall into the first class, while an identical bodily movement (e.g., due to a
twitch) would fall into the second class. (However, acts taken to limit twitches would be
part of the moral world.) This is what is called the issue of the scope of morality. Given
that what distinguishes the act from the twitch is not a perceptible property, we know
that there will be indiscernible events that do and do not belong in the scope of morality.
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F.M. KAMM
Within the realm of events subject to moral evaluation, there are, however, also
conceptual issues related to indiscernibles. For example, there has been discussion of
what behavior is a killing rather than a letting die. Some of these discussions make use
of “galleries [Hospitals?] of indiscernibles,” comparable to Danto’s gallery for art. Here
is a well-known case: Someone is attached to a life support machine. If the person’s doc-
tor unplugs him, it is said by many to be a case of terminating treatment that consti-
tutes a letting die. By contrast, if the person’s “greedy nephew” unplugs him, in a
“perceptually indiscernible” way with perceptually indiscernible consequences (the
uncle dies), it is said by many to be a killing.
Though it is imagined that the doctor and the nephew engage in the same exact
movements, this is not necessary in order for the issue to arise of whether the two acts
are of the same type (killing or letting die). This is because no one would take seriously
the idea that, for example, a difference in the curve made by the doctor’s hand from the
curve made by the nephew’s hand could be relevant to whether one act was a letting die
and the other a killing. The same could be true of Danto’s examples. Suppose that each
of his red canvases had a slightly different tiny dot in its right corner. The canvases
would be discernible, but it would not be any easier to determine by perceptual means
what was an artwork from what was not. However, once one decides (by reference to
nonperceptual factors such as aboutness etc.) which canvases are artworks, the dots
could help avoid confusing the artwork with the non-artwork.
It has been argued that factors not perceptible in the unplugging action (such as who
owns the life support machine, who has the rights to control the machine, etc.) could
make the physically identical act (and consequences) of pulling the plug into either a
killing or instead a letting die. For example, if a doctor exercising legitimate control over
the machine attaches someone to it and then while still retaining legitimate control
over its use unplugs the person, he could be letting the man die in withdrawing life
support as much as he would be letting him die if he did not start the life support
machine to begin with. By contrast, if the nephew pulls the plug on the machine,
assuming that he has no right to decide whether to let others use it, he will have inter-
fered with a machine he has no right to control, and this results in someone’s death.
This may make what he does a killing. The view that factors not perceptible in an act
can determine whether the act is a killing or a letting die is analogous to Danto’s view
that something not perceptible in a physical object can determine whether something is
art.
B. Note that some other factors imperceptible in an act may not be relevant to
whether the doctor and the nephew kill or let die. For example, if the doctor is greedy
and intends the patient’s death for his own interests and against the patient’s interests,
this needn’t mean that he kills rather than lets die. It may only mean that he impermis-
sibly lets die. If the nephew is not greedy but correctly thinks his uncle would be better
off dead and acts for his sake, this needn’t mean that he lets die rather than kills, though
it might make his killing permissible. One implication of this is that conceptual issues in
ethics can be distinguished from judgments about permissibility and impermissibility; it
is a mistake to determine that pulling the plug is a killing merely because it is impermis-
sible or that it cannot be a killing merely because it is permissible. Similarly, the merit of
an artwork is not relevant to deciding if it is an artwork. For example, item (5) in Danto’s
list may be an artwork and yet be a very bad or meritless one.
70
The most famous thought experiments in ethics are not concerned with determining
into which conceptual category an act falls, but with whether an act is permissible and
why. For example, many variations on one basic Trolley Problem Case are thought
experiments about whether and why what is assumed to be a killing (turning the trolley
from killing five people to killing one other person) is permissible when one could instead
do what is assumed to be a letting die (as when a bystander does not turn the trolley
away from hitting five people thereby letting them die so as not to kill one other person).
In philosophy of art, a comparable question is whether what had been determined to be
an artwork is at least minimally good, comparable to “permissible” in morality. A sec-
ond question is what makes or explains why the minimally good work of art is good.
Other thought experiments in ethics are concerned with whether an act of one type is
morally equivalent to or morally different from an act of another type and why. A
famous example is whether killing is per se morally worse than letting die per se. The
comparable questions in philosophy of art might be whether one type of artwork (e.g.,
still life) has less merit per se than another type (e.g., landscape) and why.
None of Danto’s thought experiments that I have described is concerned with these
comparable questions about the merit of works of art. Hence, use of thought experi-
ments in ethics is often unlike the use of thought experiments in Danto’s work. One
question is whether thought experiments could be used in art analogous to the way
they are used in ethics to deal with (im)permissibility or moral (in)equivalence and the
reasons for it. Another question is how the use of these thought experiments in ethics
bears on the issue raised by Wollheim of what a particular case can tell us about a gen-
eral claim. Let us consider the second question first.
To determine if killing in itself (per se) is worse than letting die per se, the philoso-
pher James Rachels asks us to imagine two different cases in which all factors are held
constant except that one is a killing and the other a letting die. In the letting die case,
someone sees a child drowning in a bathtub and does not rescue him because he intends
the child’s death in order to inherit his money. In the killing case, someone holds a child
in a bathtub under the water, drowning him, because he intends the child’s death in
order to inherit his money.3 Rachels thinks that the killing case is not morally worse
than the letting die case, and from this he concludes that killing is not per se morally
worse than letting die per se.
Much has struck philosophers as problematic about Rachels’ discussion. I shall dis-
cuss only one point that will inform my discussion of the Danto/Wollheim debate. If it
were true that a particular case of killing is morally equivalent to a particular case of
letting die (and it is not clear this is so in Rachels’ cases), one could not conclude from
this that killing per se is never morally different from letting die. The claim that (a) there
is a per se moral difference between killing and letting die is not the same as the claim
that (b) in every case killing will make some moral difference that letting die does not.
One could show that (b) is not true by a set of particular cases without undermining the
per se moral difference claim in (a). One set of cases in which a killing and a letting die
differ morally when all other factors are held constant could defeat the claim that killing
and letting die are per se morally equivalent, but one cannot establish a universal claim
of per se equivalence on the basis of one set of cases in which a killing and a letting die
do not differ morally when all other factors are held constant. There might be a per se
moral difference that does not show up sometimes because even if the cases are
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F.M. KAMM
equalized for all factors besides the ones whose moral significance we are testing, the
particular equalized factors in the case might “silence” or override a per se moral
difference between the factors we are testing. For example, if someone has competently
requested that one end his life, it may not make a moral difference whether one does so
by killing him or letting him die. Or if someone has been legally sentenced to death, it
may not matter whether officials authorized to see that he is dead do so by letting him
die or by killing him. But these cases where a killing and a letting die are morally
equivalent do not show that per se one type of act has no factors that make it morally
different from the other that would account for moral differences in other sets of equal-
ized cases.
This claim that the moral character of different acts could differ per se, while some
cases involving the different acts are morally equivalent, brings to mind (for different rea-
sons) Wollheim’s remarks on Danto’s gallery of indiscernibles. The fact that in some cases
it is impossible to distinguish an artwork perceptually from a non-artwork does not show
that there is no per se (conceptual) difference based on perceptual properties between an
artwork and a non-artwork. Given what I said about killing and letting die, it might be
suggested that there is some factor in some cases that is overriding or “silencing” the role
of certain factors that still make a per se difference between art and non-art.4
In (B) I considered whether there is a moral difference in permissibility or in seri-
ousness of a moral wrong. The most direct comparison with art bears on evaluation,
whether some works of art are at least minimally good or why one is worse (or better)
than another. Could, then, thought experiments be used in art as they are used to deal
with (im)permissibility or moral (in)equivalence? It seems unlikely that the method of
thought experiments I have described will work with art because in morality there are
thought to be factors that weigh in the direction of permissibility or impermissibility
or, other things equal, make an act morally worse than another. This is one reason
why thought experiments can be good predictors of how one should deal with real-life
cases. But there do not seem to be comparable factors that at least weigh in the
direction of one artwork being good or better than another. That we admire the blue
in one good artwork does not mean that the same blue in another artwork will weigh
in favor of its being good. Perhaps properties at a very high level of generality, such as
effective composition or dynamism, could lead us to think that an artwork would be
better than another. Even this seems unlikely. The goodness of an artwork does not
seem to be predictable from a list of its qualities in the way the permissibility of an act
is. But perhaps this is only true when non-artists consider these qualities (even at a
high level of generality). Is it possible that (as some have thought) an artist can know
that once instantiated in the real world the artwork she has in mind as good will be
good?
3 Comparing Danto on Ethics to Wollheim on Art
A. Surprisingly, in his own discussion of the permissibility of certain acts of killing and
harming (see below), Danto seems to have adopted a view similar to the one Wollheim
adopted about Danto’s indiscernibles. Consider the following excerpt from Danto’s
consideration of whether assassination could ever be morally permissible:5
72
Because he was a monster, Hitler may be considered too extreme a case upon which to base
a philosophical analysis of assassination. Consider torture … I am utterly opposed to the
use of torture, but I suppose cases can be imagined, along Dostoevskian lines, in which
one’s stand against torture might be weakened because it is a dramatically lesser evil.
Suppose a man has, but refuses to divulge, information which would save millions of inno-
cent lives … I do not know what I would say if torture were proposed. There is no morality
for extreme situations and it is a mistake to argue from extreme cases to routine ones. In
any event, it is not true that torture in the extreme case is justified. Patterns of justification
cannot be designed for extreme cases; it is not that torture is justified, but that under such
wild circumstances “right” and “wrong” do not apply. It is, thus, no justification of canni-
balism that cases are available in which cannibalism seemed the only alternative to an
agonizing death. I could understand a man who resisted the opportunity to survive, and I
could understand a man who yielded. Extreme cases warp the concept of a policy, and
Hitler’s seems precisely to be an extreme case. No argument from it is available, not even if
one could secure the assent of every moral person that the killing of Hitler would have
been a dramatically lesser evil than the deaths of millions of people directly traceable to his
policies. I do not say a way cannot be paved from the extreme case to the practice. … All I
am saying is that a way has to be paved, that the inference from the extreme case to the rou-
tine is fallacious without supplementary defense and then the supplementary defense
eliminates the relevance of the extreme paradigm. … Is assassination, therefore, never jus-
tifiable, or at best not unjustifiable because of the moral structurelessness of the extreme
case? Is it “beyond good and evil” only when the intended victim is a monster like Hitler? …
Routinization of assassination is … consistent only with the devaluation of all values. …
Accordingly, it can only be consistently [sic] with any true system of values that
assassination is exceptional and hence extreme.6
This position about right and wrong action has echoes of what Wollheim says about the
conceptual issue of art versus non-art. Consider the case of the egalitarian artist who
exhibits the found red canvas (#5 in my list above of Danto’s indiscernibles): (i) A
Wollheimian might say (applying Danto’s words about assassination to #5) that this is
an extreme case, “and it is a mistake to argue from extreme cases to routine ones …
inference from the extreme case to the routine is fallacious without supplementary
defense and then the supplementary defense eliminates the relevance of the extreme
paradigm” (to determining what is art). (ii) Wollheim thinks it is revealing that “art”
might be applied to #5 with a degree of reluctance or indecision that Danto ignores.
However, Danto takes note of indecision in the case of the permissibility of torture or
cannibalism. Of an extreme case, he says, “I could understand a man who resisted …

and one who yielded.” Wollheim might use the same words to describe his response to
deciding #5 to be art. (iii) Wollheim might say of #5 (using Danto’s words about tor-
ture), “it is not that one is justified in saying … [#5 is art] … but that under such wild
circumstances ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ do not apply.” (iv) Wollheim might say that a concept
of art for ordinary cases derived from #5 being art “is then consistent only with the
devaluation of values” (or concepts, in the case of art); “accordingly it can only be con-
sistently [sic] with any true system of values” (or concepts) that #5 “is exceptional and
hence extreme.”
B. Is Danto right in what he says (seemingly à la Wollheim) about assassination,
cannibalism, and torture? I do not think so. Here are some reasons that pertain to
torture.7
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F.M. KAMM
(i) The fact that one could be reluctant to think that torture is sometimes mor-
ally permissible, or that one could understand both the person who said it
was and the one who said it wasn’t, does not mean that torture isn’t in fact
sometimes permissible (e.g., all things considered justified).
(ii) The fact that a type of act that is usually wrong would be done in circum-
stances where the consequences of its not being done would be extremely
bad does not mean that the act is now “beyond good and evil.” Thomas Nagel
thinks that cases like the one Danto imagines, in which we would torture an
innocent in order to save the world, are “moral blind alleys” in which no
matter what we do (torture or not), we act wrongly.8 But doing an all things
considered wrong act no matter what we do would obviously not mean that
the whole issue was beyond right and wrong (or good and evil). Danto him-
self thinks that “one’s stand against torture might be weakened because it is
a dramatically lesser evil,” though this is not ultimately his final position as
he switches to the “beyond good and evil” view.
(iii) An alternative view of the “dramatically lesser evil” justification is known as
“threshold deontology”: deontological side constraints (on not harming
innocents) may permissibly be overridden in some cases when the conse-
quences are bad enough. However, I do not think that this “dramatically
lesser evil” argument is the best way to morally analyze most cases of torture,
though it may be the way to analyze the so-called Dostoevskian ones in which
an innocent who has no responsibility for the threat facing the world must be
tortured or killed to save millions.
(iv) In cases where the person to be tortured is morally responsible for the threat,
there could be other grounds than that torturing him is a “dramatically lesser
evil” done to prevent the threat from coming to fruition. For example, Danto
describes someone who is refusing to give information that he has that could
save many people. This person might not have started the threat facing them;
however, he is “letting them die” when he could easily save them (and so has
what is called “negative responsibility” for the event). However, if letting die is
morally different from killing, this could argue against his having sufficient
responsibility for the threat to justify torturing him to prevent it. By contrast,
suppose the very person who presented the threat to the world, for example,
Hitler, was the person who would have to be tortured to stop the threat from
coming to fruition. The argument for the moral permissibility of torturing him
is not that it is the dramatically lesser evil, but that Hitler’s wrong act makes
him responsible for the threat, and so he is liable to be harmed in order to save
his victims. Call this the Responsibility Argument. I think it may succeed.
(v) The Responsibility Argument need not be restricted to cases involving an
enormous loss to the world. Consider ordinary cases in which a villain
threatens to kill one other person (e.g., he has set a bomb that will go off
unless we torture him for the information to stop it). I agree with Danto that
we should not rely on the extreme case (in which many lives are at stake) to
argue about the ordinary case, but this is consistent with it being correct to
use the same type of Responsibility Argument here as in the extreme case: In
order to save his potential victim once he has finished setting his bomb, the
74
villain could be liable to suffer at least the sorts of harms that it would be per-
missible to impose on him while he is establishing his threat in order to stop
him doing so.9 Using the Responsibility Argument to justify sometimes tor-
turing in such non-extreme cases would not signify “the devaluation of
value.”
Notes
1 See Danto 1981.

2 See Wollheim 2012.
3 These cases are due to James Rachels (see Rachels 1975).
4 It is also possible that, as Wollheim says in the case of art and non-art, it is because killing and
letting die differ per se that a particular killing is morally equivalent to a particular letting die.
For more on this see Kamm 1996.
5 Danto 1974.
6 Oddly, Danto goes on to say that despite assassination’s “categorical extremity” it is not really
“beyond good and evil” and it is not true “that nothing morally useful can be said about
political assassination” (Danto 1974, 434–5).
7 Some of what I say here is based on my discussion of torture in Kamm 2011.
8 See Nagel 2012, 74. However, it may rather be true that one of the acts is right even though
it wrongs someone. For example, I have argued that even though it is permissible to turn a
trolley from five toward one other person, that person may be wronged by our doing this. See,
for example, my discussion in Kamm 2016.
9 See Kamm 2011 for additional steps in the argument.
References
Danto, Arthur C. 1974. “A Logical Portrait of the Assassin.” Social Research 42(3): 426–38.
––––. 1981. Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kamm, F. M. 1996. Morality, Mortality, Vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press.
––––. 2011. Ethics for Enemies: Terror, Torture, and War. New York: Oxford University Press.
––––. 2016. The Trolley Problem Mysteries. New York: Oxford University Press.
Nagel, Thomas. 2012. “War and Massacre.” In Mortal Questions, 53–74. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rachels, James. 1975. “Active and Passive Euthanasia.” The New England Journal of Medicine 292:
78–80.
Wollheim, Richard. 2012. “Danto’s Gallery of Indiscernibles.” In Danto and His Critics, edited by
Mark Rollins, 2nd ed., 30–9. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
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9
A Normative Perspective on Basic Actions
CAROL ROVANE
Are there such things as basic actions? Is the idea of a basic action philosophically
important? Arthur Danto’s novel, and deservedly influential, contribution to the philos-
ophy of action is to raise these questions and then to answer them with a most definite
yes.
I want to consider how we should answer these questions if we bring a normative
orientation to bear in the philosophical study of agency. Such an orientation has
become a familiar fixture of philosophical work on the topic of agency. But I want to
situate Danto’s work in relation to a particular elaboration of it that has emerged at
Columbia University, where Arthur presided for so long as a senior philosophical figure.
This particular normative orientation – which I will characterize as thoroughgoingly
normative – governs Isaac Levi’s work on decision theory and rational choice, as well as
Akeel Bilgrami’s work on self-knowledge and the metaphysics of agency and value, and
also my own work on agent-identity, self-constitution, and the metaphysics of value.
This thoroughgoingly normative orientation invites us to look more closely at aspects
of Danto’s views that have not drawn nearly as much philosophical attention as his
conception of basic actions, which has enjoyed such enormous influence. The aspects I
have in mind concern the agent’s first-person point of view. Although Danto’s scattered
remarks about this are fascinating, I do not find in his work a sufficiently elaborated
account of three aspects of it: what is epistemically distinctive about the sort of first-
personal knowledge that agents possess; what is metaphysically distinctive about the
sorts of things that agents know from a first-person point of view; what is a first-person
point of view. In what follows, I explore all of these matters, both from Danto’s point of
view and from the thoroughgoingly normative point of view of his Columbia
colleagues.
76
1 What Danto Says about the Agent’s First-Person Point of View
Let me remind readers how Danto defines basic actions. His initial definition is negative:
when we perform a basic action there is nothing else that we do in order to cause it. But
he also specifies, more positively, that a basic action is something we do just like that, at
will. Two correlative claims about non-basic actions follow: when we perform a non-
basic action, there is something else that we do in order to cause it; in such cases, we do
one thing, the non-basic thing, by doing another thing, which may or may not be basic.
Danto claims that each agent has a repertoire of basic actions, which roughly
speaking is a set of capacities to perform various kinds of basic actions. He claims further
that agents know that they are able to perform the various kinds of basic actions that
belong to their repertoires, but they do not know how they are able to perform them.
Thus I know that I can raise my arm directly at will, just like that, but I have no idea how
I am able to do this.
It is clear that Danto conceives the sort of knowledge-how in question, which he says
agents don’t need in order to perform basic actions, as a kind of practical knowledge –
knowledge from which agents act, as opposed to the sort of knowledge about themselves
that they might acquire when they view themselves as objects, as scientists might. I
take it that, in Danto’s view, agents need to exploit such practical knowledge-how when
they perform non-basic actions – to be able to do one thing by doing another involves
knowing how to do the one thing by doing the other.
It is also clear that Danto conceives the sort of knowledge-that which agents possess
concerning their repertoire of basic actions – knowledge that they can perform them
directly at will – likewise, as practical knowledge. This comes through when he clarifies
that such knowledge-that cannot be inductive knowledge. The point is not entirely
obvious. After all, we are not born knowing what we can do at will, so how else could we
possibly learn this other than through observation and induction? But if we consider
the matter more closely, it is easy to see that there is a difficulty for the idea that our
practical knowledge is based on induction. In every case, either what we observe is a
case of doing something at will, or it is not. If it is, then we must already know that we
can do it at will – for you can’t unknowingly do something at will. And yet, if what we
observe is not a case of doing something at will, then our observation is not relevant to
learning what we can do at will.

When Danto registers this point about how an agent’s knowledge of its repertoire of
basic actions cannot be arrived at inductively, he registers a profound distinction bet-
ween the first-person point of view from which we act and the third person point of
view from which we observe and predict. It may seem as though this is only an epistemic
point, about two different ways of knowing – first personal ways and third personal
ways. But we shall see that, ultimately, it brings in train a metaphysical point about the
nature of what can be known from these two different perspectives.
Descartes famously argued along these lines, from the special nature of first-person
knowledge to a metaphysical dualism of mind and body. Most readers of Descartes pre-
sume that they find in his work an emphasis on the nature of consciousness as an attri-
bute of an immaterial soul that is distinct from the material body. Danto is no Cartesian.
He is interested in agency, not consciousness; and unlike Descartes, who also empha-
sized agency in his account of the mind, Danto’s interest in agency is an interest in
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CAROL ROVANE
directly embodied agency. Nevertheless, because his conception of embodied agency is a

conception of something that can be known only from a first-person point of view, it
leads him to posit a duality of the me and the not-me. Danto’s non-Cartesian dualism
poses a problem of other bodies, which he claims is a much more important philosophical
problem than the problem of other minds that is alleged to follow up on the nature of
consciousness.
I will explain below why I do not think there is a problem of other bodies. But first I
want to clarify that if Danto thinks there is one, then it is not open to him to embrace a
purely biologistic conception of the agent and its capacities to perform basic actions.
Admittedly, that conception does seem to fit many things he says. He says, for example,
that an agent’s capacities to perform basic actions are capacities to directly control its
body, and also that these capacities are a gift. I take this to mean that they are, somehow,
metaphysically given. It may seem plausible that they are biologically given – that they are
motor capacities through which an organism directly controls its biologically given body.
This is not Danto’s view. He defines the agent’s body much more abstractly, as that over
which the agent exerts direct intentional control when it performs basic actions. And he
goes out of his way to point out that not every part of the human organism belongs to
an agent’s body in this sense – hair, teeth, and so on do not. This point might not seem
fatal to the equation of an agent’s capacities with biologically given motor capacities to
control a biologically given body – after all, no biologist would say that an animal with
motor capacities has motor control over all aspects of its animal body. But note that if
we did equate an agent’s capacities for basic actions with biologically given motor capac-
ities, then surely a biologist could study how agents are able to perform basic actions in
a scientific way. And Danto would surely be right to point out that even if an agent were
to learn such a scientific account of how motor capacities work, this would not supply
the agent with the sort of practical knowledge that it needs in order to exercise its own
agency, for agency is exercised from the first-person point of view, and not from the
third person point of view from which scientific investigation is conducted. Were this
not true, it would be impossible for Danto to so much as intimate that there might be a
problem of other bodies.
2 The Distinctive Character of First-Person Knowledge Owes

to Agency
Akeel Bilgrami aims to capture and fortify the Cartesian insight that our knowledge of
our own minds is privileged in a way that our knowledge of the world is not. He sum-
marizes the Cartesian insight in terms of two phenomena: authority and transparency.
Our self-knowledge is authoritative because we cannot be in error when we self-ascribe
psychological attitudes; our self-knowledge is transparent because we cannot be igno-
rant of our psychological attitudes either. Bilgrami argues that we cannot explain these
features of self-knowledge in purely causal terms by positing such things as special
perceptual abilities or a special functional organization, because any such causal
condition for self-knowledge can in principle fail, whereas there is no room for epi-
stemic failure from the first-person point of view – there is no room for either error or
ignorance.
78
Some philosophers might infer that we do not really enjoy the sort of epistemic priv-
ilege that Bilgrami aims to explain; and they might seek support for their conclusion in
such enterprises as psychoanalytic theory and cognitive science, both of which posit
psychological phenomena with respect to which we clearly do not enjoy such epistemic
privilege. But Bilgrami draws a different inference: such privilege is to be explained not
in the causal terms of psychological science but rather in normative terms. This requires
him to give up the common assumption that the psychological attitudes are causal dis-
positions to behave and to adopt a conception of them as commitments in the normative
sense that Isaac Levi exploits for the purposes of decision theory. To believe something in
this normative sense is to hold something true, and to be committed to reasoning and
acting in the light of that truth. To value something in this normative sense is to hold it
to be worthy of pursuit, and to be committed to reasoning and acting in the light of that
worth. (Bilgrami does not use the term “worth” but speaks instead of objective desir-
ability.) What distinguishes commitments from causal dispositions is that the subjects
who undertake them believe they ought to live up to them by reasoning and acting in
accord with them. Yet they are not guaranteed to live up to their commitments, for they
can fail to live up to them compatibly with still holding them so long as they can recog-
nize their failures, and are prepared to take their failures as grounds for self-criticism.
What subjects cannot do is embrace commitments in this normative sense while being
mistaken about, or ignorant of, what they are thereby committed to. Bilgrami concludes
that it is a condition on having commitments at all that our knowledge of them incor-
porates the kind of epistemic privilege that Descartes claimed for our knowledge of our
own minds – it must be authoritative and transparent.
It follows from Bilgrami’s normative account of self-knowledge that subjects who
enjoy privileged knowledge of their own minds are agents, for only agents can under-
take commitments, and strive to live up to them, and criticize themselves for their fail-
ures to live up to them. The converse holds as well in his view: only reflective creatures
who knowingly reason and act from a first-person point of view, in the light of their
own commitments, qualify as agents.
Bilgrami makes no mention of the sort of phenomenological approach to explaining
the privileged character of self-knowledge that most readers of Descartes think they
find in his work, and which they see as leading him to posit a metaphysical dualism of
mind and body. Such a phenomenological approach would construe epistemic privilege
as a kind of privileged access that is afforded by consciousness. Bilgrami eschews all ques-
tions about how self-knowledge is afforded, and fastens exclusively on the normative
point that self-knowledge is a condition on the kind of agency that is possessed by reflec-
tive subjects with a first-person point of view. His eschewal of the how question is a
striking point of convergence with Danto’s claim that agents do not know, and more-
over do not need to know, how they are able to perform basic actions. Yet, there is also
an important difference. Danto seems to just plunk it down as a brute fact about agents,
that they have no idea how they are able to perform basic actions. In contrast, Bilgrami
situates his convergent point, that agents have no idea how they know their own
thoughts, in a systematic account that explains the distinctive nature of self-knowledge
by putting it into perspicuous relation to the distinctive nature of what is self-known –
which is thought, construed not as causal dispositions to behave, but rather as irreduc-
ibly normative commitments.
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CAROL ROVANE
3 Agents’ Powers
Danto would surely be right to insist that the first-person point of view from which
mental agency is exercised, by undertaking irreducibly normative commitments, must
also be a first-person point of view from which embodied agency is exercised so as to
effect changes in the world. He would be right to insist, as well, that no account of the
distinctive nature of the first-person knowledge that agents possess can be complete
unless it includes an account of agents’ knowledge of their powers to act. So the question
arises, what would it be to try to make sense of agents’ first-person knowledge of their
powers to act in normative terms? Levi’s definition of an option suggests an answer to
this question.
According to Levi, to face an option is to have a certain kind of first-person belief: I
face an option to perform a certain action X just in case I believe that if I choose X then
X will be done (it is implicit in this belief that X will be done by me, of course – it is, after
all, a first-person belief). Levi’s interest in choice is an interest in rational choice, and the
rational thing to do in his view is to choose the option that emerges to be best in the light
of all of one’s commitments – best, that is, in the light of all of one’s beliefs about what
is true and good, where these beliefs include one’s beliefs about what one will do if one
chooses it (one’s options). Levi does not think we need a philosophical account of how a
choice is efficacious, any more than Bilgrami thinks we need a philosophical account of
how we come to possess self-knowledge of our commitments, or Danto thinks we need a
philosophical account of how we are able to perform basic actions directly at will. Levi
holds that it suffices to register what agents think, from their own first-person points of
view, in the course of exercising their agency. In his view, to register this is to register
the normative basis from which agents self-knowingly deliberate, choose, and act.
Danto sets aside the issue of choice. He wants to make sense of how willing can be
located within actions themselves, and so need not be preceded by any separate mental
act such as choice or intention. It is a perfectly good goal to try to make sense of this idea –
an idea that is sometimes put by saying that intending is in the doing. Nevertheless, it
seems to me that the kind of first-person knowledge of our powers to perform basic
actions that Danto attributes to us must in some sense be conditional knowledge –
knowledge that we will perform the actions if we will them. For it is not as though the
power to perform such actions drives us to perform them all the time, and when we are
not performing them we know that it lies within our power to perform them in certain
conditions. This is part of what Levi is getting at when he defines options in the way that
he does – they are things we will do if we choose to do them. To some extent, we can
make sense of such conditionality without bringing in an explicit act of choice, as
follows: my knowledge that I can perform a certain kind of action is a belief that I will
perform it insofar as I think it is called for by the circumstances in which I find myself,
where to think it is called for is precisely to will it in the weak sense of recognizing that it
is worth doing. In such a case, there would be no separation between willing and doing –
my actions would literally be informed by thoughts, in the form of beliefs about what
difference they make in the world, and about the worth of that difference.
I have been exploring the extent to which it might be fruitful to bring a normative
orientation in the philosophy of action to bear in our efforts to make sense of Danto’s
conception of basic actions. But when we adopt a normative orientation, we must also
80
ask: Does Danto’s distinction between basic and non-basic actions hold any normative
significance for the first-person point of view of agency – that is, is it something that
agents ought to take due account of when they deliberate and act? My preliminary
answer to this question is that its normative significance is very limited. From a norma-
tive point of view, the paramount questions that an agent faces concern: what actions
are open to me to perform, and among them, which are more worth doing, and which
is most worth doing? The subsidiary question which, among the actions that are open
to me, are basic vs. non-basic appears to be a mere how-to question.
Danto does not regard this as a merely subsidiary, how-to, question, but rather as a
question of philosophical significance – a significance that I will continue to probe in
the next section.
4 The First-Person Point of View and Embodiment
Danto conceives an agent’s own body as that through which it performs basic actions; it is
what falls within its direct intentional control when it performs actions just like that, at will.
The agent can exert intentional control over other things in the world, too, by performing
non-basic actions, but then its intentional control is merely indirect, a matter of producing
causal effects in the world via the more direct form of intentional control that it has over
its own body. Since basic actions are performed from a first-person point of view, the body,
as Danto defines it is very much owned – it belongs to me, the agent who possesses it, as my
body. This is of a piece with Danto’s point that to be an agent, and to possess a body, goes
together with recognizing a basic metaphysical duality between the me and the not-me.
Recall that Danto raises a problem of other bodies, which he compares to, but also dis-
tinguishes from, the problem of other minds. Both problems are alleged to arise because
we must conceive others in terms of what we can know only from our own first-person
points of view. In the case of consciousness, the thought is that there is something it is
like to be aware of my own feelings, experiences, etc., and I can never directly confirm
that there is something it is like for others too – for all I know, they are mere zombies for
whom there is nothing it is like at all. The parallel problem about other bodies would be
that I know from my own case what it is to have a body in Danto’s sense, of possessing
a repertoire of basic actions, but I can never directly confirm that others possess a body
in this sense – for all I know, their movements are mere events and not actions at all.
The normative orientation that Levi, Bilgrami, and I all share does not give rise to any
parallel problem about other agents. It does recognize a sharp distinction between the first-
person point of view from which agents deliberate and act, vs. the third-person point of view
of observation and prediction. But the former is not a point of view that generates so-called
privacy. Agents’ capacity to conceive others as agents as being like themselves, in the respect
of possessing the first-person point of view of agency, goes hand in hand with a social capacity
to engage other agents from within the space of reasons in distinctively interpersonal ways,
such as argument, conversation, criticism, etc. Agents cannot consistently engage others in
these ways while raising a doubt about whether others are agents in the normative sense.
But if a normative orientation in the philosophy of action does not raise a problem in
the region of Danto’s problem of other bodies, then, presumably, it does not accommo-
date the conception of the body that is supposed to rise to the problem; but in that case,
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CAROL ROVANE
it presumably does not accommodate the distinction between basic and non-basic
actions either. This is a point to which I will return.
5 What Is an Agent?
Danto does not go so far as to equate the agent with its body; that is, he does not say I am
my body. Rather, he equates the agent with its powers to perform basic actions – which
leads him to say, rather poignantly, that the life of an agent diminishes as these powers
diminish, and when they cease altogether that constitutes the death of the agent. The
point that I want to emphasize, however, is that these powers are not separable from the
agent’s first-person point of view – that is, these powers exist only insofar as the agent
who possesses them knows that it possesses them in a first-person way. It follows that the
life of an agent is inseparable from its first-person point of view.
When we adopt a normative orientation in the philosophy of action, we will agree
with this last point. But we will conceive the agent’s first-person point of view in norma-
tive terms, as the body of commitments from which an agent is committed to deliber-
ating as it strives to meet the normative requirements that define individual rationality.
The most general such requirement is a requirement to arrive at and act upon all-things-
considered judgments about what it would be best to think and do, where the “all” ranges
over all and only the agent’s own commitments.
I take it to be a definitional point that an individual agent ought to meet the require-
ments that define individual rationality. Somewhat more controversially, I take it to be a
corollary of this definition that whenever, and wherever, there is a commitment to
meeting these requirements, there is an individual agent who reasons and acts as one.
What makes this a normative analysis is that it makes no reference to any non-normative
condition of agent identity, such as the living human organism. If we were to suppose
that an agent just is a human being, then we would have to suppose that an individual
human being ought to strive to meet the normative requirements that define individual
rationality within the whole of its human life. This would mean that it ought to arrive
at and act upon all-things-considered judgments that take into account all and only the
thoughts that arise within its human life. However, a human life is not necessarily the
site of a commitment to doing this – a commitment to reasoning and acting as one –
within the whole of that human life. This commitment may also arise within different
parts of a human life, and it may arise within groups of human lives. In all of these cases,
there is an individual agent who reasons and acts as one, from a body of commitments
that constitute its own first-person point of view. The upshot is that while there can be
agents of human size, there can also be multiple agents within a single human being
and group agents comprising many human beings.
This is not the place to try to elaborate or defend these admittedly controversial
claims about multiple and group agency. What I can do is clarify why they follow upon
a thoroughgoingly normative orientation in the philosophical study of agency. Once I
have clarified this, I can offer some reflections on what it means to say that agency is
embodied, and compare the resulting conception to Danto’s.
The quickest route to seeing the normative point of the normative analysis of agent
identity lies in the case of group agency. Insofar as a group of human beings is able to
82
reason and act as one, it generally manages this by coordinating its efforts through overt
discussion. But these discussions are not carried out in the spirit of arguing, or other
techniques of persuasion that distinct agents exert over one another from their separate
points of view. They are carried out rather in the spirit of working out what it would be
best to think and do in the light of a body of pooled deliberative considerations. One
example I often use in order to illustrate this highlights the difference between a philos-
ophy department that “decides” matters by arguing and then voting, vs. a philosophy
department that truly deliberates, by working out the all-things-considered significance
of all of the considerations that have been brought to the table to consider. In the latter
case, the discussions that occur in a department meeting have the same normative form
that we find in the silent deliberations of an individual agent of human size: one thing
is said, and the next thing that is said registers something that rationally follows from
what is said, and that next thing is a step in further discussion that continues in the
same spirit of working out what follows from the entire pooled set of deliberative consid-
erations. This pooled set then constitutes the single point of view from which the philos-
ophy department reasons and acts as one. Obviously, the boundaries of this point of
view are not metaphysically given but are forged through effort and will.
According to the normative analysis, this is always true, no matter what boundaries
get set. That is, the existence of an individual agent with its own point of view is always
a product of effort and will. It follows that a human being is not born as an individual
agent with a single, first-person point of view in the normative sense. A human being
becomes the site of such a single point of view when it becomes the site of commitment
to reasoning and acting as one within the biological boundaries of its life. But human
lives may support other commitments as well – commitments to reasoning and acting
as one within less than that whole human life, as well as across many human lives.
It might seem paradoxical to say that agents are products of effort and will: how can
there be any such effort and will unless there is an agent already there to exert it? But
there is no paradox, if we allow that the life of an agent consists in the intentional activ-
ities – the thinkings and doings – through which its life is constituted. It is the thinkings
and doings that do the constituting work so as to yield a recognizable individual who
reasons and acts as one. This, in my view, is the correct interpretation of, and the deep
truth in, the claim that agents are self-constituting. The life of an individual agent just is
its rational activities, which are directed at meeting the normative requirements that
define individual rationality.

The boundaries that circumscribe a given agent’s life are always forged for reasons.
These reasons concern the worth of what can be done by constituting a particular
agent, with its own point of view, within those particular boundaries. It is obvious that
what a group agent like a philosophy department can do, is not the same as what an
agent of human size can do, which in turn is not the same as what can be done by mul-
tiple agents within a human life. This is another respect in which the normative anal-
ysis of agent identity is thoroughgoingly normative – not only does it say that no other
metaphysical condition is required for the existence of an agent, besides the presence of
a commitment to meeting the requirements that define individual rationality within a
given boundary; but furthermore, it says that the very reasons for an agent’s existence
are likewise normative, insofar as they have to do with the fact that reasoning and act-
ing as one within that given boundary makes it possible to do something worth doing.
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CAROL ROVANE
What, then, does the agent’s body emerge to be on the normative analysis of agent
identity? To some extent, we can model it on Danto’s definition of an agent’s body, as
that over which it exerts direct intentional control by performing basic actions, only we
must substitute the normative definition of an agent’s powers that I offered above in my
friendly amendment to Danto and Levi. What an agent can do in this normative sense is
what the agent believes it will do if it recognizes reasons to do it. The agent’s body then
emerges to be the domain of intentional control that is referenced by such first-person
conditional beliefs about its own powers. Note that, just as the very existence of an
agent is not a metaphysical given according to the normative analysis but a product of
effort and will, the same holds for an agent’s body. This may seem paradoxical in just the
way that the idea of self-constitution may seem paradoxical. But the point should be
easy to see if we consider what lies within the power of a philosophy department to do,
and how a particular domain of intentional control comes to be. This point about self-
constitution makes for a sharp contrast with Danto’s view, on which an agent’s reper-
toire of basic actions is a gift. Nevertheless, the normative analysis does yield a distinction
between the me and the not-me: the me that acts upon the world will incorporate what-
ever I take to be under my intentional control – though, intuitively, this might include a
great many things that Danto would place on the worldly side of the me/not-me divide.
References
Bilgrami, Akeel. 2012. Self-Knowledge and Resentment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 1965. “Basic Actions.” American Philosophical Quarterly 2(2): 141–8.
Levi, Isaac. 1985. Hard Choices. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Rovane, Carol. 1998. Bounds of Agency. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
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10
Cognitive Science and Art Criticism
MARK ROLLINS
1 Introduction
If it is true, as Arthur Danto has claimed, that Andy Warhol is the closest thing to a
philosophical genius the artworld has produced, we should carefully consider Warhol’s
words when he asks: “How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be
able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without
feeling you’ve given up something. I think that would be so great, to be able to change
styles.” In a certain respect, Warhol is right: one style is not better than another in the
sense that, when a new style appears, only it is seen as having aesthetic interest, while
others come to be viewed as mere antiquities. But it is not true that styles change wil-
ly-nilly, as it were, from week to week. Rather, the changes are systematic in some sense.
I want to consider a line of thought in Danto in that regard about the bearing of cognitive
science on our construal of changes in art. Danto claims that whatever bearing we take
cognitive science to have will depend on how changes in it are construed; and that con-
strual is subject to deep logical constraints. That is the claim I wish to address.
Given Danto’s admiration for Warhol, we might expect him to be sympathetic with
the idea that one style is not better than another so that you could switch styles from
one week to the next without losing any artistic or aesthetic value. However, whether
that is so or not will depend on what we take Warhol to mean when he says it ought to
be possible to be an Abstract Expressionist next week and a Pop artist the week after
that. There is no reason, of course, that an artist could not paint in the manner of
Abstract Expressionism, Impressionism, or whatever; that is, to use artistic devices that
are characteristic of one or another style. Nor is it unthinkable that a given artist could
switch readily from one manner to another, which is what the best art forgers can do.
But painting in the manner of an Expressionist or Impressionist is not the same as being
one; and whether it is feasible to think I could now be one, then be the other, will depend
on what we think being a certain kind of artist requires.
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For Danto, a key to the issue of how to understand change in art forms and artistic
identities is found in his fundamental notion that both the meaning and the style of a
work of art are historically indexed; that is, they depend on historical conditions. For
example, the primary meaning, value, and artistic interest of Impression Sunrise, will
depend on the circumstances that obtained during the life and times of Monet. All such
circumstances are historical in the sense that they derive from prior circumstances, and
they constrain how one can think and act. To that extent, they constitute worlds that cre-
ate points-of-view, which inform the selves that are expressed in art and are the subjects of
cognitive psychology. Strictly speaking, the world of Warhol cannot be the world of
Monet; thus, Warhol cannot be an Impressionist, properly so-called. To be sure, worlds
and points-of-view can be changed; but it is incredible to imagine someone changing
from one to another in the sense that Warhol suggests, namely virtually ad lib. Thus,
Danto says: “I am not certain I would know what to make of a person who changed his
world every year or every month,” not to mention every week (Danto 1999, 173–4). That
possibility runs counter to the general notion of historical indexing as Danto construes it.
Danto’s skepticism about facile changes in world views is born out of his theory that the
history of such changes has a certain logic, defined over basic or fundamental forms of action
and thought; a view that applies as much to science as it does to art. In the case of cognitive
science and art criticism, the histories intersect. The conditions to which artworks are indexed
include ideas and beliefs, psychological states, the contents of which themselves depend on the
times and places in which they arise. But then the very notions of “idea” and “belief” might be
historical artifacts, not basic or fundamental to our understanding of human actions and
minds. Thus Danto asks: How radical can changes in the science of the mind be, and what are
their implications for our understanding of changes in the world of art? Danto’s comment
about the incomprehensibility of someone changing his world view very frequently implies
his answer: Folk psychological notions like “belief” are fundamental and impervious to radical
change. Art criticism will, and indeed must, continue to be couched in terms of them.
I am going to argue that, while Danto is right to be skeptical about radical change in
cognitive science and art criticism, there are nuances to the nature of historical indexing
that are implied by his own larger theory of art, but in resisting the possibility that
cognitive neuroscience might displace folk psychology, he glosses over them. These
nuances have to do with the dynamics of the artworld, in which forms of art are taken
up, are predominant for a period, and then retain aesthetic interest, though not such as
they originally had. My claim will be that contemporary cognitive neuroscience has
some resources for accounting for these dynamics. Accommodating them will require
new approaches to art criticism that may, at least in some cases, leave folk psychological
notions behind. Roughly speaking, artworld dynamics can be understood with refer-
ence to theories of aesthetic preference; and aesthetic preference can be explained much
more in terms of brain processes than we have previously realized.
2 Danto’s Deduction
In developing his argument, Danto takes as his starting point a 1986 review in the
journal Science by the geneticist Daniel Botstein of the research of Jeremy Nathan and
associates on the microbiology of color vision. Botstein speaks of this work as “beautiful”
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in the sense that it makes a valuable contribution to science through excellent experi-
mental design that adheres to the standards of observation, testing, and confirmation.
In Danto’s words, according to Botstein, science is beautiful “when it succeeds.” But as
he notes, Botstein also speaks of the “aesthetics” of the scientific procedure in more tra-
ditional terms; it is (quoting Botstein now) “a lovely thing, like a classical symphony or
a gothic cathedral” (Danto op. cit. 207).
Pressing that thought further, Danto suggests that the aesthetics of science might
reach a kind of high point or culmination when, in the course of history, science comes
to explain itself. What form would such a beautiful explanation take, what sort of sci-
ence world would it reflect, by what means could it be achieved? With Nathan’s work in
mind, the question for Danto becomes one of whether the form of thought that explains
microbiology could be reduced to microbiological terms (or to the genetic basis for
microbiology). That leads him to consider the larger question of whether Eliminative
Materialism (EM) is generally credible, EM being very much in the air at the time
(Churchland 1981, 67–90, 1986; Stich 1983). To this question, Danto’s answer is a
firm “no.” EM would require a world change away from the familiar view of the mind as
a repository of reason and belief. That is a change that cannot be made. Folk psychology
is forever, so to speak.
Danto’s argument turns on a logical point. Folk psychology is the long-standing
idiom for the expression of hypotheses in the human sciences, and as a condition on its
own advancement, it cannot repudiate itself. Philosophers “who moot these matters
exemplify them”; thus “elimination … is strictly unthinkable.” In this way, Danto says,
“we have settled the question of the future of science by a kind of transcendental
argument” and settled the future of art criticism as well. The transcendental argument
is that it is a condition on the development of the human sciences that folk psychology
be true. The future of criticism is not at risk.
The idea that the self-repudiation of folk psychology is a kind of paradox can be illus-
trated by a visual analogy. Imagine an “impossible” picture by Escher called Erasing Hands,
a variation on his familiar Drawing Hands. The puzzle posed by the latter picture, which
shows two hands, each drawing the other, is that for the first hand to be shown as drawing
the second, it would have to have already been drawn by the one it is trying to draw; which
means that the second hand must have already been drawn by it. The problem with show-
ing two hands simultaneously erasing each other is that the process could never be complete,
since at some point neither pencil would have a sufficient shaft or rubber tip for the process
to be brought to an end. The effort at elimination would remove the means by which elimi-
nation could proceed; the reductive process would reduce itself. Likewise with using the lan-
guage of beliefs and desires, to which even neuropsychology as a science is currently
wedded, to eliminate folk psychology and, with it, art criticism in its familiar form.
However, taken only so far, Danto’s analysis is not really convincing. The obvious
response is that folk psychology will not simply be eliminated but be replaced, and the
replacement can occur in a piecemeal fashion. If new concepts can arise, as some devel-
opmental psychologists have argued, from a bootstrapping process, then old ones might
be replaced by a kind of bootstrapping as well. Thus folk psychology need not be thrown
out all at once, and the future of criticism will be one of gradual change (although the
end result will not map well onto the original theory overall). However, Danto holds
certain views of change that, if correct, would serve to block this move.
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First, it is a fundamental assumption in all of Danto’s work that change presupposes

and is defined over non-change. There are, for example, basic actions on which non-
basic actions depend, but which depend on no other actions themselves. A basic action
can have non-basic meaning (or, more precisely, constitute a non-basic event), and its
non-basic meaning can vary from one situation to the next. To raise your arm is to per-
form a basic action that may count, non-basically, either as casting a vote or as waving
goodbye. One argument for basic actions is that something must remain constant, as
the background against which various inconstancies can be identified. If actions are
identified with reference to intentions or other mental representations, then there must
be basic mental representations as well, on which other mental representations depend,
but which depend on no other representations themselves. This is especially so, since,
for Danto, mental representation is a form of action; thus, without invoking some basic
forms, he runs the risk of circularity. The point is that not all mental representations are
on a par, and proposing to eliminate beliefs and intentions, even gradually, down to bed-
rock imperils the system on which our understanding of human knowledge and action
depends. Perhaps what Danto would say is that, in so far as EM proposes to eliminate the
fundamental belief that there are beliefs, it can only produce something inherently con-
tradictory; viz. a new belief that there are no such things of which it is an instance itself.
The belief that there are beliefs is thus not a viable candidate for elimination, nor there-
fore is the reference to beliefs generally.
That point takes on added dimensions when combined with a second fundamental
assumption in Danto’s work. In his view, the mind should be seen as a text. Just as the
meanings of words depend on the sentences in which they are used, so do the meanings
of sentences depend on the texts in which they appear; that is, the relations in which they
stand to each other. This is holism, in one sense of the word. And it is as texts, so con-
strued, that minds constitute selves and embody worlds. Thoughts are represented in sets
of mental sentences, which are organized into coherent wholes, and not simply bundled
together, as Hume might put it, in this way or that. They have the structure of narratives,
on Danto’s view. Narratives are stratified; but that does not mean that they are like layer
cakes. Rather, the stratification is hierarchical. Narratives are made up of events, some of
which encompass smaller events, and those events are made up of actions, some of which
are basic, others of which are not. That is what Danto claims is the structure of human
minds as well as of the novels and visual narratives that human minds write, paint, read
and view. It is here that cognitive science and criticism most directly intersect. Not only
does textual criticism depend on the theory of mind, but the best theory of mind takes its
explanations to involve a form of textual criticism: “The two cultures… are (thus) like two
halves of a circle that join at the theory of texts” (Danto op. cit. 223). Applied to concepts
in folk psychological narratives, this textual holism is a barrier to piecemeal change.
3 Change and Non-change
In response to Danto’s argument, I want to focus on one point that is implied by the
exhortations of Warhol, with which we began. Warhol’s remarks suggest a number of
different things: (a) One style is not better than another. (b) An artist can switch from
one style to another at any point in time. (c) She or he will thereby be, in alternation, an
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exponent of more than one style. (d) This alternation should be admissible, even
admired, by the artworld, in accordance with whatever canons of art criticism and
evaluation its members employ. Danto can accept (a) on the grounds that styles are his-
torically indexed, and their value is relative to the historical conditions that obtained
when they first held sway (thus fixed in perpetuity in that regard). But in that case, (b)
and (c) are undercut; and so is (d) if it is taken to mean that a work using Impressionist
devices in the year 2000 should or could be admired as a genuine Impressionist work
(and not, say, as parody or homage). That is the point I wish to address.
Danto says that he never really worked out the nature of the enfranchisement of art
(to use his term), but he believed that it depended on some combination of aesthetic
pleasure and cognitive appeal. The second part is important since the artworld for
Danto is a world driven by the exchange of ideas. To account for the dynamics of this
exchange, Danto suggested that art history can be explained “in the Darwinian
manner;” that is, in terms of competition and selection. But Danto thought that Darwin
had an Hegelian vision, so the theory of the enfranchisement is given a historicist spin:
competition involves a progressive exchange of ideas in a rationalistic context for the
confirmation of beliefs.
Two things are striking about what Danto says. First, aesthetic pleasure and cognitive
appeal are variables that figure heavily in recent theories of aesthetic preference. This
suggests that, in trying to work out the nature of change and non-change in art and
science, we might think of the history of enfranchisements in terms of how changes in
aesthetic preference are explained. Second, in citing competition as the basis for the
emergence of ideas and the entrenchment of art forms that express them, Danto opens
the door to thinking of brain processes in terms of competition as well. He opens that
door because he himself speaks of the mind as a text that supervenes on brain processes.
Thus, he employs a model that works at the level of external behavior (text composition
and interpretation) and then projects it inside the head. While he doesn’t actually say
that the brain itself is a text, his endorsement of Fodor’s view does suggest that there
really are mental sentences (Danto op. cit., 222). And since sentences only have
meaning in the larger texts in which they occur, there really must be mental texts in
some sense of the word.
If this internalization move is legitimate for the textual model, then it ought to be
feasible for other models as well. In particular, we might take models of aesthetic
preference to characterize neurological processes. That is, groups of neurons form con-
nections with other groups of neurons, driven by some sort of “cognitive appeal” that
holds for each group. The external model would be this: in the artworld, there is a
rational competition among ideas and their artistic modes of expression. These ideas
and modes have varying degrees of cognitive appeal. The acceptance of one or another
on that basis reflects an aesthetic preference. The question then would be whether that
concept of aesthetic preference can be used to explain how connections among neu-
rons are formed in ways that make no reference to ideas and beliefs. If so, can that be
said to figure necessarily in our understanding, appreciation, and acceptance of var-
ious art forms?
To be clear, the issue I am raising is not whether aesthetic preference at the behavioral
level can be explained wholly in terms of neuronal “preferences” (if such there be). That
is the specter of EM that Danto resists. While I don’t rule that possibility out, I think that
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construing the matter in that way oversimplifies things. Rather, my question is whether
art criticism must take account of neuronal preferences not described as preferences in
folk psychological terms, along with whatever else it takes into account. So, where
Danto sees the issue as one of “EM versus folk psychology”, I see it more as one of
whether there are important aspects of art history, and of our understanding of art,
that folk psychology leaves out. To be sure, in my view, familiar folk psychological
notions are eliminated from part of our understanding of art; but this need not be taken
to imply that they are eliminated tout court. Perhaps this is a step in a larger step-wise
elimination, but that is not what I am claiming here.
To develop my argument, I suggest first that cognitive appeal can be construed as
what is called “interest” in the literature on aesthetic preference. Interest for the per-
ceiver is a function of the degree of manageable uncertainty (to coin a term) about how to
understand a work of art. The uncertainty is about how to organize the features of an
image in order to identify the objects or events they represent. Uncertainty is relative to
the perceiver’s expertise, and interest depends on the perceiver’s sense that she can
eventually sort it all out. It depends on her awareness, at some level, of her ability to
cope. If a stimulus is either too challenging or not challenging enough given a perceiv-
er’s abilities, then it will not be of interest to her or him, not “liked,” and not treated
preferentially. If we think of the features that distinguish one art form from another (in
particular, artistic devices that are characteristic of styles) as what determines the
nature of the challenge, then it is possible to think of the turn from one style to another
as reflecting changes in aesthetic preference over time.
Focusing on representation in art, one way to develop the idea of manageable uncer-
tainty might be this: it is often argued that object recognition, either in art or in the flesh,
depends on matching the perceived features of the object to an object or event schema
stored in memory. Perceptually, different art forms differ by virtue of the type of variations
on the schema they introduce. This idea can shed light on the history of art: with enough
experience on the part of the audience, the devices that were initially seen as engaging to
them begin to lose traction; that is, they become more and more manageable by more and
more people. They then give way when something new with the right degree of novel
uncertainty comes along. However, they still retain perceptual and cognitive interest
because of the way schemas work. Deeply entrenched schemas take on modular prop-
erties, even if they are acquired or learned. That is, they remain in memory, are engaged
by certain features, and create expectations about the course of perception, even when
experience has taught the perceiver that those expectations are going to be frustrated in
the end. There is a schema for the human body that is engaged as much by Demoiselles
d’Avignon as it is streetwalkers on a Barcelona avenue. And this is so no matter how many
times we have seen the painting or others like it. The cubist devices that Picasso employs
violate the expectations set up by that schema; yet we continue to take pleasure in them
and find them interesting, precisely because those expectations continue to be set up.
Of course, such an account would only be grist for Danto’s mill if we took schemas
to be concepts for objects and events and their manageable uncertainty to be a function
of our cognitive facility with them. This would be especially so if the schemas were said
to be acquired through a process of observation and confirmation and then used in
practical reasoning to explain how humans behave. However, for a number of reasons,
I think that this need not be the case.
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First, the experience that matters here involves prior encounters with works of art,
the record of which is stored in episodic memory (Tulving 1983). As such, that record
may take a non-propositional form and need not involve propositional attitudes such as
beliefs. There are encoding effects that derive from the conditions under which past
encounters occur and constrain the use of episodic memories, but those have nothing
to do with the logic of ideas. This begins to suggest a different model of historical
indexing than the one that Danto has in mind.
Second, there is no proprietary sense of the term “schema.” Thus it is open to a dev-
otee of cognitive neuroscience to use the term to refer to activation patterns in the brain
that occur habitually. In that vein, it can be argued that a perceiver’s sense of her ability
to cope–that is, to rise to the challenge of object recognition that certain forms of art
present–is not a matter of probabilistic inference. Rather, it depends on a process of
trial-and-error that is modifiable as it goes along. This process depends on perceived
similarities between the present task and those the perceiver has performed before,
rather than on judgments of probability about the likelihood, in a certain case, that this
feature fits together with that.
Third, empirically grounded accounts of color vision in the experience of art can be
given that make no mention of the perceiver’s beliefs. For instance, in a certain water-
color by Cézanne, boats are depicted in a marina in a quasi-Impressionist style, with
only patches of color here and there across the sides of the boats and incomplete
contour lines defining the boats’ shapes. As far as the visual system is concerned, this
could be a painting of broken-down boats on which the colors have faded and flaked. In
that case, the lines and colors would be representational features used to depict realisti-
cally some kind of boat graveyard. However, we do not see them that way. Rather, color
is experienced as if it were continuous across the surfaces of the boats, and the shapes
of the boats are seen as if they were complete. One way to explain the experience of
color spreading is in terms of the perceivers’ beliefs about colored surfaces and shapes.
However, another way is to cite the coarse manner in which the color system’s neurons
code color, which gives the location of color a certain indeterminacy. Because of this
coarse coding, when a neuron is activated by a patch of color, if it is near another
neuron that responds to a part of the visual field where there is no color, the receptive
field of the first cell will expand and invade that of the second, firing as if there were
color there. Contour completion, in turn, depends on the perception of color, the illu-
sory spreading of which reinforces the perception of shape. That is, our response to
these works depends on combinations of competition and cooperation among various
systems in the brain; strategies in one sense of the word. It is fair, then, to refer to the
“interest” of a certain activation pattern for the groups of neurons that are involved in
terms of the prospects for strategic success that it holds. Success in this case means
performing a task in an economical and effective way.
Of course, in the face of this evidence, Danto could say that it just proves his point. If
our understanding of Impressionism were reduced to such terms, then anyone who
employed the relevant artistic devices could produce these brain-based color spreading
effects and thereby actually be an Impressionist, at any point in art history, which is
counter-intuitive at best. Thus, I take Danto’s analysis to imply that the conceptual
framework from which this implication emerges must be on the wrong track. His
argument is a kind of modus tollens on a large scale: EM implies I (Impressionism at any
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time). But I is not the case (because of historical indexing). Therefore, EM is generally
false.
However, this line of thought ignores the fact that the neurobiological account of
color vision allows that there can be individual differences in neural strategies as a
result of differences in prior encounters with art, which are encoded in episodic memory.
Repeated encounters with this work and others like it should create durable processing
connections (neural strategies) in perceivers’ brains, producing a greater capacity to
manage uncertainty, which we can think of as something like greater art critical exper-
tise. As this expertise spreads among denizens of the artworld, it affects the type of pref-
erential status such works have. In that case, it is not true that anyone who used
Cézanne’s artistic devices could be an Impressionist, because (in effect) the neural strat-
egies that have come to be typical of the audience will have changed over the years since
Cézanne created the work. Thus the account provides for historical indexing without
having to invoke propositional attitudes.
The point then is this: If this account is correct, a full appreciation of a work of art
will require reference to neural strategies, perhaps in some cases weighting them over
accounts in terms of the beliefs and intentions of folk psychology. Yet such strategies are
not, as we might put it, brute physiology, and they are sensitive to historical conditions,
as Danto requires. And that means that, while EM full-bore may not be justified, neither
future science nor art criticism will be wedded to their familiar forms.
4 Conclusion
Danto argues that there is an essential dependence on belief-desire psychology in both

science and art. However, in pressing the claim as a logical point, I think he goes too far
in making familiar forms of psychological explanation as central as he does; essential
not just as one ineliminable aspect of explanation and appreciation, but as either
sufficient on their own or as necessary for an account of any and all aspects of change
and non-change in the two domains. My claim has been that recent research, not avail-
able at the time Danto made his argument, shows that, logical deductions aside,
advances in cognitive science suggest that, in the future, the language of art criticism
will have to change.
References
Churchland, Paul M. 1981. “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes.” The
Journal of Philosophy 78(2): 67–90.
Churchland, Patricia Smith. 1986. Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 1999. “Beautiful Science and the Future of Criticism.” In The Body-Body
Problem, 206–26. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press.
Stich, Stephen. 1983. From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tulving, Endel. 1983. Elements of Episodic Memory. New York: Oxford University Press.
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11
Perception
SAM ROSE AND BENCE NANAY
Jerry Fodor wrote the following assessment of Danto’s importance in 1993: “Danto has
done something I’ve been very much wanting to do: namely, reconsider some hard
problems in aesthetics in the light of the past 20 years or so of philosophical work on
intentionality and representation” (Fodor 1993, 41). Fodor is absolutely right: some of
Danto’s work could be thought of as the application of some influential ideas about per-
ception that Fodor also shared.
The problem is that these ideas have turned out to be false. Both Danto and Fodor are
modularist: they both think that perception is an encapsulated process that is in no way
influenced by any kind of non-perceptual processing (see, e.g., Fodor 1983, Pylyshyn
1999). Many of Danto’s famous and influential arguments rely very directly on this
modularist assumption.
There is now, however, a wealth of evidence against modularism of the strong kind
held to by Danto and Fodor. We now know that perceptual experience is not determined
entirely by the retinal input: our visual processing is influenced at various points in a
top-down manner. What we know and what kinds of visual stimuli we have encoun-
tered previously deeply influence how the retinal input is processed. The empirical liter-
ature on this is vast and conclusive (for an overview, see Teufel and Nanay 2017 but see
also the references in the last section of this chapter).
What does this mean for Danto’s views on art and perception? While one of Danto’s
premises may turn out to be false, the history and examples he gave are valuable and
bear repeating. Even more importantly, Danto’s aesthetics can in part be separated out
from his modularism, leading us to draw slightly different but arguably even more inter-
esting conclusions from famous thought experiments such as the Gallery of
Indiscernibles.
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SAM ROSE and BENCE NANAY
1 Danto on the History of Vision Historicism
Danto was “temperamentally and philosophically” opposed to the idea that visual per-
ception has a historical dimension, that is to say that vision varies according to the
individual’s knowledge about the world, or that perception is “plastic” (Danto 2001b,
40). In taking this line, Danto set himself against what he saw as a dominant belief in
the historicity of vision within the humanities. Names were not on the whole named in
relation to this idea, though Marx Wartofsky’s work was taken as representative (see,
e.g., Wartofsky 1981), and the heavy use of art historical example suggests that art his-
torians of the latter half of the twentieth century were on his mind (Carroll 2001;
Nanay 2015). Tellingly, in reflecting on his interest in the area, Danto recalled his
dismay at a conference on the historicity of the eye organized by the German art
historian Gottfried Boehm:
I discovered that the belief that the eye is historical appeared so accepted by the other par-
ticipants that the only thing left to do was illustrate it as a new paradigm for theoretical art
history. I, by contrast, could not believe that the visual system was as plastic as at least an
extreme statement of the eye’s historicality implied. I was convinced, as I still am, that
however various the beliefs with reference to which the visual world is interpreted from one
culture to the next, there must be an impenetrable core of perceptual processing so univer-
sally distributed that we all live in the same world, visually speaking – in much the same
way that we must all metabolize protein for energy, whatever may be the differences among
national diets. From the perspective of metabolism, we are siblings under the skin,
assuming that we are normal (Danto 2001b, 40).
Unusually, Danto’s history of this tendency appealed not to Heinrich Wölfflin, Walter
Benjamin, or other writers more familiar in art historical accounts of vision histori-
cism. Anti-modularism could in fact be said to be the mainstream in the first half of the
twentieth century not only in art history, but in psychology (especially Gestalt psy-
chology and the New Look, see Bruner 1957; Bruner and Goodman 1947), and in
philosophy, especially the philosophy of science (see, e.g., Pierre Duhem’s influence in
the latter area, Duhem 1954). So Danto’s insistence on the modularist dominance in
the first half of the twentieth century is rather problematic. Partly because of this his-
torical inaccuracy, Danto talks about the great rift caused by the influence of Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. “Up until about 1952,” Danto wrote in the
1990s, “perception was regarded as something independent of language, something
that furnishes the understanding with its entire content invariantly as to whether that
understanding belongs to an intelligence equipped with language or not” (Danto
1991, 201).
What could Danto have meant here? What alternative history of the first half of the
twentieth century did he have in mind? In part, Danto looked back to British empiricist
conceptions of perception and their twentieth-century reconstruction in linguistic
terms by the Logical Positivists. For the British empiricists, according to Danto’s account,
words simply name ideas, which are copies or residues of sense impressions. Words are
thus merely associated with perceptions, in effect being external to or only contingently
connected with them. Higher-order concepts such as objects, meanwhile, are really just
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associations of basic concepts. An apple is defined by terms (“red,” “round,” “tart”)

which designate basic ideas distributed across a matrix, this being a “modular concep-
tion of the perceptual array” in which concepts are independent of each other and so
unable to be effected by other concepts or descriptions of the object (Danto 1991, 202).
An apple is visually perceived as red and round whatever one is told about it, and it
would make no sense to say that one can perceive an apple “as,” for instance, edible.
The Logical Positivists, in turn, according to Danto, gave a linguistic version of this
view of perception as part of their intended logical reconstruction of science, with a
hoped-for foundation of science on “observation sentences” verified or falsified via a
single perception. Though the sparse elegance of this program needed modification
over time, their system remains “a piece of logical architecture firmly based on percep-
tual foundations.” A “characteristic” late statement can be found in C.I. Lewis’s Analysis
of Knowledge and Valuation (1946), in which the foundation for all knowledge is said by
Lewis to be “formulations of what is immediately given in experience.” As immediate
and intuitively knowable, these are experiences for which the language used to refer to
them is no more than a “way of handy labelling” (Danto 1991, 203–4).
Danto acknowledged that the extreme thesis of perceptual plasticity, that language
is entirely responsible for shaping our experience of the world, is commonly associated
with philosophers more like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer than with Wittgenstein.
Nonetheless, he took the influence of Wittgenstein as the key factor in changing views
in the humanities, with the discussions of seeing-as and “aspect blindness” in the
Philosophical Investigations leading philosophers of science such as N.R. Hanson and
Thomas Kuhn to the view that observations in science are “theory-laden.” By the end
of the 1960s, the view had reached aesthetics – Danto singled out Nelson Goodman –
that “perceptual processes” were in all cases “cognitively penetrated by conceptual or
descriptive structures” (Danto 1991, 208). The path from this to the widespread take-up
of the idea across the humanities was never spelled out, though in art history, at least
these passages from Wittgenstein and their use by N.R. Hanson exercised a clear
influence on art historians associated with the UK’s Open University and their widely-
used textbooks of the 1980s (Harrison and Orton 1984). In any case, according to the
way Danto paints the history of thought on perception, the new orthodoxy in the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century was that there is no innocent eye free of cognition,
and as such that our personal backgrounds lead us to quite literally see the same objects
in very different ways from one another.
2 Danto against Perceptual Plasticity
Danto firmly rejects this post-Wittgensteinian turn, offering evidence for his position
that perception is neutral to language and cognition of three connected kinds. These
are optical illusions, cultural and historical variation in pictorial representation, and
the perception and cognition of animals.
Wittgenstein and those who took up his views in order to advocate perceptual plas-
ticity often appealed to simple optical illusions such as the Necker Cube and the Muller-
Lyer illusion. For Danto, by contrast, these are straightforward cases of why perception
95
is not plastic. Take the Muller-Lyer illusion. Looking at two lines of equal length, one
with inward-facing arrows and the other with outward-facing arrows appended, we
perceive the lines with inward-facing arrows to be longer. Even after we discover that
the lines are of equal length, we still see one as longer than the other. “In such cases,”
Danto cites Jerry Fodor’s Modularity of Mind as saying in support, “it is hard to see an
alternative to the view that at least some of the background information at the subject’s
disposal is inaccessible to at least some of his perceptual mechanisms” (Danto 2001a, 8
quoting Fodor 1983, 60).
For Danto, this illusion and its belief-insensitivity applies across cultures, as does the
related ability – said to explain the illusion – to perceive fictive or pictorial depth.1 If
true, this suggests that the basic features of picture perception are universal, a view
that would directly contradict the conventionalism about pictorial representation
popular in art history.
Art historians have at times thought of the various notational systems employed by
artists across times and cultures as down to the plasticity of the visual system, a view
that amounts at its most extreme to the thesis that all pictures are direct windows onto
past perceptions of the world. The landscape of China, for instance, would be one per-
ceived as “populated by calligraphic horses galloping past dotted and blotted trees.”
This, for Danto, is a false extrapolation from the “Renaissance model” of “visual fidelity,”
in which the ultimate aim is the production of pictures that “cannot be told visually
from the things they depict” (Danto 2001a, 3–4).
The twentieth-century Chinese artist Chiang Yee famously painted cows at
Derwentwater “entirely in the Chinese manner” (Danto 2001a, 3). Ernst Gombrich
wrote about the work as a case of how habits and expectations condition our seeing of
the world. But as a friend of Chiang Yee, Danto was well placed to know exactly how
little this use of a Chinese-like notational system was down to seeing, instead of being a
carefully thought-out strategy that aimed (and very successfully managed) to charm
his audience through a self-conscious contrast of “English” scene and “Chinese” mode.
Perspective, a key ground of debates about the historicity of the eye, is likewise said
by Danto to be at once “invented” as a pictorial device and “genetically defined” (Danto
2001a, 4). When in the early eighteenth century the artist and Jesuit missionary
Giuseppe Castiglione came to China, it was widely reported that local viewers acknowl-
edged his illusionistic works to more successfully ape natural vision than Chinese paint-
ings. This, however, had no relation to the artistic success of his works, as the
Renaissance model would suggest. Castiglione’s “Occidental” perspective mode was
criticized as failing to achieve more than mere resemblance; in the end even Castiglione
himself took up a Chinese mode of picturing.
In the late formulation that Danto developed in relation to such examples, we all see
the world the same way; artistic variations are down to the intention to show that iden-
tically seen the world differently (Danto 2001b). To assume a direct link between seeing
and picturing is to be blind to the particular habits and expectations that condition art-
ists’ ways of showing (not seeing) the world. It is the “cultural decision about how to
picture” that is at the heart of the interest offered by art in its manifold forms.
A final set of examples revolved around the pictorial competency of animals. Pigeons,
for instance, have been trained in experiments to recognize pictures of objects and
scenes such as trees, bodies of water, and even individual people. Leaving aside the fact
96
Perception
that the pigeons had to be trained to recognize the pictures,2 the conclusion drawn by
Danto is that they perceive the photograph and world in much the same way. That the
pigeons are dealing with “pictures plays no role in their perception.” Pigeons perceive
“that which is invariant between photographs and visual reality” (Danto 2001b). And
to this extent, which Danto calls “minimal visual experience,” we in effect “see what the
pigeon sees.”
In this way, the pictorial competency of animals provides evidence against any
causal role of human picturing in the development of natural human vision. If we see
what the pigeon sees, it must be independent of changes in art history, unless we had
some reason to suspect that pigeon vision had, too, been developed in interaction with
human picturing.3
In addition, in Danto’s words, it is evidence for the theory-neutrality of the phenom-
enology of picture perception, “so far as there are relevant isomorphisms between pic-
tures of things and the things themselves” (Danto 2001b, 42–3). Animal pictorial
competency suggests that at the level of “minimal visual experience” lies an invariant
core of picture perception. This is a kind of experience for which we can likewise postu-
late a minimal visual description. Each predicate would here be “one-case,” belonging
to the minimal visual description “in case its application does not depend for its truth on
something outside the experience.” In the example of a tree, its shape, for instance,
would be part of the minimal visual description, but its larger set of meanings that
engage our existence as cultural beings would, in as much as this takes us beyond
minimal visual experience, be subject to “extended visual description.” An extended
visual description of this kind would consist largely of relational predicates, irreducible
to conjunctions of the non-relational predicates of minimal description, and leaving
the latter impenetrable by the former.
3 Extended Perception
Despite his avowed rejection of perceptual plasticity, some doubts might arise here
about the actual extent of Danto’s modularism. Part of the goal of staking out a minimal
pictorial competence shared between humans and animals was to stress how different
human engagements with works of art must be. Our minimal competency for pictorial
perception might be the work of the “pigeon within us all,” a “primitive capacity” prior
to the human world of culture, meaning, and interpretation. In this, Danto appealed to
ideas beyond “minimal perception” such as “artistic perception” and “extended percep-
tion” (Danto 1991, 1992, 2001a, 2001b; see also Goehr 2012). “Extended perception”
here engages the “dense network of beliefs, associations, and attitudes we have acquired
in the course of a life.”
Why, we might ask, do these perceived differences not conflict with Danto’s modular-
ism? Certainly, there is some ambiguity, as when he counters the implication of his
views that we do not in fact “perceive” works of art at all:
That depends on whether we use “perceive” minimally or extendedly. If we say a pigeon

perceives a work of art, we are using a concept unavailable to pigeons, since what the
pigeon sees we know (however we know) is a work of art. The pigeon perceives something
97
invariant between a work of art and something that looks exactly like a work of art but is
not. The capacity to have a minimal visual experience derives from the genetic code for the
optical system. The rest is Menschenwerk (Danto 2001b, 43).
For advocates of perceptual plasticity, and indeed neural plasticity more generally, the
appeal to what is human here could just as well be taken to support their views. Human
culture is, after all, what the vision historicist art historians have all along claimed to
penetrate perception.4 It is entirely conceivable to imagine a two-stage position, follow-
ing Danto, where basic perception (or “minimal visual experience”) to do with aspects
such as shape recognition is modular, while cultural information added to this (in
“extended visual experience”) does involve perceptual change. Here it is not that visual
experience is modular as such, merely that minimal visual experience is modular while
extended visual experience is not.
This remains a matter of debate (see Davis 2011). Yet ultimately the hint of plasticity
in the phrase “extended” may be misleading, and this leads us back to Danto’s anti-
Wittgensteinianism. To see a painting of a dove that through a description of its artistic
properties is understood to be a symbol of the Holy Spirit – to see the world of human
meaning in a work of art – is, for Danto, to have an extended perception of that painting.
The capacity to identify things under descriptions of this kind, however, “is modular
through the fact that relations do not penetrate their terms. We have organs through
which we identify things under minimal descriptions. It requires language to identify
things under maximal descriptions” (Danto 2001b, 43).
Extended perception, in other words, involves “associations” that “have reference to
things that lie outside the minimal visual experience.” Seeing the bird in the knowledge
that it means the Holy Spirit “may not be phenomenologically distinct from seeing the
bird tout court,” for the difference lies “not at the level of perception but at the level of
interpretation and connotation” (Danto 1991, 211). Such meanings are, in a phrase of
Mark Rollins that Danto adopts, the “invisible content of visual art.”
4 Modularism and the Gallery of Indiscernibles
This leads to a key sense in which moving past modularism might give a new perspec-
tive on Danto’s views. Danto seemed to place much weight on there being no necessary
phenomenological difference between minimal and extended perception. But if there is
a perceptual difference in such cases, a number of new conclusions need to be drawn.
We can see this by examining the thought experiment at the heart of much of Danto’s
aesthetics.
Modularism is the crucial premise in a major conclusion Danto drew from his cele-
brated gallery of indiscernibles, his thought experiment (Danto 1981, 1) – a thought
experiment that radically transformed the kind of questions aesthetics and the philos-
ophy of art asks today. Imagine a gallery of indiscernible canvases that are all mono-
chrome red of the same shade and of the same size. While the observable properties of
all these artworks are the same, their “meaning” and aesthetic value can be very differ-
ent: if one of the paintings, made by a counterrevolutionary Russian émigré, is called
“Red Square,” and the other one is called “The Israelites crossing the Red Sea,” then
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Perception
these two paintings, in spite of being indistinguishable, will have very different aesthetic
value. Thus, aesthetic value is only loosely (if at all) related to perception.
Danto never mentioned that there was an actual real-life gallery of indiscernibles.
From 2 to 12 January 1957 (years before the publication of Danto’s Artworld paper)5,
Yves Klein had an important exhibition at Galleria Apollinaire (on Via Brera), in Milan
(see Banai 2014). The title of the exhibition was Proposte monochrome epoca blu, and
the exhibited objects were eleven identical blue monochromes, all unframed, all 30 by
22 inches. But they were differently priced. In spite of Klein’s claim that all were sold
immediately, in fact, only three were sold during the exhibition (Lucio Fontana pur-
chased one of the three).6
As one of us argued at length elsewhere (Nanay 2015), in presenting the gallery of
indiscernibles, Danto oscillates between two arguments, one simpler and somewhat
obvious, the other more complicated and more problematic. The simple one is this: the
observable properties of the canvases are the same: they are perceptually and even
physically indistinguishable. But the aesthetically relevant properties of the canvases
are very different. So there is a disconnect between the observable properties and the
aesthetically relevant properties. This is not a very surprising conclusion in the light of
Duchamp’s work or, to get closer to aesthetics, since Walton’s paper “Categories of art”
(Walton 1970). Danto presumably meant to establish a stronger claim.
And here is the stronger claim that he seems to be arguing for: when we are looking
at these canvases, we have the very same perceptual experience. But the aesthetically
relevant properties we attribute to them are different. So there is a disconnect between
perceptual experience and the attribution of aesthetically relevant properties.
The problematic assumption of this stronger claim is the first one: that our percep-
tual experience of these canvases is the same. And this is where Danto’s modularism
becomes very important. This claim would be true if perception were modular. If per-
ception were modular, then the retinal input would determine our perceptual experi-
ence. And as the retinal input when looking at these canvases would be the same, our
perceptual experience would also be the same.
One standard way of questioning Danto’s conclusion about the gallery of indiscern-
ibles is exactly to deny that our perceptual experience of these canvases would be the
same (Lamarque 2010; Margolis 1998, 2000; Rose 2017; Wollheim 1993). Our aim
here is to point out how Danto’s claim about the sameness of our perceptual experi-
ences follows from his modularism. And given that modularism turns out to be false, we
should reject the claim that the perceptual experience of these canvases would be the
same.
Here is a simple way of seeing the empirical inadequacy of Danto’s conclusion. In a
recent and influential experiment, two pictures of identical (mixed race) faces were
shown to subjects – the only difference between them was that under one the subjects
read the word “white” and under the other they read “black” (Levin and Banaji 2006).
When subjects had to match the color of the face, subjects chose a significantly darker
color for the face with the label “black.” This experiment has the exact same structure
as Danto’s thought experiment: the two visual stimuli share all their observable prop-
erties – just like the canvases in the gallery of indiscernibles. But, crucially, our experi-
ence of the two stimuli are different – we see one as being darker than the other. We
should expect the same results in the gallery of indiscernibles.
99
If perceptual experience is partly determined by top-down influences, then we have

no reason to think that our perceptual experience of the canvases in the gallery of indis-
cernibles would be the same. In fact, we have strong reasons to conclude that our per-
ceptual experience of them would be very different as the top-down influences (cued by
the titles of the artworks) on our perceptual processing are very different. So in the light
of what we know about vision, we should conclude that our perceptual experience of
the canvases is very different. So it’s no surprise that the aesthetically relevant prop-
erties we attribute to them are also different.
The Gallery of Indiscernibles thought experiment does not establish what Danto
wanted to establish. It is not the case that we have the same perceptual experience in
front of these indistinguishable canvases. But this does not mean that the thought
experiment of the Gallery of Indiscernibles is pointless. Given what we now know about
top-down influences on perception, it becomes all the more useful in thinking about the
practices of art history and criticism (Rose 2017), and it helps us to raise more nuanced
and more interesting questions about perception in aesthetics.
The issue is not whether our perceptual experiences are different, but rather how
they are different and what explains this difference. If there are top-down influences on
our perceptual experience of these canvases, what is the mechanism of these influ-
ences? Is it some form of mental imagery that colors our perceptual experience? Or
does what we know about the painting guide our attention differently in front of differ-
ent pictures? Disposing of Danto’s false premise of modularism does not make the
Gallery of Indiscernibles outdated. Rather, it opens up new and exciting ways of using
the Gallery of Indiscernibles in order to ask questions about our perception of
artworks.
Notes
1 In the current empirical literature on the Muller-Lyer illusion, both of these claims are taken
to be very controversial (see Glennerster and Rogers 1993; Nanay 2009; Weidner and Fink
2007 for summaries).
2 From the point of view of cognitive ethology, Danto’s argument is very naïve–see Fagot 2000
and Fagot 2013 for a summary of what would constitute picture perception in animals. His
use of empirical findings is also very cherry-picked (of the vast quantity of experiments he
picked out those very few that seem to support his conclusion). For a more conceptual critique
of Danto’s use of these experiments see Davis 2011, 11–42 and esp 187–92, who draws the
very different conclusions that the precise point of importance is the becoming present of
pictures in a form of life.
3 See again Davis 2011, ibid. for criticism.
4 Danto at once point strikingly posited “that the experience of art description really does pen-
etrate perception, but that is because perception itself is given the structure of thought”
(Danto 1992, 214), a view that on one reading at least could leave little between Danto and
the anti-modularists. Danto nonetheless rejected the idea that this might involve “neural
pathways or the phenomenology of perception”, and gave no suggestion in his later work on
the subject that this view might modify his modularism.
5 Danto 1964. This is the paper where Danto first presented a version of the argument that he
later popularized with the help of the Gallery of Indiscernibles thought experiment.
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Perception
6 It is not clear whether Danto knew about this exhibition. If he did, one wonders why he did
not acknowledge that his celebrated thought experiment is in fact just a description of a
real-life event–something that borders on plagiarism. If he did not, one may wonder why not,
given the art historical importance of the Klein exhibition.
References
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12
The Anthropology of Art
DAVID DAVIES
While Danto’s contributions to philosophical reflections on the anthropology of art are

not extensive, they are significant and have generated considerable critical discussion in
the literature. The discussion has raised important questions about Danto’s more gen-
eral claims about the nature of art. I begin with his reflections upon art and evolution
in his 1985 David and Marianne Mandel Lecture in Aesthetics presented at the Annual
Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics. I then examine two further papers in
which he addressed comparable issues.
Danto makes clear in the final paragraph of his address that his principal aim was to
clarify the sense in which what he termed “the end of art” (when art becomes self-con-
scious and transforms itself into its own subject) transformed the entire culture and
thereby “served as an evolutionary means of the highest sort” on at least one concep-
tion of evolution. The motivation for so describing “the end of art” was provided by
David Mandel’s own claim that “art is the chief agency of human evolution.” Expressing
skepticism about the idea that art could spring from or produce a new heritable trait,
Danto suggests that art can shape human evolution only if art itself has an evolu-
tionary structure. To the extent that, as Danto first argued in “The Artworld,” art
“modifies the environment to which art must adapt” (1986, 227), developments in art
make new things possible. But this by itself provides no enduring genetic change in
human beings: it depends upon the continued existence of an artistic tradition and
would not survive the loss of that tradition. If, however, art does contribute to our evo-
lution, this change must be reflected in the history of art, since, if art historically
changes us, these changes will shape the further development of art. Thus Mandel’s
thesis must engage with standard theories about the historical development of art in
order to determine whether such theories might accommodate the idea that art induces
genetic changes in us.
Danto considers three different views of the historical development of art: (1) that it
is the history of mimesis (Vasari and Gombrich); (2) that it is an epiphenomenal
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David Davies
reflection of “deep changes” in the structures whereby societies order their experience
and their representations of reality (Panofsky); and (3) that history itself should be con-
ceived cognitively as the unfolding of thought’s attempts to come, through a process of
inquiry and investigation, to an understanding of its own processes (Hegel). Danto
argues that neither of the first two models of the historical transformation of art fit
with Mandel’s claims. If, following Gombrich, the history of art is a history of making-
and-matching – of developing and applying representational conventions or “sche-
mata” in terms of which painter and audience apprehend the painted world – matching
seems to call upon our biologically fixed and cognitively encapsulated visual capacities,
while making involves at most a development in manual dexterity and drawing skill.
The Panofskyan model, on the other hand, cannot serve Mandel’s purposes because it
considers art too epiphenomenal to be a major instrument of evolutionary change.
The Hegelian model, however, does accord art a central role in the unfolding of his-
tory. While this would not vindicate Mandel’s thesis in its general form, there would
nonetheless be a historical moment at which art was indeed the chief means of human
evolution, albeit evolution in human thought rather than at the genetic level. The “end
of art” here is a matter of our not being able to practice art as we had done before,
something Danto traces to the emergence of Modern Art in response to the challenges
that the emergence of cinema presented to the traditional narrative aims of representa-
tional painting. He identifies two prominent strands of thought in artistic Modernism.
One denies that the essence of art lies in representation at all, leading to the development
of abstract art and formalistic aesthetics. The other pursues representational goals at a
non-optical level, seeking to represent a higher reality. Danto cites Kandinsky’s essay on
spirituality as exemplifying this conception of painting as a transformative activity, and
he sees this second strand of artistic Modernist thought as the natural intellectual envi-
ronment for Mandel’s ideas. He concludes by suggesting that, with the “end of art,” we
can finally envisage a definition of art that cannot be overturned by developments in art
history. Such a definition would be open to the variety of things that art has been and
will be, and could itself explain why such openness obtains.
When Danto was envisaging such a definitional project, he was also engaged, in his
capacity as a critic, with more immediate problems arising from claims being made
concerning the artistic status of certain African artifacts. These claims seemed to rest
upon the very “aestheticist” conception of art repudiated first in “The Artworld” and
then in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Danto’s thinking on these matters was
first expressed in response to the 1984 MoMA exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th century
art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, curated by the then director of MoMA, William
Rubin. The exhibition placed tribal artifacts side by side with modernist works by artists
such as Picasso, Giacometti, and Klee, a strategy echoed in more recent curatorial prac-
tice. For example, the “Inner Worlds Outside” exhibition, held at the Whitechapel
Gallery in London in 2006, juxtaposed works by recognized “insider artists” such as
Dubuffet and Klee with works by “outsiders” such as Henry Darger and Scottie Wilson
without providing receivers with any obvious means for determining to which group a
given piece belonged.
In his introduction to the catalogue, Rubin spells out the motivation for his curato-
rial strategy. He initially introduces the issue of “primitivism” as one of influence, “the
interest of modern artists in tribal art and culture, as revealed in their thought and
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works.” In so doing, he distances his concerns with the artifacts in question from the
“quite different” concerns of anthropologists and art historians who have studied the
relevant tribal cultures (Rubin 2006, 129–30). While the latter are interested in
“understanding tribal cultures in the contexts in which they were created,” Rubin’s
announced concern is to “understand ... the Primitive sculptures in terms of the
Western context in which modern artists ‘discovered’ them.” As soon becomes clear,
however, Rubin understands the “discovery” of the Primitive by the moderns in terms
that seem to trespass seriously upon the anthropological and art-historical issues that
he sets aside. “Influence” is understood as the recognition by modern artists of “affin-
ities,” similarities in the aesthetic sensibilities and motivations of the makers of tribal
artifacts and modernist painters: Rubin claims to discern the same “instinctual artistic
drive” shaping both Primitive and modern creations (135). “Primitive” artifacts influ-
enced modernist artists because the “conceptual complexity and aesthetic subtlety”
(133) of such artifacts revealed to them artistic possibilities that transcended the “pre-
vailing aesthetic canons” of late nineteenth-century European art.
This analysis leads Rubin to move from talk of influence to talk of “affinities.” His
claim is that modernist artists saw in the artifacts the expression of a similar sensibility –
an expression of “the artistic mind.” The basis for these claims is the striking visual
resemblances between tribal and modernist works (134): “When we compare Ernst’s
Bird Head to an African mask of the Tusyan people, for example, we find among other
common characteristics – apart from a general sense of the apparitional – such partic-
ulars as a flat rectangular head, straight horizontal mouth, small round eyes, and a
bird’s head projecting from the forehead.” Generalizing from such examples, and
arguing that the influence cannot be a simple matter of copying, Rubin claims that we
can account for such affinities in terms of “the fact that both modern and tribal artists
work in a conceptual, ideographic manner, thus sharing certain problems and possibil-
ities … The art-making process everywhere has certain common denominators, and, as
the great ethnologist Robert Lowie quite rightly observed, ‘the aesthetic impulse is one
of the irreducible components’ of mankind” (135).
In a critical discussion of Rubin, Thomas McEvilley (1992) summarizes Rubin’s
argument as follows: “the objects themselves are proof of the formal decisions made,
and the formal decisions made are proof of the esthetic sensibility involved” (44). It is
hardly surprising that this argument was viewed with great suspicion by the author of
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Danto, 1981). While Rubin may be correct in
thinking that the question of influence does not require that we attend to the work of
anthropologists, the issue of affinity surely does, since it relates to what motivated the
makers of the tribal artifacts to give them the form that they have. Rubin seems to
assume that the intentions and sensibilities of the makers can be read off from the
resulting forms. But, as Danto repeatedly argues, the essence of art can’t be a matter of
manifest properties. Describing the exhibition as “stupendously misconceived,” and as
“a failed product of misapplied ingenuity,” Danto’s principal point is that, given our
ignorance of what tribal artifacts were designed to do, we are in no position to deter-
mine whether or not they are actually artworks: “I don’t think we really know the first
thing about primitive art, not even whether it is right to treat it as art” (1984, 148).
This skepticism is reinforced by reflection on salient differences that might exist bet-
ween the function of the exhibited tribal artifacts and the function of the modernist
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David Davies
artworks with which they are juxtaposed: “One may speculate that whatever ends they
serve will not be esthetic, or will rarely be that, and that they typically exist in a universe
of forces, powers, gods, and magic with which they may put their users in touch.” The
closest possible analogue in the Western tradition might be the investing of certain
Byzantine icons with the capacity to make present to the viewer the depicted saints, but
this “contrasts sharply with the distancing manner of representation that animates a
good bit of Western art.” Tribal artifacts of the kind included in the MoMA exhibition
“are instruments of ritual existence to which the suitable response might be a dance or
a howl, not the peering and pointing that goes on in museums.” A further reason for
saying that these artifacts are not art is that “the cultures they came from almost cer-
tainly lacked a Western concept of art” (148–49). The claim is that we have good reason
to think that the ends the tribal artifacts served, or were meant to serve, were not
artistic. Thus, such objects belong in an ethnographic museum, not an art gallery. The
artifacts in the exhibition are grouped simply in terms of “adventitious visual congru-
ities,” rather than in terms of any understanding of “what they meant to their makers”
(149).
It might be wondered, however, whether Danto’s criticism is not equally reliant on a
suspect appeal to the very aestheticist ideas that seem to fund Rubin’s reasoning. For,
as with other critics of Rubin such as McEvilley, Danto’s argument here seems to rest
on two assumptions: (a) that the utilitarian functions of tribal artifacts – functions that
we presume would be revealed if, unlike Rubin, we did pay attention to what ethnogra-
phers say about such artifacts – are incompatible with their being artworks, and (b)
that only those cultures that possess our concept of art can produce artworks. The
second of these assumptions, while widely made, has been subject to critical scrutiny
by Dominic Lopes (2007), and the first assumption, if taken as a general claim, fails to
take account of the utilitarian functions of many acknowledged artworks in our own
tradition, something that Danto himself acknowledges in the later paper discussed
below. It is also unclear from Danto’s critical review of Rubin’s exhibition under what
circumstances tribal artifacts would be rightly viewed as artworks. If we grant that this
will depend upon how the artifacts functioned, or were intended to function, in their
cultures of origin, and will thus require attention to ethnography, what kinds of
functions should we look for in trying to determine whether any of these artifacts
qualify as artworks?
These questions are partly addressed in a piece that Danto wrote a couple of years
later for the catalogue for an exhibition ART/Artifact on the eponymous distinction.
This exhibition (1988) was curated at the Center for African Art in New York by
anthropologist Susan Vogel. The motivation for Danto’s paper was again the presenta-
tion of an artifact – a Zande hunting “net” – whose perceptual similarities to contempo-
rary Western artworks by artists such as Eva Hesse and Jackie Windsor were supposed
to justify its classification as art. Danto begins by rehearsing his charges against Rubin’s
“methodologically flawed” 1984 exhibition that, as we saw, was premised on the
assumption that what enfranchises African artifacts as art is their manifest resem-
blance to paintings by modernist artists such as Picasso. If we reject this premise, how-
ever, we must explain how to draw what Danto calls (1988, 20) the “absolute” line
between artwork and artifact, if not in terms of possession of aesthetic qualities or of
being a possible object of “detached aesthetic scrutiny.”
106
To illuminate the nature of this divide, Danto employs his favored strategy of imag-
ining two different kinds of things on opposite sides of the divide that nonetheless have
identical perceptible properties, offering in this case an imaginary anthropological
example (23–26). The Pot People and the Basket Folk, living in communal ignorance of
one another on either side of a mountain, each produce both pots and baskets percep-
tually indiscernible from the pots and baskets produced by the other. But the Pot People
take their pots to be of great significance in their culture, and the Basket Folk ascribe a
parallel significance to their baskets. For the Pot People, God is a pot-maker, and “the
people cannot look upon a pot without feeling themselves symbolically present at the
beginning of the world order.” For the Basket Folk, baskets “embody the principles of
the universe itself,” and baskets are objects of great meaning and spiritual power.
Danto suggests that, if we are to understand how perceptually indistinguishable
objects – the pots or the baskets produced in the two cultures – can nonetheless have
such different significance in those cultures, we must first clarify the nature of “mere”
artifacts. The latter, as products of “craft,” have the status of tools or instruments or
objects of use. Works of art can have a secondary identity as such objects of use, and for
a long time, indeed, works of art enjoyed double identities as both objects of use and
vehicles of spirit and meaning. However, as Danto reflects, a contemporary “aestheti-
cist” conception of artworks that renders works by their very nature as lacking a use,
makes it difficult for us to see what the works can do apart from being art. Having
rejected that conception, Danto draws on Hegel’s idea of Greek sculpture as the perfect
wedding of form and meaning, describing an artwork as something that “gives material
embodiment to a kind of spiritual content” (29). While the meaning of an artifact is
exhausted by its utility, “artworks have some higher role, putting us in touch with
higher realities; they are defined through their possession of meaning. They are to be
explained through what they express. Before the work of art we are in the presence of
something we can grasp only through it [the work]” (31).
Returning to his perceptually indistinguishable pairs of pots and baskets, Danto
maintains that “what makes the one an artwork is the fact that, just as a human action
gives embodiment to a thought, the artwork embodies something we could not concep-
tualize without the material object which conveys its soul.” An artwork is thus by its
very nature “a compound of thought and matter… An artifact is shaped by its function,
but the shape of an artwork is given by its content” (31). To be a work of art “is to
embody a thought, to have a content, to express a meaning, and so the works of art that
outwardly resemble Primitive artifacts embody thoughts, have contents, express mean-
ings though the objects they resemble do not” (32). The further implicit assumption is
that the Zande nets exhibited by Vogel are merely artifacts.
Danto’s argument has drawn widespread criticism, many of his critics, including
Vogel herself, questioning the role played in that argument by the anthropological
thought experiment. Some of these criticisms leave the core of Danto’s argument intact.
Denis Dutton, for example, argues that Danto’s strategy for differentiating indistin-
guishable counterparts in the case of late modern artists such as Warhol cannot be
applied in the case of the artifacts produced by the Pot People and the Basket Folk. For
this strategy relies upon the ability of Warhol to comment, through his work, on its
commercial counterpart, whereas the lack of communication between the two cultures
in Danto’s thought experiment rules out any such commentary. But, as we saw above,
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David Davies
the indistinguishable counterparts in the thought experiment do not presuppose a non-

manifest difference of the sort proposed in the case of Warhol but are used to allow us
to ask what kind of non-manifest difference there might be. Dutton also questions the
“human possibility” of the scenario in the thought experiment on the grounds that,
given the significance that pots and baskets have for the Pot People and the Basket Folk
respectively, there would be “an evolved canon of excellence” of which the craftsmen in
each country would be aware, and which would enable them to distinguish the artifacts
to which they ascribe such significance from the functionally equivalent artifacts in the
other culture. Dutton cites, as evidence, the Sepik carvers of New Guinea who can
easily differentiate works of spiritual and magical significance from works of pure
utility (1993, 17–18). But questioning the practical possibility of a philosophical
thought experiment seems inappropriate unless this bears upon its ability to model, and
thereby illuminate, the target phenomenon.
This brings us to deeper critical responses to Danto’s argument that seek to establish
precisely this point. Vogel, Alfred Gell, and Larry Shiner, all in different ways, argue that
the distinction upon which Danto’s argument relies – between things that are “mere
artifacts” whose meaning is exhausted by their use and things that are artworks that
function as expressions of “spirit” – is not operative in the kinds of cultures posited in
Danto’s thought experiment. As is exemplified in Stephen Davies’ discussion (2007) of
the aesthetic dimensions of Balinese culture, the separation of different human prac-
tices familiar in our own culture – the distinctions between art, religion, politics, sport,
and civics, for example – finds no purchase in such cultures. Thus, while Danto allows
that some artifacts do “double duty” both as objects of use and vehicles of spirit, it is
difficult to find any elements in such tribal cultures that do not do “double duty” in this
way: political, religious, and aesthetic values permeate everything done and made in
such cultures.
Gell asks: “How could African masks be deployed in a ritual context as instruments
of efficacy and not simultaneously have whatever cultural-interpretive significance
they would have to have, according to Danto’s own theory, to qualify as artworks?”
(2006, 225) He applies this analysis to the very tribal artifact whose putative artistic
status Danto targets in his criticism of ART/Artifact. Danto, he argues, assumes that
because a “net” is a tool used for hunting, as a means to obtain food, it must be a mere
tool. But African ethnography brings out the highly ritualized nature of hunting, where
such things as nets and traps play a complex cultural role similar to the one played by
the African ritual masks that Danto is happy to see as artworks. Citing work by Pascal
Boyer (1988) on the metaphysical significance of the use of different traps to catch dif-
ferent types of animals, Gell suggests that “these devices embody ideas, convey mean-
ings, because a trap, by its very nature, is a transformed representation of its maker, the
hunter, and the prey animal, its victim, and of their mutual relationship” (228). Larry
Shiner (1994) identifies a further problem for Danto’s claim that it is the expression of
deep cultural meanings of the users that differentiates artworks in such cultures from
“mere” artifacts. Many of these meanings are clearly religious or political, Shiner notes,
but the expression of these kinds of meanings is the very thing that has led historically
to the exhibition of such artifacts in anthropological museums rather than in art gal-
leries. Since “primitive” cultures do not make the kinds of differentiations that we do
between art, religion, politics, and economics, we lack a reason to classify the kinds of
108
meanings that Danto associates with artifacts as artistic meanings rather than reli-
gious or political meanings.
Vogel, Dutton, and Gell each suggests how Danto’s project – to clarify the distinction
between artworks and non-artistic artifacts in the kinds of cultures supposedly exem-
plified by the Pot People and the Basket Folk – might more profitably be pursued. Both
Vogel and Dutton argue that, in cultures where objects imbued with the shared mean-
ings of the culture are ubiquitous, the distinction must be drawn in terms of what
Vogel terms “the aesthetic dimension” (Vogel 1988 cited in Dutton 1993, 20), the fact
that only some of the artifacts having symbolic significance are made to be perceived.
Dutton endorses Vogel’s suggestion: “Most primitive artworks capture attention not
only because of the ideas they embody, but because they are made to look striking,
shocking, beautiful, grotesque, etc.” The perceivable aesthetic properties of such arti-
facts are “intrinsic aspects of primitive art,” the very aspects that led Picasso and Roger
Fry to recognize certain African artifacts as art even though they were oblivious to
their meanings. Dutton draws a more general moral from this: Danto’s claim, in
Transfiguration, that interpretation distinguishes artworks from aesthetically identical
counterparts, does not apply to some art in other cultures. While those African arti-
facts that are artworks are, like other artifacts in the culture, essentially interpretable
in terms of the cultural meanings that they embody, their being artworks resides in the
perceptual articulation of those meanings, so that coming to appreciate primitive art-
works requires not merely acquiring knowledge of their cultural context but also
“gaining cultural knowledge in order to see aesthetic qualities which have intention-
ally been placed in the objects to be seen” (20). If Dutton is right, it seems that Rubin’s
exhibition was not “stupendously misconceived,” as Danto claimed, but rather rested
on the correct observation that, in the case of African art, the eye can descry whether
something is art, as artists like Picasso and Modigliani did when they drew upon the
artifacts displayed in the Trocadero in their own art.
It is difficult to imagine that Danto would view these proposed “aesthetic” concep-
tions of the distinguishing features of artworks favorably, even if the proposal is sweet-
ened by the idea that we need only to supplement his interpretational account of this
distinguishing feature in our tradition, as set out in Transfiguration, with an aesthetic
account that applies in the case of “tribal” artworks. For, to raise the obvious question,
why should we think that the two proposed distinguishing features canvassed here are
different ways of drawing the same distinction, the sought distinction between those
artifacts that are artworks and those that are not. For this reason, Danto might be more
sympathetic to Gell, who prefaces his own proposal by rebuking anthropologists of art
for remaining in the thralls of a “reactionary” aesthetic conception of art. His concern
about Danto’s account is that, while it acknowledges that there are artworks that do
“double duty” as objects of use and expressions of spirit, it fails to acknowledge the sig-
nificance of this fact: most artworks also have practical functions and “the interpreta-
tion of ‘practically’ embedded artworks is intrinsically conjoined to their characteristics
as instruments fulfilling purposes other than the embodiment of autonomous
‘meaning’” (2006, 233).
I take Gell to be suggesting that, in the case of such artworks, whether they be
“tribal” or the kinds of artworks in our own tradition that Danto describes as doing
“double duty,” what matters is not being interpretable per se but having interpretations
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David Davies
that are essentially linked to the instrumental purposes that they serve. But this by itself
will not work since even such meaningful but non-artistic artifacts as road signs in our
own culture have meanings that are essentially linked to their functions. This suggests
that, in Gell’s account, we put more stress on the grounding of interpretations in the
characteristics that bear on the performance of something’s instrumental function. The
suggestion then is that certain artifacts are artworks in virtue of how, through such
characteristics, they articulate some meaningful content bearing upon the performance
of their instrumental functions. Linking this to the proposals by Vogel and Dutton, we
might revise their suggestion in the following way: what makes tribal artifacts artworks
is not that they possess aesthetic features intended only to engage the perceptual
attention of their audience, but that it is through such perceptual attention that their
cultural meanings are articulated. Whether these kinds of proposals represent revisions
or clarifications of Danto’s account depends upon how one interprets his undeveloped
references to an African artwork’s giving “material embodiment” to its content,
“embod[ying] something we could not conceptualize without the material object which
conveys its soul,” and being something whose shape “is given by its content.” These for-
mulations might suggest that Danto has in mind a distinguishing feature of African
artworks that pertains not to whether something has cultural meaning but to how such
meaning is realized in the material features of the artifact. Nonetheless, Danto’s critics
are right to point out that he does not explicitly offer such a distinguishing feature.
Such an account might apply equally well to those artworks doing “double duty” in
our own cultural tradition to which Danto refers – altarpieces, for example. And, if we
seek a unified account of the distinction between artworks and other artifacts, we might
wonder whether a parallel account might be available not just for “aesthetic” art in our
own tradition but also for the kinds of modern works whose artistic status Danto tries
to clarify in terms of interpretability alone. This kind of revision (or clarification) of
Danto’s account, tying the concept of art not to interpretability per se but to the way in
which a work’s interpretation is to be grasped by receivers, might be one way to provide
the kind of unified account he is seeking in his writings on tribal artifacts and would
speak to a curious lacuna in his account unremarked by his critics. For, in arguing that
the pots of the Pot People and the baskets of the Basket Folk are artworks by virtue of
embodying cultural meanings, he fails to address the objection that his own account of
interpreting artworks in our own tradition requires that we locate them in the context
of “an artworld”: only when we are able to so locate them can we see them as art. In the
case of tribal artifacts, however, their interpretations do not, it seems, depend upon
such localizability, if we agree with Dutton and Gell that there is no distinctive cultural
practice to which they belong and other artifacts in such cultures do not: what they
share with Western artworks, it seems, is not interpretability within an “artworld”, but
only being interpretable in virtue of the cultural meanings that they embody. If, how-
ever, something’s being art lies not in its being a material embodiment of meaning but
in the ways in which that meaning is materially articulated, this provides a potential
bridge between modes of articulating artistic meanings in “the artworld” as character-
ized in Danto’s paper of the same name and modes of articulating such meanings in
other cultural contexts. It is Danto’s laudable wish to offer a non-parochial account of
the “line” between artworks and other artifacts that, ironically, suggests how his
account of art in our own tradition might be fruitfully rethought and extended.
110
References
Boyer, P. 1988. Barricades mystérieuses et Pièges à Pensée: Introduction à l’analyse des épopées Fang.
Paris: Société d’Ethnologie.
Danto, Arthur C. 1981. Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
–––––. 1984. “Defective Affinities: ‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art.” The Nation 37226. New
York. Reprinted in: H. Morphy and M. Perkins (eds) (2006) The Anthropology of Art: A Reader,
pp. 147–149. Blackwell, Oxford.
–––––. 1986. “Art, Evolution, and the Consciousness of History.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 44(3): 223–33.
–––––. 1988. “Artifact and Art.” In Susan Vogel, ed., ART/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology
Collections, 18–32. New York: Center for African Art and Prestel Verlag.
Davies, Stephen. 2007. “Balinese Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65(1):
22–9.
Dutton, Denis. 1993. “Tribal Art and Artifact.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51(1):
13–21.
Gell, Alfred. 2006. “Vogel’s Net: Traps as Artworks and Artworks as Traps.” In The Anthropology
of Art: A Reader, edited by Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins, 219–35. Oxford: Wiley
Blackwell. Originally published in: Journal of Material Culture 1 (1996), 15–38.
Lopes, D. M. 2007. “Art without ‘Art’.” British Journal of Aesthetics 47(1): 1–15.
McEvilley, T. 1992. “Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief.” In his Art and Otherness, 27–56. Kingston, NY:
Macpherson and Co.
Rubin, W. 2006. “Modernist Primitivism: An Introduction.” Reprinted In The Anthropology of Art:
A Reader, edited by H. Morphy and M. Perkins, 129–46. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shiner, Larry. 1994. “‘Primitive Fakes’, ‘Tourist Art’, and the Ideology of Authenticity.” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52(2): 225–34.
Vogel, S. 1988. “Introduction.” In Susan Vogel, ed., ART/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology
Collections, 11–17. New York: Center for African Art and Prestel Verlag.
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13
The Birth of Art
WHITNEY DAVIS
Arthur Danto’s well-known theses regarding the “end of art” have been much debated.
Throughout his career, he developed an intricate and ever-changing theory of the his-
torical emergence of a twentieth-century Western “postmodernist,” “pluralist,” and
“posthistorical” artworld, now fully globalized – an artworld in which art, as he
described its history, has come to its art-historical end in the sense that it has fully com-
prehended and achieved its own essence, as it were liberating it from its earlier inade-
quacies. In “The Artworld” (1964), Danto identified this world-historical transformation
with the putative success of American Pop artists, notably Andy Warhol, in creating
artworks which supposedly were indiscernible perceptually from the ordinary imple-
ments and commodities they replicated, much as Marcel Duchamp had done through
his “readymades.” Warhol’s success compelled one to recognize, at last, that the essence
of art does not lie – as it were formalistically – in something that it is visually or materi-
ally. Art can look any which way; art can be made of, or from, any thing.
In part, Danto’s theory of the end of art derived from a transhistorical philosophy of
art – of what art essentially is – which he stated most fully in The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace (1981) and later in What Art Is (2013), identifying “the invariant
condition[s] for something being art in every world in which there is art at all” (Danto
2000a, 425). And in part it derived from a history of art, or more exactly a theory of art
as essentially art-historical, which he stated most fully in After the End of Art (1997b).
We might then expect Danto to offer a complementary – though not necessarily a fully
symmetrical – account of the historical “beginning,” “origin,” or “birth” of art. As we
will see, however, this expectation will be somewhat frustrated. Just as art has continued
to be made and valued after the art-historical “end of art” in the early 1960s in New
York City, so too did (or does) art continue to be made and valued in many contexts
before and outside the history of art qua art described by Danto. Identifying the whens
and wheres of its “birth,” then, will turn our attention in several different theoretical
and historical directions, possibly somewhat incompatible. I will identify three of
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The Birth of Art
these: Danto’s views of a natural aesthetic sense as a precondition of art; of a history of

art in a narrow sense, in which art comes to an end; and of a history of art in a larger
sense, in which art is perpetually born.
These matters have sometimes been considered in terms of tensions between Danto’s
“essentialism” and his “historicism” (e.g., Kelly 1998). Here, however, I consider them
in terms of the dimensions of Danto’s naturalism, to which – as I believe – he was always
committed (see especially Danto 1967).
1 Natural Pictorial Competence and Natural Artistic Capacity
First off, a ground-clearing operation. In addition to his philosophy of (the history of) art,
in the broad domain of aesthetics Danto developed a theory of depiction. Perhaps it was
less influential than his art theory. Certainly, it had formidable rivals in accounts of depic-
tion set forth by E. H. Gombrich, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Wollheim, of whom only
the last had a full philosophy of art. But we find Danto’s theory of depiction continually
admixed with his propositions about art for two reasons: first, because our visual under-
standing of pictures – perhaps unlike art – can be described, he thought, as culturally
invariant so far as basic capacities to recognize objects depicted are concerned, and sec-
ond, because much if not most of the history of art is also the history of “pictures as an
art” (to modify Wollheim’s phrase). What is true of all pictures, then, will be true of much
art, though what is true of all art needs not to be true of most pictures. Danto used the
same analytical apparatus to investigate both pictures and art, the so-called method of
indiscernibles, to excavate the relations and distinctions between invisible predicates
(such as “is a picture of,” “is art”) and visible morphologies (such as “I see a red square”).
Indeed, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, a book ostensibly about art, Danto ini-
tially employed the method of indiscernibles to differentiate individuals in an imaginary
suite of look-alike red squares, some of which are art, some pictures, and some neither art
nor picture – a thought-experiment with several predecessors, such as Alphonse Allais’s
all-black and all-white pictures – jokes – in his Album primo-avrilesque of 1897. (Danto
seems to have come upon the example of Allais after writing The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace [see Danto 2000a, 425–6, 2000b, 307].) Obviously, there is an extensive
contingent overlap between pictures and artworks. But Danto took the necessary relations
to be different – virtually inverse. In the case of pictures, we move from the picture to
object recognized. In the case of art, we move from the object recognized to art. In prin-
ciple, then, a picture can carry us all the way through from object recognized to art. And
this is one of the models Danto used to describe the beginning of art.
I will pass lightly over Danto’s claim that non-human creatures such as pigeons and
sheep can recognize pictures, as if they possess a “pictorial competence” (Danto 1992a,
24) – that is, more narrowly, that they can recognize (and on training can sometimes
discriminate among) the objects depicted in our pictures, “exhibit[ing] recognitional
dispositions” (Danto 1992a, 24) upon encountering our pictures as displayed to them,
even when the pictures seem (to us) to be formally abstracted from the real things they
depict. I would, however, be willing to accept – if pushed – that Nim Chimpsky’s mirror-,
icon-, and picture-using behaviors (see Danto 1981, 75) likely indicate something like
pictorial competence in the hominid genetic line.1
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WHITNEY DAVIS
Danto’s claims about “animals as art historians” (Danto 1992a) – or picture-perceiv-

ers at any rate – are characteristic of his strong naturalism, which holds, among other
things, that “human beings, as natural objects, are no less subject to natural laws than
are other parts of nature” (Danto 1967, 448), in turn suggesting – if not entailing – the
continuity of the natural human and broader natural orders, though the discovery of
these continuities is an empirical, scientific, and historical matter. As it seems to me,
Danto aimed to underwrite his notion that among humans an invariant pictorial com-
petence must operate with regard to all the cultural conventions of pictorialization that
might be identified by historians in terms of variable and varying styles and iconogra-
phies. Everyone anywhere should be able, Danto argued, to recognize depicted objects so
long as these beholders have seen something sufficiently like the real things and can
infer recursively from the recognizable depicted objects to a class of putatively real
things made visible to them in depicted form.
Stated another way, Danto’s hermeneutics of animal pictorial competence under-
girds his avowedly modularist claim – his own brand of naturalism – that basic percep-
tual competences as such, such as seeing objects in pictures, are not open to – cannot be
penetrated by – non-natural categories, classifications, and cultural constructions,
except in the obvious sense that the object must be recognizable for it to be recognized in
pictures. Instead, basic perceptual competences provide the materials and media of
cultural traditions of depiction across all historical contexts; supposedly, “the eye is not
historical” (Danto 2001b, 9; see Davis 2011, 11–32). According to Danto, any human
being can naturally work with pictures in so far as they can naturally recognize the
objects they depict without having to have a theory of depiction as such and therefore a
background theory (presumably a culturally and historically specific construction) of
an extra-pictorial “real world” that a picture depicts. Insofar as we can naturally recog-
nize the objects depicted – whatever their meaning and value – we don’t have to think
pictures, as it were. By contrast, according to Danto, because nothing needs distinguish
art as distinct from the world it is about, art does indeed require such an “atmosphere of
theory” (Danto 1964, 581) – of art and of reality – within which artists and people who
engage art must operate, though not always in self-conscious articulations (it was only
in the era of Warhol that art exemplified the theory in which art comes into being as art).
Still, Danto occasionally treated art – or artistic capacity – as a natural psychological
invariant somewhat like pictorial competence, though artistic capacity partly requires
a competence in generating, perceiving, and understanding non-natural meanings. At

the end, then, I will have to return to his notion – undeveloped but explicit – of an
“innate art making module.” Danto seems to have been comfortable with the idea that
what has sometimes been called an “art instinct” (Dutton 2009; compare Davies 2012)
naturally evolved as an intrinsic capacity in human beings – the human equivalent of
similar senses and behaviors in non-human creatures such as the nest-adorning bow-
erbirds described in anthropocentric terms by Heinz Sielmann (1971) and Karl von
Frisch (1975) – the birds are “painters” and “architects” (for useful critical discussion,
see Hansell 2005). In turn, in the words of Democritus quoted by Gottfried Semper in
The Four Elements of Architecture of 1851 (Semper 2010, xx), whom Danto followed in
turn – human beings became “the pupils of animals” in their activities of weaving,
knotting, fencing, mounding, walling, and the like. Danto suggests that we might take
these incipiently artistic and architectural practices to be “the most primordial
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The Birth of Art
examples of human poesis [sic]” (Danto 1998a, 1) from which art draws and to which
it sometimes refers (as pictorial and/or as art).
Still, this natural aesthetic origin of art is only an evolutionary precondition of art. It
is not its essence in its own history as art. For the essence of art, according to Danto, lies,
first, in its intentional directedness or “aboutness” – presumably the bowerbird’s nest is
not “about” his own nest, say, or “about” his quest for a mate or “about” the yellowness
of his orchid décor (Sielmann 1971, 151) – and, second, in having “a meaning that [is]
embodied in a way that [makes] sense in the artworld” (Goehr 2014, xiv), showing in
that world what the configurations are about in the world – as it were an “aesthetical
idea,” in Kant’s phrase as endorsed by Danto.2
2 Art in the Narrow Sense: Transfiguration and Vorkunsten
How does this double involution – this “transfiguration” – arise? The question is not easy
to answer. As Danto wrote in one of his most Hegelian formulations, “that there should be
a fold in the universal fabric through which that fabric becomes in its entirety, the fold
itself included, an object of awareness to itself, is not something for which our knowledge
of the rest of the fabric altogether prepares us” (1997a, xiv). To quote the artist Arakawa,
who was much admired by Danto (see Danto 2010), “essentially the human condition
remains prehistoric as long as such a change from the Given, a distinction as fundamental
as this, has not yet been firmly established” (Arakawa and Gins 1979, 1). Like Hegel, who
used the metaphor of a mirror (Gegenschein, “counter-reflection”), Danto wanted us to
acknowledge that the question of the “fold” probably cannot be fully answered scientifi-
cally – as a chapter, say, in empirical evolutionary biology or even as a proposition in
philosophical psychology as these sciences stand now. (Despite his interest in the pictorial
competence of animals, Danto was quite hostile to the notion that animals, even near-
human primates, can think by way of abstract semiotic codes – such as the quasi-iconic
signs manipulated and putatively understood by chimpanzees – that represent classes of
real things in their world.3) The “fold” must be addressed, it seems, in a philosophical his-
tory of spirit, and there chiefly in terms of metaphors (“fold,” “mirror,” etc.) for the world-
folding or the world-mirroring that is the identity – or at any rate the historical work – of
human spirit as such. Because “it is only in the realm of spirit that we exist as human
beings,” Danto (1997b, 274) could say that this historical work of human spirit is also
natural.
Fortunately for Danto’s purposes, an influential account of the fold(ing) already lay
to hand – an account both philosophical and historical. And as icing on the cake, it hap-
pened specifically to address the nature of art. Danto must have studied it around the
time he was writing “The Artworld” in 1964, though to my knowledge, he did not cite
it explicitly in his work for another twenty years.
In addition to supplying the metaphors out of which our conception of the real world
first springs, Danto wrote in 1965 in Nietzsche as Philosopher, “art (in the narrow sense)
creates for us another world alongside the real world – an art world, we might call it – into
which we may from time to time escape” (Danto 1965a, 47, my italics). In The
Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Danto (1981, 71–82) juxtaposed the “innate” human
capacity for pictorial perception or, more modestly, for depicted-object-recognition, with
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Nietzsche’s story of the historical transformation of Dionysius in ancient Greek ritual,

drama, and art. According to Nietzsche, initially the early Greeks (like ritualists any-
where) took the god to be bodied forth – made present – in ritual practice, not yet art. But
the god was enacted in Classical Greek drama – art. In this re-presentation, his deepest
meaning could now be embodied (in his representation and its dramatic narrative) as a
terrifying abyss of disintegration and ecstasy which is specifically relative to the discur-
sive “Apollinian” framing and even exaltation of the experience itself, the production of a
beautiful appearance without which a truly Dionysian unframing cannot be
understood.
As Danto recalled Nietzsche’s point in exploring the aesthetics of presence, the
folding of the erstwhile archaic idol (a “real” god-thing) into dramatic art transfigured it:
a substitute god in the real world became a representation of the god “standing outside
and against” reality (Danto 1981, 77), “transfiguring … phenomena into their pure
phenomenality” (Porter 2000, 75) and in so doing paradoxically giving a perspectival
meaning to the presences by reflecting them. Overall, to fold a representational seman-
tics for reality over the perceptual syntax of reality is the work (as it were jointly) of art
and philosophy.
The “end” of this process of the artistic transfiguration of reality already lies in its
beginning, though again it took more than twenty years for Danto, in After the End of
Art, to extract the Hegelian lesson from the Nietzschean narrative. If Hegel was right,
artistic transfiguration must be partly self-consuming; in the modes of representational
imitation and expression that inaugurate its very distinction from “reality,” art belongs
as much to “reality” as to the “concept of reality” that it also requires and embodies.
From the beginning, then, art is passing into the concept that sublates it.
As Frank Ankersmit (2007) has argued persuasively, we might identify four links in
Danto’s chain of artistic transfiguration: first, the idol as the real god; second, a repre-
sentation indiscernible from it that can take its place (a “substitute”); third, “a represen-
tation that has an ontological and epistemic status of its own and that is no longer
indiscernible from what it represents” (Ankersmit 2007, 178); and finally, closing the
circle, the return of the founding possibility of indiscernibility between real things and
art once the representational page has been irreversibly turned and the essence of art in
the “aboutness” of embodied meanings has been revealed by art. I think Ankersmit is
right that “with the Brillo Box the history of art [according to Danto] paradoxically
comes to an end at exactly the same place where it began three thousand years ago [in
ancient Greece]. For the presence of one and the same Dionysius on several individual
occasions would then be the obvious theological anticipation of the presence of one
and the same Brillo box at the grocery and in the museum” (Ankersmit 1998, 70). As
Jonathan Gilmore writes, “If Danto’s claim about the end of art is true, it is because that
event is part of an internal development whose beginning requires that manner of
ending, to the extent that an internal ending is reached at all” (Gilmore 2014, 284).
Whether or not Danto’s account of the birth of art in Transfiguration is true to
Nietzsche’s, his account comports with other twentieth-century genealogies of art, for
example, Gombrich’s story of the origins of pictorial art in the making of substitutes
(Gombrich 1960), and of philosophy, for example, Werner Jaeger’s and Bruno Snell’s
developmental accounts of science, criticism, and self-consciousness in classical Greece
(Jaeger 1934; Snell 1946). As for actual art, cultural, and intellectual history, however,
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The Birth of Art
it leaves much to be desired, as Danto surely recognized. For example, because Danto
wanted to take ancient Egyptian pyramids to have embodied “the meaning appropriate
to their mummified tenant[s]” (Danto 2000c, xx–xxi), he would want to dispute Hegel’s
notion of ancient Egyptian “Symbolic Art” as merely a Vorkunst, a “pre-art,” insofar as
Hegel could not find an adequate embodiment of meaning in the pyramids (see Davis
2018).
In fact, it turns out that what Egyptian art lacked was not so much a concept of
reality as a concept of art alongside reality, reality’s twin (whether or not art is an iden-
tical twin) (see Danto 1981, 77–8). The beginning of art, according to Danto – its
condition of possibility – is really the emergence of the “atmosphere of theory” of art
generated in the artworld (Danto 1964, 581). Here Danto would seem to be on firmer
ground historically, in dealing with ancient Greek art at any rate. For Classical Greek
culture did enunciate a theory (or theories) of art: as a poetics; as mimēsis; as praise of
human excellence (aretē); as worthy of a person’s ethical emulation; as expressive of an
artist’s distinctive talents and style; as incarnating communal norms and values; as
embodying meanings in ways that deserved focused discursive ekphrasis, and so on –
terms still recognizable, if disputed, in the artworld of Danto’s New York. As Danto put
it,
the world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less than the real one. It is the
role of artistic theories, these days as always, to make the artworld, and art, possible. It
would … never have occurred to the painters of Lascaux that they were producing art on
those walls. Not unless there were neolithic aestheticians (Danto 1964, 584).4
3 Art in the Large Sense: Ausderkunstweltkunstleren and

Pre-Historical-Art
I will leave it to anthropologists of art to take up the question of whether “aesthetic sys-
tems” – “atmospheres of [art] theory,” artworlds – can be found outside the Greco-
Roman and post-medieval Western traditions in which art (narrowly speaking) was
born, in which it historically unfolded, and at the end of which its essence had been
exposed. Danto was committed, I think, to the Nietzschean moment conceived as a

world-historical punctuation in the history of art only in a highly metaphorical way, as
his cautious openness to finding art – that is, transfigured artifacts – in ancient Egypt
and in the indigenous traditional cultures of Africa might suggest. I suspect that his
burgeoning career as an art critic for The Nation compelled him provisionally to accept
these latter kinds of possibilities for the simple purpose of taking a look at all the art
proffered to him as art by the “post-historical” New York artworld.5
Speaking for myself, I see no reason why the artworld that produces art needs to be
anything other than the artwork itself. An artwork implies an artmaker and their folding
of their world – a totality of competence, intention, and reflection enfolding the art-
work. If successful, art is its own theory as it were – carrying with it its own atmosphere
or aura of self-reflection. Some of Danto’s most interesting (if sometimes puzzling)
meditations on this possibility can be found in essays that have not been much addressed
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WHITNEY DAVIS
by his philosophical commentators, especially “The Artworld and Its Outsiders” (Danto
1998b), “Outsider Art” of 1997 (Danto 2000d), and “The End of the Outsider” (Danto
2002). In these writings, Danto adopted some of the terms for non-artworld art that
had initially been promulgated by modern artists such as Jean Dubuffet (who wanted to
identify an art brut – the “art of irregulars”; Dubuffet 2007) and scholars such as Roger
Cardinal (who coined the term “outsider art”; Cardinal 1973), denoting “the natural
state of art, before being shaped by institutions” (Danto 1998b, 27) and “unsmirched
by artistic culture,” as Dubuffet proposed (Dubuffet 2007, 101, 104). According to
Danto, artists such as the American painter Henry Darger were “deeply outside the
institutional framework of the artworld” (what George Dickie called the “art circle”
[Dickie 1974, 1984]); because the “artworld does not enter into any explanation of
their work,” we might best treat each “as an artworld unto himself.” Their work could
have been done “anywhere where humanity is to be found” – the equivalent among
“artists-not-of-the-artworld” (“Ausderkunstweltkunstleren”) of the art-history-ending
achieved by artworld-artists in making anything at all into art (Danto 2000d, 242,
246, 248). From this point of view, an artist – even one operating in the artworld? –
might be said to be their own (and perhaps their only) institution and their own (and
perhaps their only) critic, and equally, we, with a theory of their art and our own, can
retroactively provide them with art institutions and art critics that were foreclosed to
them.
If we do not demonstrate that something is art by finding its extrinsic institutional
and discursive “artworld(s),” perhaps historically localized and specialized only in what
Joseph Alsop (1982) called the “rare art traditions,” we demonstrate it by finding its
intrinsic “worldmaking” (to borrow Goodman’s [1978] phrase) by way of artistic
“aboutness” and embodied meaning, naturally inhering in the artwork working in the
world. Or so I reconstruct Danto’s understanding of what might be called “pre-histori-
cal art,” following the suggestion of Birgitte Hilmer (1998) in her sympathetic reading
of Danto’s Hegelianism.6 “For we can ask,” Danto wrote in After the End of Art, “whether
there was, in Hans Belting’s phrase, ‘art before the era of art,’ so that we can identify
cave paintings and altarpieces as art even if those who made them had no concept of
art to speak of ” (Danto 1997b, 136; Danto referred to Belting’s Das Ende der
Kunstgeschichte? [1983] and Bild und Kult [1990]). “It was not that those images were
not art in some large sense, but their being art did not figure in their production” (1997b,
3, my italics). Put another way, arguably these before-arts had natural aesthetics but no
aestheticians – or if they did, the aestheticians were simply the artists themselves. To
modify a famous slogan of Barnett Newman’s, aestheticians would be as useless to
before-artists as ornithology would be to birds – including the aesthetically sensitive
bowerbirds (see Newman 1990, 304).
Of course, art in the “large sense” (if we do want it to be art) requires a theory of
non-artworld art (and dialectically of its “deep Otherness”), though this theory, by defi-
nition, was not necessarily the theory – if any – held by non-artworld artists (“Deep
Otherness” is Danto’s phrase for Darger [Danto 2000d, 242–3]). Hence Danto’s tenta-
tive thesis of the continuous natural birth of art, which contends “that there may very
well be an art-making module, together with an art-receiving module – that art is as
much an innate endowment of human beings as folk psychology, [and] that every-
where, in every culture, human beings make art” (Danto 1998b, 26). Indeed, as Hilmer
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notes, pre-historical-art “might well fulfill the … conditions [of art] in a much higher
degree than historical (self-reflecting) art itself,” for “art is often exemplarily fulfilled in
a preceding naïve state” (Hilmer 1998, 80) unaided by aestheticians and art historians
and by art museums and art markets. Hilmer suggests – and I agree – that the “reflectiv-
ity” of pre-historical art “can be gathered from the way the work refers to its predeces-
sors – not just being ‘under their influence’ but actively choosing among different
historical (even remote) possibilities or rejecting them… . [Prior to reflectivity], every
object suitable to be co-opted by art proper as its unconscious predecessor will pass for
art before art (or before the end of art, if you wish)” (Hilmer 1998, 80). In the end,
despite his comment about Lascaux in “The Artworld” in 1964, quoted above, Danto
came to accept that the cave paintings had (art?-)historicity because “later painters [at
Lascaux] had their predecessors as models” – the specifically artistic element of the
“ritual decision” to paint in that place (Danto 1997b, 62).7 Indeed, as Jerrold Levinson
has argued, our own “recursive” concept of art as “irreducibly historical” might
demand that there be – have been – historical arts that we can retrodictively mobilize as
instances of art which validate our own art-making in their light, having already vali-
dated themselves art-historically.8
To be clear, none of this would require Danto to jettison his theses about the essence
of art in terms, say, of the artistic transfiguration of mere substitutes for things and of
the embodiment of meaning. It only required him (within the terms of his theory of art)
to modify his privileging of the artworld, and maybe of that history of art qua art as his-
torically born and ended in our artworld in the era of art. A plausible way to make these
accommodations would be to lay greater emphasis on the “irreducible historicality”
(Levinson 2006a) of all art, pre-art-historical, historical, and post-historical as mapped
in what Hilmer calls Danto’s “three-tier model” of the “inherent historicity” of art
(Hilmer 1998, 82).
Danto’s recognition of real non-artworld art, he said, generated a new “indiscern-
ible” for him (Danto 2000d, 246). Given that our artworld – having ended art’s history –
makes available “all possible styles and modalities of art” (Danto 2000d, 245), there is
no way to tell on the face of it whether a given artwork belongs inside or outside the art-
world, especially when the work itself is literally encountered somewhere outside.
Danto had found himself writing about the perilous intersection of non-artworld art
being shown in semi-artworld contexts such as the Museum of Modern Art’s Primitivism
exhibition (Rubin 1984; see Danto 2006), the Museum of American Folk Art (see
Danto 1998b), and exhibitions of private collections of “vernacular art” (see Danto
2002) – exhibitions having the potential, at any rate, to occlude the “natural state of
art” precisely by bringing it into a certain history of art.
Paradoxically, it is artworld art – art in “the narrow sense” and maybe narrow art –
that Danto winningly called “art sans phrase” (Danto 1998b, 27), that is, art without a
qualification. By contrast, Danto took non-artworld art – art in “the large sense,” and
maybe art at large – to be fated to be “art avec phrase” – that is, art qualified as “prehis-
toric art,” “primitive art,” “folk art,” “outsider art,” and so on. We should rather say, I
think, that art qua art is always art avec phrase – namely, “historical.” The construal of
“historical” does not have to be about beginnings and endings in the real world of art,
or anything else – for there are none. As Danto himself pointed out The Analytical
Philosophy of History (Danto 1965b), “history” occurs in narrative retrodictions and
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WHITNEY DAVIS
proleptic predictions – of the “pre-art-historical” and the “post-art-historical” as the

case might be. Anyway, and having reached this stage of Danto’s analytics, we might as
well simply get rid of “art-historical” avec phrase. “Art-historical” sans phrase will do just
fine.
Notes
1 For Danto’s various treatments of this matter, see Danto 1991, 1992a, 2001a. For one of the
background experiments, see Vaughan and Greene 1984, which seems to me to show only that
pigeons can categorize configurations and can be trained to discriminate among them, though
this doesn’t amount, I think, to perception of pictures qua pictures. (See the useful discussion in
Wynne and Udell 2013, 249–50.) For Nim’s achievements, see Terrace 1979, 87, 115, 147,
150, 163, 165, 209, 231; compare the more cautious assessments in Povinelli 2000.
2 Late in his career, Danto (2007) acknowledged the affinity between his concept of art-as-
embodied-meanings and Kant’s theory of aesthetical ideas in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (sect.
49; Kant 2000, 191–5).
3 See Danto 1983, addressing the work of the the psychologist David Premack, who had taught
chimpanzees to use an artificial language of plastic icons.
4 Compare Danto 1981, 44, for a similar formulation. The painters of Lascaux actually
belonged to a paleolithic culture of the Pleistocene “Ice Age,” not a neolithic culture of the
post-glacial Holocene.
5 See especially Danto 1992b, on the 1988 “Art/artifact” exhibition at the Center for African
Art, New York; and compare Danto 1994. It seems to me that Danto tried to maintain a judi-
ciously agnostic posture. For example, while he was willing to entertain the possibility of tribal
artifacts as “art” (though not in the “narrow sense”) he was also sceptical of the grounds of
certain “post-historical” comparisons between such art-artifacts and modern Western
avant-garde art qua art–supposed “affinities” staged, for instance, in the Primitivism in
Twentieth-Century Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1984 (Rubin 1984; see
Danto 2006). There is no space here to trace Danto’s path through these thickets in any detail.
6 “In inherently reflecting its concept,” Hilmer writes, “[art] projects its own conditions into the
past, co-opting ‘pre-historical’ artworks as predecessors and classical examples” (Hilmer
1998, 71). In Danto’s response to Hilmer, he appears to endorse her approach (Danto 1998c,
136).
7 Danto was using an influential description of Lascaux by the art historian Meyer Schapiro
(1994), who noted the accumulative, palimpsestic structure of many Paleolithic paintings.
As early as “The Artworld,” Danto endorsed something like a recursive or retrospective
approach: “It is [the] retrospective enrichment of the entities in the artworld that makes it
possible to discuss Raphael and De Kooning together, or Lichtenstein and Michelangelo”
(Danto 1964, 583). Works of art, he later wrote, “form a kind of organic community, and
release latencies in one another merely by virtue of their existence. The world of artworks is
a kind of community of internally related objects” (Danto 1997, 162–3).
8 For Levinson’s “retrospectivist or auto-referentialist” theory, see Levinson 2006a, 13. Oddly,
Levinson doesn’t seem quite to accept “ritual cave paintings,” probable “ancestors of art
activities,” as art (2006a, 15). Levinson would differ from Danto–or Danto writing in one
way, at any rate–in positing “as the crucial contextual condition of arthood not a relation to
some prevailing artistic theory, nor a relation to a surrounding social institution, but a
relation to the concrete history of art-making and art-projection into which the candidate
object hopes to enter” (Levinson 2006b, 29).
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Schapiro, Meyer. 1994. “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in
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Semper, Gottfried. 2010. The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings. Translated by Harry
Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Terrace, Herbert L. 1979. Nim. New York: Knopf.
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14
The End of Art
GEORG W. BERTRAM
The thesis that art has ended is widespread in modernist philosophical aesthetics. Hegel
and Danto are not the only ones to have claimed that art came to an end at some specific
moment in history. Other versions of the thesis can be found in Nietzsche (2000),
Benjamin (2008), and Adorno (2002, 16). Is it possible to conceive of art without
claiming that art comes to an end? Must one acknowledge that art ends again and again
somehow to safeguard it against the forces that would actually bring it to its end (cf.
Geulen 2006; Vercellone 2013; Vilar 2010)?
The thesis of the end of art is intrinsic to the question of what art is. Yet, most
prominent proponents of the thesis are not primarily interested in what art is or
becomes after its end. They are rather interested in what it was before it ended. Those
who claim that art has come to an end at some point in history say that art has done all
it can do before its end. In Hegel’s famed words: “Art, considered in its highest vocation,
is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Hegel 1975, vol. 1, 11). It is important to take
this claim at face value. Art no longer pursues its highest vocation. What does this
mean? It seems to mean that art was, at some point, effective in a self-evident way,
according to how Hegel characterized the classical form of art: as offering “immediate
satisfaction of absolute spirit” (Hegel 1975 vol. 1, 102). (Classical) art was in a state in
which it was not possible for art to fail. But, so the story goes, art increasingly lost this
state of undisturbed self-evident effectiveness, so that at its end it was confronted with
its failure. This is Hegel’s thesis in a nutshell.
Understood in this way, the thesis says that at some point in art’s historical
development, the possibility of art failing was simply not on the table. Bluntly put:
According to the end-of-art thesis, art can have a self-evident effectiveness – an effec-
tiveness that cannot be called into question. So even though it might seem that those
who support claims about the end of art would mourn it, this is, in fact, not the case. In
this sense, claims about the end of art are always claims about what art was before it
came to an end (cf. Pippin 2014, 33–39). Another aspect of the end-of-art thesis that
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The End of Art
grabs the analyst’s attention is this: Those who claim that art has (in some way) come
to an end take the end of art as something that has no bearing on that which consti-
tutes what art is. This is a key commitment made by many philosophies of art. We must
question whether it holds true if we want to understand what the end-of-art thesis
means.
Danto is one of the most prominent proponents of the end-of-art thesis in recent
debates in the philosophy of art. His defense of the thesis is two-pronged. On the one
hand, Danto follows Hegel when explaining his understanding of how art has come to
an end. On the other hand, he develops his own version of the thesis by offering an
account of the history of the visual arts from the nineteenth century up through the
1960s and 1970s (about which Hegel, of course, could never have known anything). I
want to show that both Hegel’s and Danto’s explanations of what comes after the end
of art allow us better to grasp some attributes essential to what art is. Reading Hegel
and Danto’s works on aesthetics against the grain reveals a philosophical concept of art
as an endless struggle to make real something that realizes the essential nature of art.
1 Danto on the End of Art
Danto is very explicit about what he thinks Hegel is saying. His interpretation of Hegel’s
end-of-art thesis has two parts: the first concerns the notion that the highest vocation
of art is to realize absolute spirit; the second concerns the decay of art.
As for the highest vocation of art, Danto relies on a historical narrative according to
which art is the first practice through which absolute spirit comes into existence. Danto
attributes the following claim to Hegel: “He saw Art as, so to speak, a staging area in the
epic of self-knowledge” (Danto 2004a, 538). He continues by saying that by under-
standing art as a staging area (in the sense that art, historically, has been the first prac-
tice through which self-knowledge has been realized), Hegel only really viewed art as a
historical “phase of thought” (Danto 2004a, 537). This phase ended when thought no
longer needed to express itself in sensory forms: “The End-of-Art-Thesis proclaims our
liberation from having to find sensuous equivalents for the content of thought” (Danto
2004a, 537).
Danto cites multiple passages from Hegel that state that art continues to exist after
the end of art. The end of art is not a definitive ending of art. Rather, Danto thinks it has
to be understood as a shift in the role art plays within the totality of human practices.
Danto takes Hegel as saying that absolute spirit has developed so that it is no longer real-
ized through art but through religion and philosophy. Art has fallen to the mere level of
objective spirit. After its end, art is just one cultural practice among others; it no longer
plays a role in the constitution of humans’ self-knowledge but expresses something that
only has meaning within a specific historical-cultural context. Hegel famously claims
that after the romantic form of art, art embraces anything and everything that has to
do with human beings. It “makes Humanus its new holy of holies” (Hegel 1975, vol. 1,
607). Danto reads Hegel as saying that everything is possible in art after the romantic
form of art because nothing is of interest any more (cf. Danto 2014). For Danto’s Hegel,
art has reached a state of endless interchangeability in the sense that the subject mat-
ters of artworks and the forms they take are open to limitless variation.
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GEORG W. BERTRAM
A key aspect of Danto’s reading of Hegel’s end-of-art thesis is that he understands it

as a claim about a historical development. He seeks to make the kind of development of
the history of art that he sees in Hegel more comprehensible by contrasting it with an
understanding of this development as an ongoing process of perfection, which Danto
has good reasons for rejecting. For one, it is simply impossible to integrate the various
art movements of the twentieth century into such a homogenous narrative. Danto pre-
fers to see the historical development of the arts as a sort of Bildungsroman. But his story
about art’s development takes a different direction than the one he attributes to Hegel.
In Danto’s view, art’s development should not be understood as part of the development
of absolute spirit; rather, it should be understood as a development that has a bearing
on that which constitutes what the arts themselves are.
From this perspective, the development that brings art to its end is internal to art
itself. According to Danto, the basic goal of the development of the arts is to reach a
state in which art becomes self-conscious, in which it attains knowledge of what it itself
is. When art achieves this knowledge, the historical development of the arts is over. As
is well known, Danto’s primary points of reference in twentieth-century art are certain
works of Andy Warhol, which are largely perceptually indiscernible from ordinary
objects, but which he thinks are the best examples of art’s coming to self-consciousness.
According to Danto, works that highlight their own indiscernibility from ordinary
objects realize a certain limit in art’s development. When art understands itself as a
sensuous-material product that acquires meaning only through interpretation, its
development has reached an insurmountable endpoint. Danto grasps art’s apex in a
Hegelian vein when he claims that art has become its own philosophy (Danto 2004b,
107). He insists, however, that art does not thereby become philosophy. Rather, he takes
art’s realization of a philosophical self-understanding as the final station in art’s
history.
When the arts attain this kind of self-consciousness, Danto speaks of their reaching
a “post-historic” state characterized by a boundless plurality of artistic styles and forms.
In their post-historic condition, artworks can draw on any and all styles and forms from
the history of the arts or from the present or future. Danto follows Hegel in stating that
art after its end is anything but dead. It can continue to be what it is in the framework
of a human form of life. According to Danto’s Hegelian model, artworks articulate
understandings for those engaged within a particular historical-cultural form of life in
a sensuous-material way. The artworks realize “embodied meanings” (Danto 2007).

The end of art does not change art’s relevance or potential. What ends is the history of
art’s becoming self-conscious.
Danto’s end of art thesis draws from a post-metaphysical understanding of what art
is. Compared with Hegel’s thesis, Danto does not make claims about art’s metaphysical
status, according to which the absolute spirit assumes human practices that are beyond
nature. Danto offers a more modest conception, according to which the artworld is
made from perspectives and theories drawn from historical-cultural situations relevant
to human beings, as well as from prevalent theories of what art is. Art is a practice of
art’s articulating itself not independently but as immersed with the history of human
culture. The only development specific to art – which is somehow independent of the
history of human culture – is the process through which art becomes self-conscious.
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Danto conceives of art as one practice among many through which articulations
of self-understanding are realized. In a human form of life, the development of art
does not encompass other practices and forms of practice. Thus, the only
development relevant for art itself is the one it realizes in and for itself. Danto
argues, therefore, that the development of the arts reaches its end when art comes
to understand itself as a practice of articulating understandings through sensu-
ous-material products. Beyond the development in self-understanding that art real-
izes for itself, art’s role within the framework of human practices is to just be one
practice among others. This seems to be the basic lesson of Danto’s post-metaphys-
ical conception of art.
2 Hegel’s End-of-Art Thesis Revisited
Danto stresses repeatedly that his philosophy of art is Hegelian in spirit. But to what
extent does his end-of-art thesis remain true to Hegel’s? Does Hegel himself understand
the end of art as a phase that comes at a certain point in the historical development of
the arts? To get a better grasp of Hegel’s conception of art, it is important to understand
two essential elements of it and their relation to one another. On the one hand, Hegel
categorizes art in three different forms, namely the symbolic, the classical, and the
romantic forms of art. On the other hand, he thinks that art as a whole is actualized
through the system of the arts. The pertinent question about Hegel’s aesthetics for this
inquiry is: Is the symbolic form of art the beginning of the historical development of the
arts and the romantic form of art its end?
There is clear evidence that Hegel does not read the historical development of art in
this way. Two points are of particular importance here: First, Hegel views the
development realized through the three forms of art as something that continues after
the apex of art has been reached. This is clear because if art were to end with its apex,
the classical form of art would have to be the end of art’s development. But Hegel clearly
states that the romantic form of art (and art after the end of the romantic form of art)
comes after the classical form of art. Thus, Hegel’s philosophy of art raises the question
of how something can develop after having reached its apex. Is it simply a decline, or is
it something else?
Second, Hegel conceives of the romantic form of art as a response to the shortcom-
ings of the classical form of art. He characterizes the shortcomings in question by
claiming that “the supreme works of beautiful sculpture are sightless” (Hegel 1975,
vol. 1, 521). We might interpret this claim by saying that the classical form of art only
makes human self-understanding objective through a sort of material externality. It
lacks the inwardness and spontaneous expression that defines the types of self-under-
standing developed by human beings. Even though the romantic form of art ultimately
fails to achieve the kind of inseparability of form and content that Hegel thinks consti-
tutes the ideal of beauty, it does represent an improvement on the shortcomings of
classical art insofar as it articulates the above-mentioned inwardness. It follows that the
development traced by Hegel’s theory of the three forms of art is at once a narrative of
improvement and decline.
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GEORG W. BERTRAM
But how can a development be both an improvement and a decline at the same time?
If one understands a specific development as historical in nature, one seems to be con-
fronted with the alternative of understanding it either as an improvement or as decline.
But one can easily combine the two by viewing the development as being primarily
systematic in nature. This is to say that art is realized through different forms which, if
taken for themselves, are all one-sided. Thus, the romantic form of art is an improve-
ment on the shortcomings of the classical form of art, and at the same time a step
backward with regard to the improvements realized by the classical form of art on both
the symbolic and the romantic forms. Thus, for Hegel, art develops in such a way that
different manifestations of art correct the shortcomings of other manifestations. Art
realizes itself through different forms, none of which, however, can realize art as a
whole. According to this theory, tensions between different realizations are definitive of
what art is.
What does all of this mean for the end-of-art thesis? If one takes Hegel as trying to
explain the relations that are essential for the coming to being of art, one might ask
whether the end of art is an aspect of the relations in question. How might Hegel under-
stand the end of art as something that has a bearing on that which constitutes what art
is? A clue lies in Hegel’s claim that art stops pursuing its “highest vocation” after it
comes to its end. As we have seen, Danto understands this claim as saying that art stops
being part of absolute spirit. But another reading is possible. In its highest vocation, art
is the one and only realization of absolute spirit, a staging area, as Danto puts it. But if
art’s highest vocation is relegated to the past, this must mean that absolute spirit itself
has changed. As an aspect of absolute spirit, art is now dependent on religion and phi-
losophy and thus stops being effective in and of itself. As Hegel’s explanations of the
romantic form of art clearly say, the sensuous-material configuration of a work of art
no longer speaks out of itself. Rather, artworks have to be interpreted. In other words,
they need conceptual practices. Put differently, after it stops pursuing its highest voca-
tion, art is inextricably connected with philosophy (and religion).
This reading gives occasion for a reassessment of the end-of-art thesis. As Danto
doubtlessly acknowledges, art persists after its end. Hegel is very clear about this: “We
may well hope that art will always rise higher and come to perfection” (Hegel 1975, vol.
1, 103). The end of art simply means that art is no longer effective in a self-evident way.
In other words, it is inherently confronted with the possibility of failure. If, in Hegel’s
view, everything that has to do with human beings is a possible subject for art after the
end of the romantic form of art, then art becomes a struggle about what is relevant and
what is not. As players in this struggle, works of art have to face the possibility of failing.
The end of art is inscribed into every work of art itself. It affects the practice of art as a
whole.
At the beginning of the essay, I claimed that theses about the end of art are always
also theses about what art was before its end. Hegel’s conception of the classical form of
art is illuminating in this respect. In the classical form of art, works of art speak through
the sensuous shape given to the material by the artist. Here, it seems that works of art
show their meaning directly and thus attain their status as art without any struggle.
But we have extensive evidence that this is a fiction (just think of the famous painters’
contests in antiquity, of Plato’s criticism of poetry, and of the paragone). From its very
beginning, art has always been bound up with a struggle about what it means for works
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The End of Art
of art to realize what they aim at realizing and, thus, what it means for works of art to
succeed. A closer look clearly shows that art has always been bound up with contesta-
tion. Every work of art has to develop its own conception of how it aims at realizing
what art is, and in this sense, it always opposes analogous conceptions put forth by
other works of art. Accordingly, art has never been self-evidently effective. Thus, Hegel’s
position clearly says that the end of art belongs to what art is.
3 Re-Interpreting Danto’s End-of-Art Thesis
This reading of Hegel’s end-of-art thesis suggests that we might also be able to interpret
Danto’s version of the thesis in a similar vein. Can one remain true to Danto’s theory
and say that the end of art has a bearing on that which constitutes what art is? At first
glance, it might seem that what I have called Danto’s post-metaphysical conception of
art does not allow for the kind of interpretation I have developed for Hegel’s end-of-art
thesis, if, that is, Danto understands the end of art as a purely historical fact.
Nevertheless, I would like to try and show that Danto’s end-of-art thesis is not as strictly
historical as it might first seem. As with Hegel’s end-of-art thesis, systematic aspects
linger in Danto’s version, too.
We have seen that there are two essential aspects of Danto’s understanding of the
end of art. First, at its end, art attains self-consciousness. Second, art does not, in the
strict sense, develop after coming to its end. Thus, we have to ask whether self-con-
sciousness and a state of non-development are essential characteristics of what art is.
And the answer to these questions is simple: Yes, they are. It is easy to conceive of art as
a constitutively self-conscious practice that does not develop in the strict sense.
In explaining these two characteristics (in Danto’s spirit), we can continue where we
left off in the reassessment of Hegel’s end-of-art thesis. One of the lessons we might draw
from Hegel’s thesis is that the end of art is inscribed into every work of art, since no work
of art can sufficiently ground itself in a self-evident fashion. Every work of art has to
face the possibility of failure. This implies that every work of art develops a conception
of what art is and seeks to succeed by realizing this very conception. In other words,
every work of art is (at least implicitly) self-conscious about what it means to realize art
in the way in which that work of art aims at realizing it. Thus, works of art are essen-
tially self-conscious. The history of the arts itself makes it easy to see the truth of this
claim. The paintings of Velásquez are as self-conscious in their realization as the contra-
puntal music of Bach. The instability of art is the reason why it is self-conscious.
It seems far more difficult to explain why the claim that art is always in a state of
non-development should also hold true, and thus to make sense of the second
characteristic of what the end of art means for Danto. But a second look allows us to see
that this is also mistaken. The non-developmental character of art can be explained by
saying that artworks always struggle in their particular realizations of what art is
because art has no self-evident foundation. Every new work of art has to establish for
itself what it means to succeed as art and realize art according to its own standards.
Conceived in this way, art has to be understood as an endless struggle about what con-
stitutes art. Because it is inherently involved in such a struggle, art does not develop.
Even though there are developments in the arts–developments that are related to the
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GEORG W. BERTRAM
artwork’s position within a set of historical-cultural practices, among other things–art

in its basic structure does not develop in a strict sense. A development that would be
essential for art would allow artworks to find a more or less stable place within that
development. But every work of art has to initiate art anew. Within every work of art,
art has a fresh start. In this sense, art does not develop.
What I take here (in turning Danto against himself) from Danto’s conception of art’s
end might help us develop a better idea of what art is. A more or less superficial under-
standing of art makes it seem as if art were part of the historical development of what
one might call cultural formations. Understood in this way, art is nothing more than an
expression of historical-cultural forms of life. But art is something quite different: It is a
way in which human beings attempt to answer questions about who they are. Even
though these questions are not timeless, they cannot be limited to specific historical-
cultural situations, either. They connect the authors of Genesis with Kant and
Sophocles’ Antigone with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The different practices through which
human beings try to give an answer to the question of who they are seem to have a
transhistorical character. What is achieved in these practices can last for centuries or
more. As elements of a practice without real development, artworks produced
2,500 years ago can be as relevant for us today as the newest novels or performances.
What does all this mean for the Bildungsroman Danto writes on the development of
the arts? I suggest that we read Danto’s end-of-art thesis as we read Hegel’s account of
the classical form of art. Both seek to make counterfactual explanations about art in a
way that suggests that art has a firm foundation. In Danto’s narrative, artworks seem to
have more or less stable positions within the historical development of the arts. They
are steps in art’s path to becoming self-conscious. But this journey was over from the
very beginning. Danto’s Bildungsroman is thus a way of bringing us to the insight that
art does not work within the kind of stable framework the story itself suggests it might.
In short, and in Hegelian terms: Danto’s Bildungsroman sublates itself. It is a narrative
that cancels itself out in order to justify its end. Even though at first sight it might seem
like the narrative would be about what art was before its end, it, in fact, only concerns
its end. Thus, what we said about Hegel’s end-of-art thesis also holds for Danto’s: It
explains what art is in terms of what it is after its end.
4 The End of Art without End
One might conclude by saying that the end-of-art thesis has a deep irony to it. Ironic is
the fact that the end of art does not come to an end. On the one hand, we find different
versions of the end-of-art thesis and different ideas about what constitutes the end of
art throughout the history of the philosophy of art. According to the philosophies of
Hegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and many others, art ends in different ways. The endless
ending of art is what informs the history of the philosophy of art. On the other hand,
the end of art is central to what art is. It is not just a narrative that philosophers of art
have simply thought up, but an aspect of art’s constant struggle with itself. Both Hegel
and Danto teach us that after its end, art persists in a state of confusing plurality in
which art comes to no end because it is not at all clear what belongs to art and what
doesn’t.
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The End of Art
This is essential for what art is: Since art has no firm foundations, there are no fixed
criteria determining what can be a work of art, even though, for Danto, all works of art
embody their meanings. In this sense, the end of art should be understood as its
beginning. Since art is unstable, it never ends. This is a conceptual, not an empirical
claim. The concept of art cannot tell us anything about what art’s end might be. Thus,
art in itself has to be conceived of as a constant process of struggle about what art is.
Since this process does not, for conceptual reasons, come to an end, art remains in a
state of constant beginning. The end of art is also always its beginning.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London:

Continuum.
Benjamin, Walter. 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J.A.
Underwood. London: Penguin, 1–50.
Danto, Arthur C. 2004a. “Hegel’s End-of-Art Thesis.” A New History of German Literature, edited
by David E. Wellbery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 535–540.
———. 2004b. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2007. “Embodied Meanings, Isotypes, and Aesthetic Ideas.” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 65(1): 121–9.
———. 2014. Art after the End of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Geulen, Eva. 2006. The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel. Translated by James McFarland.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by Thomas
Malcolm Knox. Oxford: Clarendon.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2000. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Pippin, Robert B. 2014. After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Vercellone, Federico. 2013. Dopo la morte dell’arte. Bologna: il mulino.
Vilar, Gerard. 2010. Desartización. Paradojas del arte sin fin. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad
Salamanca.
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15
Representation, Truth, and Historical Reality
FRANK ANKERSMIT
Le point de la representation de l’univers dans chaque monade estant establi, le reste n’est
que consequences.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
1 Introduction
The word “representation” can be used in different contexts. The main uses are (1)
linguistic representation, (2) political representation, and (3) aesthetic representation.
We should primarily, in the first case, think of the representation of the world by the use
of language; in the second of how in many countries the collective will is expressed by
means of political representation; and in the third of the work of art representing a
sitter or a landscape. But is the meaning in all three cases the same? If so, this would be
of considerable interest. Recall how Kant divided his three Critiques into three domains:
of truth (first Critique), of ethics (second Critique) and of aesthetics and nature (third
Critique). Though Kant carefully carved out relations between the three, they were to
remain fundamentally distinct. Just as “Gallia omnis divisa est in partes tres,” so it is
with philosophy for Kant – and, in fact, down to the present day. There is no bridge bet-
ween the “is” and the “ought” (first and second Critique), and since the universality of
the judgment of taste is subjective and not objective, it cannot be of any use in the first
two domains where objective validity is required. Nevertheless, if the word “representa-
tion” did have the same meaning in the three different contexts, this would enable us to
132
enlarge the tunnels between the three domains of philosophy a bit beyond the size Kant
allowed. We might, perhaps, even come to the conclusion that representation is the
common ground for all three domains.
Can sameness of meaning of the word “representation” be upheld for the three
domains via the notion of truth? That truth can be used in the context of linguistic
representation is, I would almost say, a “truism.” First, the philosophical analysis of
linguistic representation is mainly an effort to find out the truth about truth.
Second, language may express truths about the world. This view is often called “rep-
resentationalism.” Next, truth has been used for political representation – when a
political collectivity engages its political will. Brutus writes in the Anti-Federalist
Papers:
the very term representative, implies, that the person or body chosen for this purpose,
should resemble those who appoint them – representation of the people of America, if it be
a true one, must be like the people. (…) They are the sign – the people are the thing signified
(…) (my italics) (Manin 1997, 110).
Finally, there is the truth in aesthetic representation, when we say about a portrait or a
marine painting of a sea-battle that is true to the sitter or the warships patterned in
battle. Or when Dostoyevsky’s novels truly represent human nature.
However, these compatibilities of truth and representation are highly question-
able. The theory of political representation defended by Brutus is nowadays univer-
sally rejected. As for aesthetics, we may prefer a “truthful” caricature to a photo of
some politician even though the latter is strictly more “truthful.” The truth in novels
is highly complicated, beyond the Kantian schema. Finally, what about linguistic
representation? The banal truth is that when philosophers use in this context the
notion of representation it is virtually without any content. Representation becomes
a mere spin-off of the notion of truth adapting itself to anything the philosopher of
language has to say about truth. It’s a semantic dummy. In sum, where we’re left in
the case of the second and third domains, with representation without truth, we
end up in the case of linguistic philosophy with truth without representation. So
much, then, for our hope to stage representation as the common ground for the
three domains.
The aim of this chapter is to show that there is a notion of representation in which
truth and representation go together while, at the same time, representation openly and
proudly parades the roots it has in aesthetic representation. This is the notion of repre-
sentation that we find in the writings by Danto and Leibniz.
2 The Human Being as ens representans
Toward the end of his Connections to the World, Danto characterizes the human being as
an ens representans, suggesting that the capacity of representation is our essence, as
human beings [Danto 1989, 251]. But what does Danto understand by “representa-
tion”? Danto suggests one meaning when inviting us to think of a triangle as having (1)
subject, (2) representation, and (3) the world as its three corners. Danto proposes three
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FRANK ANKERSMIT
relations between (1) world and subject, (2) subject and representation, and (3) repre-
sentation and the world. The first is of causality: the world may cause us to have certain
representations of it. The third asks for the truth or falsity of our representations of the
world. (1) and (3) sustain the “connections to the world.” The second relation, causal or
not, is internal to the subject, a mental representation. Without external relation, the
mind would be a mere Cartesian ens cogitans, not an ens representans. Or, as Danto some-
what ingenuously states, representation presupposes the existence of an outside world
to which we can have access (Danto 1989, 13).
Here, Danto is thinking of linguistic representation. He writes: “the thought that
sentences must be the basic representation and that we are linguistic entities come late
to philosophical awareness, and it is part of what sets our century apart from the rich
but inadequate history of speculation on the content of the mind” (Danto 1989, 250).
Next, he asks us to imagine a car having a gauge saying that “the tank is empty.” For
Danto, this is not a (true) sentence if it compels us to grant the car the knowledge of hav-
ing an empty tank. Cars don’t know; only minds know. They are like texts constantly
being rewritten. Clearly, Danto discusses here true (or false) sentences and the
knowledge expressed by them. So we’re still safely in the domain of linguistic represen-
tation here – and where the notion of representation is (as we saw above) without any
specific philosophical content.
Danto was one of the most original philosophers of art and aesthetics of the twen-
tieth century. He used the term “representation” in this context as well. Two possibilities
arise. The first is that Danto simply had two conceptions of representation, one for the
philosophy of language and/or linguistic representation and another for aesthetic rep-
resentation, and that he carelessly used the same term for both. The fact that he never
explicitly contrasted either the two conceptions or the different possible uses of the
term “representation” suggests that he probably believed that any sensible person
would immediately recognize that the meaning the term has in the context of linguistic
representation differs from its meaning in aesthetic representation – and this is all
there is to it.
Then the other possibility: perhaps he believed there to be some common ground
between art and knowledge (assuming the latter to be a central topic in philosophy of
language); more specifically, that there should be a cognitive dimension to art and
aesthetic representation. As far as I know, Danto never discussed the specific cognitive
merits of art. So we will never be able to tell whether he was prepared to grant to art a
specific cognitive function or not. Yet, no kind of art was less likely to invite a promising
analysis of the cognitive dimensions of aesthetic representation than the art Danto
liked most to discuss: that of Pollock, Barnett Newman, De Kooning, Rauschenberg,
Rothko, and so on. Had Danto shared Gombrich’s and Wollheim’s interest in figurative
art, he might have given us something to go on here. But even when (most subtly) com-
menting on artists such as Breughel, Caravaggio, Degas, Leonardo, Raphael,
Rembrandt, or Vasari, Danto’s focus was not on the cognitivist aspirations of their
work (supposing that we can attribute such aspirations to them). Still, let’s now assume
that, for Danto, the word “representation” has two meanings: a weaker, predominantly
epistemic one for linguistic representation and a stronger one for art.
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3 Danto’s Four Theories of Representation
Danto discusses aesthetic representation according to three theories. But a fourth sug-
gests itself. Danto illustrates the first with Nietzsche’s account of the Dionysian rites in
The Birth of Tragedy: each time a quasi-orgasmic state of frenzy is achieved in the ritual,
the God Dionysius is believed to be present again. Representation is here re-presenta-
tion. This theory is a non-starter.1 Suppose I teach a class each Tuesday. But each
Tuesday I will be myself when entering that class again, and not a representation of
myself. We are not representations of ourselves. This leaves us with the resemblance
theory and the substitution theory of representation.
According to the former, a representation resembles what it represents; think of the
drawing of a tree and the tree itself. Think next of a red spot on a map of France repre-
senting Paris. This spot does not resemble Paris; nevertheless, in the practice of mapping
and map-reading, the red spot is made to function as a cartographic substitute for the
actual city of Paris. This is why theorists such as Gombrich, Goodman, and Danto prefer
the substitution theory to the resemblance theory of representation. It may be that
there is more truth in the resemblance theory than the adherents of the substitution
theory allow, so that looking for a prudent mix of the two recommends itself. Whatever
the possibility, the crucial datum is that both theories agree that the representation and
what it represents are different things.
In Danto’s writings, now, there is the trace of a fourth theory of representation. It
differs from both the resemblance and the substitution theory by claiming the identity
of the representation with the represented. Obviously, at first sight, this is a most coun-
ter-intuitive theory of representation: for can we possibly still speak of a represented
and its representation if both are identical? In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,
Danto comes closest to formulating this theory:
And something of the same sort is true for the historical period considered as an entity. It is
a period solely from the perspective of the historian, who sees it from without; for those
who lived in the period it would be just the way life was lived. And asked, afterwards, what
is was like to have lived then, they may answer from the outside, from the historian’s per-
spective. From the inside there is no answer to be given; it was simply the way things were.
So when the members of a period can give an answer in terms satisfactory to the historian,
the period will have exposed its outward surface and in a sense be over, as a period (Danto
1981, 207).
The idea is that a historical period is a historical period only if seen as such from a per-
spective later than itself. We don’t have, first, the historical period (as a represented)
and, next, the historical period (as a representation of that represented), in the way that
the sitter for a portrait and the portrait exist independently from each other. Rather, the
existence of the historical period (as a representation) is the condition for the existence
of the historical period (as a represented) and vice versa. It is as if the hierarchy between
a representation and the represented (i.e., what the representation represents) has been
reversed, as if the sitter for a portrait could only come into being with the portrait(s)
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FRANK ANKERSMIT
that have been painted of him. The represented comes into being with the representa-
tion. As long as there was no representation, there was simply nothing to be repre-
sented – at that time people were still blind to the represented. Better still, at that time
there was, as yet, no represented at all. But after the representation had come into
being, thanks to the historian, the represented existed, albeit as a product or spin-off of
the representation only – for the historian lives in a world in which the world as repre-
sented by him has ceased to exist. It's having gone out of existence is, as Danto correctly
emphasizes, a condition for the possibility of our having a representation of it. For as
long as the past still existed, it was the present and therefore a reality that could not pos-
sibly be represented “as past.” Historical reality only comes into being ex post facto
when the past no longer exists. Historical writing is the science of the ex post facto. Now,
what drops away in Danto’s account is the represented as an autonomous entity – as it
clearly still is in, for example, the sitter for a portrait.2 The result is that the terms repre-
sentation and the represented may well have different meanings or intensions (here they
still respect the origin they have in the resemblance and the substitution theory), but
their extension is the same – as is the case in Frege’s example of the morning and the
evening star. And again, having the same extension is where the representation and the
represented essentially differ from how things are in the case of the resemblance and
the substitution theory.
Danto does not develop this fourth theory of representation in any detail; in fact,
what was said just now is, to a large extent, a “charitable interpretation” (in Davidson’s
terminology) of what he says. He merely suggests the possibility of this account of rep-
resentation and seems to be uninterested in, and even unaware of, what is new and
revolutionary in it. It is even flatly at odds with other more well-considered and lengthily
elaborated discussions of representation elsewhere in his vast oeuvre (Danto 2007,
Chapter XIV).
If, then, we want a more satisfactory account of this variant of representation,
we will have to turn elsewhere. Leibniz is the first one to come to mind – as commen-
tators such as Dillmann, Köhler, and Mahnke insisted already a century ago Leibniz
is, after all, the philosopher of representation par excellence.3 His substances,
monads, are, basically, representations of the universe – of its past, present and
future – as perceived from their unique point of view. The notion of representation
is the throbbing heart of his entire system. As he acknowledges himself: “le point de
la representation de l’univers dans chaque monade estant establi, le reste n’est que
consequences” (quoted in Köhler 1913, 162). Moreover, Leibniz allows us to elabo-
rate Danto’s fourth theory of representation and to re-formulate it in terms of a
consistent account of how representation functions in the sciences and history. My
appeal to Leibniz should not therefore be regarded as a mere strategic maneuver, or
as an attempt to exploit his thought for a purpose not having its solid basis in his
philosophical writings. With Leibniz we get deeper into the secrets of representation
than with any other philosopher. Above all since his notion of representation com-
pels us to propose a new theory of what is (historical) reality. As we shall see by the
end of this chapter, the reflection on representation urges us to reconsider our
ontological commitments.
136
4 Leibniz’s Monadology
In Sections 6 and 7 of the Monadology, Leibniz offered the following summary of his
(monadological) metaphysics:
so one can say that monads can only begin or end all at once, that is, they cannot begin
except by creation or end except by annihilation […]. There is likewise no way of explaining
how a monad can be altered or changed internally by any creature, since nothing can be
transposed in it, and we cannot conceive in it, as we can in composite things among whose
parts there may be changes, that any internal motion can be excited, directed, increased,
or diminished from without. Monads have no windows through which anything could
enter or depart. Accidents cannot be detached from substances and march about outside
of substances, as the sensible species of the Scholastics once did. So neither substance not
attribute can enter a monad from without (Leibniz 1976, 643).
This picture of the world consisting of windowless entities wholly enclosed within
themselves is, at first sight, the ne plus ultra of implausibility and completely at odds
with how common sense demands us to look at our world. Nevertheless, Leibniz’s
metaphysics respects at least partly our intuitions about how the world is given to us
– for it incontestably presents itself to us in the form of individual things. Leibniz
took the idea over from the scholastics, especially the leader of the “second scholas-
tics,” Francesco Suarez (1548–1617). He expounded it already in the Leipzig-
dissertation he wrote as a seventeen-year-old and to which he adhered for all of his
life.4 He relentlessly elaborated it into its last logical (and nominalist) consequences
concluding with a universe consisting of individuals only. However, these individ-
uals (he called them “substances” or “monads”) are individuals in a far more radical
sense than in any modern conception of them (Ankersmit 2013). Whereas the latter
leaves ample room for all we would wish to locate “between” individuals, such as
their interactions, their relationships, or generalizations over individuals, all of this
is “packed up” or “subsumed,” so to speak, by Leibniz within the individuals them-
selves. This is what makes them “windowless,” as he put it in the passage quoted
above.
So even this world consisting of individuals only differs, in the end, dramatically
from how common sense tells us to conceive of it. But the latter appears again in
Leibniz’s system as the domain of the “phaenomena bene fundata”5; that is, in the
world as it appears to the monads. Interactions and relations between things then enter
the scene – giving us the world as we know it. So when we move from the metaphysical
foundation of the universe – the domain of the monads – to that of the “phaenomena
bene fundata,” the monads react like the buds of flowers: they unfold their petals, open
up and make their inner selves visible to each other. Relations, the laws of nature, still
lying dormant in the monads, now awaken to active life and can become the object of
scientific research. Both Kant and Leibniz postulate a phenomenological reality and
something “deeper” from which it originates. For Kant, this is noumenal reality about
which nothing can be said. The noumenon is, therefore, in the Kantian system at best a
redundancy, at worst a mystery, and in any case an entity that is best removed from it.6
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The result is idealism. But the whole effort of the Leibnizian system is to leave no room
for any mysteries in the relationship between the noumenal and the phenomenal
worlds: the monadological universe is the metaphysical counterpart of the word of the
“phaenomena bene fundata.”
Leibniz requires us to conceive of the monadological universe as an infinity of
monads mirroring themselves in each other, without there being anything outside or
beyond this basic metaphysical fact. The claim almost inevitably invites the complaint
that this cannot be, since it would reduce the Leibnizian universe to the nonsensical
status of a house of mirrors where everything mirrors everything else – but with the
all-important qualification that there is nothing to start or trigger this endless mirror-
ing process. So, if we are prepared to go along with Leibniz’s metaphysics, we must pos-
tulate, in addition to his metaphysics, something existing outside and independently of
this endless mirroring process and that is actually mirrored by the mirrors. Just as in a
house of mirrors, nothing will happen as long as nobody enters it. A metaphysically
upgraded version of the “phaenomena been fundata” being here the obvious candi-
date; and then the proper “representational order” seems to have been restored. For
then the domain of the “phaenomena bene fundata” contains the representeds and
that of the monads, the representations. However, as Leibniz-scholars will immediately
protest, this is irrevocably at odds with Leibniz’s claim that (1) there is no reality outside
the monads and how they represent the world, and (2) that the “phaenomena bene
fundata” must therefore be located in that world. and not outside it. For Leibniz, there is
nothing outside or beyond representation and their representeds. As Cassirer forcefully
put it:
The universe, as represented by the monads, is the sum and the totality of all spatial-
temporal phenomena: but precisely these phenomena themselves present to the mind in
their order and with their intimate lawlike connections a content and a fundament more
certain and solid than could possibly be demanded. Here thought finds its final halt and
objective destination. […] So it is mere self-deception if some metaphysics would pretend to
be able to go beyond these phenomena. Hence, Leibnizian philosophy has no answer to
offer to the question of why there is this ever-changing manyfold of representations (my
translation) (Cassirer 1966, 97).
To forget this is to miss the whole point of his metaphysics. If Leibniz’s critics continue
their protest and reiterate that there simply must be something that is mirrored, the
discussion will copy that between realists and idealists. Realists always snap at the ide-
alist: “don’t you see that chair and table over there, so how could you possibly deny
there is a reality outside ourselves?” To which the idealist replies: “of course I see that
chair and that table. But you have still not grasped my point when I said ‘esse est per-
cipi.’” So it is with Leibniz; though he would probably prefer to say that being is both
perceiving and being perceived (or representing and being represented). Replacing
“being” by A, “representing” by B and “being represented” by C, we get “A = B = C,”
suggesting the identity of representation (or the representation) and being represented
(or the represented).
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5 Leibniz and the Identity of the Representation and the Represented
Cassirer’s observation gets us to the heart of the matter. Since there is nothing outside
or beyond the monad’s representations, there is no domain apart from the representa-
tion where we could locate the representation’s represented. Surely, monads represent
the universe that is just all the monads within it. And then we may be tempted to con-
clude that these other monads are the represented. The objection seems to make sense.
But this gets us to a snag we overlook all too easily. Take a landscape and a painting of
that landscape. It seems natural to say that the painting is the representation and the
landscape the represented. But is it? Let’s think of two painters painting the same
landscape from the same perspective and under exactly the same circumstances, while
producing – as ordinarily will then be the case – two different paintings of that allegedly
same landscape. There must now also be two different representeds, for representeds
always correspond to representations, and if representations differ, their representeds
must do so as well. Hence, each of the two painters projects his own represented on that
landscape.7 So we then have two representeds – but only one landscape. Clearly, this
state of affairs is impossible to reconcile with the intuition that the landscape should be
the represented. So we shall have to disconnect the represented from the landscape. But
what now should we “do” with it? We know where “to put” landscapes and representa-
tions of landscapes in the practice of landscape-painting, but where can we safely store
away representeds? There is no depository for them – unless we are prepared to add to
the inventory of the world a category of things no one has ever perceived or ever will.
The situation is rather like thinking a thought, asserting an assertion or wishing a
wish, and where the activity the verb refers to and its object are inextricably tied up with
each other. How could we think without there being a thought we think; how could
there be a thought without the act of thinking? It is different with verbs like reading,
cutting, or telephoning. The book you read, the rose you cut, or the person you tele-
phone exist independently of their being, read, cut, or telephoned by you. But represent-
ing is on a par with thinking and not with reading, cutting, or telephoning. Representing,
that is, offering a representation, implies the identity of the representation and the rep-
resented, just as the thought is the act of thinking it. We do not, first, create some empty
space by the act of thinking that is “filled,” next, with the thought we think. Similarly,
the represented cannot be isolated from the representation (as the book can be isolated
from the act of reading). Again, it’s like Nietzsche’s example of “the rumble of the
thunder”: there is not (1) the thunder and (2) its rumbling, no, the thunder is its rum-
bling. And just as “the rumbling of the thunder” is a wholly accepted manner of
speaking, so is the phrase “the representation of a landscape.” Still, we must recognize
that we have pulled apart one and the same thing (thunder and rumbling, or represen-
tation and represented) by associating the second term with some objectively existing
phenomenon (the rumbling we hear, or the landscape we see). In fact, in all these cases,
the action and its result are the same.8
Hence, this is not meant to dispute the meaningfulness of the phrase “representing a
landscape” (or “the rumbling of the thunder,” for that matter), nor an attempt to
correct our dictionaries. Even more so, the argument must not be interpreted as the
(patently ridiculous) claim that the representation is a representation of the
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FRANK ANKERSMIT
represented, if the latter term stands for the representation’s represented, and not for
what the representation represents (i.e., the landscape). The representation represents
the landscape, but not its represented. The whole point of my argument is, after all, that
we must keep apart from each other the landscape and the representation’s represented.
Indeed, my argument is only that in the process of representation, the represented does
not get us all the way back from the representation to what it represents (e.g., the
landscape). To do so is what the advocates of the resemblance and the substitution
theory hope to do. Their theories leave far behind themselves what was called “the rep-
resented” here; they boldly move back again to the landscape that the representation
represents. And they rely on the mechanisms of resemblance and/or substitution – per-
haps other such mechanisms could be conceived of – to make the final leap from the
represented (as understood here) to the landscape. Still, however understandable the
wish to make this final leap may be, reason forbids us to move beyond the represented.
We can go no further than that.
Arguably, the source of all misunderstandings is the ambiguity of the term “the
landscape”: the definite article suggests there being just one landscape in this context
(which is correct) and that we exactly know what that landscape is or what the phrase
“the (this) landscape” refers to, as undoubtedly is the case with proper names, such as
“Queen Elizabeth II of England.” Decisive is an asymmetry between how language
relates to the world, on the one hand, and the representation to what it represents, on
the other. Proper names and uniquely identifying descriptions fix this relation with
absolute precision in the case of language. But there is no such fixity or certainty in the
case of representation. For, to repeat, when two (or more) painters paint a landscape, it
makes no sense to say that this painter paints the landscape and the other does not –
even though the sometimes dramatic differences between their paintings seemingly
compels us to make such a decision (how could two, or more, dramatically different rep-
resentations of a landscape possibly be representations of one and the same landscape?).
However, in the case of painting (representation) each painter has, or creates9 “his own
landscape,” so to say, and there is not some intersubjectively accepted landscape that
could function as the neutral arbiter between them.
6 Representation and Reality

It has been argued that both Danto and Leibniz defended a theory of representation
differing from the two traditional ones – the resemblance and the substitution
theory of representation – and did so by upholding the identity of the representation
and the represented. Now one may ask: what’s the big deal? Surely, the latter differs
from the former, as I have made clear. But it has not been shown that the former two
should be wrong, and if so, why. In the introduction, it was pointed out that the
word “representation” can be used in many different contexts and that we have no
good reason to assume that all these uses should share some common ground. In
sum, we now have just one more theory of representation – indeed a welcome
addition to our understanding of representation – and that seems to be all there is
to it.
140
Without exaggerating the importance of my argument, I do insist that more is

involved in it than may seem so at first sight. Recall that I appealed to historical repre-
sentation when suggesting the plausibility of the third theory of representation. The
example could be so suggestive since it makes sense to say – with Danto – that they seem
to entail a reversion in the hierarchy of the represented and the representation.
“Normally” we think the represented to precede its representation. But in the case of
historical representation we conclude – with Danto – that historical reality only comes
into being thanks to representation. Similarly, without some form of political represen-
tation there is no political reality – but only an indefinite mass of human individuals.
Clearly, most people will correctly be most reluctant, to say the least, to agree with the
idea that mountains, plants, animals, and human beings only come into being with
their having been represented in one way or another. On the other hand, they might
agree that the idea is less foolhardy for mathematics and the sciences (especially if we
think of the signs10 used in these disciplines).
Ultimately, the issue of whether there is such a conflict between these three theories of
representation discharges into a debate about metaphysics. Self-evidently, one may accept
the challenge and engage in such a debate. But dealing with the problem in this way will
be much like deciding to travel from London to Paris via Hong Kong with all the resulting
dangers of missing flight-connections and potential loss of one’s luggage. So we’d best be
content with the observation that, indeed, we are compelled to some metaphysical fine-
tuning when comparing linguistic representation with aesthetic and historical represen-
tation. The former involves us in a direct conflict between, on the one hand, our
deep-seated common sense conviction that in the case of, for example, landscape painting
the landscape itself is the represented, while, on the other hand, we learned above why we
have good reason to doubt that conviction. Whereas in the case of the latter two, no such
conflict is to be feared, Danto’s and Leibniz’s claim of the identity of the representation
and the represented tells us so, and why. Stretching the metaphysical issue beyond this
quickly leads to a philosophical quagmire subject to the law of the diminishing returns.
Still, the insight that the issues of representation and truth are closely intertwined is
already significant. This is what I wanted to emphasize by this chapter’s title.
Notes
1 Though we shall see in that §5 there is more than a kernel of truth in it insofar as it is sugges-
tive of an identity of the representation and the represented.
2 For an elaboration of this claim, see §5.
3 Dillmann wrote in 1891 that it should be regarded as “den interessantesten und tiefsten,
zugleich den wichtigsten Begriff ” of Leibnizian monadology (Dillmann 2016 (1891), 304).
He was followed in this by several others, such as Cassirer, Heimsoeth, Schmalenbach and,
above all, Paul Köhler who ended his book with the quote from Leibniz used as epigraph for
this chapter.
4 During a stroll through the Rosenthal garden just outside Leipzig when he was fifteen Leibniz
decided in favour of the materialist, mechanistic world view. But it would be an only very brief
flirt. For in the dissertation he wrote two years later he had returned again to the scholastic
notion of the individual.
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FRANK ANKERSMIT
5 To be distinguished from mere “phaenomena” as given in optical illusion or in dreams.

6 As was already perceptively pointed out by Friedrich Heinrich Jakobi to Kant’s profound
irritation.
7 To put it in the terminology I used before: each of the two paintings presents us with a differ-
ent aspect of the landscape. And where the aspect is part of the landscape. When entering a
dark chamber with a torch-light, the aspects of the furniture illuminated by the torch-light
are aspects of the furniture (and not of the torch-light). The “aspect” and the “represented”
are two words for the same.
8 Precision in the use of the verb “to represent” will require us to recognize it to function as the
Greek middle voice: unlike modern English classical Greek knows apart from the active and
the passive form a reflexive use of the verb. For example: apart from the active form “ντύνω το
παιδί” (I cloth the child) and the passive form “το παιδί ντύνεται από τη μητέρα” (the child is
clothed by its mother) there is the medial form “ντύνομαι” (I cloth myself).
9 The English word “landscape” is derived from the Dutch word “landschap.” Many Dutch words
have this suffix “-schap.” It is the same in German with the cognate suffix “-schaft”; think of
“Wissenschaft,” “Gemeinschaft” or, again, “Landschaft.” The etymological origins of the Dutch
suffix “-schap” and the German “-schaft” are identical with those of the Dutch verb “scheppen”
and the German verb “schaffen,” meaning “creating.” Etymology thus suggests that a landscape
(“landschap” or “Landschaft”) is created rather than found. Clearly, this is in agreement with
my argument here. I’d like to thank my colleague Professor Jack Hoeksema for this information.
10 Where I define the sign as the symbol that stands for, or represents itself–and where, hence,
the representation and the represented coincide. For an elaboration of this claim and for the
relevance of the notion of the sign for an adequate understanding of historical writing, see
Frank Ankersmit, “Where the Extremes Meet,” in Jouni Matti Kuukkanen ed., Philosophy of
History. Twenty-First-Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 67–87.
References
Ankersmit, Frank. 2013. “History as the Science of the Individual.” Journal of the Philosophy of
History 7: 396–426.
———. 2020. “Where the Extremes Meet.” In Philosophy of History. Twenty-First-Perspectives,
edited by J. M. Kuukkanen, 67–87. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1966. “Einleitung.” In Hauptschriften zur Grundlegung der Philosophie. Band II,
edited by G. W. Leibniz, 97. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.
Danto, Arthur C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Common Place. A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge,
———. 1989. Connections to the World. The Basic Concepts of Philosophy. New York: Harper & Row.
———. 2007. Narration and Knowledge. With a New Introduction by Lydia Goehr and a New
Conclusion by Frank Ankersmit. New York: Columbia University Press.
Dillmann, E. 2016 (1891). Eine neue Darstellung der Leibnizschen Monadenlehre auf Grund der
Quellen. Norderstedt: Hansebooks.
Köhler, Paul. 1913. Der Begriff der Repräsentation bei Leibniz. Bern: Verlag von A. Franke.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von. 1976. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Philosophical Papers and Letters. A
Selection Translated and Edited, with an Introduction by Leroy E. Loemker. Dordrecht and Boston
MA: Reidl.
Manin, Bernard. 1997. The Principles of Representative Government. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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16
History and Retrospection
NOËL CARROLL
1 Historical Retrospection
For Arthur Danto, historical thought is essentially a matter of retrospection insofar as

the historian comments on the events, actions, and thoughts of agents in the past from
a future that in turn becomes the historian’s gaze into the past. The historian can
describe, from the perspective of November 1918, the United States’ entry into the
Great War in 1917 as its turning point. The description is what makes for “historical
knowledge as such,” “the historical mode of cognition,” and “the phenomenology of
historical consciousness” (Danto 2007, 342–47). Danto contrasts his account of his-
torical thinking with two others: one is the substantive philosophy of history; the other
is the eyewitness view. He regards both of these as mistaken in virtue of their failure to
take heed of the retrospective dimension. The first is exemplified by thinkers from Saint
Augustine to G.F.W. Hegel and Karl Marx. They present the world‘s history as leading
up to and reaching its end in the City of God, the Ideal state, or the withering away
thereof. The eyewitness view, contrarily, contains the commonplace prejudice that his-
tory is a record of what one witnesses moment by moment: what is felt, seen, thought
in all the varieties of immediate experience. The more informants, the merrier.
2 Substantive Philosophy of History
Danto’s argument against the very possibility of constructing a substantive philosophy

of history begins by pointing out that what its philosophers aspire to is the construction
of a narrative of the whole of history (Danto 2007, 1–16). However, on Danto’s view,
in order to compose a genuine narrative of the entire course of history, one would have
to know, really know, how the story ended. But that would require, so to speak, standing
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Noël Carroll
outside of history. Yet, that is a position no one can inhabit. The substantive philosopher
of history is, like the rest of us, inescapably inside the historical process. The whole story
of human history, logically speaking given Danto’s concept of narrative, cannot be nar-
rated until after “the fat lady sings.” And no one lives there.
Of course, Danto is relying here upon what he takes to be the nature of a proper nar-
rative. A proper narrative, according to Danto, is not just a time-ordered chronicle of
the events and states of affairs that happen. A proper narrative connects those events in
such a way that the ending of the story discloses the significance of the events, actions,
and states of affairs that come before it. That is, a proper narrative has what literary
critics call “closure.” Thus, although the substantive philosophers of history pretend to
be telling the whole history of the world, they are not truly doing so just because as long
as humans are still alive, not all the facts are in. Something may happen after the
substantive philosopher of history has published his treatise that will cancel his diag-
nosis, as Francis Fukuyama learnt after his The End of History and the Last Man hit the
bookstores in 1992 (Fukuyama 1992).
From Danto’s viewpoint, the substantive philosopher of history is not only a failed
narrator but also a failed historian. This is because narrative is the mode of discourse
appropriate to the historical mode of cognition insofar as narrative closure is what
reveals retrospectively the significance of the moments described in the preceding chain
of events. And what else, if not explaining the significance of past events, is the
fundamental role of the historian? Thus, the substantive philosopher of history is
nothing but a historian manqué. His identification of the end of history is at best an
attempted prophecy and at worst a wish.
For example, according to Marx, with the inevitable arrival of communism, he
“could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criti-
cize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shep-
herd, or critic” (Danto 2007, 395) But this story of a utopian return to an Eden after
the demise of the capitalist division of labor cannot count as genuine history because it
is not in the past of the historian.
As Lydia Goehr points out, Danto emphasizes when a historian can write what about
the past (Goehr 2007). Substantive philosophy of history violates the relevant temporal
constraints on genuine history writing by describing what has not happened yet.
Because a genuine historical narrative focuses on something in the historian’s past, it
will be incomplete just because the historian or her successors have a future. That is
why as the future arrives, new historical narratives must be written, going beyond the
previous ones. By attempting to fix the end of history, the substantive philosopher of
history fails as a historian because he presumes to know the future historically. He pre-
tends to tell a story that he is in no position to tell.
Danto cannot be charged with begging the question here, since the idea of narrative
on which his argument depends does seem to mark an intuitively recognizable distinc-
tion between a time-ordered list of a series of events in roughly the same spatio-tempo-
ral neighborhood, often referred to as a chronicle, and a narrative proper which
connects those events in terms of their significance. The latter does seem to require
closure (which requires knowing where the story ends). Consequently, if this account
of narrative is accepted and proper historians are identified as narrators of this sort,
144
then substantive philosophers of history are not proper historians, since they do not
really have access to knowledge of what closure attends the history they recount.
Parenthetically, Danto’s demonstration of the limitations of the substantive phi-
losophy of history not only clarifies his notion of historical retrospection but also
dismisses the substantive philosophy of history as an acceptable philosophical
approach to history. It takes the entire historical process itself as its object which, as
Danto argues, is not feasible as long as future development is still open to living
humans. But this failure of the substantive philosophy of history paves the way for an
alternative philosophical approach, namely, what Danto calls the analytical philos-
ophy of history.
This is the kind of philosophy that Danto himself practices. It takes historical inquiry
as its object of study and takes up such questions as the nature of the kind of cognition
that is definitive of history as the investigation of the past. This philosophy of history
involves the refutation of false conceptions of historical inquiry, like the substantive
philosophy of history and the eyewitness view of history.
3 Eyewitness View of History
Danto’s objection to the eyewitness view of history, like his dismissal of the substantive
philosophy of history, also rests upon its failure to appreciate the role of retrospection in
the production of historical knowledge as such. The eyewitness view of history is the
commonplace view that what history, as a process of inquiry, ideally aspires to is a rep-
resentation of the past exactly as it unfolded on a moment-to-moment basis to its inhab-
itants – that is, a representation of the past as it appeared to our ancestors – just as they
saw it, so to speak. And, at least according to Hayden White, something like this goal is
also shared by many living historians who desire to hold a mirror up to the past (White
1978). However, Danto rejects this wish by demonstrating how far short it falls from the
actual practice of genuine historical research.
Danto refutes the eyewitness view of history by means of a thought experiment that
reveals, as Oscar Wilde might say, that one should be careful what one wishes for. For
the satisfaction of the wish that encourages the eyewitness view of history would actu-
ally thwart some of the most important features of what we recognize as the genuine
practice of history as inquiry.

In order to defeat the witness view of history, Danto invents a science fiction machine
called “The Ideal Chronicler” (Danto 2007, 149–82). The Ideal Chronicler registers
every historical fact as it emerges. It describes each fact as would to an observer at the
moment of its emergence. It is epistemically constrained, as an actual observer would
have been, to having no access to the future. It produces a chronicle, a list of time-
ordered events. It is an ideal chronicle because it supplies a list of every event that tran-
spires with no gaps in the record.
Indeed, it is that feature of the ideal chronicle that probably mistakenly convinces
many that this is what they want of history: a complete record with nothing left out.
But the ideal chronicler diverges from actual historians in Danto’s view because it can
have no knowledge of what is in the future of the events chronicled. In other words, the
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Noël Carroll
ideal chronicler lacks something that is essential to historical cognition, according to

Danto, namely, a retrospective vantage point from which to discern the significance of
the events that preoccupy them.
To demonstrate this, Danto invites readers to think about what he calls “narra-
tive sentences.” “When the United States invaded Afghanistan, America entered its
longest war to date” is a narrative sentence. It says something about America’s
invasion of Afghanistan that could only be known in the future of that invasion –
specifically at the point in time when it became the longest war waged by the United
States. With the notion of the narrative sentence in hand, Danto is ready to unmask
what is wrong with the Ideal Chronicler and the eyewitness view of history it
elaborates.
Imagine that the Ideal Chronicler works by churning out each fact as it appears in a
descriptive sentence constrained, like a historical witness, by lacking knowledge of the
future. Can the Ideal Chronicler print out a sentence like “When the United States
invaded Afghanistan, it entered its longest war to date”? Certainly not: because that
would require knowledge that would only become available many years hence. In short,
the Ideal Chronicler is necessarily incapable of producing narrative sentences. It can
describe historical events in the past as they appear in the present of the Ideal Chronicler.
But the Ideal Chronicler has no knowledge of what is in the future of those events and
states of affairs. Thus, unlike the practicing historian, the Ideal Chronicler cannot tell
its readers the historical significance of the events it records in light of the ongoing flow
of events of which they are integral parts.
Consequently, insofar as the disclosure of the significance of past events in the
unfolding chains of events that comprise the historical process is a primary, if not the
primary, task of the historian, the Ideal Chronicler cannot serve as a model of historical
research, and the eyewitness view of history which it realizes so completely must be
abandoned. It is not up to delivering what we want most from historians – not only a list
of what happened but accounts of the significance of what happened.
Narrative sentences are an invention of Danto’s that enables him to show what is
wrong about the desire for an Ideal Chronicler. It is not the case that Danto is claiming
that all genuinely historical sentences are narrative sentences. Clearly, they are not. But
the reason that they cannot be processed by the Ideal Chronicler reveals something
about history as inquiry for Danto: namely that history writing is retrospective; that the
historian discovers the significance of past events by connecting those events to events
in the future of those events but which are in the past of the historian.
What we expect from historians is not a simple chronicle – a time-ordered list of this
event followed by that, and then what came next. What we want is arrangement of
those events in terms of their significance as revealed in the ongoing development of
the relevant events. Just as the significance of Oedipus’s killing of the old man and his
retainers at the crossroad is disclosed subsequently, so the significance of the Boston
Tea Party only gains historical weight in the historical narrative of the American
Revolution. What comes later in the story gives meaning to what came earlier. So, even
if not all historical sentences are narrative sentences, narrative sentences illuminate
the essential, narrative, retrospective structure of historical knowledge (Danto 1986,
1987, 1997; for criticism, see Carroll 1998).
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4 End of Art
Before turning to a critical discussion of Danto’s analytical characterization of histor-

ical inquiry, note should be taken of Danto’s best-known foray into history writing,
namely his conjecture that art history has come to an end. In a series of articles, Danto
argued that sometime around 1963, with the exhibition of certain works by Andy
Warhol – most notably his Brillo Box – art came to an end.
On the face of it, this claim seemed patently absurd. Surely since 1963 more art has
been created in the United States than at any other comparable time period in its his-
tory. However, this response to Danto’s conjecture rested upon a misunderstanding.
For Danto’s conception of the end of art had to do with his sense of the nature of nar-
rative, including historical narratives, and the way in which the end of a story casts
retrospective significance upon the events that led up to it. Danto’s proclamation about
the end of art had nothing to do with the volume of art productivity and everything to
do with how that productivity could be characterized in the form of a historical
narrative.
From Danto’s perspective, the structure of a narrative, properly so called, could be
exemplified by the old proverb: “For want of a shoe, the horse was lost, for want of the
horse, the rider was lost, for want of the rider the battle was lost, and for want of victory,
the kingdom was lost.” In this story, the significance of the failure of the horse to be
shod, which could not be known until after the fall of the kingdom, is clarified retro-
spectively. According to Danto, this kind of story can no longer be told about the art-
world. In that sense, a certain sort of art history, as a form of inquiry, can no longer be
told. Thus, it is a certain mode of art history as inquiry, not art history as process, that
has come to an end.
For Danto, there have been two great narratives in art history. The first can be called
“the conquest of visual appearances.” It is the quest for the highest degree of verisimil-
itude possible. Started by the Greeks, restarted during the Italian Renaissance, and con-
tributed to by Netherlandish painters, the artists of the Baroque and Neo-Classical
periods, and nineteenth-century realists like Courbet, graphic artists came closer and
closer to capturing the appearances of the visible world. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion tells
one version of this story.
Moreover, according to Danto, this story had a happy ending. Photography and then
cinema, which adds the impression of movement to the visual array, complete the aspi-
ration to reproduce visual appearances. And once the quest has been realized, the art
historian could emplot the significant contributions that led to the closure of the project.
However, the very success of the first great narrative of Western art history puta-
tively led to a crisis. Once the narrative question of whether or not the conquest of
visual appearances could be answered, the question emerged of what the aspiring artist
was to do next.
Several projects recommended themselves. Two notable ones were expressionism
and formalism. In the case of expressionism, artists would create designs expressive of
typically unnamed affective states, such as emotions and moods. Formalism, in con-
trast, encouraged artists to produce what was called “significant form,” visually
arresting compositions of line, color, and vector.
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Noël Carroll
Both these projects were generative, but their respective developments could not support
the kind of linear narrative represented by the story of the conquest of visual appearances.
Why not? Because neither project promised closure. Expressionists could paint, one after
another, of the indeterminately large range of affective states, but there was no determi-
nate point at which the job would be done. Likewise, there are probably enough kinds of
significant forms to keep artists busy till the end of time. But there will be no closure in sight
just because it is so unclear what would constitute closure for a formalist.
Expressionism and formalism could be chronicled. But they could not support the
kind of retrospective narrative exemplified by that of the conquest of visual appear-
ances. This is because they lacked a determinate target, one that the art historian could
recognize retrospectively had been hit. And lacking that, the historian would be unable
to single out, in an evolving narrative, the contributions that made that achievement
possible.
Nevertheless, another option appeared on the horizon, which had an animating
target of the sort that promised the possibility, if achieved, of once again organizing art
history-as-inquiry as a retrospective narrative. And that narrative, for want of a better
label, can be called Modernism.
Roughly speaking, Modernism is the view that the vocation of art is to interrogate
the nature of art by artistic means – to disclose the essence of painting by painting, for
example. Modernists are committed to answering questions like “What is the nature of
painting?” and “What is the nature of sculpture?” by the way they structure their works
in their respective media.
Certain modernists think of flatness as an essential feature of painting which
encourages them to emphasize the surface of their painting rather than attempting to
counterfeit the impression of three-dimensional space. Rather than conceiving of
painting as a window onto the world, various modernists concentrate, so to speak, on
the qualities of the glass itself. Furthermore, this affords a way to construct a develop-
mental narrative that promises the possibility of closure, since painting, ex hypothesi,
has an essential nature that presumably can be made manifest by the way in which
certain paintings have been composed.
This narrative begins with Manet who eschewed various perspectival choices so as to
foreground the two-dimensionality of the painterly object. Impressionism dissolved the
picture plane into dabs of paint which also had a flattening effect, especially when
looked at close-up. Cubists contracted pictorial space by fragmenting it, Pollock by

reducing it to line and color, and Morris Louis by soaking it in paint, thereby fusing the
surface and the medium.
Each Modernist movement and each Modernist artist used technique in a way that
refined what they thought was an essential feature of painting and/or invented more
and more sophisticated ways in which to acknowledge what they already identified as
the relevant conditions of possibility of the medium. The history of art could be
recounted as on the march again. It had a goal toward which it was headed, and it
would achieve its aim once all the essential features of painting were revealed by means
of the artistic choices of Modernist artists.
And this is where Warhol enters the story that Danto is telling. The Modernist
program presupposes that the essential features of painting can be isolated by means of
148
painting. But what are the means of painting? Discernibilia – that is, things the eye can
discern by looking. Warhol’s Brillo Box, on the other hand, is putatively indiscernible
from the everyday Brillo cartons that Proctor and Gamble manufacture. Warhol’s Brillo
Box is an artwork; none of Proctor and Gamble’s Brillo cartons are artworks. Therefore,
whatever accounts for the nature of art is not something that we can discern by looking.
Thus, it is not something that the artist can disclose by plying her trade, just because
she trades in discernibilia.
Danto draws several consequences from this state of affairs. First, since whatever
constitutes art is indiscernible, Modernists must give up on the attempt to isolate the
nature of art by means of painting. If they want to continue the project of defining art,
they must give up painting and become philosophers. Moreover, since the develop-
mental trajectory of art has been stopped in its tracks, artists are now free – in what
Danto designates as the post-history of art – to explore their own interests. Art no
longer has a corporate project. For Danto, this is all to the good. Consequently, Danto’s
conception of the end of art is very open to the highly pluralist art world we see today.
Hence, the ongoing activity of the contemporary art world is not a counterexample to
Danto’s hypothesis, but a confirmation of it.
Of course, the way that Warhol provokes the end of the Modernist narrative is quite
different from the way in which photography and cinema brought closure to the con-
quest-of-appearances narrative. Photography and cinema realized the aspiration that
animated the quest for verisimilitude. Warhol derailed the Modernist project, revealing
retrospectively that Modernism was a quixotic venture from the get-go. Indeed, Danto
thinks that Warhol’s intervention was so decisive that there will never again be the kind
of art historical narrative represented by the two aforesaid stories.
5 Discussion
Although it is quite clear that the interrelated themes of retrospective significance and
narration are the dominant ones in Danto’s philosophy of history, it is less obvious what
specific philosophical claim these themes are meant to serve. Is Danto maintaining that
the discovery of retrospective significance and/or narration is essential to historical
knowledge or cognition, or perhaps more broadly, to history as inquiry? Are retrospec-
tive significance and narration supposed to be unique to history as inquiry, sufficient to

demarcate historical inquiry from scientific inquiry? What is the import of Danto’s
emphasis on these themes?
When Danto first published his work on the philosophy of history, the notion that
narrative was the essential medium of historical inquiry was abroad. Narrative, in
this light, was advanced in contrast to scientific inquiry. One might easily assume
that Danto belongs to that tendency. However, retrospective narration is not sufficient
to demarcate historical inquiry from scientific inquiry. Darwin’s theory of evolution,
the tectonic plate theory of the movement of the continents in geology, and the Big
Bang Theory in cosmology are all retrospective narratives. So, narrative of the kind
that interests Danto does not sharply distinguish between historical and scientific
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Noël Carroll
inquiry. Nor, by the way, does narrative distinguish between the work of the
professional historian and the layperson recounting the past in everyday language.
Moreover, retrospective narration is not an essential medium for the transmission of
historical knowledge. A graph comparing the naval strength of the great powers on the
brink of World War I or a map of medieval shipping routes in the Mediterranean are no
less contributions to the fund of historical knowledge than the story of the rise of Jim
Crow laws after the American Civil War. So, retrospective narration is neither a
necessary nor a sufficient condition for historical inquiry. Nevertheless, by pointing to
its centrality in historical discourse, Danto did make a singular contribution to the
discussion insofar as he dispelled the notion that what we really desire from history is an
account of how folks back then saw it unfolding moment by moment.
Danto’s insight that a genuine historical narrative requires a retrospective stand-
point pinpointed a yawning conceptual flaw in substantive philosophies of history.
Insofar as Francis Fukuyama located the end of history – the triumph of liberal
capitalism everywhere – in his own future, he was not, despite appearances, doing his-
tory proper. He was not situated in the right temporal position to know that the ten-
dencies he observed in the present would result in the conditions he heralded. In this,
Danto not only established that the analytic philosophy of history rather than the
substantive philosophy of history was the appropriate locus of philosophical research,
but he also revealed a systematic error perpetuated by substantive philosophers of
history.
One way of describing that flaw would be to say that although substantive philoso-
phers of history presented their accounts as scientific narratives, they were not, specifi-
cally because they were not genuinely retrospective. However, one might question
whether scientific narration is the only kind of legitimate historical inquiry.
Aren’t some legitimate forms of historical inquiry practical? For example, Robert
Kagan’s The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Emerging Imperial World recounts recent
history in order to alert readers to what needs to be done in the evolving international
situation (Kagan 2018). Not all historical inquiry is scientific in the preceding sense.
Much of the very justification of the practice of history is practical – that is, as a source
of usable information.
In that regard, perhaps we can re-interpret many of the substantive philosophies of
history more charitably than Danto does. When Kant anticipates the emergence of a
cosmopolitan world-federation, he is not pronouncing it to be a done-deal (Kant 1984).

It is rather a plan or a recommendation of how to proceed into the future. It is intended
to orient or to guide princes in the present about the direction of their activities.
Likewise, Marx’s prognostications about the revolution of the proletariat and the with-
ering away of the state might be re-read as charting a pathway through an uncertain
future.
In this way, substantive philosophies of history might be reconceived as orientational
narratives, rather than scientific narratives, and be valued for their practical usefulness
(Carroll 2013). This would not only account for their recurring seductiveness but also
would give them some purchase on one of the legitimate functions of historical inquiry,
thereby salvaging them somewhat from Danto’s otherwise decisive, conceptual onslaught.
150
Moreover, this re-interpretation of substantive philosophies of history may be rele-

vant to a heretofore unacknowledged problem with Danto’s end of art thesis. As we
have seen, Danto has argued for the utter rejection of substantive philosophies of art
and yet his end of art thesis is unmistakably a substantive philosophy of art history.
Thus, strictly speaking, Danto himself has provided us with the very best criticism of his
own view himself. However, if we re-conceive his end of art thesis as an orientational
historical narrative, rather than a scientific historical narrative, we may re-read it as a
useful guide to art making and art criticism in the wake of the decline of the Modernist
project. That is, the end of art thesis may be construed as a useful critical recommenda-
tion to the post-historical artworld rather than an attempt at metaphysics.
References
Carroll, Noël. 1998. “The End of Art?” History and Theory, 37(4): 17–29.
–––––. 2013. “Danto, the End of Art, and the Orientational Narrative,” in Randall E. Auxier and
Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds., The Philosophy of Arthur Danto. Chicago, 433–52.
Danto, Arthur. C. 1986. “The End of Art,” in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New
York, 81–115.
–––––. 1987. “Approaching the End of Art,” in The State of the Art. New York, 202–18.
–––––. 1997. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton.
–––––. 2007 [1985]. Narration and Knowledge. Columbia University Press.
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press.
Goehr, Lydia. 2007. “Afterwords,” in Arthur C. Danto, Narration and Knowledge, New York:
Kagan, Robert. 2018. The Jungle Grows Back: America and our Imperiled World. New York.
Kant, Immanuel. 1984. “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in
Lewis White Beck, ed., Kant on History. Indianapolis, 11–26.
White, Hayden. 1978. “Interpretation in History,” in Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: John Hopkins
Press.
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17
Action in the Shadow of Time1
ADRIAN HADDOCK
In his Analytical Philosophy of History, published in 1965, Arthur Danto made a path-
breaking, but largely unacknowledged contribution to the philosophy of action.2 I shall
suggest that this book, rather than the later Analytical Philosophy of Action (1973), rep-
resents Danto’s most important work in action theory.3
In 1963, Donald Davidson published “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” which encour-
aged us to think about action on the following lines.
Someone has done something. (Jane has turned on a light, say.) As such, something
has happened. (The light has come on.) And it has happened because she has done this
thing. (The light has come on because Jane has turned it on.) A sentence, to the effect
that someone has done something, entails not only a sentence to the effect that
something has happened, but also a sentence representing causality, to the effect that
the second thing has happened because the first thing was done. That the sentence rep-
resenting causality is entailed by the first sentence reflects the fact that its explanans
entails its explanandum. And that it represents causality is reflected in the fact that it
entails that a further causality-representing sentence is true – one to the same effect,
and with the same explanandum, but whose explanans does not entail its explanandum.
(The light has come on because Jane has flipped a switch, for example.) But now we
have a regress: if someone has done something, then something has happened because
she has done something else. Davidson (1987) seeks to stop this regress by positing sen-
tences, to the effect that someone has done something, which entail that something has
happened, but do not entail any sentence representing causality: the things that these
sentences say that we have done are actions of a special kind. Others seek to stop the
regress by positing sentences, to the same effect, which do not entail that anything has
happened: the things that these sentences say that we have done are not actions at all,
but pure acts of will.4 But Davidson and the others agree on the following: modulo the
sentences in the regress-stopping class, sentences to the effect that someone has done
something entail sentences that represent causality; and, it is through sentences to this
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ACTION IN THE SHADOW OF TIME
effect that philosophical reflection on action is to proceed. These two commitments con-
stitute the core of the way of thinking about action that Davidson encouraged.
Danto has the second of these commitments in his sights. And this comes out in his
discussion of “the Ideal Chronicle” (I.C.). No chronicle can be a history, on account of
the distinct temporal standpoint it enshrines. Chronicles are written from a standpoint
that is contemporaneous with what they record – and as such, bear the present tense
– whereas histories are written from a retrospective standpoint – and as such, bear the
past tense. In consequence, the I.C. excludes what Danto calls a “narrative sentence”: a
sentence, in the past tense, which either is or entails a sentence, equally in the past
tense, which represents a pair of things that happened (or were done) at distinct times.
Danto takes sentences of this form to be distinctive of historical representation. And a
sentence representing causality, of the sort that figures in the way of thinking about
action that Davidson encouraged, is a case of such a sentence. So, the I.C. excludes sen-
tences of the very form that Davidson treats as central to the representation of action.
“Is the I.C. then to be deprived of the whole language of action?” (Danto 1965, 159)
It is by asking this question, and answering it as it does, that Danto’s book makes its
signal contribution to action theory.
Its answer is “No” – but not because it posits a special class of regress-stopping sen-
tences that represent actions but are not narrative sentences. Danto’s book does not
have a regress in its sights. Instead, it considers sentences of a form that is absent from
Davidson’s reflection, and in so doing brings out its absence. Davidson’s sentences are to
the effect that someone has done something: their verbs bear the past tense and the per-
fective aspect. But Danto’s sentences are to the effect that someone is doing something:
their verbs bear the present tense and the imperfective aspect. As such, they do not
exhibit the earlier entailments. Someone is doing something. (Jane is building a ship,
say.) It does not follow that she has done this thing. (That Jane has built the ship.) And
so, it does not follow that the relevant thing has happened. (That the ship has been
built.) The route to excogitating a narrative sentence that Davidson’s sentences afford is
no longer available. There is a route to excogitating a “because” sentence that exhibits
a structure of doing and happening. If someone is doing something, then something is
happening. (A ship is being built.) And it is happening because she is doing this thing.
(The ship is being built because Jane is building it.) But this is not a narrative sentence:
its verbs do not bear the past tense and the perfective aspect, and as such it does not rep-
resent a pair of things that have happened (or were done).

Danto’s sentences are central to the language of action. And they are not excluded
from the I.C. But they are excluded from the way of thinking that Davidson encouraged.
Davidson’s sentences represent completed actions, and as such treat of action from a
retrospective standpoint: the actions are over and done with, and the philosopher looks
back on them. But Danto’s sentences represent actions in progress, and as such treat of
action from the standpoint of acting: the actions are in the course of being done, and
the philosopher is with them throughout – as their agent, if the sentences are in the first
person (“I am building a ship”), or as their chronicler, if the sentences are in the third
(“She is building a ship”). A reflection on action that proceeds through Davidson’s sen-
tences occludes the topic of acting. And it is the perfective aspect, rather than the past
tense, that is responsible for this. A sentence whose verbs bear the past tense but the
imperfective aspect treats of action from a retrospective standpoint, but still represents
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Adrian Haddock
acting. But such a sentence is not one of Davidson’s sentences, because it fails to sustain
the entailments that a sentence needs to sustain in order to entail a narrative sentence.
(Jane was building a ship – but perhaps the ship was never built.) Davidson’s sentences
leave the topic of acting out of sight.
In the years since the publication of Danto's book on history, this oversight has come
to be recognized, thanks centrally to Michael Thompson’s essay “Naïve Action Theory”
(2008). Thompson’s essay is in part a reading of G.E.M. Anscombe’s Intention (1963).
It brings out that a fundamental feature of Anscombe’s reflection on action is that it
proceeds through (what we might call) “Danto’s sentences.” It is through these sen-
tences that the topic of acting comes into focus. And they help us to understand one of
the most important ideas in Intention: that intentional actions are “known without
observation.” This idea invites the following objection:
Now it may be e.g. that one paints a wall yellow, meaning to do so. But is it reasonable to
say that one “knows without observation” that one is painting a wall yellow? And similarly
for all sorts of actions: any actions that is, that are described under any aspect beyond that
of bodily movements (Anscombe 1963, 50).
It is tempting to think that one cannot be painting the wall yellow unless, as a result
of one’s brush work, yellow paint is actually getting onto the wall – and surely, knowing
that it is requires observation? But there is an error here, which Danto helps us to see.
What does it mean to say that the paint “is actually getting onto the wall?” This remark
purports to introduce a constraint on the truth of saying that one is painting the wall
yellow. But if it means that (some) yellow paint has got onto the wall, then it introduces
too severe a constraint, because that is a not a condition for one to be painting the wall
yellow. (From the fact that one is so painting the wall, it does not follow that one has so
painted any of it.) On the other hand, it might be merely a way of saying an aspect of
what “one is painting the wall yellow” already says: the central part of what is said by
“one is painting the wall yellow” is equally said, in the passive voice, by “the wall is being
painted yellow;” the remark merely repeats an aspect of what is said by the latter – and
as such, does not introduce any constraint.5 The question of what it takes to falsify a
Danto-sentence is not as straightforward as it may be tempting to think. Through bring-
ing this out, Danto’s discussion removes an obstacle to understanding Anscombe’s idea
of knowledge without observation. And in so doing, it helps to clear the ground for
understanding her related idea of knowledge that is not merely non-observational but
“practical,” in that its office is not to conform to reality, but to change reality so that
reality conforms to it.
The occlusion of the topic of acting not merely impeded the reception of Anscombe’s
monograph; it blighted the philosophy of action for decades. The occlusion was
fundamental, pervasive, and – in hindsight – extraordinary. It cries out for diagnosis.
And a lack of attention to language must, I think, be part of the story. We have con-
trasted sentences to the effect that someone has done something with sentences to the
effect that someone is, or was, doing something. But there are also sentences to the effect
that someone does something; “Jane paints the wall yellow,” for example. And many
philosophers of action unreflectively employ sentences of this form. (Think of the hardy
perennial: “Jane raises her arm.”) How are these sentences to be understood? On the
154
face of it, their verbs bear habitual aspect: “Jane paints the wall yellow quite regularly,”
we might say (“the problem, you see, is that the paint keeps washing off ”). But philoso-
phers of action will surely reject this temporal interpretation, because they surely think
of their topic as our doing things in the here and now. How, then, are the sentences to be
understood? Well, we can understand them as abstractions, whose “concrete” meaning
is given either by a Danto-sentence (one which says what we are doing), or by a
Davidson-sentence (one which says what we have done). This is not an understanding
that the abstract sentences themselves provide for, because it requires holding them
together with the “concrete” sentences. Philosophers of action who unreflectively
employ the abstract sentences assume that their meaning takes care of itself, and as
such fail to have in mind the concrete sentences in which their meaning consists. As
such, given that they reject the habitual interpretation, there is nothing that they could
mean by the abstract sentences.
But this “linguistic” explanation cannot be the whole story. And Danto’s own case
brings this out. Danto deserves credit not merely for opening up the topic of acting but
also for describing the lineaments of the way of thinking that occludes it. And yet, it is
striking that, when he turns to think systematically about action, he conspires in the
same occlusion. In 1973, he published his Analytical Philosophy of Action; and although
the topic of acting is not simply absent from this book, a structural feature of the book
prevents it from coming clearly into focus. Bringing this out will, I think, reveal
something important – not merely about Danto, but about the temptations to which the
philosophy of action is subject.
Danto’s later book begins with the idea that there is a philosophically significant
analogy between action and knowledge. By itself, this idea should not invite our suspi-
cion. But the following thought, through which Danto seeks to articulate the analogy,
should: just as there is basic cognition – cognition that is “logically immune to failure”
(Danto 1973, 136) – so there is basic action – action that is equally so immune.
The ideas of cognition and action are alike in that they each exhibit an act/object
ambiguity. So far, we have spoken of actions in the object sense of things that are being,
or have been, or can be, done; but we may also speak of actions in the act sense of cases
of doing, or having done, things. Similarly, we may speak of cognitions both in the act
sense of cases of knowing, or ostensibly knowing things, and in the object sense of
things known, or ostensibly known, or knowable. In what follows, we shall primarily

speak of actions and cognitions in the act sense.
In any cognition, something is given to us, and we take it to be something. (That fixes
the meaning of “cognition,” as it figures in this discussion.) In almost all cognitions,
misrecognition is possible: it is possible that what is given to us is not what we take it to
be. But in a basic cognition, this is not possible. As such, in a basic cognition, we know
what is given to us to be what we take it to be. What we know is capable of standing to
what we ostensibly know, in a non-basic cognition, in a nexus of theoretical reason – we
ostensibly know something, in a non-basic cognition, on the basis of knowing what we
know, in a basic cognition, and as such through knowing what we know, in a basic
cognition. But we know what we know, in a basic cognition, through knowing nothing
but itself. These points are related: it is because basic cognitions are in this sense
groundless that they are infallible, in the sense of being immune to the possibility of
misrecognition.
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Adrian Haddock
Analogously, in any action, we try to do something. (That fixes the meaning of

“action,” as it figures in this discussion.6) In almost all actions, misperformance is pos-
sible: it is possible that we do not do what we try to do. But in a basic action, this is not
possible. As such, in a basic action, we do what we try to do. What we do is capable of
standing to what we try to do, in a non-basic action, in a nexus of practical reason – we
do what we do, in a basic action, in order to try to do something, in a non-basic action,
and as such, we try to do something, in a non-basic action, through doing what we do,
in a basic action. But we do what we do, in a basic action, through doing nothing
but itself. These points are related: it is because basic actions are in this sense
groundless that they are infallible, in the sense of being immune to the possibility of
misperformance.
It is crucial that, despite its groundlessness, and consequent infallibility, a basic cog-
nition remains a cognition, in that it sustains the structure of recognition: even in a
basic cognition, something is given to us, and we take it to be a certain way. Similarly, it
is crucial that, despite its groundlessness, and consequent infallibility, a basic action
remains an action, in that it sustains the structure of performance: even in a basic
action, we try to do something. In each case, however, this makes no sense. A cognition
that is immune to misrecognition is no cognition, and an action that is immune to mis-
performance is no action. This is for the following reason.
In a basic cognition, only by stripping the cognition of all conceptual content can the
possibility of misrecognition be foreclosed, consistently with the cognition’s sustaining
its structure: what is given must be given in a way that involves no identifying concept,
and the putative concept under which we bring what is given must be understood
through this non-conceptual way. And then it is not a cognition at all, because what we
“know” cannot stand in any nexus of theoretical reason: if we were to attempt to
express what we “know” in language, we could not advance beyond the non-concep-
tual “That is that.” As such, basic cognition is a myth – what Wilfrid Sellars (1956) calls
“The Myth of the Given.”7
Analogously, in a basic action, only by stripping the volition at the heart of the action
of all conceptual content can the parallel possibility of misperformance be foreclosed,
consistently with the action’s sustaining its structure. And then it is not an action at all,
because what we “do” cannot stand in any kind of nexus of practical reason: if we were
to attempt to express what we “do” in language, we could not advance beyond an inar-
ticulate sound. As such, basic action is a parallel myth – “The Myth of the Giving,” we
might say.8
To see why basic cognition must be non-conceptual, consider a statement of the
form “It strikes me as X” – where the opening pronoun indicates a perceived material
object, and “X” names a color. Such a statement will lapse if no material object is per-
ceived. But insofar as there is such a statement, it is immune to the possibility of mis-
recognition: there is no possibility of its being false on account of our being given a
color, and falsely taking this color to be “X.” As such, it might be tempting to think that
it expresses a basic cognition – or, more precisely, that it contains a statement that
expresses such a cognition, in which we are given a certain color, and we truly take this
color to be “X”: a statement of the form “That G is X,” for example, in which the demon-
strative expresses the manner of being given the color.9 However, insofar as “X” is a bona
fide color-name – one whose sense goes beyond that of the demonstrative (“That color”)
156
which expresses how the color is given at the time of the statement – it is always possible
that the statement misrecognizes the color given at the time. Collapsing the sense of “X”
to the sense of the demonstrative will foreclose this possibility. But insofar as the demon-
strative has conceptual content (indicated here specifically by “color”), it is repeatable,
and with its repetitions come the possibility of misrecognizing the color over time. (At a
later time, we might say falsely “That color is that color” – where the first demonstrative
expresses how a color is given at the time of this statement, and the second (a “memory
demonstrative”) expresses how a color was given at the earlier time: “That color – the
one I am seeing now – is that color – the one I saw earlier,” as we might more explicitly
say.) Only by stripping the demonstrative of all conceptual content can this possibility
be foreclosed. That leaves us with the non-conceptual, and as such unrepeatable “That.”
If we were to try to collapse the sense of “X” to that of this bare demonstrative, it would
yield the equally motionless “That is that.” – The idea of basic cognition falls apart
when we try to think it through.10
The same goes for the idea of basic action. Insofar as the volition at the heart of an
action bears conceptual content, misperformance is possible. When I introduced the
idea of action, I used the kind of abstract language that needs to be made concrete if
it is not to be read habitually. “We do not do what we try to do”: if this is not habitual
then, concretely, it means that we have not done what we are, or were, doing. (“Jane
tries to paint the wall yellow”: non-habitually, and concretely, this means that Jane is,
or was, painting the wall yellow – but it does not settle whether she painted it yellow.)
Sustaining the distinction between being in progress and being completed is not spe-
cial to action: it is the general mark of change. (The tree is coming into bloom – but it
has not yet come into bloom, for example). Change is action insofar as the things that
sustain the distinction exhibit a nexus of practical reason (one that might be made
explicit by saying, for example, and inter alia, “I was painting a certain brick yellow in
order to paint the wall yellow.”) And it is through sustaining this distinction that the
possibility of misperformance is provided for. Basic action must be immune to this
possibility. “In a basic action, we try to do something, and there is no possibility that
we do not do it”: concretely, but n on-habitually, this means that, in a basic action, we
are doing something, and there is no possibility that we have not done it. Basic action
does not sustain the distinction between being in progress and being completed. As
such, basic action cannot be change. But then how can it be action, given that the
mark of an action (in contrast to a pure act of will) is that it sustains the structure of
our trying to do something? That structure just is the structure of change, insofar as
the change exhibits a nexus of practical reason: to sustain this structure just is to sus-
tain the distinction between what one is doing and what one has done. There are verbs
of action that do not sustain this distinction – verbs of what Zeno Vendler (1957) calls
“achievement.” (“Getting to the top” is a standard example.) But these verbs depend
for their application on the prior application of verbs of change – verbs of what
Vendler calls “accomplishment”: it is this that allows them to count as verbs of action
in the first place, and in so doing to sustain their own possibility of misperformance.
(Getting to the top requires, for example, walking from the bottom to the top.) A verb
of basic action would be a verb of action whose application entails that we have done
something but which is neither a verb of change nor dependent for its application on
the prior application of such a verb. There is no such verb – and, as such, no way of
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Adrian Haddock
expressing the intention at the heart of a basic action. If we were to try to express it,
we would have reached the point “where one would just like to emit an inarticulate
sound”11 – perhaps a “this,” or perhaps better an “oompf,” to try to convey that we
have done something although there is no saying what.
The fantasy of basic action is the fantasy of action without acting. Despite disclosing
the topic of acting in his book on history, Danto succumbs to this fantasy in his book on
action. Strangely, however, even as he does this, he simultaneously acknowledges its
fantastical character. He observes that actions, whether “basic” or not, “take time, how-
ever brief,” and, as such, “the shadow between doing and deed … has temporal room at
least to fall”: the action may break off before it reaches completion – it may end up being
“an incomplete performance … an uncompleted action” (Danto 1973, 77–8). In our
terms: because action is change, failure is always possible – and as such, there is no
such thing as basic action (although, of course, Danto does not draw this conclusion).
Once again, we have a situation that calls for diagnosis. What leads Danto to cover
up his own insight? The superficial explanation is that he takes himself to have an
argument for why there must be basic action (and equally, basic cognition). But I do not
think this can be the whole story. His argument is as follows.
[The] difficulty is not that it is impossible that an infinitude of distinct things could be
known or done. It may be possible … that an infinitude of things should be done even in a
finite interval, or that an infinitude of distinct things known even by a finite mind (sic). It is
rather that one could not enter the chain of actions or cognitions if, always as a condition
for doing so, one must know or do something first: for that condition then has a condition
that one must know or do something else first, and this runs viciously to infinity. So if there
are mediated actions and cognitions, there must be [basic] actions and cognitions … (Danto
1973, 28).
The argument begins by purporting not to deny that “an infinitude of things [could]
be done in a finite interval.” But then, immediately, it denies this by assuming not just
that acting consists in doing a chain of actions (in the object sense), but that any such
chain has a first link. (The supposed viciousness of the regress consists in its undermin-
ing the idea of a first link: take any putative candidate for such a link, and there will
always be a prior action on the chain.) A chain of actions with a first link is a finite
chain; so, because acting consists in doing a chain of actions, and because acting takes
a finite stretch of time, doing an infinitude of actions in a finite stretch of time is pre-
cluded. The argument, as applied to action, is incoherent. It is also question-begging,
for the idea that there must be a first link, which the argument takes for granted, just is
the idea that there must be a basic action. For these reasons, it is hard to believe that
this argument can explain the hold that the idea of basic action has over Danto. He sees
not only that, because basic action is groundless, it must be immune to misperfor-
mance, but also that, because the shadow can always fall, no action can be so immune.
How, then, can he believe in basic action? The answer, I think, is that he is in the grip of
the architectonic parallel between action and knowledge, and that he is independently
convinced of the reality of basic cognition. It might seem to be at the very least disput-
able that there are actions that are immune to misperformance. But that
there are statements that are immune to misrecognition seems to be beyond dispute.
158
And it is easy for a philosopher who is not sensitive to the threat of the Myth of the
Given12 to confuse this idea with the distinct idea of cognitions that are so immune. For
such a philosopher, it will seem no less beyond dispute that there are basic cognitions.
And then – given the parallel – it will seem that the same must also go for basic actions.
It might be thought that the opening regress affords a case for basic action in the dif-
ferent sense of the “actions of a special kind” that Davidson posits. All that is required
of these “actions” is that they play this regress-stopping role; they need not be “logically
immune to failure.” However, they can play this role only insofar as they do not involve
acting – for if they do, then the shadow will have room to fall. Where Davidson needs
there to be only one thing done, there will be (at least) two. In fact, there will be indefi-
nitely many, for insofar as what is done takes time, “however brief,” there is room for the
shadow. The opening regress is not to be stopped, for it just is the indefinite divisibility
that characterizes any action, on account of its character as change.13
In contrast to a basic action, a pure act of will is not an action of any kind. As with
the statements that are immune to the possibility of misrecognition and which purport
to express visual sensations, the only standard to which the statements that purport to
express pure acts of will are subject is that of truthfulness: there is no further question
about whether the acts they express were ever “completed,” or “successfully performed.”
These acts are immune to the possibility of misperformance, and as such, they are not
actions.14 “For as soon as I had the will, I would have had a wholehearted will. At this
point the power to act is identical to the will” (Augustine 1991, 147).15 Saint Augustine
is not speaking here of a will to change anything, but of a will to serve the Lord.16 As
such, the “power to act” of which he speaks is not one whose “exercises” sustain the
distinction between being in progress and being completed; the office of the quotation
marks here is to indicate the absence of a distinction between the “power” of which
Saint Augustine speaks, and the acts of will that are its “exercises.” That is why the acts
are pure: because, in them, the distinction between power and exercise has lapsed. I
would not dream of rejecting the idea of such a power. But it would be another fantasy
to think that its exercises are cases of change.
Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of Action is remarkable and instructive in not only exem-
plifying the fantasy of basic action but also exposing basic action as a fantasy through its
insight into the nexus of action and time – an insight that received unmasked expression
in his earlier book on history. In this way, it affords a fascinating case of a philosopher who
attains but fails to hold firmly onto a fundamental insight. For the insight, Danto deserves
more recognition than he has received so far. But if we want to share in the insight, and
to explore its significance for understanding human action, then we should – at least ini-
tially – turn away from his book on action, and study his book on history instead.
Notes
1 I would like to thank Anton Ford, Jonathan Gilmore, Lydia Goehr, Alec Hinshelwood, Jennifer
Hornsby, and Colin Johnston for their very helpful comments and suggestions.
2 The only other acknowledgment of this contribution comes, I think, in my (2008).
3 This is not to deny the importance or interest of Danto’s 1973 book. (I can think of few better
introductions to the philosophy of action than its wonderful fifth chapter, “Gifts”.).
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Adrian Haddock
4 See, for example Hornsby 1980.

5 Compare Ford 2014, 24–8.
6 Compare the discussion of basic action and trying in Danto 1973, 137–8.
7 Compare McDowell 1994, Lecture I.
8 I owe the label to Hurley (1995).
9 Compare the relational account of looks-statements in Sellars 1956, 141.
10 See Anscombe 1976, esp. 51–3, a paper deeply influenced by Wittgenstein 1953, esp.
§§243–298. I suspect that Danto’s own negative judgment of Wittgenstein’s later philoso-
phy—“beautifully written and thought, but philosophically of no significance whatso-
ever”—explains why he overlooks this problem for the idea of basic cognition. (For this
“obiter dictum,” see Danto 2007, 39).
11 Wittgenstein 1953, §261.
12 As, I think, Danto is not; see note 10 above.
13 See Thompson 2008, 106–12. See also Lavin 2013.
14 Compare Anscombe 1963, §§1–3 on expressions of intention for the future.
15 See Augustine 1991.
16 Compare Wittgenstein 1961, §6.43.
References
Anscombe, G.E.M. 1963. Intention, 2nd edn. (2000) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1976. “The Subjectivity of Sensation,” reprinted in her Metaphysics and the Philosophy of
Mind: Collected Philosophical Papers Volume II. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981.
Augustine. 1991. Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 1965. Analytical Philosophy of History, reprinted as Narration and Knowledge,
with a new introduction by Lydia Goehr and a new conclusion by Frank Ankersmit. New York:
Columbia University Press, 2007 [1985].
———. 1973. Analytical Philosophy of Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2007. “Response to Stanley Cavell.” In Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur C.
Danto, edited by Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly. New York: Columbia University Press,
37–42.
Davidson, Donald. 1963. “Action, Reasons, and Causes,” reprinted in his Essays on Actions and
Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.
———. 1987. “Problems in the Explanation of Action,” reprinted in his Problems of Rationality.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.
Ford, Anton. 2014. “Action and Passion.” Philosophical Topics 42(1): 13–42.
Haddock, Adrian. 2008. “Danto’s Dialectic.” Philosophia 36(4): 83–93.
Hornsby, Jennifer. 1980. Actions. London: Routledge.
Hurley, S. L. 1995. “Wittgenstein on Practice and the Myth of the Giving,” reprinted in her
Consciousness in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
Lavin, Douglas. 2013. “Must There Be Basic Action?” Noûs 47(2): 273–301.
McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sellars, Wilfrid. 1956. “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” In Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, edited by Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven, vol. 1. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press; reprinted in Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality,
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 127–96.
160
Thompson, Michael. 2008. Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vendler, Zeno. 1957. “Verbs and Times.” The Philosophical Review 66(2): 143–60.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell.
———. 1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. London:
Routledge.
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18
The Sixties
ESPEN HAMMER
The sixties may have been the defining decade of Arthur Danto’s intellectual
development. In 1964, impressed by the philosophical implications of Andy Warhol’s
Brillo Box, he published his seminal essay “The Artworld” in The Journal of Philosophy.
During the same decade, he also wrote books on Nietzsche and the philosophy of his-
tory while establishing himself as a philosopher of great promise. Of course, the sixties
were tremendously eventful. This was the period of the civil rights movement and the
war in Vietnam, with radical transformations taking place regarding issues of race,
gender, and academic study. Ultimately, the very question of what it means to be an
American citizen was at stake. As a new popular culture emerged and consolidated its
unruly grip on people’s minds, the sixties also witnessed the unraveling of high, mod-
ernist art as a dominant cultural form. Experimentalism became the norm, both among
the avant-garde and in the culture at large. In the midst of this whirlwind, Danto was
able to cultivate his characteristic renaissance attitude: equally at home in the most
abstract corners of contemporary analytic philosophy and in the artworld (where he
was well versed in especially the visual arts) he approached the culture of the sixties
with a detached yet highly informed mind. As many of his colleagues left the world to
itself while focusing on abstruse problems of logic and language, Danto moved effort-
lessly between the seminar room and the gallery, opening up vistas between philosophy
and art that continue to be explored fifty years later.

However, Danto appears to have been conflicted between two fundamental attitudes
or commitments.
On the one hand, and especially when talking to other philosophers, he would pre-
sent himself as an essentialist. In a world of breathtaking political and cultural transfor-
mation, where everything seemed to be up for grabs, he viewed the search for necessary
and sufficient conditions for something X (where X, most often, would stand for art)
being of a particular kind or belonging to a certain order as of the greatest importance
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The Sixties
and value. Ultimately, in Transfiguration of the Commonplace and elsewhere, he came to

define art essentially as embodied meaning, presented to, and chosen by, the artworld.
On the other hand, when contemplating the world around him more directly, Danto
would leave the determination of any such constraints on meaning or reference to his-
torically existing communities and embrace, as it were, the vernacular in all its unruly
plurality. Anticipating such figures as Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Francis
Fukuyama, who in various ways tried to motivate ideas of “the end of history” (or “the
end of philosophy”), Danto became the thinker of “the end of art,” where the end meant
the beginning of something radically different: an artworld without historically neces-
sitated, progressively structured narratives, in which everything is considered possible.
As Danto (1997, xiv) would put it, “Ours is a moment, at least (and perhaps only) in art,
of deep pluralism and total tolerance. Nothing is ruled out.”
While focusing on the sixties, the aim of this chapter is to set Danto’s post-historical
view up against the main competing camp of the time, namely aesthetic modernism.
Ultimately, I find that Danto’s notion of a simple transition into a so-called post-histori-
cal condition, engendered supposedly by Warhol’s discovery that visual markers as
such do not allow us to identify whether something is a work of art, fails to resonate
with how many leading artists and critics of the time came to view the position and fate
of modern art. From the vantage point of modernism, the crisis of art was not merely
epistemological or ontological, calling for a definition, but went socially and existen-
tially to the heart of what it is to be a human subject and to experience the world as such
a subject. Danto asks what art is. Aesthetic modernism, by contrast, asks what the expe-
rience of art involves and the value it may ultimately have in human life. It is the tension
between Danto’s question and the modernist’s that I would like to explore.
Essential to Danto’s view is that whether or not some item X is art is a question that
can be raised independently of our experience of it. Brillo Box in the gallery, it is assumed
(at least in his early work), is visually indistinguishable from a Brillo box in the hardware
store; hence visual qualities alone cannot settle the question of whether or not the
object in the gallery is a work of art. Rather, it is in part thanks to the artworld that
Brillo Box in the gallery counts as art. By putting it on display in a designated space,
perhaps next to other items that count as art, and inviting and encouraging commen-
tary and criticism, the artworld has in effect decided to treat it as such.
However, as Danto’s criticism of George Dickie’s Institutional Theory shows, the fact
that the artworld has endorsed an item is at best a necessary but not a sufficient
condition for something to count as art. According to Dickie (1969), if the artworld
decrees that something is a work of art, then it follows that it is one. However, as Danto
points out, the Institutional Theory begs the question of what it is that actually licenses
members of the artworld to pass judgments. If mere membership is sufficient to bestow
authority, then one must either accept that membership implies some knowledge or
understanding, which begs the question, or simply that membership alone, indepen-
dently of knowledge, is sufficient to generate epistemic authority. However, if it is, then
the theory seems utterly nihilistic. Surely, for the institution to grant status, it must
have some claim to non-arbitrariness!
As opposed to the Institutional Theory, which stakes everything on the decisions of
the artworld, Danto claims that two invisible properties must be present in addition to
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ESPEN HAMMER
the status-bestowing activities of the artworld.1 First, works of art are about something,
and accordingly have meaning.2 Second, the meaning of works of art is internal to
them. They embody their meaning. As Danto (2013, 40) puts it, “It is the invisible prop-
erties that make something art.” Rather than experiencing any visible properties, the
decisive task of the viewer is to “interpret the meaning-bearing properties in such a way
as to grasp the intended meaning they embody” (Danto 2013, 38).
In line with its underlying pluralist intuition, Danto’s (purportedly essentialist) defi-
nition is highly inclusive. It allows us to see Brillo Box as a work of art, and the same
goes for John Cage’s 4’ 33”. Indeed, according to this account, since anything can
embody meaning in this way, there is no a priori restriction on what may count as art.
The definition does not rule out any type of object in advance. A medical journal may
be a work of art. A tooth. A piece of paper. A textbook. As Danto (2000, 431) puts it,
“The artworld is a model of a pluralistic society, in which all disfiguring barriers and
boundaries have been thrown down.” Hence “It is the mark of our period that every-
thing can be regarded as a work of art and seen in textual terms” (Danto 2000, xxx).
Danto would often claim that his definition of art happened to suit the 1960s art-
world exceptionally well (even though the theory was meant to apply universally).
Despite the presence and authority of modernist critics such as Clement Greenberg, the
sixties’ artworld was rapidly turning from its modernist art practices to conceptual and
post-conceptual practices.3 Indeed, this is not only a conception that includes
Duchamp’s Fountain and Warhol’s Brillo Box, but much of the period’s most influential
art from John Cage to Gordon Matta-Clark and beyond. The definition is capable of
being this inclusive because art no longer tries to be aesthetic: being presentable to the
senses no longer plays a role. Here is Danto in 2013, assessing the situation of contem-
porary art: “I’m not sure that I want to furnish examples of this yet, but I can say that
most of the art being made today does not have the provision of aesthetic experience as
its main goal. And I don’t think that was the main goal of most of the art made in the
course of art history” (Danto 2013, 150).
Danto’s sweeping claim about the non-aesthetic purpose of “most of the art made in
the course of art history” may seem dubious. It is offered without any evidence. More
importantly, it fails to account for the traditional interest in aesthetic form, including
not only “beauty” (however significant a value it has been) but the way or mode in
which the beholding of a work of art is able to strike us as the sensuous beings we hap-
pen to be. Danto insists on the necessity of embodiment; yet while the embodiment is
never indifferent to the meaning incorporated, its purpose is precisely to transmit the
meaning; it is not meant for aesthetic enjoyment. Danto’s view, in other words, is funda-
mentally and explicitly anti-aesthetic. In stark opposition to the tradition from
Baumgarten and Kant to Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Dewey, he seeks to dis-
entangle the very idea of what art is from any account of aesthesis, or sense, instead
focusing on the production and reception of embodied meaning. Rather than being
sensuously admired or appreciated, works of art are meant to be interpreted. Nothing
of constitutive importance about any work of art can be known only in sensing.
The sixties were no doubt a time of great artistic and aesthetic questioning. In
seeking to disengage the definition of art from visible properties and open aesthetic
reflection to the pluralism of an increasingly dematerialized artworld. Danto’s model
responded with great gusto to the new uncertainty and openness that characterized
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this period. However, the sense of crisis besetting traditional understandings of art was
not something that only Danto registered. For the remaining proponents of modernism,
among them Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, and Stanley Cavell, art had become
equally problematic to itself, calling not only for greater understanding and elucidation
but also for reflection on whether art may continue to be of any significance, or even
survive, under circumstances in which the artworld was presented with challenges
such as consumerism, the culture industry, and commodification. Thus, in “Music
Discomposed,” published in 1967 (three years after Danto’s breakthrough essay, “The
Artworld”), Cavell claimed that, under the conditions posed by modernity, artistic con-
ventions can no longer be felt to have the authority needed to unite artists and audi-
ences around corresponding intuitions about what it is for something to be an
accomplished work of art. Starting perhaps as early as the late Beethoven, convention
gradually lost its capacity to unreflectively command assent, thereby alienating audi-
ences from serious artists, who increasingly had to find out for themselves what it is that
might satisfy them: “The entire enterprise of action and communication has become
problematic. The problem is no longer how to do what you want, but to know what
would satisfy you” (Cavell 1976, 201).
Cavell’s version of the “Is this art?”-worry is not that some object previously thought
to be art falls outside the scope stipulated by a pre-given definition (or, vice versa, that
some object, such as a urinal, that one thought could not be a work of art, must be
included); rather, it is that something presented as art might be fraudulent, where fraud-
ulent means not fully meant, irresponsible, not explicitly accounted for by the artist
(who, under modern circumstances, cannot extricate herself from what Cavell calls the
“burden of modernism,” namely autonomy). However, since this cannot be known in
advance (if so, this art would no longer be modern or aesthetically autonomous), no
criterion will allow artist or audience to tell the fraudulent from the genuine work. The
artist has to experiment with ideas in order to see whether any of them may satisfyingly
count as his or her own. The critic, on the other hand, needs to expose herself to the
work. In short, whether or not a work of art is fraudulent must include some reference
to how it is experienced. It can only be known in sensing. “It is not, as in the case of ordi-
nary material objects, that I know because I see, or that seeing is how I know (as opposed
to being told, or figuring it out). It is rather that, one may wish to say, that what I know
is what I see; or even: seeing feels like knowing” (Cavell 1976, 201). You have to hear or
see it to tell. The point of the work – the way it sincerely and openly displays its
self-authorizing commitments – comes to be known in seeing or hearing it adequately.
I said: in art, the chances you take are your own. But of course you are inviting others to
take them with you. And since they are, nevertheless, your own, and your invitation is
based not on power or authority, but on attraction and promise, your invitation incurs the
most exacting of obligations: that every risk must be shown worthwhile, and every inflic-
tion of tension lead to a resolution, and every demand on attention and passion be satisfied
– that risks those who trust you can’t have known they would take, will be found to yield
value they can’t have known existed (Cavell 1976, 199).
There are many differences between Cavell’s austere, skeptical modernism and
Danto’s relaxed, inclusive attitude. Some of them hinge on differences in taste and
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sensibility, while others are reflective of deep philosophical disagreements. The one that
interests me, and which may be the most revealing, is the disagreement between them
over the role of subjective response in the identification of an object as a work of art. Is
knowing an object to be a work of art internal to one’s sensing of it as such? Or is know-
ing an object to be a work of art independent of such sensing (and dependent, instead,
on knowing that the object falls under a definition stipulating necessary and sufficient
criteria for it to be a work of art)?
Danto highlights the 1960s as a time when artists and critics alike started to move
decisively away from the idea that “quality in art” should be identified with the presence
of compelling aesthetic properties. Danto is in this regard particularly scathing in his
critique of Greenberg, whom he thinks based his art criticism on his own “practiced
eye,” which supposedly could pick out “greatness” (which was all that mattered when
identifying something as a work of art) on the basis only of some mysterious retinal
moment of satisfaction, incommunicable to the uninitiated.4 For Danto’s Greenberg,
the adequate appreciation of art is wholly abstract: all it requires is a practiced eye and
the capacity to set aside, in the act of judging aesthetically, all knowledge and
information one might possess of the origin and meaning of the work. This is the critic
as inscrutable, unaccountable authority figure, privately engaged with the supposedly
autonomous object of aesthetic appreciation, making “subjectively universal” judg-
ments in a Kantian vein, while, unlike the new cultural sensibility of the 1960s, aggres-
sively refusing to view cultural artifacts in terms of their actual context of origin.
The risk that Greenberg’s stance degenerates into a completely unearned and
self-righteous elitism, oblivious to the real developments of the artworld, is fairly overt
in passages such as the following (which Danto quotes in After the End of Art, 89):
“There are criteria, but they can’t be put into words – any more than the difference bet-
ween good and bad in art can be put into words. Works of art move you to a greater or
lesser extent, that’s all. So far, words have been futile in the matter … Nobody hands out
prescriptions to art and artists. You just wait and see what happens – what the artist
does.”5
A question worth raising, however, is whether Greenberg may have misrepresented
an insight worth pondering. It is true that Cavell sometimes uses words such as “arro-
gance” and “arrogation” in trying to characterize the stance and attitude of the critic
– and indeed also of the philosopher himself. Yet this is not because he dismisses other
points of view or is unwilling to be held accountable for his views. Rather, it is that,
faced with works of art, what it is to experience them is internal to the value they may
have for us. It is inherently first-personal, and as such is divided by an ontological abyss
from any third-person point of view, and therefore from any procedure involving the
mere application of a criterion. The arrogance, if that is the right word, arises from the
fact that aesthetic experience is subject to distrust: a work is of value only if you can see
or hear that it is.
What would experience in general come down to if we could no longer find ways to
be open to encounters in which our own presence to the object is internal to its evalua-
tion? This is the animating concern behind the German philosophical discourse of
Erfahrung as it unfolds in that long sweep from Kant to figures like Benjamin and
Adorno. Consider for a moment Kant’s distinction between regular empirical judgment
and aesthetic judgment. In regular empirical judging I know insofar as my judgment is
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The Sixties
truth-apt, which for Kant means that experiential intake has been taken up and synthe-
sized according to purportedly universal rules or categories, staking out what it is to be
an object in general. That the cat is on the mat thus purports to be true independently
of my sensing it. Someone must be able to sense it for the judgment to be justified; how-
ever, the truth-claim is raised independently of anyone’s sensing of it. In aesthetic judg-
ment, however, the claim to universal validity would make no sense independently of
my own sensing of the object. In this case, it is my own response that forms the basis
upon which I make a claim to universality. I have not subsumed the object under a rule
or criterion. I have known the object in sensing it, seeking to make my own response
exemplary.
Conceptions of the irreducibly first-person experiential quality of response have
been central to other articulations of aesthetic modernism as well, in particular that of
Adorno, for whom aesthetic experience figures as a corrective to the subsumptive iden-
tity-thinking purportedly prevalent in modern societies. To accept the idea that art of a
certain kind – modernist art – can be viewed as conducting some sort of critical reflec-
tion on experience may not be easy. My suspicion, however, is that many upheavals in
the artworld of the 1960s can indeed be interpreted in precisely this light. More than
anything else, and in opposition to aesthetic modernism, the work that Danto takes to
be emblematic of the period – Warhol’s Brillo Box – strikes me as a rejection and recan-
tation of all the traditional constituents of full, unrestricted subjective life (and the
values associated with them): imagination, creativity, expressivity, emotion, technique,
intuition, sensing, judgment, empathy, discernment, and appreciation – in short all the
capacities that a nineteenth-century “aesthetic education” were supposed to develop.
In this way, Warhol seems indeed to react to a past formation and, in light of new devel-
opments, to stake out entirely new approaches to art.
It is hard not to sympathize with Danto’s enthusiasm for Warhol’s supposed democ-
ratization of art. Warhol, Danto writes in his 2009 portrait of the artist, not only took
art down from its bourgeois pedestals but sought to embrace the vernacular in all its
complex, twentieth-century American forms. The Campbell’s Soup Cans celebrates
American everydayness: “The mandate was: paint what we are. The breakthrough was
the insight into what we are. We are the kind of people that are looking for the kind of
happiness advertisements promise us that we can have, easily and cheaply” (Danto
2009, 16). However, it also seems right to suggest that Danto is giving us a metonym for
an even more momentous transformation – that Warhol truly was the artist for a world
which, as Danto puts it, has “itself […] undergone a parallel change.”6
What kind of change? Danto increasingly came to accept and employ the kinds of
post-this, post-that designations that became fashionable in the 1980s and 1990s.
While predominantly in reference to art, he speaks of the “post-historical” as well as the
“post-modern,” claiming that Warhol’s “discovery” liberated “historical” art from its
false yet historically entrenched self-interpretations. However, in his 2009 book on
Warhol, it is not only art but its social context that has undergone a radical transforma-
tion. Although Danto refrains from offering any social analysis, it seems evident that
what he has in mind is the emergence of consumerism, and with that, one might add,
pervasive commodification of all objects and social relations. Somewhat surprisingly
for someone steeped in the elitist culture of left-liberal academe, Danto welcomed this
new reality. Indeed, judging from his interpretation of Warhol, he even appears to give
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it a celebratory twist. Warhol grew up in squalor, he tells us, in a depressed neighbor-

hood in Pittsburgh. In the new post-World War II reality, he found to his satisfaction
that he could have what everybody else had: Coca Cola, McDonald’s hamburgers, etc.:
“Unquestionably, McDonald’s is the paradigm of universal sameness in food the world
over, singled out wherever globalism is protested. But as we know, Andy liked every-
thing to be the same” (Danto 2009, 57).
The world, then, that Warhol prophesied with such precision, and which started to
take shape in the 1960s, is the post-industrial world of corporate America, in which all
previous commitments to expression and experience, depth and transcendence, seem
to have been replaced by the today so familiar orientation towards appearance, speed,
self-presentation, impact, and standardization.7 Post-modernism, Fredric Jameson
claimed, is the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” It is, as Danto himself intimates, a
world of consumerist entitlement, offering great and widely shared opportunities for
the pursuit of pleasure and enjoyment. Anything is of value as long as someone is wil-
ling to pay for it.
However, it is far from evident that this is a world in which the arts can truly thrive.
As the artworld becomes increasingly commercialized and globalized, the endless new
possibilities that Danto claimed to have detected in the pluralist artworld may not lead
anywhere. Where material and aesthetic constraints once articulated a purpose and a
framework of significance, allowing art to emerge as a site of self-exploration and
ongoing negotiation of the terms of subjective responsiveness, the whims of the
market with its highly commodified values of the merely fashionable, fascinating or
“interesting” now set the tone for pretty much all evaluation and reception of contem-
porary art.
Is this the true end of art? Probably not. Yet if Danto (2000, xxx) is right that “it is
the mark of our period that everything can be regarded as a work of art,” then it follows
that we no longer have a concept of art that normatively refers us to the world of sense.
Instead, what we choose to call art must be viewed, as Danto (2000, xxx) puts it, “in
textual terms,” as statements, one might add, circulating in our now digitally mediated
reality. This new literalism may be the fate of art. Yet if it is to be approached ade-
quately, we need more than conceptual and ontological analysis. The “post-historical
perspective” is itself historical. As such, it should not be regarded as immune to
criticism.
Notes
1 Danto 1997, 195: “The difference, philosophically, between an institutionalist like Dickie and
myself is not that I was essentialist and he was not, but that I felt that the decisions of the
artworld in constituting something a work of art required a class of reasons to keep the
decisions from being merely fiats of arbitrary will. And in truth I felt that according the status
of art to Brillo Box and Fountain was less a matter of declaration than of discovery. The experts
really were experts in the same way in which astronomers are experts on whether something
is a star”.
2 This, ultimately, distinguishes the Brillo box in the hardware store from the Brillo box in the
gallery. Only the latter, by denoting the former, embodies meaning.
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The Sixties
3 Since the turn of the century, Danto has added elements to his definition of art in terms of
embodied meaning. Art, he has gone on to claim, should be a “wakeful dream” and (drawing
on Kant’s account of aesthetic ideas in the third Critique) display “spirit.” See Danto 2013,
48–9 and 123–9. It should be noted that none of these added features demand that works of
art be presentable to the senses.
4 See for example Danto 1997, 89–90.
5 Clement Greenberg, “Interview Conducted by Lily Leino,” in Greenberg 1993, 308.
6 Danto 2009, 17: “Warhol went from what one of Henry James’s characters describes as ‘a
little artist man,’ on the fringe of a fringe of the artworld, to the defining artist of his era. That
could only have happened had the world itself not undergone a parallel change, through
which the transformed Warhol emerged as the artist it was waiting for.”
7 Fredric Jameson (1991). I will admit to finding Jameson spot-on when, on page 9, he claims
that “Andy Warhol’s work in fact turns centrally around commodification, and the great bill-
board images of the Coca-Cola bottle or the Campbell’s soup can, which explicitly foreground
the commodity fetishism of a transition to late capital, ought to be powerful and critical
political statements”.
References
Cavell, Stanley. 1976. Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays. Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy 61: 571–84.
———. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
———. 1997. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
———. 2000. The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Artworld. Berkeley, CA and London:
———. 2009. Andy Warhol. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
———. 2013. What Art Is. New Haven. CT and London: Yale University Press.
Dickie, George. 1969. “Defining Art.” The American Philosophical Quarterly 6: 253–6.
Greenberg, Clement. 1993. The Collected Essays and Criticism. Vol. 4. Chicago, IL and London: The
University of Chicago Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Post-Modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
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19
Criticism and the Pale of History
GREGG M. HOROWITZ
Reading the morning newspaper is the realist’s morning prayer. One orients one’s attitude
toward the world either by God or by what the world is. The former gives as much security
as the latter, in that one knows how one stands (Hegel 1964, 247).
Having accepted the invitation to write a regular column about art from Elizabeth
Pochoda, then the literary editor of The Nation magazine, Arthur Danto wrote a lot of
criticism. Whether, as is my guess, the total quantity of his criticism outstrips his
philosophical writing, we must wait for the publication of Danto’s Gesamtausgabe to
answer for certain. But taking into account the critical essays he wrote with alarming
alacrity for The Nation, Artforum, Grand Street, Modern Painters, Naked Punch Review, The
Soho News, and other magazines, the essays he produced for catalogs dedicated to
individual artists, the theoretical essays about the nature of art and history, which
included lengthy passages of pure criticism, and the published interviews about art and
art criticism that he never ceased to delight in sitting for, a dispassionate observer of
Danto’s oeuvre might reasonably think of him principally as an art critic with a side gig
as a philosopher.
What can we bring into view about Danto’s intellectual project if we adopt the point
of view of this imaginary dispassionate observer?
Treating Danto primarily as a critic might, I realize, sound misguided, perhaps even
specious, to readers of this volume. As needs no real argument, Danto made an utterly
decisive intervention in Anglo-American philosophy of art long before he imagined a
career as an art critic, and, as Danto often said in justifying his extraordinarily catholic
range of subjects, he could not have become the pluralistic critic he was, following the
trails of contemporary art wherever they led him, had he not first become a post-histor-
ical philosopher of art (Danto 1997c, 47). Beyond this chronological fact about Danto’s
career, students of his philosophy know that he pressed no thesis more urgently than
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that an adequate philosophical theory of art, if true, is true of art as such, true without
regard to historical indices (or any material indices whatsoever). Counterexamples
offered up by art of later periods do not historicize older theories; they falsify them. The
philosophy of art, in short, turns away from the specificities of individual works of art
(Danto 1981c, 30). The task of criticism, however, is to interpret specific artistic mean-
ings – “embodied meanings” was Danto’s way of saying it – and make judgments of
relative quality. Because critics get caught in the mesh of specific times, places, tech-
niques, and intentions, to think of criticism as the driver of Danto’s intellectual project
– to put aesthetic judgment before ontology – would, from Danto’s expressed point of
view, be to set things in the wrong order. More on embodied meaning and the logical
priority of philosophy below. First, I want to introduce a third reason that taking Danto
primarily as an art critic might seem perverse. It is a different sort of reason from the
first two, for it applies not to Danto uniquely but to art criticism as such: art criticism is
a genre without significant historical structure or weight. It has neither an informative
past nor the prospect of an afterlife. In this respect, to think of Danto (or anyone, really)
centrally as a critic carries with it a whiff of the ash heap of history.
Philosophy – to state the obvious – has a historical canon. However intensely and
appropriately strained in the current moment, that canon sustains the vitality of phi-
losophy of the past. Better put, the canon just is the vitality of the philosophy of the
past. We continue to learn what philosophy is and is for in the present by situating our-
selves in relation to a canon that, it is not an exaggeration to say, persistently judges us.
Philosophers now and then rebel against the imperiousness of their history, but nothing
attests more to the significance of that history than the utopian wish to make a clean
start. Thinking today about Danto as a philosopher is itself part of the never-ending
process of historical vitalization. It forces us to measure ourselves by measuring his
achievement, which is to say: it is to us something obviously worth doing.
By contrast, art criticism appears neither to need such systematic historical attention
nor to reward it. Critics put themselves in dialogue with their contemporaries, to be
sure, but their predecessors they simply leave behind. As The New York Times film critic
A.O. Scott puts it, “The number of critics who have managed to last – to claim, on the
basis of their critical writing alone, a foothold on Parnassus or a spot in the canon – is
vanishingly small (Scott 2017, 15).” (And this in a defense of the study of criticism!)
Danto wrests himself free of the history of art criticism when, in writing about recent
predecessors, he claims that their critical approaches must be understood as artifacts of

their historical time. “(Clement) Greenberg effectively stopped writing criticism in the
late 1960s, and it is difficult not to suppose that he did so because his entire practice as a
critic (my emphasis) was unable to gain a relevant purchase on an artistic practice gov-
erned by the principle … that anything can be an artwork, that there is no special way
that artworks have to look, that everyone can be an artist” (Danto 1997a, 90). “Difficult
not to suppose,” an odd phrase expressing an inarguable voidance of historical conti-
nuity, says it all. Danto does not mean to suggest that no purpose can be served by
reading critics after their moment has passed. Compelling insights may be scattered
amidst the historical rubble, and some essays display a literary verve that we can admire
and, indeed, seek to emulate. Further, as academic anthologies of art criticism show,
studying the art criticism of past eras can be valuable to cultural historians. But
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however worthwhile to reread critics of earlier periods, we do not – apparently, cannot

– learn from them how to practice art criticism now.
The lack of an autonomous history of art criticism, one that would make current
practice intelligible in terms of its own history, should puzzle us. Many other genres of
criticism plainly have histories that shape their current practice in terms both of subject
and method. Literary and higher criticism, to choose but two examples, aim to turn the
attention of readers toward latent currents of meaning in, respectively, literature and
the Holy Bible. That there are such latent meanings, that they need to be rescued from
the dead hand of tradition, that the vehicles of that rescue must be crafted with an eye
toward both the meanings they excavate and the audiences they address, and that new
meanings will need to be uncovered in the future as perspectives that once were fresh
degenerate into crusty common sense, all this means that later methods of i nterpretation
must be developed in the critical spirit of the methods they replace. The hand-in-glove
development of meanings and the methods for interpreting them just is the autono-
mous history of literary and higher criticism. It is also what makes them enterprises fit
to become academic disciplines (a stamp of approval that, in its own way, endangers
their autonomy, but that is another story). None of this is true of art criticism, which,
by contrast with literary and higher criticism (and philosophy), is a journalistic
enterprise. It directs our attention not to meanings that need to be teased out of works
and texts but to current gallery and museum shows. As with other sorts of journalistic
writing that engage what is nowhere else but right before our eyes – movie and book
reviews, fashion reporting, the gossip pages, and so on – our interest in the season’s
criticism wanes with the natural turning of our interest to what the new season brings.
Art criticism remains as anchored in the present as the shows and exhibitions it tackles.
Far from dragging art into history, as literary and higher criticism do to texts, art
criticism shelters art in the pure present of daily life, of which it is an agent.
When it was first published in 1993, no one would have thought to ask if we should
read Danto’s review of that year’s infamous “political” Whitney Biennial (Danto 1994,
312-17). This is assuming that we were interested in contemporary art in the first
place, in which case such interest as we had in the Biennial would readily carry over
into an interest in reading and talking about it. But now, almost thirty years later, the
context that made Danto’s essay live as criticism has disappeared. Again, this does not
mean it is not worth reading from other points of view, but there is no denying that
Danto’s essay, along with the Biennial itself, has become a historical artifact, a fate they
were powerless to avert. The value of Danto’s essay as criticism is exhausted in its rela-
tion to the moment of the art world in which it participated. And if the same is true of
all of Danto’s critical writing, there is no reason for us to review Danto’s career as a
critic. That career has no autonomous structure, no internal path of development to
trace out. At this point, we might be tempted to retreat to the safer ground of justifying
an interest in Danto’s criticism on the parochial grounds that he was also an important
philosopher.
It is, however, worth lingering over art criticism’s helpless dependence on its moment
in time. To regard contemporary art post-historically amounts to detaching the question
of what makes art valuable from questions of its historical development. Danto was a
unique critic in making the behest of timeliness essential to his critical practice. However
172
much erudition is put to work in art criticism, it remains, Danto saw, journalism and
nothing but.
When fifteen years ago almost to the day, I began my tenure as art critic for The Nation, my
editor asked only that my reviews appear while it was still possible for the shows discussed
to be viewed…Because my pieces appear in time for motivated readers actually to engage
with the art, a special relationship between us – the critic, the reader, and the art – is
opened up. Part of my task, as I saw it, was to furnish readers with a piece of thought they
could carry into the galleries with them (Danto 2000b, ix).
Danto understood his assignment to be to write as if addressing the assembled audi-

ence of the art world, conceived as readers who could engage with the art in question
and talk back to him. (The audience also included artists, who “always have an ideal
audience in mind – an art world for which they work” (Danto 2000b, ix)). Although the
same might be said as a plain matter of fact of anyone who writes regular reviews, not
everyone takes this constraint to be intrinsic to the critical endeavor. But as the emphatic
“actually” in the quote above attests, Danto embraced this “presentism” directly and
without reservation. We can also see this embrace photo-negatively in the way he dis-
tinguished his practice from those of prior critics. Danto rarely criticized them for get-
ting things wrong about this or that artist or mistakenly assessing artistic quality. (To
argue like that would require that he imagine them, contrary to fact, as his contempo-
raries.) Danto criticized them, rather, for taking the concerns that guided their treatment
of the art of their own time to be more than a contemporary matter. From the limited
perspective of their present, they illicitly addressed the future. We could develop this
point by returning to Danto’s treatment of Greenberg. Because, however, Danto, like
almost all serious art critics after the 1970s, regarded Greenberg as the Other of con-
temporary critical practice who never stopped deserving a trouncing, let us turn instead
to Harold Rosenberg, hired untimely by The New Yorker to write about art. Danto wrote:
That was in the middle 1960s, when the entire art world underwent another change, and
when the (Abstract Expressionist) movement Rosenberg had done so much to bring to an
understanding of itself had given way to something altogether different … It was as if
Rosenberg had lost sight of the distance between a strategy of critical response and a phi-
losophy of art, as if he had confused a thought that pertained to a moment of high paint-
erly achievement with a definition of art valid for all seasons. He was painful … to read
inasmuch as one wanted clarifications of the new work that he was incapable of giving
(Danto 1987a, 3).
This pitiless criticism of Rosenberg amounts to accusing him of the genre-hopping

of the sort Danto thought endemic to art-world writing, where critics peddle aesthetic
theories in disguise and critical concerns and preferences come camouflaged as
philosophical problems and theories. Instead of seeing history, both going and coming,
coursing through the art he reviewed, Rosenberg, Danto suggests, should have taken
his mission straight from the problems presented to him by the offerings of the season.
Rosenberg would have had to be a different kind of critic to heed such advice, but for
Danto it was an authoritative norm. A cardinal task of art criticism, he believed, is to
maintain contact with the actuality – the presentness – of art. Danto was the first critic,
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and to my knowledge the only one, to shape a philosophy of art criticism around the
unchanging journalistic task of covering the news of the art world.
Bringing into focus Danto’s presentist critical practice takes us back to the two ques-
tions left hanging earlier in this chapter: what does the presumptive priority of philos-
ophy tell us about Danto’s critical practice? And what did Danto mean in referring to
artistic meaning as “embodied meaning”?
Danto was fond of Heinrich Wölfflin’s motto from The Principles of Art History that
“not everything is possible at all times.” (Danto 1981b, 44, 1981a, 113, 1997c, 44-5).
For this reason, it was commonly assumed that Danto was some sort of historicist. But
Danto certainly did not follow Wölfflin in the belief that the historical nature of art
entails that “seeing as such has its own history, and uncovering these ‘optical strata’
has to be considered the most elementary task of art history” (Wölfflin 1950, 11). The
first part of Wölfflin’s axiom expresses Danto’s conviction that the story of art has a
narrative structure. What can be recognized as art at a given moment depends on the
stage of art’s historical development, in much the same way that we can only recognize
objective features of the world – our names, that it is us in the mirror, that objects are
not destroyed when they are hidden from us – at distinct stages of our individual
development. But for Danto this implies not relativism but an irreversible teleology. The
history of art is cumulative and directional, and earlier theories of art become historical
discards that leave behind problems for future thought. From this idiosyncratic Hegelian
point of view, the development of art aims at a goal: knowledge of art’s essence. But
having barred any sort of relativistic tolerance from the developmental story that cul-
minates in consciousness of art’s essence, it follows for Danto that the essence of art
cannot be identical to any specific shape of art. What makes something a work of art,
in short, has nothing to do with how it appears. The run of actual works of art that con-
stitutes art’s history is, from the philosophical point of view, a series of siren songs.
Plugging our ears against their fascination, for Danto, is the core prerequisite of philos-
ophy of art.
Part of the complex conceptual revolution fought by modern art has been to de-estheticize
the artwork … because some deeper identity than that of compounding visual sauces for
the eye of the artlover has always belonged to art. The struggle has been to retrieve this
identity from the esthete (Danto 1987a, 1–2).
Its identity has always belonged to art, even though it took two millennia from the first
posing of the question for us to come to know what that identity is. As Danto bluntly
puts it, “Art is eternally the same … I do not see how one can do the philosophy of art –
or philosophy period – without to this extent being an essentialist (Danto 1997c, 95).”
But art’s essence has remained hidden from us by its appearances since the foundation
of the world. Of course, essences are in some sense hidden by their very nature; because
they are embodied in all the individual existents of which they are the essences, they are
in principle not sensuously discernible. Essences are essentially not aesthetic phe-
nomena. What makes Danto’s Hegelianism idiosyncratic is that he floats free and clear
of Hegel’s metaphysics of history. The turbulence of Hegel’s struggle of universality, the
erotic object of thought, against particularity, the erotic object of sensuous experience,
is entirely absent from Danto’s philosophy of art’s history. Rather, like the blank face of
174
Andy Warhol in whom Danto first saw it dawn, Danto’s philosophical essentialism is an
expression of the happy negation of art’s entire history. Its history is over, can make no
more future claims on us, when art has at last ceded to philosophy the problem of what
it is, a problem that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, never properly
belonged to it. And this entails that the ending can only be apprehended from a
philosophical point of view. Here, then, we find the priority of philosophy, which rips
the concept of art from the body that gestated it, over art criticism, which continues to
splash about in the realm of specific works of art.
The previous two paragraphs trace out the priority of philosophy from a philosophical
point of view. The liberation of philosophy from the workaday concerns of art criticism
also turns out to be, however, the liberation of criticism from philosophy. As the final
appropriation by philosophy of the question of art’s identity disburdens art of the long-
ing for self-understanding that was the motor of its history, art becomes its own satis-
faction, which finally sets the proper goal for art criticism.
In my own version of the idea of “what art wants,” the end and fulfillment of the history
of art is the philosophical understanding of what art is, an understanding that is achieved
in the way that understanding in each of our lives is achieved, namely, from the mistakes
we make, the false paths we follow, the false images we have come to abandon until we
learn wherein our limits consist, and then how to live within those limits (Danto 1997c,
107).
Freed of any longing beyond itself, art now coincides with its desire, with an edge of
remorse, perhaps, but definitely without remainder. This does not mean that all art is
good; not all desires are good, and sometimes the vessels for expressing or fulfilling them
are poorly chosen. But it does mean that as the philosophy of art escapes enchantment
by the history of art, so, too does art criticism leave behind the task of the deep interpre-
tation which rested on the idea of an essential mismatch between art’s content and its
form (Danto 1986). Art no longer promises us happiness. It simply makes us happy or
fails to. In this condition, art criticism no longer has the task of keeping an eye on where
art is going but simply on what is right there before our eyes. Essentialist philosophy of
art and timely journalistic criticism stand revealed as two expressions, running in per-
fect parallel, of the timelessness of art. We might then say with equal justice that the
priority of philosophy to art criticism in Danto amounts not to the priority of philosophy
over art criticism but to the need to craft a philosophy fit to the critical acknowledgment
of art’s historical finitude.
What exactly, we should then ask, does art criticism in its liberated condition have its
eye on? The first answer that comes to mind is: specific works of art. This answer may
strike us as unhelpful. For Danto, however, who in the service of the philosophical hunt
for art’s essence steadily deployed the example of two things that are visually indiscern-
ible when only one is a work of art, it is worse than unhelpful. Because no work of art
need any longer defend its identity, it cannot attest to that identity. The danger is now
unavoidable that when we think we are looking at a work of art, we are really seeing
nothing but a urinal. Sometimes Danto tries to sort this out by claiming that a work of
art has a different causal history from something that, although visually indiscernible,
is not a work of art. But it is difficult not to suppose that Danto knew this explanation to
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GREGG M. HOROWITZ
be inadequate, since it would make the artistic intentions and actions of artists external
to the art under interpretation, leaving us hungry not for criticism but biography. We
need a concept that captures not the pre-history of an artwork but what stands before
us right now, awaiting criticism. This unresolved question returns me to the other
theme I left hanging earlier. To refer to the specific works of art that he interprets, Danto
uses the concept of “embodied meanings.”
The thesis which emerged from my book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is that
works of art are symbolic expressions, and that they embody their meanings. The task of
criticism is to identify the meanings and explain the mode of their embodiment. So con-
strued, criticism is just the discourse of reasons, participation in which defines the art
world of the Institutional Theory of Art: to see something as art is to be ready to interpret
it in terms of what and how it means (Danto 1992, 41).
What exactly Danto intends by embodied meaning is, for me at least, hard to make out
with any precision. Sometimes, as above, he uses it to mean that works of art are sym-
bols the semantic expressiveness of which somehow depends on or is shaped by the
bodies that bear them. At other times, Danto shifts his emphasis in a more aesthetic
direction: “a meaning is materially embodied in artworks, which show what they are
about” (Danto 2000a, xx). Danto’s italicization of the word “show” underscores that
meaning is not merely embodied in works of art but also made visible, available to us in
our perception of them. Yet elsewhere Danto says that “a work of art is composed of a
material object given life by a structure of thought, much as a human being may be
regarded as a body animated by a soul. Criticism, in its highest vocation, identifies the
thoughts that give life to a work or set of works” (Danto 1987a, 4). This last formula-
tion draws on a familiar analogy between persons and works of art, albeit that Danto
makes it run in an unfamiliar direction, such that the meaningfulness of works of art is
clarified by reference to the ensoulment of persons. In any case, this last elucidation of
embodiment pushes it in the direction of something like incarnation, or, as Brian
Soucek acutely puts it, the miracle of transubstantiation (Soucek 2014). In the last
ditch, it seems, when we ask how art embodies meaning, we are left rehearsing the
mysteries.
My aim is not to disentangle Danto’s account of embodied meaning. I want only to
observe that whenever the time comes to account for his experience of the art that he
confronts as a critic, the concept he crafts to reflect on it becomes unsettled. An artifact
that is completely at one with its meaning, like a person completely at peace with him-
self, disarms our efforts to draw meaning out of it. It ceases to mean anything, really, if
what we mean by “meaning” entails the pathos of longing for interpretation. No addi-
tional concept will avail if, as they stand before us as perfect embodiments of their
meaning – in their post-historical condition of timeless presence – works of art reveal
themselves to be simultaneously specific things and universals.
If works of art are self-possessed embodiments of what they mean, then the task of
criticism can be only to let them appear to us in their full self-possession. And yet:
“Criticism, in its highest vocation,” Danto writes in the passage quoted above, “iden-
tifies the thoughts that give life to a work or set of works.” With the phrase “highest
vocation” Danto echoes Hegel’s thesis that “art, considered in its highest vocation, is
176
and remains for us a thing of the past” (Hegel 1975, 11). What Hegel meant by this is
that works of art, like Pompeii under the spades and pickaxes of the archaeologists,
have now disgorged the meanings they sheltered into the space of discourse. Embodied
meanings have for us broken apart into meanings and bodies. For criticism to identify
the thoughts that gave life to a work is for it to leave the bodies behind. The only way to
avoid Hegel’s darkening vision is to tarry with the differences it made to those thoughts
that they had to venture out into bodies, and to the bodies that were burdened in bearing
those thoughts. T.J. Clark points to the ever-potent lack of fit between bodies and what
they are made to mean when he writes:
Making anything in the world particular, taking advantage of the physical resources of the
medium with that in mind, means that qualities and dimensions in the thing portrayed are
taken seriously for the first time – aspects common wisdom ignores. But those aspects and
dimensions are not (ever) invisible or non-existent in everyday life. They haunt the world
of established truths and exclusions … Life would be a self-destroying mechanism if they
did not (Clark 2018, 121).
One cannot imagine Danto writing a piece of prose like that, so unhappy and yet so
utopian. But Danto, too, knows that bodies left to fend for themselves in the glory of
their full meaning – bodies that mean rather than bodies that matter – are, like aban-
doned gods, frail, defenseless, and endlessly needy. I close with two passages from
Danto’s savagely funny review of the Guggenheim’s 1985-86 exhibition
“Transformations in Sculpture.”
In the world according to Barnett Newman, sculpture was characterized as what you
bump into when you back away from a painting to get a better look. So what do you bump
into when you back away to get a better look at a piece of sculpture? At Transformations in
Sculpture … you bump into The Guggenheim itself. This means that you get the look per-
mitted by the constraining bays of that unaccommodating helical gallery, whatever the
sculpture itself might demand or you might require (Danto 1987b, 153).
Nothing is more vulnerable to brutal interruption than our experience of something

self-sufficient. One might even imagine a clever curator with a vengefully anti-aesthetic
agenda intending to make the point that not even masterpieces of sculpture are truly
autonomous achievements. Even if that takes it too far, the Guggenheim, in its indiffer-
ence to how the sculptures on display embody their meanings, has delivered an insult.
Two insults, in fact. The first is to the sculptures themselves, and the second to us, so
rudely blockaded from a presentist encounter with them. On behalf of his readers,
Danto insults the museum in turn.
The Guggenheim is beginning to look shabby. The highest ramp is filled with pieces of
stowed paraphernalia, as though it had been turned into a kind of attic. It is a very
ill-considered perversion of architectural intentions. The light is so bad one feels the
management is trying to save money on electricity. The wonderful reflecting pool with
which the great slow spiral used to end has been cemented over, inducing a terrible opacity
where light was once captured by water. The walls are dirty. In an exhibition, as in a meal,
presentation counts for something. This is a graceless show. What could have been an
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GREGG M. HOROWITZ
exhilarating experience has been turned into a dull textbook of modern sculpture. Both
times I visited I left the show depressed (Danto 1987b, 158).
In its belligerence, this is an exemplary piece of journalistic art criticism. It may not
identify the thoughts at work in the sculptures on display, but it certainly does come to
their defense as they try – and fail – to make meaning. Bodies that embody meaning and
the meanings they embody turn out to need help after all, especially in the post-histori-
cal present. “Concerned but not comfortless,” says Nietzsche, “we stand aside for a little,
as contemplative spirits who are permitted to witness these enormous struggles and
transitions. Alas! The magic of these struggles is such, that he who sees them must also
take part in them” (Nietzsche 1999, 75).
References
Clark, T.J. 2018. “Bruegel in Paradise.” In Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come. New York:
Thames & Hudson 74–126.
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61: 19.
———. 1981a. “Aesthetics and the Work of Art.” In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A
Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 90–114.
———. 1981b. “Content and Causation.” In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy
of Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press33–53.
———. 1981c. “Works of Art and Mere Real Things.” In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace:
A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1–32.
———. Winter 1983. “E.H. Gombrich.” Grand Street 2: 2 47–67.
———. 1986. “Deep Interpretation.” In The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York:
Columbia University Press 47–67.
———. 1987a. “Prologue.” In The State of the Art. New York: Prentice Hall Press 1–7.
———. 1987b. “Transformations in Sculpture.” In The State of the Art, 153. New York: Prentice
Hall Press 153–58.
———. Spring 1989. “Narratives of the End of Art.” Grand Street 8: 3 33–53.
———. 1992. “The Art World Revisited: Comedies of Similarity.” In Beyond the Brillo Box: The
Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux 81–116.
———. 1994. “The 1993 Whitney Biennial.” In Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays & Aesthetic
Meditations. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux 3–20.

———. 1997a. “From Aesthetics to Art Criticism.” In After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and
the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 41–60.
———. 1997b. “Introduction: Modern, Postmodern, Contemporary.” In After the End of Art:
Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1997c. “Master Narratives and Critical Principles.” In After the End of Art: Contemporary
Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1997d. “Painting and the Pale of History: The Passing of the Pure.” In After the End of
Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 1998. “The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense.” History and Theory 37: 4.
———. 2000a. “Art and Meaning.” In The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Artworld.
New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux xvii–xxx.
———. 2000b. “Preface.” In The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Artworld. New
York: Farrar Straus & Giroux ix–xv.
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Freeland, Cynthia. 2008. “Danto and Art Criticism.” Contemporary Aesthetics 6. https://digitalcommons.
risd.edu/liberalarts_contempaesthetics/vol6/iss1/20 (accessed December 2, 2020).
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1975. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
———. 2002. Miscellaneous Writings of G.W.F. Hegel. Edited by Jon Stewart. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Theory 37: 4.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Edited by Raymond Guess and
Ronald Speirs. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Scott, A. O. 2017. “The Critic as Artist and Vice Versa.” In Better Living through Criticism: How to
Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth. New York: Penguin Books 13–40.
Soucek, Brian. 2014. “Review of the Philosophy of Arthur Danto.” In Notre Dame Philosophical
Reviews, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn. https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/
he-philosophy-of-arthur-c-danto (accessed November 24, 2020).
Wölfflin, Heinrich. 1950. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later
Art. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
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20
Postmodernism and Its Discontents
DAVID CARRIER
Art historians interpret artworks, tell the history of art and compare diverse artistic
traditions. Aestheticians define art, explain what artworks are, and identify the conse-
quences of their distinctive nature. They thus have different interests. Until recently, art
was not centrally concerned to raise challenges about the nature of art. To be sure, that
visual art traditionally consisted of expressive representations raised philosophical
questions. How can an artwork be a representation? And how can that object be expres-
sive? These questions were discussed. When, however, we get to some modernist and
contemporary art, then the relationship between art history and aesthetics becomes
more important. Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) and some more recent work by many
other artists challenges prior definitions of art. And so philosophical discussion is called
for.
We will look in detail at just one case study. Both Arthur Danto and Rosalind Krauss
wrote extensively about contemporary art. Often, indeed, they discussed some of the
same artists. And Danto, like Krauss, was also a practicing art critic. And so contrasting
their claims provides instructive lessons about the general relationship between art his-
tory and the philosophy of art.
This chapter has four parts. Part one presents one key portion of Krauss’s theorizing;
part two describes Danto’s definition of art; part three compares and contrasts their
accounts; and, finally, part four offers some general observations. Sometimes the
account adopts a personal tone, because I was involved, in a minor way, in the debate
between Danto and Krauss.
At the start of her career, Krauss wrote about the modernist sculpture of David
Smith. She was much influenced by the most important American art critic of the day,
Clement Greenberg. Then her book Passages in Modern Sculpture (1977) offered a his-
tory of sculpture from August Rodin into the 1970s.1 A traditional monograph, without
180
reference to Greenberg, it narrates the historical development of modern sculpture up

to minimalism and earth art of the 1960s. Already her interests had changed. And her
next book, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), has a
very different, less familiar structure. It presents theoretical essays about Surrealist
photography, Jackson Pollock’s abstractions, and other topics. The French structuralists
and post-structuralists, who were being much discussed in American literature depart-
ments, heavily influenced Krauss. The style of argument is novel, and so it’s unsur-
prising that it took art historians some time to catch up with her ways of thinking.
Responding to radically original contemporary art, Krauss offered a challenging
philosophical argument about the nature of art. Although she does not mention Danto,
her claims confront Danto’s aesthetic. Krauss also developed other philosophical argu-
ments, including some which I have discussed elsewhere.2 But for our purposes, it’s
most instructive to focus on her early view of the nature of art.
We will consider just one influential essay in The Originality of the Avant-Garde,
“Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1978). After describing minimalist works by Robert
Morris, Robert Smithson, and other 1960s artists who soon became well known, Krauss
asks how to relate their work to earlier sculptures like Rodin’s. Her conceptual apparatus,
the diagrams of the French structuralist A.-J. Greimas, was obscure, at least to art his-
torians. But her basic idea was straightforward. The new works look very different from
any prior art. To mention one of Krauss’s examples, Robert Smithson placed mirrors in
the Yucatan and photographed them; his artwork was very different from Rodin’s figu-
rative sculptures. And so we need to understand why such artifacts are artworks.
When Greenberg described the sculpture of Smith, he offered a historical analysis:
(It) grew out of Synthetic Cubism, with its clear drawing, and it never forgot Synthetic
Cubism. But by the mid-1940s it had loosened up in what can be called an Abstract
Expressionist direction, and it was doing so independently of painting and perhaps even
earlier.3
Smith’s sculptures look different from most earlier artworks, but they evolve out of
this tradition. (Greenberg did not admire the 1960s artists discussed by Krauss. Because
he thought that they offered nothing new, his brief account of them was dismissive.)
Krauss, however, argued that these artists successfully broke radically with tradition.
Hence the key word in the title of her essay: “sculpture in the expanded field.” Now the
range of possible sculptures expanded dramatically. Looking at this development from
the viewpoint of Greimas’ logical structure, she argued, was to adopt an essentially
anti-historical analysis. These new 1960s sculptures are dramatically unlike any ear-
lier art, and so a new narrative form is required. The identity of sculpture itself remains
unchanged, but now it has a place within the field of other artworks diagramed in this
structure.
Consider how we describe change. The United States grew from thirteen states to
fifty; an automobile has its mechanical components gradually replaced, until perhaps
no element of the original vehicle survives. Analogously, we can describe any novel art,
however radical, by appeal to stage-wise precedents. Eighteenth-century French
painters depicted humble landscapes; nineteenth-century English photographers pre-
sented rural scenes: and so by stages we could arrive at a genealogy for Smithson’s
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DAVID CARRIER
photographs of mirrors. As with the United States or a car, we describe a large change
by dividing it into relatively small stages.
For Greenberg, whose ways of thinking were famous when Krauss published “the
expanded field,” the history of painting from Giotto to Picasso to Jackson Pollock is such
a story of the large cumulative effect of relatively small changes preserving the essence
of painting. Krauss takes issue:
Profoundly historicist, Greenberg’s method conceives the field of art as at once timeless
and in constant flux. That is to say that certain things, like art itself, or painting or sculp-
ture, or the masterpiece are universal, trans-historical forms. But in the same breath it is to
assert that the life of these forms is dependent upon constant renewal, not unlike that of a
living organism.4
As Greenberg said, only constant change keeps painting alive. Krauss thought that
his historicist account presents you from seeing that minimalism is a truly novel sculp-
tural development.
If the nature of art has changed so dramatically, then perhaps art history writing
also should. But in fact the questions discussed in the Warhol literature are not different
in kind from those considered in commentary on Nicolas Poussin or Jackson Pollock.
Accounts of those artists trace their early careers, explaining how they came to make
original works; discuss the reception of their art; interpret the works; and describe the
artists’ personalities. Maybe, however, this only shows that her colleagues have not yet
understood Krauss’s radical lesson about the need for novel ways to describe contempo-
rary art.
Like Krauss, Danto was inspired by a novel artwork. Although himself a successful
practicing artist in the 1950s, doing traditional works, in his early career he had not
been especially interested in aesthetics.5 But when he saw the first exhibition of Andy
Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964), he thought that philosophy had to explain why these
objects were artworks. A painting by Poussin is made with a great number of brush-
strokes. A sculpture by Rodin is created by laboriously carving marble. And so these
works look very unlike anything from outside the art world. But this Warhol sculpture
looks just like the Brillo boxes in the grocery store. And so it was important to explain
why it, too, was an artwork.
After publishing his first account of Brillo Box in The Journal of Philosophy, Danto
eventually returned repeatedly to discuss that example. By stages he changed many
details of the exposition. He appealed to Hegel’s aesthetics, which he thought supported
some of his claims; Warhol, he argued, brought the history of art to an end. Thanks to
the fame of his philosophical aesthetics Danto became an art critic. He published many
books, catalogue essays, and reviews about contemporary art. And he did a book about
Warhol. Because Danto was a prolific writer, a full account of the development of this
analysis would be a large task.6 However, he never changed his basic philosophical
argument. And so for our present purposes, laying out the key basic theme running
through all of his texts will suffice.
The brillo box in the grocery is not a work of art. Warhol’s Brillo Box in the gallery is
an artwork. Art historians interpret this Warhol, museums display it, and it is auc-
tioned. But art historians, curators, and collectors are not interested in the brillo box.
182
Why are these objects, a brillo box and Brillo Box, which look the same, treated so differ-
ently? Poussin’s paintings and Smith’s sculptures look unlike anything you find outside
of the art world. And so a definition of art can appeal to their distinctive appearance.
Indeed traditional aesthetics defined visual art by reference to its appearance. Brillo Box
is more challenging, for an explanation of why it is an artwork cannot merely refer to
its appearance.
Danto’s very surprising original argument was that, in general, the identity of visual
art as art does not depend upon its appearance. He lays down a brief two-part definition
of the essence of art. An artwork is about something, and it embodies its meaning.7
Poussin’s paintings are about their historical subjects, which they depict; Smith’s sculp-
ture Blackburn (1949–50) is, quoting Krauss in Passages, about the translation of “the
taboos of totemism into a language of form,” and it embodies that meaning in steel and
bronze.8 Books about Poussin and Smith describe in words these subjects, but only their
artworks both present and embody their subjects.
Danto offers a completely general account, one that identifies the essence of all art.
(He focuses on visual art but claims that his aesthetic applies to all art in any media.) His
written commentaries on Warhol tell what is embodied in Brillo Box, which is a com-
mentary on the meaning of visual art in a commodity culture. Danto’s definition thus
explains why paintings by Poussin, sculptures by Smith and Brillo Box are all works of
art, distinctive sorts of things unlike artifacts from outside of the art world. Any art
made anywhere by anyone has the essence he laconically identifies.
Let’s note problems, first with Krauss’s account, then with Danto’s. Consider the
quotation from Greenberg that motivates Krauss’s analysis. It gives an accurate, clear
summary of his claims. Greenberg thinks that painting has a fixed nature, an essence–
and that over history that art form has changed dramatically. But what’s not correct is
Krauss’s suggestion that there is some contradiction involved in claiming both that
painting (or visual art) has an essence and that it has changed.
Saying that something or someone has an essence is compatible with allowing that
they change; a seed, once a small sapling, becomes the grown tree. Analogously the
same person has changing qualities. We use such appeals to essences to explain why a
thing (or person) is the same thing (or person) after change. Krauss says:
Historicism works on the new and different to diminish newness and mitigate difference.
It makes a place for change in our experience by evoking the model of evolution, so that
the man who now is can be accepted as being different from the child he once was, by
simultaneously being seen–through the unseeable action of the telos–as the same.9
This statement is misleading. The same person once a child now is an adult: persons
change and so one aim in speaking of essences is to describe such changes.
There are other problems here as well. In fact, as Danto pointed out to me, the
Greimas diagram, which (under another name) is familiar to logicians, doesn’t quite
have the significance that Krauss gives to it. Her claim that diagramming the forms of
sculpture translates discussion of development into an atemporal format isn’t actually
plausible; identifying the logical structures of sculpture is a more shaky enterprise than
she indicates.
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DAVID CARRIER
But these philosophical confusions say nothing about the correctness of Krauss’s
general argument. When something changes a great deal, it’s possible to plausibly
argue that the original thing has not survived. Someone might well argue that the
sculptures of Smithson and some of his contemporaries are so different from traditional
works that giving them all the same name “sculpture” is misleading. Krauss is right to
say that Greenberg’s historicism diminishes newness and mitigates difference. But that
says nothing about the correctness of either his ways of thinking, or her opposed anal-
ysis. If radically new art grows out of tradition, then an essentialist can perhaps explain
how art has changed; but maybe, however, essentialism is basically mistaken.
Danto’s firm conviction was that a proper aesthetic must be essentialist. This view-
point does not, however, amount to a disagreement between Danto the philosopher and
Krauss an art historian. Some art historians are not essentialists. At the start of The
Story of Art, E. H. Gombrich says: “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only
artists.”10 To take this claim literally, art has no essence, but perhaps artists do; maybe,
that is, there is some essential quality defining an artist. It would be mistaken, I think,
to analyze this statement in more detail, for Gombrich is not really making a philosophical
point.11 His goal, in context, is to describe the great varieties of legitimate responses to
varied artworks. Conversely, philosophers inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s account of
family resemblances have denied that art has an essence. As we have seen, there are
very varied visual art forms. Maybe, then, art is impossible to define. Danto’s analysis is
a polemic against this commonplace view, which was important when he developed his
account.
After backing into his published account of essences by correctly noting my mis-
taken reading of his prior claims, Danto claims to vindicate his “philosophical belief
that art is an essentialist concept” on the grounds that his treatise Transfiguration of the
Commonplace “captured part of the essence of art.”12 This statement surely is oddly
unsatisfying. Allowing that he did not know what to say next, Danto never returned to
finish his analysis. It is surprising that a much-published philosopher who loved to
argue never dealt with this seemingly obvious central point.13 If you are asked, “can
you walk all the way non stop from New York to Pittsburgh?” saying in reply that “you
can walk from New York to Princeton” is not an adequate response. The question is: Can
you go this whole distance from New York to Pittsburgh? That Danto’s definition of art
was partly correct does not demonstrate that it could be completed.
This critical observation says nothing about either the ultimate correctness of
Danto’s aesthetic, or his broader claim that a correct aesthetic theory must embrace
essentialism. Danto was a philosopher with a system, and his account of aesthetics fits
together, as he said, with his discussions of action, historical explanation, and knowledge.
He explained the parallels between descriptions of actions, historical explanations,
knowledge, and artworks like Brillo Box. But even if essentialism is the general key to his
system, that doesn’t show that essentialism also is required within aesthetics. Who is to
say that the structure of art or the art world does not differ from that analyzed in his
accounts of action, historical explanation, and knowledge? Danto believes that essen-
tialism is the only satisfactory basis for philosophy. Could it be, maybe, that artworks are
special sorts of things? Why then claim (without further argument) that essentialism is
needed in aesthetics? Danto doesn’t indicate how to answer these questions.
184
Sometimes appealing to essentialism involves a conservative ideal that at bottom

nothing ever changes. This maybe is a psychological point. Arguing that in the long run
the French Revolution of 1789 had only a limited effect on the political life of that
nation may involve that way of thinking. Conversely, saying that after the abolition of
the monarchy, France became a different country is to emphasize the radical change
brought about by that revolution. But this parallel cannot explain how to adjudicate
this dispute between Danto and Krauss, for they both agree that some 1960s art is rad-
ically original, but he explains that transformation in essentialist terms while she rejects
that way of thinking.
The question at stake is not how much change in art is possible. Everyone agrees that
Warhol’s and Smithson’s works are very different from those of Poussin and David
Smith; but if Danto is correct, they all are covered by his one definition. In Passages
Krauss discusses Brillo Box. Relating it to minimalism, she offers a very different anal-
ysis from Danto.14 Like the minimalists, the pop artists employed “elements drawn from
commercial subjects.” But the minimalists were exploring this idea of the readymade
(which went back to Duchamp) “in a far less anecdotal way than the pop artists, consid-
ering its structural rather than its thematic importance.” Nothing that she says takes
issue with Danto’s account, but in honesty, her interpretation is too different to make
productive debate possible.
Krauss became a colleague of Danto at Columbia. And he published a remarkably
sympathetic review of one of her books, after she presented a dismissive account of his
claims. But since neither scholar initiated a dialogue, that challenging task has been
bequeathed to their successors. Along with Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H.
D. Buchloh, the other very influential art historians associated with her journal October,
she published Art Since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, a textbook
that discusses a variety of philosophical writers.15 But although it presents short
accounts of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, and
Fredric Jameson, neither Danto’s name (nor that of any other analytic philosopher)
appears in this vast, two-volume book. Conversely, the details of Krauss’s account have
not been much discussed either by Danto or by other philosophers.16
I used to believe that this potentially instructive encounter between Danto and
Krauss was a missed opportunity. It seemed frustrating that two contemporary writers
understood some of the same artworks so differently and didn’t discuss that difference.
How was it possible, I wondered, that a philosopher and an art historian had such dif-
ferent viewpoints? But now I see that this response was probably mistaken.
Danto’s philosophical account of Warhol focuses on Brillo Box, with some notes
about Warhol’s films. Writing as an art critic, he also says a great deal about Warhol’s
paintings. In general, however, only Brillo Box generates the philosophical issues.
Warhol’s paintings have untraditional subjects, and some of them are made in untradi-
tional ways, using stencils; but they are recognizable as works of art. Warhol’s pub-
lished writings do pose challenges, but Danto didn’t focus on them.
Philosophers of art ask whether something is a work of art. But when art historians
deal with these artifacts, they take for granted that they are works of art. They are inter-
ested, rather, in the historical sources of this art, and in its interpretation as personal or
cultural expression. That something is in the art museum or gallery is sufficient for
their purposes to show that it is art. From the point of view of the art historian, the
185
DAVID CARRIER
philosopher’s concern with the nature of art thus is a side issue. For the philosopher,
conversely, the art historians’ lack of discussion of conceptual issues marks a real disin-
terest in theoretical speculation. This discussion is not meant to criticize either Krauss’s
or Danto’s analysis. Nor, conversely, is it to complain that art historians and critics
neglect philosophical concerns. These different kinds of art writers simply have quite
distinct concerns.
From a philosopher’s point of view, what is interesting about Warhol is that he chal-
lenged traditional definitions of art. Art historians discuss visual precedents for Brillo
Box, dissect Warhol’s personal life, and describe the cultural significance of his art. But
for the philosopher these are secondary concerns. To put this difference dramatically,
Danto’s questions don’t mean anything to an art historian qua historian, while many
of the art historian’s questions don’t matter to him qua philosopher.
But there is more to this. Danto was not only an aesthetician but also an art critic. He
always said that there was no particular relationship between these two forms of his
writing. It’s true, I grant, that his criticism often referred to Warhol. But he also devoted
a great deal of attention to contemporary figures, the abstract painter Sean Scully for
example, who have no connection whatsoever to Warhol. And Danto said that his defi-
nition of art didn’t tell you how to judge individual works. It would be possible, I think,
to agree with Danto that Warhol refocused the entire philosophical discussion about
the essence of art and still think that he was a dull artist.
For Krauss the story is different; she also has published art criticism. For her, the
dividing line between the art history writing and the criticism is less firm. In general,
she doesn’t give extended attention to the artists she doesn’t find philosophically
challenging.
In the nineteenth century, Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophies played a crucial role in
the formative development of art history writing. But nowadays Danto’s philosophy of
art doesn’t have a similar role, for art writing about contemporary art doesn’t depend in
any comparable way upon his philosophical analysis.
Art historians and aestheticians have different roles, which is to say that they
describe and think about art differently. But there is no reason that one person cannot
take on both roles. As we have seen both Danto and Krauss did that. So too have both of
the editors of this book, Professors Lydia Goehr (on at least one occasion) and Jonathan
Gilmore (frequently). Sometimes understanding diverse roles requires an act of imagi-
nation. But people who are both art historians and aestheticians are inside of both
roles, so to speak, in the way that Daniel Barenboim, who both conducts and plays the
solo piano in concert, is both conductor and pianist. If we want to understand the rela-
tionship between art history and aesthetics, then why not simply ask someone who can
do both?
On reflection, however, this analysis may not be completely satisfying. Consider this
problem. Myself, when I write art history, I offer one kind of argument, and when I
compose an essay in aesthetics, another kind of argument. The form of these argu-
ments is different. For example, art historians are interested in Warhol, the gay artist,
while philosophers are concerned with how Warhol challenges our concept of art. But
if you ask me how to compare these two kinds of writing, all I can say is that they are
different. I know enough not to offer my art history editors the material that I send to
a philosophy editor, and vice versa. But that I am both art historian and philosopher
186
doesn’t give me any privilege in offering this contrast between the disciplines. That
these two forms of writing are different doesn’t mean that one is intrinsically better
than the other.
Consider a related example. Contemporary philosophers often study historical
figures. Sometimes they focus on just one figure, but on occasion they become expert in
several different. Adorno and Danto were very different major philosophers who dealt
with some of the same issues. And so it’s most interesting to compare and contrast their
accounts. Suppose, then, that someone is expert both in Adorno and Danto. She has, let
us imagine, read closely the writings of both in the original languages and come to a
clear understanding of their claims. And so we ask her to compare and contrast their
arguments. I am not sure that this dual-expertise means that this philosopher can offer
such a comparison. Suppose that she replies: Adorno and Danto are simply very differ-
ent philosophers, so different that comparing their claims is almost impossible. Has she
missed anything?17
Danto loved thought experiments. Here, then, consider yet another. You hold a new
academic chair, divided between art history and philosophy. You have that post because
you have published both as an art historian and as aesthetician. And it happens that
you’re invited to lecture at a prestigious university. But when you arrive with the pre-
pared lecture, you realize that you can’t remember whether you were invited by the art
history department or the philosophers. At this (unusual) university, art historians
attend philosophy lectures, and vice versa. But obviously, these two audiences have dif-
ferent expectations. You give your lecture and take the questions. The philosophers
praise your brilliantly original analysis, while the art historians complain that you don’t
discuss relevant themes. Do you then conclude that you gave a philosophy lecture? Does
this show that a brilliant philosophy lecture can be a bad art history lecture? I am not
sure how to answer these questions, for understanding the philosophical significance
of different roles can be difficult.
Consider another thought experiment. Suppose that you are involved in a debate
about tenure at your university. Were I a young faculty member, you say, I would abol-
ish tenure, but as a tenured faculty member I vote to preserve tenure. This obviously
seems a sophistical answer. You are asked what is right, not how your action would
depend upon your personal role. Morality involves giving a general answer, not telling
what is to your advantage.
I have posed these many questions that I don’t know how to resolve. Perhaps this
shows that I am really a philosopher! But it is true that for me as an art critic, evaluation
of Danto’s aesthetic isn’t a pressing concern. But I can tell one good story. Twenty some
years ago, when I first taught in China, I presented Danto’s aesthetic theory. It was a
hot, humid night and so there were mosquitoes in the lecture hall. In the question
period, a student killed a number of them, held them on his hand, and asked if this was
an artwork. I regret that I didn’t get his name, for I was impressed.
If my analysis is correct, then it allows us to imagine the likely fate of Danto’s writ-
ings. Philosophers will continue to discuss his theory, for it makes controversial, major
claims. And his art criticism, which deals with such a marvelous range of artists, will be
essential for study of the late twentieth-century New York art world. But art historians
are unlikely to take up discussion of his aesthetics.18
187
DAVID CARRIER
Notes
1 See my review Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XXXVI.4 (1978): 510–12.
2 See my Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: from Formalism to beyond
Postmodernism (Westport, CT: Greenwood/Praeger, 2002).
3 Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4. Modernism with a Vengeance
1957–1969 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 216.
4 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1985), 1.
5 See my “Arthur Danto: Artist,” 1 January (2011), http://artcritical.com/2011/01/01/
danto-artist.
6 See my “Danto as Systematic Philosopher, or; comme on lit Danto en français,” in Mark
Rollins, ed., Arthur Danto and His Critics (Basil Blackwell, 1993), 13–27; reprinted in the sec-
ond edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
7 Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 195.
8 Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1977), 155.
9 Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde., 277.
10 Ernst H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (London: Phaidon 1995 (sixteenth edition)), 15. Danto
speculated about Gombrich’s lack of concern with Duchamp and Warhol; in fact, when I
asked Gombrich he confirmed that he had no interest in this art. See my “The Big Picture.
David Carrier Talks with Sir Ernst Gombrich,” Artforum, February 1996: 66–9, 106, 109.
11 I suspect that Gombrich was thinking of the claims of his friend the philosopher Karl Popper.
As a graduate student at Columbia I did a thesis under Danto, which discussed Gombrich at
length, though it did not focus on this issue.
12 Danto, After the End of Art, 195.
13 I published a sketch of a counterexample to this claim, but so far as I know, no one has taken
up that point; see my Proust/Warhol: Analytical Philosophy of Art (New York: Peter Lang, 2008).
14 Passages, 249–50.
15 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900.
Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004).
16 But see my Rosalind Krauss. When she first read the book she said that with one exception,
which is not relevant here, that it was an accurate report.
17 This may not be the whole story; see my review Lydia Goehr, Elective Affinities: Musical Essays
on the History of Aesthetic Theory, History & Theory 2010, 49.1: 139–46.
18 I thank Barry Schwabsky for correction of one important point in my discussion of Krauss.
References
Carrier, David. 1978. “Review, Krauss, R. E. (1977).” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism:
510–12.
———. 1993. “Danto as Systematic Philosopher, or; comme on lit Danto en français.” In Arthur
Danto and His Critics, edited by Mark Rollins, 13–27. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
———. February 1996. “The Big Picture. David Carrier Talks with Sir Ernst Gombrich.” Artforum
66–9, 106, 109.
188
———. 2002. Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to beyond
Postmodernism. Westport, CT: Greenwood/Praeger.
———. 2008. Proust/Warhol: Analytical Philosophy of Art. New York: Peter Lang.
———. 2010. “Review, Goehr (2010).” History & Theory: 139–46.
———. 2011. “Arthur Danto: Artist,” 1 January 2011, http://artcritical.com/2011/01/01/
danto-artist
Danto, Arthur. 1995. After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ:
Foster, Hal, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh. 2004. Art Since 1900.
Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism. London: Thames & Hudson.
Goehr, Lydia. 2010. Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory. New York:
Gombrich, Ernst H. 1995. The Story of Art. London: Phaidon.
Greenberg, Clement. 1993. The Collected Essays and Criticism: Volume 4. Modernism with a
Vengeance 1957–1969. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Krauss, Rosalind E. 1977. Passages in Modern Sculpture. New York: Viking.
———. 1985. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
189
21
Shakespeare and the Repetition of the
Commonplace
RACHEL EISENDRATH
Arthur C. Danto’s 1981 The Transfiguration of the Commonplace begins and ends with
quotations of William Shakespeare’s 1604–1605 Hamlet. Lines from the closet scene
serve as the book’s epigraph: “HAMLET: Do you see nothing there? QUEEN: Nothing at
all, yet all that is I see.” And the book ends by conflating two passages from this same
play, claiming that artworks provide “a mirror” (a reference to Hamlet’s assertion that
actors must “hold as ‘twere the mirror up to Nature”) in order to “catch the conscience
of our kings” (a reference to Hamlet’s desire that his Mouse-Trap will expose Claudius’s
guilt: “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King”).1
My task in this brief essay is to follow the slender threads of these few Shakespearean
phrases to see what they can teach us about Danto’s book. I should say at the outset that
I am not a Danto scholar but a scholar of Renaissance literature. While Danto often
assumes a Hegelian teleological progression, according to which the most recent art is
the most advanced,2 my orientation will be different. In my experience, Shakespeare’s
texts can prove more complex than we are, teaching us things that we don’t yet know
about ourselves. Artworks are indeed mirrors – but, recalling the well-known fairytale,
mirrors that sometimes tell recalcitrant truths. Danto himself points out that “mirrors
and then, by generalization, artworks, rather than giving us back what we already can
know without benefit of them, serve instead as instruments of self-revelation.”3
Before delving into the specifics of these quotations, it is worth noting – partly by
way of explaining my essay’s focus on a few brief lines of Shakespeare – that quotation
is a key conceptual category of Danto’s book. Even though his work tends to be associ-
ated primarily with visual art, providing a philosophical vindication for works of Pop
Art like Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box or Roy Lichtenstein’s Portrait of Madame Cézanne, he
quotes various literary authors throughout the book and discusses the meaning of
quotation as an epistemological category. Although he does not mention it, the word
“commonplace” in the title of his book can refer not just to commonplace objects, such
as boxes of scouring pads, but also to easily recognizable sayings, such as well-known
190
Shakespeare and the Repetition of the Commonplace
quotations of Shakespeare. The word comes from classical rhetoric, referring back to
the locus communis, that is, shared places or categories for constructing arguments, of
which maxims or other familiar sayings are one example.4
It is for good reason that Danto’s book downplays the differences between literary
and visual arts. After all, Danto’s core questions concern aesthetic philosophy, specifi-
cally the ontology of art. He wants to explain how two things that are identical in every
discernible physical respect can nonetheless differ in that one thing is an artwork and
the other is a mere thing. That this situation can be so is not debated – it is assumed from
the beginning. The answer for Danto is that an artwork is not just about something in
the world; the artwork is also about this aboutness.5 He explains that this key compo-
nent of aboutness means that an artwork’s self-reflection on its own mode of represen-
tation lies at the core of what makes it art. While it is hard to recall a theory of literary
or visual art that, at least since Plato, does not include issues pertaining to art’s own
mode of representation – the late-sixteenth-century poet Sir Philip Sidney, for example,
described poetry’s claim to truth as being that it does not pretend to tell the truth (“What
child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an
old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?”6) – what seems new in this book of Danto’s is
the focus on this issue of aboutness as the foremost defining feature of art. In his
account, the history of art has led to a point where this question of art’s status “has
almost become the very essence of art itself.”7 An artwork like Brillo Box, in so drasti-
cally emphasizing this single variable that the artwork teeters on the line between seem-
ing an artwork and a mere thing, thereby manifests for Danto this philosophical
distinction and gives it a physical form in the world.
Danto builds his argument through a discussion of literary history. He credits Jorge
Luis Borges with being the first to discover that there can be artworks and objects
which are outwardly indistinguishable. Danto spends several pages analyzing a 1939
short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” where Borges imagines a sym-
bolist poet of the twentieth century setting himself the near-impossible task of repro-
ducing chapters of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote – but not by copying them;
rather, by finding the impulse for them within himself. The work that Menard pro-
duces is in essence a long quotation, and by virtue of that fact – and this is key for
Danto – possesses a new meaning. Danto says that, for Borges, the later Quixote repre-
sents an advance on the first and is “infinitely more subtle.” Here we seem to have an
exemplary case in the literary sphere, where two things are the same, but one repre-
sents a transfiguration. “Borges’ contribution to the ontology of art is tremendous,”
Danto writes.8
It seems that Borges’s work provides a kind of mirror that reflects Danto’s ideas about
art. But mirrors are problematic things – especially ones as complex as literary texts by
Borges or, as I’ll soon discuss, by Shakespeare. In Borges’s short story, we read of this
imagined work of Menard’s – but we do so through the eyes of a narrator whom Borges
presents as absurdly pretentious. Gathered with other faithful followers at Menard’s
“marmoreal place of rest” (el mármol final), this narrator laments the textual corrup-
tions that have entered into his supposed master’s work. Money and power are key com-
ponents of this story. Among the faithful are the baroness de Bacourt and the countess
de Bagnoregio, both of whom have offered their gracious approval of the narrator’s
words:
191
RACHEL EISENDRATH
The baroness de Bacourt (at whose unforgettable vendredis I had the honor to meet the
mourned-for poet) has been so kind as to approve the lines that follow. Likewise, the count-
ess de Bagnoregio, one of the rarest and most cultured spirits of the principality of Monaco
(now of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, following her recent marriage to the international phi-
lanthropist Simon Kautzsch – a man, it grieves me to say, vilified and slandered by the vic-
tims of his disinterested operations), has sacrificed “to truth and to death” (as she herself
has phrased it) the noble reserve that is the mark of her distinction, and in an open letter,
published in the magazine Luxe, bestows upon me her blessing.
There is no mistaking the effect of parody. When the narrator lists the complete works of
Menard, two in particular stand out: a “definition” of the countess, which aims to correct
“the inevitable biases of the popular press,” and a cycle of sonnets dedicated to the bar-
oness.9 To the extent that Borges’s story provides an argument at all (he elsewhere expresses
doubts that literature makes arguments10), it presents a satire that exposes the limits of a
coterie-based means of establishing the value of an artistic work. No matter the actual
temporal order of the two authors’ publications: Borges’s short story starts to seem less like
a justificatory precursor of Danto’s theory, and more like a trenchant critique of it.
Shakespeare pursues related questions. In Hamlet, the play from which Danto draws
most frequently in Transfiguration, we are shown situations where the exact same
physical thing is indeed declared to be two different things:
HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

POLONIUS: By th’ mass and’tis like a camel indeed.
HAMLET: Methinks it is like a weasel.
POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
HAMLET: Or like a whale?
POLONIUS: Very like a whale. (III.ii.367–73).
In this scene, Hamlet has just realized that even his friends are in the king’s service and
play upon him as though he were an instrument made for manipulation. The element
of power is important. Shakespeare emphasizes Hamlet’s disillusion with socially con-
structed reality by providing a nearly identical interaction between the prince and the
courtier Osric at the end of the play:
OSRIC: I thank your lordship, it is very hot.

HAMLET: No, believe me,’tis very cold; the wind is northerly.
OSRIC: It is indifferent cold, my lord, indeed.
HAMLET: But yet methinks it is very sultry and hot, or my complexion–
OSRIC: Exceedingly, my lord, it is very sultry, as’twere,–I cannot tell how. (V.ii.80–7).
Hamlet is exposing the ways that people will support the beliefs of those in power. As in
Borges’s short story, it is not just that we all see things differently, and that the same
thing can be two completely different things depending on which name we give it.
Polonius’s and Osric’s versions of reality are not so innocent. What Shakespeare is ana-
lyzing here, as he analyzes throughout his corpus, is the way that social power works
and how it shapes what we see and what we say, just as it does in Hans Christian
Andersen’s story of the emperor’s new clothes.
192
Flattering can take the form of echoing what people want to hear. The problem for the
“good” characters in Shakespeare’s plays is often how to speak truth to power – and how
thereby to provide a better kind of mirror, one that resists such flattery. In The Winter’s
Tale, for example, Paulina tries to confront King Leontes, who has descended into a mad-
ness of his own making. She reserves special criticism for his pandering counselors, who,
rather than telling him the truth that his fears have no connection to external reality,
have instead made themselves into a shadowy echo chamber of his madness. Converting
the palace into a kind of analogue of the interior of his skull, these counselors skulk
around as though something were really wrong, sighing every time he sighs. Addressing
them directly, she blames them for this echoing of him: the fault, she says, lies with “such
as you, / That creep like shadows by him and do sigh / At each his needless heavings” (II.
iii.32–34).11 In contrast to those who merely echo the king’s fears, she swears that her
words will be “as medicinal as true, / Honest as either” (II.iii.36–37). In this drama,
Paulina plays the role of a kind of redeemed shrew or harpy figure, and, as such, her
words are harsh. She is trying to break through the king’s fantasy world by disrupting
the echo chamber that surrounds him and insisting that there is a reality that lies outside
his imagination. For example, she confronts the king with the baby that he thinks is the
fruit of his wife’s adultery and has therefore rejected. She tries to use the baby as a mirror
of a better kind. If only she could get the king to see this tiny reflection of himself: “Behold,
my lords, / Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father – eye,
nose, lip, / The trick of ’s frown, his forehead, nay, the valley, / The pretty dimples of his
chin and cheek, his smiles, / The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger” (II.iii.96–
101). In this case, there is a truth that, whatever his inability to perceive it, actually lies
before the king’s eyes; this truth is embodied in the physical reality of a baby girl, at
whom Paulina’s words insistently point. Leontes is the father of this girl, but he needs to
recognize her as his own in order to restore himself and the kingdom to health.
In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Danto hardly mentions money or social
power and their role in our evaluation of meaning. The overall suppression of this theme
in a book that is bound up in the New York art market creates, for me, perplexity when it
comes to trying to understand what he might mean when, in the closing words of the
book, he describes art as “offering itself as a mirror to catch the conscience of our kings.”
Already to some degree in 1981 when the book was published, but especially now, it is
not clear which kings his book is challenging in championing artworks that have become
the kings of the artworld, and that are considered, in Peter Schjeldahl’s words about
Warhol, “the gold standard” that “exposes every inflated value in other currencies.”12
1 Mirror, Mirrors on the Wall
A mirror is a tricky metaphor. For a Renaissance poet such as Shakespeare, a mirror can
be a kind of technology of self-revelation, a means of finally seeing one’s own face (or
of showing someone else his face), as Danto suggests in the case of Hamlet’s Mouse-
Trap. However, a mirror can also serve as the symbol of vanity. In medieval and early
modern emblematic representations of her, Lady Vanity holds a mirror. No less popular
was the image of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own image reflected in the water.
There was also the medieval and early modern mirror-of-princes tradition (speculum
193
RACHEL EISENDRATH
principum), which offered an idealized version of a prince, against which, it was hoped,
he would learn to check himself.13
Some Renaissance poets put the various roles of mirrors – as agents of self-delusion
or of self-recognition – in close juxtaposition, as though testing the question of their
difference. Available to Shakespeare was Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered, either
directly in the Italian or in the Edward Fairfax translation of 1600. Tasso shows his
hero Rinaldo, having succumbed to a life of luxury, lying in the lap of his lover Armida.
The scene abounds in imagery of mirrors. While she looks at herself in a mirror, he
looks at himself reflected in her eyes. Begging her to look at him, he tells his beloved:
You may not know it, but in my desire

lies the true portrait of your loveliness.
Its wondrous form shows in the crystal’s art
but truer in the mirror of my heart.
Ah, if you scorn to look at me, at least
look at your own face shining in my eyes,
for your glance will delight to see itself,
rejoicing, when no other can suffice.
A mirror cannot give a sight so sweet,
no glass can comprehend a paradise!
Heaven is the mirror worthiest of you,
and in the stars you see your beauty true (XVI.21–22).14
This narcissistic use of the mirror mixes together real physical mirrors with mirrors
of Neoplatonist traditions that evoke how the lover could, as Socrates puts it in the
Phaedrus, “see himself in his lover as in a mirror” (ἐν κατόπτρῳ).15 But obviously the
mirrors in Tasso’s story are so far doing no good; as we know, the selfie is not neces-
sarily an instrument of self-realization. For Tasso, the problem becomes how to break
through such a hall of mirrors and confront the hero with reality. This Rinaldo’s
friends do – with yet another mirror. Decked out in soldiers’ pomp, they step forth
from behind some bushes where they’ve been hiding and wake Rinaldo from his dozy
state of luxurious indulgence. Immediately, at the sight of their martial splendor, he
begins to recall himself. Ubaldo then reveals the shield of diamond that he carries,
and at this point Rinaldo “turned his glance upon the brilliant shield, / and saw him-
self for what he was” (XVI.30). After so many bad mirrors, here we get the good
mirror we’ve been waiting for: the one that provides efficacious self-realization for
the hero.
Some poets make these two kinds of mirrors hard to distinguish. John Milton’s use of
the mirror is perhaps the most complex: In Paradise Lost, Eve first sees herself in a
smooth lake, and prefers her own image to that of the man who, “less fair, / less win-
ning soft” (IV.478–79), is supposed to be her mate. In leading her away from her own
fetching reflection, God draws her away from “vain desire” (IV.466), although ques-
tions may arise about whether, in so doing, God denies her the possibility of any rela-
tionship with herself, that is, denies her the possibility of self-knowledge – with the
result that she is more vulnerable to the wiles of the serpent, who seduces her by sup-
plying this old want in offering her a flattering reflection of herself in words.
194
In Shakespeare’s works, it’s hard to say what makes the difference between the good
and bad kinds of mirrors, between the kind of mirror that awakens us to reality and the
kind that leaves us more wrapped up in self-involved imaginary worlds. In the closet
scene in Hamlet, from which Danto draws his epigraph (“HAMLET: Do you see nothing
there? QUEEN: Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.”), Hamlet holds up two artworks, por-
traits of Hamlet’s murdered father and of King Claudius, and begs his mother to look
upon them and to compare these two men: “Have you eyes?” he asks her again and
again (III.iv.63; 65). He wants her to recognize the superiority of his father and the
utter repulsiveness of his uncle. And these artwork-mirrors seem, at least temporarily,
to work on her. However, what they show her is a deflected image, an image not of them
but of herself: “O Hamlet,” she begs, “speak no more. / Thou turn’st my very eyes into
my soul / And there I see such black and grieved spots” (III.iv.86–88). The sense of
reality that emerges in this scene is of the utmost complexity. The “nothing” in the lines
that Danto quotes in his epigraph from this scene, far from being Shakespeare’s resolu-
tion of the problem of meaning, is rather a moment in his depiction of an ongoing
problem of interpretation. When the ghost reappears, and the queen insists she sees
nothing, Shakespeare raises the interpretive problem of whether the ghost is real or
whether he is a figment of the prince’s distraught imagination. What’s radical about
Shakespeare’s treatment of this question, upon which so much turns, is that he renders
it not just the queen’s or Hamlet’s interpretive problem; it is also the audience’s. The
play presents us with conflicting evidence, forcing us to hold in an uncomfortable inter-
pretive suspension at least two incompatible versions of reality. Schooled in traditions
of forensic rhetoric,16 Shakespeare insists on putting us in situations of manifold inter-
pretive difficulty, with which we have to try to come to terms. After the ghost appears on
stage and then Gertrude denies having seen him, are we to think that the play itself has
entered into Hamlet’s version of reality? Or: Is Gertrude lying? Or: Are we crazy, too?
As one of my students put it, there are a lot of different kinds of “nothing” in Shakespeare’s
plays. At various moments, nothing can mean the female sex, the impossibility of speaking
the truth, or – what I’m emphasizing here – the nihilistic hole into which Shakespeare’s fic-
tional worlds threaten to collapse when the process of mutual negotiation about what con-
stitutes reality stops, when the words of those in power are merely echoed, when their
fantasies are merely mirrored. The most famous case is King Lear, where speaking truth to
power proves not the best way to get ahead in merry-ish old England: the good Kent is ban-
ished; the servant who tries to stop his master Cornwall from doing a gross injustice (blinding
Gloucester) is killed; and Cordelia is disowned. The nothing that Lear discovers on the barren
heath in the storm represents, arguably, his collapse into a nihilism of his own making.
In Othello, Iago creates another experience of nothing by perverting the role of coun-
selor and repeating or mirroring Othello’s words back to him:
OTHELLO: … Discern’st thou aught in that? Is he not honest?

IAGO: Honest, my lord?
OTHELLO: Honest? Ay, honest.
IAGO: My lord, for aught I know.
OTHELLO: What dost thou think?
IAGO: Think, my lord?
OTHELLO: Think, my lord! By heaven, thou echo’st me … (III.iii.102–9).17
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RACHEL EISENDRATH
Iago produces negation through this kind of verbal mirroring. Shakespeare was probably
thinking of Augustine, who describes evil as nothing because it is the absence of God and
therefore emerges through our distance from the goodness of his creation. This experi-
ence of nothing is so painful that Othello eventually resorts to begging for evidence, for
the “aught in that,” for the “ocular proof ” that will confirm his worst fear, which is that
his wife is having sex with his lieutenant. Lost in the inner storm of his misery, Othello
rants, “By the world, I think my wife be honest, and think she is not, / I think that thou art
just, and think thou art not. / I’ll have some proof.… / I’ll not endure it. Would I were sat-
isfied!” (III.iii.386–93). For him, even evidence of his wife’s infidelity would be less painful
than the awful nothing that Iago’s evil has opened in the heart of his sense of reality.
2 Not Nothing
It’s not that Shakespeare didn’t believe in art – or thought that it was, at base, nothing.
Danto is wrong when he says that “in his final statement” Shakespeare put art on “on
the lowest ontological rung.”18 Danto quotes, as support, the much-quoted
Shakespearean phrase from The Tempest, that art is “an insubstantial pageant fading”
(IV.i.155).19 Although a romantic tradition indeed treats this phrase as Shakespeare’s
farewell to the theatre, “his final statement” on art, this is not actually his final play. The
Tempest was followed around 1613 by two collaborations with John Fletcher: Henry
VIII, a radically political work that dares to put on stage a recent monarch, and The Two
Noble Kinsmen. More importantly, these words are not Shakespeare’s. Just as it wasn’t
Borges speaking in “Pierre Menard,” Shakespeare is not the one speaking here in The
Tempest. It is a character of his, Prospero, whose pseudo-colonialist lusts for power and
self-nostalgic regrets are made to play out in the context of other characters’ desires
and perceptions and relations to the world. Other than in his legal will, Shakespeare
didn’t offer any last and final statements.
What he did offer is an art that works by constantly juxtaposing one view of the world
against others and by placing audiences in situations where further meanings always
seem to be in the process of unfolding. Far from treating art as ontologically low,
Shakespeare seems to have thought of art as close to the best means we have for seeking
truth in a world that typically closes down this process of ongoing interpretation by echo-
ing the views of those in power. It’s not that Shakespeare possesses some claim on truth,
or that truth is even possessable, but that his art continues to thrust us into the problem
of how to try to account for an endlessly complex reality, how to attempt to take cogni-
zance of changing contingencies that alter it, how to strive to come to terms with our own
and others’ conflicting perceptions of it. When Danto happily imagines a literary criti-
cism of a phone book, or an art criticism of three thumbtacks, I wonder whether this is a
future to be wished for. Rather than being an image of the Hegelian spirit finally realizing
itself, this vision seems to be of a world narrowing in on itself, eviscerating its own sense
of content, reducing us to thought that depends on a single variable – echoing rather
than challenging our awesome capacity to be reductive, especially now in our hyper-com-
modified, Trump-tweeted world. It’s worth remembering that Hegel himself worried
about such reductive tendencies of thought, pointing out that the phrase all animals
(imagine that phrase, in neon, hanging in a gallery) “cannot pass for a zoology.”20
196
Danto presents his argument as new but also, paradoxically, as consistent with a uni-
versalized wisdom. People usually quote Shakespeare in this way, making him seem a
fount of timeless truths without purchase on history. Such a strategy is persuasive
because, as Aristotle puts it in the Rhetoric, we all love to hear expressed as a universal
truth the opinions we ourselves hold (1395b). However, in Danto’s The Transfiguration
of the Commonplace, this strategy also risks making Shakespeare seem like one of his
own minor characters, one of many who echo and flatter the kings of the world.
Notes
1 III.iv.128–29; III.ii.21–22; II.ii.539–40. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, edited by Ann

Thompson and Neil Taylor, Arden Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Thomson Learning,
2006).
2 About Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings, for example, Danto writes that “so self-conscious are
they, indeed, that they almost exemplify a Hegelian ideal in which matter is transfigured
into spirit” (111). And he says that the reason a pile of hemp couldn’t be an artwork in the
seventeenth century is because “the concept of art had not then evolved in such a way as to
be able to accommodate it as an instance” (my italics, 45). Arthur C. Danto, The
Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1981).
3 Ibid., 9.
4 Renaissance schoolboys were taught to keep commonplace books and to collect in them
quotable sayings. Hamlet refers to these books in response to the ghost’s demand to be
remembered: “Remember thee? / Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all
trivial fond records, / All saws [sayings or commonplaces] of books, all forms, all pressures
past / That youth and observation copied there” (I.v.97–101). On Renaissance commonplace
books, see Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
5 See Victoria Kahn, The Trouble with Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 109.
6 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (or The Defense of Poesy), edited by Geoffrey Shepherd,
rev. and expanded for 3rd edition by Richard W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2002), 103.
7 Danto, The Transfiguration, 56.
8 Ibid., 35–6.
9 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin
Books, 1998), 88–95.
10 In lectures given at Harvard in 1967–1968, Borges tells of reading the works of the philos-
opher Martin Buber and enjoying them as “wonderful poems,” until he learned that Martin
Buber is a philosopher. If he had known these were works of philosophy, his response would
have been different, he says: “Perhaps I had accepted those books because they came to me
through poetry, through suggestion, through the music of poetry, and not as arguments.”
Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 32.
11 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, edited by John Pitcher and Arden Shakespeare, 3rd
ser. (London: Thomson Learning, 2010).
12 “Going Pop: Warhol and His Influence,” The New Yorker (September 24, 2012).
13 For the many meanings of the image of the mirror in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, see
Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-imagery in titles and texts of the Middle Ages and the English
Renaissance, translated by Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
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RACHEL EISENDRATH
14 Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered/Gerusalemme liberata, edited and translated by Anthony

M. Esolen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
15 Plato’s Phaedrus (255D). Plato, Euthyphro; Apology; Crito; Phaedo; Phaedrus, translated by
Harold North Fowler (Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press,
1914). The mirror also plays an important role in the Republic 10 (596d–e), where Socrates
compares artistic representations to mirrors and thereby disparages mimetic artworks as
mindless derivatives of higher realities.
16 See Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance
Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
17 William Shakespeare, Othello, edited by Ernst Anselm Joachim Honigmann and Arden
Shakespeare, 3rd ser. (London: Thomson Learning, 2006).
18 Danto, The Transfiguration, 11.
19 A slight misquotation. Shakespeare’s phrase is actually “this insubstantial pageant faded”.
20 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Arnold V. Miller
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 11.
References
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1998. Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin
Books.
———. 2000. This Craft of Verse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge,
Grabes, Herbert. 1982. The Mutable Glass: Mirror-imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages
and the English Renaissance. Translated by Gordon Collier. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Arnold V. Miller.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hutson, Lorna. 2007. The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance
Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kahn, Victoria. 2020. The Trouble with Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moss, Ann. 1996. Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Plato. 1914. Euthyphro; Apology; Crito; Phaedo; Phaedrus. Translated by Harold North Fowler.
Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press.

Schjeldahl, Peter. 2012. “Going Pop: Warhol and His Influence.” The New Yorker, September
24, 94.
Shakespeare, William. 2006a. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London:
Thomson Learning.
———. 2006b. Othello. Edited by Ernst Anselm Joachim Honigmann. London: Thomson
Learning.
———. 2010. The Winter’s Tale. Edited by John Pitcher. London: Thomson Learning.
Sidney, Philip. 2002. An Apology for Poetry or the Defense of Poesy. Edited by Geoffrey Shepherd,
rev. and expanded for 3rd edition by Robert W. Maslen. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Tasso, Torquato. 2000. Jerusalem Delivered/Gerusalemme liberate. Edited and Translated by
Anthony M. Esolen. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
198
22
Engaging Henry James:
The Metaphorical Perspective
GARRY L. HAGBERG
The fact that Arthur Danto is so well known for his vibrant writing on the visual arts
should not blind us to his deep interest in literature and writing, his vision of its role in
the living of a human life, and the special way he interweaves his literary interests with
his writing on the visual arts. In Danto’s life and work, the writings of Henry James
proved particularly powerful in this regard. In an interview in The Henry James Review
(1997), Danto reported that he still
read fiction in order to put my own life in perspective. Of course, I do read it for distraction
and to a degree for entertainment. But, the things that really affect me are things that put
my life in a certain perspective. I think we’ve all admitted that state. I still have things to
learn. I read Henry James’s The Ambassadors in my fifties when I was between marriages –
how does an older man conduct an affair? – I couldn’t have gotten that from any psychol-
ogists in the world. I certainly couldn’t have gotten it from a sociologist and it’s not the kind
of thing that people talk very much about. But, James felt deeply about that sort of
autumnal relationship between Strether and the woman.
Putting a life in perspective is the project, the work, of self-knowledge. Such a per-
spective involves seeing one’s life across time, as one individual complexly interacting
with others, and often through analogy to how we approach and understand charac-
ters in literature. What Danto saw deeply was that the forms of understanding in liter-
ature and in life are parallel, that they cast light on each other. “Again, a bit later,” so he
continued the interview, “when I did marry again and had the task of my marriage and
my older daughter’s marriage, I got great solace and guidance from The Golden Bowl.
There’s probably no text that deals with those kinds of questions the way James does.
And, the writers I admire are all somehow or other like that.”
Between life and literature, Danto found parallels that were metaphorical both in
perspective and in structure. Aristotle said that the structure of metaphor is of the form
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Garry L. Hagberg
A is to B as C is to D, and then we switch A for C. Seeing that evening is to the day as old
age is to life allows us to metaphorically speak of the evening of life. The substitution,
“evening,” awakens a set of connotations absent in the original literal words “old age,”
and this both casts light and opens possibilities for thought and speech that would oth-
erwise have been overlooked. In response to the interviewer’s observation that Kafka
had a wonderful way of making metaphor literal, Danto replied,
That’s right. I’ve always felt that. I cannot help but feel that. And, I think it doesn’t matter
whether it’s about men or women. I felt strongly that Anna Karenina was a metaphor for my
life at certain points, and I think it would be a very poor life for which Anna Karenina was
not a metaphor. I think that’s true of all great fiction that I’ve read.
By “a very poor life,” Danto was referring to a life that is in a sense trapped inside the
literal, trapped inside a set of descriptions that are unremittingly practical and exhausted
by utilitarian expediency. That would also be a life unawakened to the enlivening
interest of rich description and a way of living rich in metaphor, in figurative compari-
sons, rich in the light cast by a language that is not weighed down. That is the language
that Henry James spent his literary life exploring and exemplifying.
The appreciation of James’s metaphorical style never left Danto; it remained alive
and wove itself throughout his writing regardless of primary subject. Even when
thinking about painting, Danto saw parallels to James’s intricate and hyper-alert mode
of presentation. In a review of the painter David Sawin (Danto, 1998), a painter whose
work Danto “admired without reservation” but which remained only obscurely exhib-
ited and “officially nonexistent,” Danto, like James, did not presume that the obvious or
the most visible was the most interesting. To the contrary: Danto found in the paintings
a semi-hidden content “of the purest and most profound order. … They use the classical
format of still life and landscape, but as occasions rather than subjects, for this artist is
concerned with transitions and tensions: like Matisse, he is interested not in the objects
themselves but in the relationships between them.” It was Henry James’s brother
William who claimed, as a central tenet of his philosophical work, that the relations
between things are as important as the things themselves. Henry then showed how the
relations between things (and thoughts and ideas and psychological and emotional
states) are as interesting as those experienced things themselves (cf. Hagberg, 2007).
Danto agreed: “Like Henry James (if a literary analogue is licit) whose concern was with
characters mainly as points of perturbation in social fields, objects, for Sawin, are there
for the purpose of making palpable the forces that define a world of paint.” Sensitive to
the multiple forces operating within the expressive microcosm of a set of works of art,
Danto saw special value in the fact that the eighteen of Sawin’s works brought together
in that exhibition were indeed “invisibly small by comparison with the large-scale blasts
of today’s salon pieces.”
In an article “Ounces of Example: Henry James, Philosopher,” (Bambrough, 1986)
the philosopher Renford Bambrough asked that the closest attention be brought to the
smallest details, the powerfully dispositive and telling details in James’s depictions of the
mind. Danto independently concurred: “In James, one single word can transform the
social field cataclysmically, precipitating the tensions it was the art of his mastery to
reveal. For Sawin, a single splash of color has just that effect.” Sawin’s works indeed
200
reveal precisely this: the experience of seeing, of sensing, the importance of detail itself
becomes a metaphor for the moral-psychological attention one pays to other persons.
Danto saw this and from this says more.
Henry’s brother, and his successors in classical American philosophy Josiah Royce
and George Herbert Mead, argued that it was not only the relations between things, bet-
ween separate objects, that are as interesting as the objects themselves, but that the very
idea of an object itself was ontologically suspect. They saw objects in considerable mea-
sure constituted by the relations (e.g. above, below, beside, foregrounded, backgrounded,
brighter, darker, warmer, cooler, attraction, repulsion, etc.) into which they enter. Danto
saw this philosophical point residing within the kind of painting he most admired. The
transformative power of a single word on the social fabric was the same power in a splash
of color or in a strong brushstroke that enlivens and makes vibrant all the elements
related to it. But still, is this kind of sensitivity and acute receptivity, be it in literature, in
painting, or in life, easily or readily discernible at a glance? Or rather, does it demand the
long-arc cultivation of a special (Jamesian) discernment? Danto writes: “It is exceed-
ingly difficult for readers to make the transition from Zap Comix to The Golden Bowl. The
transition from Whitney Biennial art to Sawin’s work is difficult in just that way.” Clearly,
the concept of seeing, as drawn from James, is being used in two senses: there is what
one sees, plain and unobstructed in front of one’s eyes. But then there is what Henry
James’s characters acutely “see” to informatively different degrees. This twofold seeing is
what Wittgenstein also investigated at length, though here one is immediately reminded
of Danto’s central commitment to what in art “the eye cannot descry.”1
Consider a passage from Danto’s review of a major Degas exhibition: “The Bellelli
Family is the sort of painting Henry James might have done had he been a painter rather
than a writer, but retained his novelistic powers and profound feeling for civilized desper-
ation and emotional bondage. It is an essay on matrimonial tension and domestic politics,
transacted in an elegant but cramped salotto in which mother, father, two children and
the family dog reveal the forces that tear them apart and keep them together in mutual
trapped agony” (Danto, 1990). Danto sees all the virtuosic painting in this canvas:
nuances of the execution, technique and brushwork, palette – everything pertaining to
what the eye can descry. But like James, he sees all this and – in the second sense of “see”
– much more. There are layered relations contained herein that make these figures who
they are. No one is an entity unto her or himself. Degas’s aunt Laura, married all too
regrettably to Count Gennaro Bellelli, stands with “erect suffering” and “disdain” with
her two daughters “feigning an innocence that announces their complicity,” together
posing “aggressively” as a monument against him. Her face connotes “a long list of
injuries and indignities” that “he is not allowed to forget.” (Danto does not say it, but the
Count looks like a person who has created the very circumstances about which he bit-
terly complains and of which he is justifiably not allowed to forget.) For Danto, the Count,
“penned” between armchair and hearth, can only “glare balefully at the martyrizing
martyrs,” and who, by “seeing” within seeing, glares “as if through bars no less impris-
oning for being invisible.” Windows, as metaphors for “escape and freedom,” are visible
only in a removed or inaccessible sense, in mirrors. The dog is “sneaking out of the pic-
ture before all hell breaks loose,” and as viewers, Danto suggests, our most genuine sym-
pathies are with the dog, having seen all too clearly that this group constitutes “what
Sartre later defined as ‘other people.’” Intertwining relations or person-constitutive
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Garry L. Hagberg
relations are the painting’s subject matter as well as the language we use to articulate
these webbed relations. If Henry James had been a painter and painted this work, we
would have understood – genuinely seen and seen into – his painting with the words of
his novels. And we, as he, would have understood his own life by seeing that life through,
or in the light of, both of these representational idioms, both word and paint. The
aesthetic sensibility in question here is carried by, and cultivated by, words of a Jamesian
kind. And it is thus no surprise that so many of James’s stories are indeed about painters.
For both Danto and James there is an internal or inseparable mutually constitutive rela-
tion between content and style. Danto rightly sees that the gaming table, in art and in the
reality art represents, “is a metaphor for a kind of life, the turned card a moment of truth”
(Danto, 1981). He contrasts cardplayers as painted by Caravaggio, Jan Steen, and Cézanne.
Whereas the first two painters painted psychological as well as physical reality, Cézanne
shows an external form devoid of any detectable psychological interior. How Danto sees
the difference here tells us about how he sees the essential style-content relation: a simple
model would be an additive and subtractive one, where the three painters display the same
exterior form, but only the first two add the psychological component (thus placing them
closer to Rembrandt’s psychological expressivity). That way of putting the difference rests
on separable categories of form and the representational content. But Danto’s view is not
so categorically neat; with its greater complexity, we again see the influence of James.
Danto’s “claim is that these are simply differences in metaphors and that Cézanne’s
paintings are no less expressive that Rembrandt’s.” Cézanne’s paintings of card players
are not correctly seen as half-paintings on a double-ontology model, where his paint-
ings delete an inner psychology while including the outer physical reality. Rather, with
the absence of a visible psychological interior, they assume the perspective of metaphor
through the reciprocally and inseparably evolving form-content: form circumscribes
the range of possible content as the content circumscribes the range of possible form.
The style of the presentation, the way the form emerges within the composition, is
interwoven with the content. It is striking that at precisely this point Danto makes
explicit a direct parallel to literature:
Much the same connection between form and content – much the same matter of style –
may be found in novels as well. Hemingway’s characters are like Cezanne’s cardplayers,
simple and geometrical, and they hardly can be otherwise, given the simple declarative
sentences by which they are described. … Try writing about Proustian jealousy with
Hemingway sentences. Or think of James, whose dense and gelatinous prose is perfectly
suited to exemplify what he is interested in, the field of feelings, in which the individual
characters are more or less points of condensation.
Danto identifies precisely this in James’s The Awkward Age. Danto writes,
The unanimous occupants of Lady Brookingham’s drawing room were almost more
concerned for each other’s vibrations than for anything else. All James’s characters com-
municate by means of vibrations, and the prose shows this; try to think of this being done
with Rabelaisian syntax or Johnsonian symmetries or Shakespearean fustian. … The
philosophical point is that the concept of expression can be reduced to the concept of met-
aphor, when the way in which something is represented is taken in connection with the
subject represented.
202
How something is said, is inseparable from, is part of, the content of what is said.2 How
James’s characters express themselves is – as is true in life – a part of, an expression of,
who and what they are. Like Caravaggio, like Steen, like Rembrandt, like Cézanne. But
all of this puts us on the track to a still fuller understanding of what Danto meant by the
parallel metaphorical functions of art and of literature.
In his thinking about the function and power of the museum, Danto turns to Adam
Verver, a central character in James’s The Golden Bowl. It is important to remind our-
selves of Verver’s leading ambition in order to grasp how Danto employs Verver as a
metaphor. A wealthy art collector, Verver is amassing art of the highest quality to stock
what he envisions as the grandest of all museums. His museum will satisfy the deep and
often unrecognized aesthetic need of all the workers who propelled him to great wealth.
Danto sees in Verver a release from “the bondage of ugliness” that is tantamount to a
release from the bondage of ignorance, where taking in beauty is simultaneously taking
in knowledge, and particularly an aesthetically delivered form of self-knowing. Danto
emphasizes the transformative revelation experienced by Verver himself in the presence
of great art, an inner awakening that got him past what he now understands as his
former blindness. Art’s transformative power thus becomes a self-revelation that moti-
vates Verver to plan, design, build, and open a museum – just as the Brooklyn Museum
came into being in 1897 as the projected greatest museum in the world. The Golden
Bowl was published in 1904; McKim, Mead, and White, the great firm of the period
most in accord with James’s sensibility, designed the structure; despite being radically
cut down, with only one wing of the original grand plan being built, Danto nevertheless
refers to “the high-minded Ververs of Brooklyn” (Danto, 1997). He evidently saw the
Brooklyn museum through the lens of Verver; or he saw Verver in the aspirations and
reality of that museum. Or he understood the cognitive planners of that museum as he
understood both James’s and Verver’s constructive minds. In these descriptions, conno-
tations are enlivened through metaphorical connections: ways of writing are opened by
seeing the one thing in light of the other. As Wittgenstein put it, “aspects dawn.”
Interestingly, Danto does not leave the matter there. Indeed he could not, precisely
because of his own profound Verver-like belief in the transformative power of art. Danto
writes that Verver had of course experienced art prior to what James calls his “vertiginous
peak,” the point at which Verver experienced art “existentially or transformatively.” Danto
adds: “By this I mean that he had not experienced it in a way that provided him a vision of
the world and the meaning of living in the world.” Danto then says, simply but powerfully:
“There are such experiences with art,” citing the case of Ruskin writing to his father in
1848, when he described a life-changing, life-directing experience of art from which Ruskin
derived what Danto called “a philosophy of life.” Reflecting on Verver’s case, Danto finds that
Verver believed that embarking on his second marriage would bring Verver the experiential
analogue to the transformative beauty that he had experienced in his profound engagement
with art in James’s novel and that Ruskin had experienced in life. The reason it is hard to say
if, for Danto in these important passages, (a) the literary case of Verver is illuminating
Danto’s understanding of Ruskin, or if (b) Ruskin’s case is illuminating his comprehension
of Verver within the novel (and thus in a sense measuring the novel’s mimetic fidelity against
the real-life case of Ruskin), or if (c) both of these, reciprocally intertwined, illuminate
Danto’s own experience at certain times, is that all three are simultaneously true. This is
what Danto means by the metaphorical structure of the experience of literature and art.
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Garry L. Hagberg
For Danto, aesthetic experience (of this powerful, life-directing, or transformative

kind) and self-knowledge go together. The special magnetism that pulls us back to great
works throughout the arts is anything but reducible to a model of distanced specta-
torial observation. To understand this is to understand what James, Ruskin, and Danto
all saw beneath or behind the ocular appearances. It explains why so many find them-
selves unable to leave the arts past the point of personal sacrifice and loss once they feel
this special pull, and why any conception of the arts based on the concepts of entertain-
ment or casual diversion is so hopelessly uncomprehending. For Danto, the possibility
alone justifies every form of both public and private support for the arts.
So does one want to conclude now that Danto is a Jamesian critic? Any such generic
statement, applied across the full range of Danto’s critical and interpretive writings,
would surely be somewhat crass. But still James is often present, in explicit or implicit
form. Consider Danto’s discussion of what should serve as the criterion for good public
art. Danto writes,
I find Henry James instructive here, as in most of the cruxes of life. There is a passage in The
American Scene where he records his surprised admiration for Grant’s Tomb. “I felt the criti-
cal question … carried off in the general effect,” he (James) wrote. “The aesthetic
consideration, the artistic value … melted away and became irrelevant.” What was rele-
vant, James goes on to say, was the manner in which the tabernacle of General Grant
embodied the values of a democratic society. He contrasts the monument with the tomb of
Napoleon in Paris which, “as compared to the small pavilion on the Riverside bluff, is a holy
of holies, a great temple jealously guarded and formally approached.” His point is that
these two structures project the deepest public values of the societies that built them. If
aesthetic values were a society’s deepest values, then “the aesthetic consideration” would
not melt into irrelevance unless a work failed artistically. In these two monuments, the two
societies embody themselves. I think something like this has been achieved in Maya Lin’s
great memorial to the American dead in the Vietnam War (Danto, 1987).3
Wittgenstein wrote repeatedly of “ways of seeing”; James provided a conceptual lens,

and Danto viewed art through it. Taking us back to the fundamental idea of a meta-
phorical perspective, what one might call a language of perception, or a style of seeing,
comes with any such conceptual lens. Nevertheless, a remaining issue pertains to the
interview from which I quoted at the outset, when Danto was reminded of the sense
shared by many that “contemporary philosophy has no connection with the broader
culture and more alarmingly, neither with the culture’s intelligentsia: artists, writers,
journalists and the like.” The interviewer asked: “Do you agree with that?” Danto
responded:
I think it’s a justifiable complaint. It has been a long time since philosophers wrote in ways
in which nonphilosophers, whether they’re writers or poets or whatever, would find
interest in them. Probably the last one that has reached across that kind of way, at least
from among what we think of as the Anglo-American philosophical tradition, would be
Ludwig Wittgenstein. He really continues to excite artists and writers, I think, because of
his imagination and imaginative way of writing and probably because of the unfinished
character of what he’s doing. You get the sense of somebody really thinking through ques-
tions – somebody who maintains a certain distance from philosophy, and tries to think
about philosophy in an open and pictorial way. So, Wittgenstein would certainly be, I guess,
the last of the great ones.
204
Had James been a philosopher, Danto would undoubtedly have named also him. For James
in literature and Wittgenstein in philosophy share an imaginative way of writing without
compromising the import that Danto would also draw out as philosophical. James places
his characters as, and shows his characters to be, centers of consciousness moving in a
field of multiple and ever-changing engagements, negotiating a three-dimensional field of
possibility. His characters are portrayed as conscious and active participants engaged in an
irresolvable process of making themselves who and what they are in language. If in a dis-
tinctive way, Wittgenstein is deeply similar: then his readers too get the sense that they are
in the presence of relentless thinking and rethinking, where the language in which this
thinking takes place is itself constantly considered and reconsidered for its leading and
misleading power. For Wittgenstein (and this too is true also for James), language is rarely
transparent to the user; it is not inert, not a passive instrument for the conveyance of fully
cognized content. In his phrase “maintaining a certain distance from philosophy,” Danto
is thus referring to a stance that does not accept terminologically entrenched language as
a given: Wittgenstein thinks anew. And the unfinished character is indeed an essential
part of that thinking. Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy is not of a kind reducible to a list
of conclusion-propositions or to any of the standard “isms” in philosophy. The work is
“alive” and too intellectually enlivening for this. Like James, and like so many of James’s
characters, thinking is always and ceaselessly a work in progress. We see minds at work,
often wrestling with fundamental philosophical questions of meaning.
Across the span of many years of thinking, Danto evolved perhaps the most acute
view of art’s complex relation to philosophy when, with both Hegel and James in mind, he
wrote that “The experiences belong to philosophy and to religion, to the vehicles through
which the meaning of life is transmitted to people in their dimension as human beings.
And at this point I return to Adam Verver’s conception of the thirsting millions. What
they thirst for, in my view, what we all thirst for, is meaning: the kind of meaning that
religion was capable of providing, or philosophy, or finally art” (Danto 1997, 187–88).
For Danto, art either was or strived to be what it can be at its most profound: a locus
of human meaning. That did not make art or literature a static object of distanced con-
templation, but a living form of engagement relationally enmeshed in a self-interroga-
tion, self-composition, or self-structuring. And this required the two senses of “see.” No
sentence of Danto’s better captures the Jamesian core thought: “That is, art was con-
strued as a fount rather than merely an object of knowledge.” And to that fount, Danto
deeply believed, humanity will always return.
Notes
1 Bambrough, 1986; cf. Hagberg, 2010, 2016; Danto, 1964. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, Revised 4th ed., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), “Philosophy
of Psychology: A Fragment, sec. 111”. (Prior to this edition this was called Part II, Section xi).
See also Danto’s own encapsulation of the idea in Danto, 2000: “The difference between art-
works and mere objects is momentous, but it cannot rest on anything that meets the eye. The
distinction between meaning and being is a good place to start in working toward a critical
assessment: one has to ask how the meaning is embodied in the material of the object” (xi).
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Garry L. Hagberg
2 Cf. Danto’s self-reflective remark from his preface to The Madonna of the Future: “The degree to
which my pieces actually achieve a status as literature is not for me to say, but my effort as a
writer is in every instance to remove obstacles to their being such. At the very least, this
means making them as clear as possible, which means that I bring to the writing on art what
I learned as an analytical philosopher, inspired by such literary models as David Hume,
Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W. V. O. Quine. Only, it seems to me,
if essays have a degree of literary quality is there any good reason to republish them” (xii).
3 Danto, 1987, 92–93. Another place (and there are many more of these than I can discuss
here) where Danto sees art and develops his language for it out of Jamesian perception and
language, is in his review of the paintings of Lee Krasner; see The State of the Art 33. See also
his essay (1998, 113–25); this essay is reprinted from Danto’s Introduction to James’s story
“The Madonna of the Future” as illustrated by Jim Dine’s photographs of his Ape & Cat
sculptures, in the Arion Press edition.
References
Bambrough, Renford. 1986. “Ounces of Example: Henry James, Philosopher,” in Nicholas Boyle
and Martin Swales, eds., Realism in European Literature: Essays in Honour of J. Stern. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 169–82.
Danto, Arthur. C. and Liszka, James Jakób. “Why We Need Fiction: An Interview with Arthur C.
Danto,” The Henry James Review 18.3 (Fall 1997): 213.
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld,” The Journal of Philosophy 61.19: 571–84.
–––––. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
196.
–––––. 1987. The State of the Art. New York: Prentice Hall, 1987, 92–93.
–––––. 1990. Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present. New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux, 18.
–––––. 1997. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 175–76.
–––––. 1998. “The Future of the Madonna,” The Henry James Review 19.2: 113–25.
–––––. 2000. The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World. New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux
Hagberg, Garry. L. 2007. “Imagined Identities: Autobiography at One Remove,” New Literary
History 38.1: 163–81.

–––––. 2010. “In a New Light: Wittgenstein, Aspect-Perception, and Retrospective Change in
Autobiographical Understanding,” in William Day and Victor Krebs, eds., Seeing Wittgenstein
Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 101–19.
–––––. 2016. “Leonardo’s Challenge: Wittgenstein and Wollheim at the Intersection of Perception
and Projection,” in Gary Kemp et al., eds., Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation.
Abingdon: Routledge, 117–59.
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23
Literature, Philosophy, Persona, Politics
RICHARD ELDRIDGE
Arthur Danto’s philosophical writing is replete with literary references. Here is a

selective list, drawn only from his books on art, of some of the authors he mentions,
cites, or discusses: Aristophanes, Ashbery, Auden, Borges, Cervantes, Coleridge, Defoe,
Dickens, Eliot (George), Eliot (T. S.), Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Hemingway, H ijuelgo,
Homer, James, Joyce, Kafka, Keats, Lawrence, Mallarmé, Mann, Maugham, Ozick,
Poe, Proust, Racine, Rilke, Rimbaud, Shakespeare, Swift, Vonnegut, Woolf,
Wordsworth, and Yeats. The list spans lyric poetry, drama, the novel, and the short
story and the English, French, German, and Greek literary traditions. Frequently the
sources, especially Proust, are cited in the original language. Clearly, Danto was a
prodigious reader, and it would repay some attention to consider the work in presenting
a philosophical persona and in developing a view that is done by these references and
comments, all within the framework of Danto’s unmistakable lapidary style.
It is, moreover, a striking fact, but one easy to miss, that Danto’s analysis of art is
itself stated in terms drawn significantly from literary studies. The differentium of art as
a distinct kind of representation, Danto tells us in the crucial Chapter 7 of The
Transfiguration of the Commonplace, “must be close to … the point of intersection between
style, expression, and rhetoric” (Danto 1981, 165). The title of that book is itself appro-
priated from a book described as having been written by a character in Muriel Spark’s
novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a title that Danto says he “admired and coveted,
resolving to take it for my own should I ever write a book it might suit” (Danto 1981, v).
Danto chose the philosophy of literature, and in particular the relations between litera-
ture and philosophy, as the topic of his 1983 APA Presidential Address (Danto 1984,
135–61).
What, then, are the affinities and the differences between philosophy and literature,
both as Danto officially discusses them and as they are manifested throughout his
philosophical writing? Are literary expressiveness, stylization, and rhetoric in any way
essential to philosophy as Danto conceives of it or practices it? More specifically, how for
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RICHARD ELDRIDGE
Danto, both in theory and in his practice, do philosophy and literature define them-
selves in both engaging with and distinguishing themselves from each other?
Danto’s official view about the nature of philosophy is quite clear. Philosophy is purely
a conceptual enterprise, aimed at solving problems about the natures of things precisely
where no empirical information is available to settle what they are. Or, as Danto puts it in
his Presidential Address, “the form of a philosophical question is given – I would venture
to say always, but lack an immediate proof – when indiscriminable pairs with neverthe-
less distinct ontological locations may be found or imagined, and we then must make
plain in what the difference consists or could consist” (Danto 1984, 151; see also Danto
1986b, 173). Here philosophy, according to Danto, aims to discover necessary truths
having to do with the essences of things. When, but only when, we establish such truths
are we then able to say what essential differences (typically involving relations to us and
our doings) distinguish items (works of art vs. mere things; dream images vs. veridical
images; intentional actions vs. mere bodily movements; causal connections vs. constant
conjunctions, and so on) that are perceptually indistinguishable. As Noël Carroll ele-
gantly summarizes the idea, philosophy is conceptual, not observational: “philosophy
transcends experience, whereas science interrogates and organizes it, [by searching for]
experiential, aka empirical, differences” (Carroll 2015, 557). As a result of its trafficking
in the purely conceptual, necessary, and essential, philosophical work embodies no eval-
uative or critical agenda. It either gets right everything that falls under a concept by pos-
sessing an essence (without questions of comparative value arising), or it is simply
mistaken. As Danto remarks about his own philosophy of art,
it has to fit everything [that is art] because it means to articulate the very concept of art. So
in particular it entails no critical agenda. A lot of critics say about things that cannot easily
be thought of as anything but art, that they are not art. That is the mark of their having an
agenda. I have none. … Every work of art has to exemplify [the theory] to perfection or it is
bad or incomplete as philosophy (Danto 1994, 11).
While this is a prima facie plausible and important view of philosophy, there are also
some reasons to worry whether it can stand. Are conceptual, empirical, and evaluative
questions always so sharply distinct from one another, especially when the phenomena
whose shared essence we are concerned to discover include something as artefactual
and subject to historical development as art? Can philosophers just “get it right,” once
and for all, without also developing and enacting a critical stance that both feeds into
and draws from particular perceptions, as we are invited and enabled by a set of articu-
lated concepts to see, understand, and engage with the phenomena in a certain way?
Perhaps with something like this worry arising sotto voce, and while he both main-
tains and practices his official view, Danto also takes pains both to enact his own style
and to comment on style in philosophy as a distinct personal and historical achievement.
One historical source for the idea of perceptually indistinguishable counterparts are the
sets of identical twins in Shakespeare: two sets of identical twin brothers in A Comedy of
Errors and the identical but gender-distinct (according to the mistaken conception of the
time) twins Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night. Sorting things out may require all the
complexities of a Shakespearean comedy, where those complexities may include histor-
ical knowledge, perception, evaluation, and felt affinity, among many other things.
208
Whatever his historical sources, however, Danto tells us, surely not exempting himself,
that “most… star philosophers have pretty distinct voices;… the jokes, the asides, the
syntax, the punctuation (like parentheses), the vocabulary, the imagined cases, the author-
ities appealed to, the tone, give the author away” (Danto 1996, 90, 91),1 even if an essay
has been anonymized for blind refereeing. These features matter, moreover, for the work
that philosophy does. Danto describes “the bottom-line view of philosophy” that under-
takes to develop only via impersonal theses and arguments, and that requires “the suppres-
sion of voice” as “abstract, distorted, and surrealistic” in being too severed from our actual
experiences as historical and embodied beings (Danto 1996, 101–2, 104). Voice and “the
aura of a total vision” in the philosophical text do work in helping us to see, understand,
and evaluate phenomena; “suppression of our facticities results in a distorted representa-
tion of the world, the world according to Nobody” (Danto 1996, 103, 104). “Creative phi-
losophers do not do philosophy by producing atoms of bottom-line ‘good’ philosophy,” and
“blind philosophy might to everyone’s profit stop being written” (Danto 1996, 104).
Generally speaking, ‘the freer the voice, the better the philosophy” (Danto 1996, 104). All
this at least suggests that philosophy at its best is personal, creative, and stylized as opposed
to impersonal and concerned with essences in a brutely factual way. If discoveries of
essences that anyone should recognize were all that is properly in view, then why should it
matter who is writing with which individual historical experience, vision, and voice?
In the very same essay in which he develops this point, however, Danto also pulls
back toward his official view of philosophy as a distinct practice that is different from
literature. Though philosophy at its best may be creative, free, and expressive of a total
vision, Danto also worries about inconsistency with his official view, as he stops to ask,
“Does this mean that philosophy and philosopher are inseparable? Or that there is a
deep connection between philosophy and voice?” (Danto 1996, 91). To focus in reading
philosophy on the sound, image structure, vocabulary, syntax, and the other textual
phenomena through which literary voice is distinctively achieved at least runs the risk
of “vaporiz[ing] philosophical writing into poetry” (Danto 1996, 94) by failing to take
seriously philosophy’s defining pursuit of impersonal and necessary truths about
essences. It is important to avoid this risk, since the pursuit of impersonality and the
erasure of distinct authorial voice “implies a vision of ourselves as vehicles for the
transmission of an utterly impersonal philosophical truth, and it implies a vision of
philosophical reality as constituted of isolable, difficult, but not finally intractable prob-
lems” (Danto 1984, 139). For Danto, that vision of philosophy is worth holding onto,
since “nothing could be more dismal to contemplate than philosophizing without end”
(Danto 1986a, 210). This thought – philosophy has an end, whereas art does not –
amounts to “an argument that philosophy is not art” and not literature, since art and
literature are enterprises that we rightly expect to continue without end. Even if there is
a death of art in its once upon a time defining enterprise of self-definition – a death
arrived at in Warhol’s work coupled with the essentialist definition Danto achieves in
reflecting on it – that is no reason either to expect or to hope for artmaking itself to end.
Socially and institutionally situated, pluralized embodied meaning-making is just fine.
This goes for both art and literature, but not philosophy, which in contrast aims more at
truth than at expression. Unlike in art and literature, in philosophy, “there are theses …
and so truth or falsity, to the assessment of which voice seems hardly to matter; … [in]
philosophy neat, clean, and simple, … issues of logical consistency and truth trump
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RICHARD ELDRIDGE
those that pertain to the expressive dimension of writing” (Danto 1996, 102). Directly
disclaiming the significance of his own style, Danto announces, “I don’t have the
patience to embody my ideas. … As a philosopher I want to mainline, to get directly to
the issue,” pushing all matters of literary artistry to the side (Danto 1986b, 184).
In contrast, what philosophy does and should seek to suppress – embodiment, incar-
nation, style, and voice – are essential to what literature is. Where philosophy seeks gen-
eral truths and invites the assessment of its claims as true or false, poetry, for example, is
an incarnation of a movement of thought and experience into which readers are invited
to enter. The point comes not in arriving at a doctrine but rather in sharing in that
expressed movement in order to understand and feel what something in particular is like.
Or, as Danto puts it in characterizing Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,”
You cannot flatly say, “Frost said, ‘And miles to go before I sleep.’” Of course the words were
his. But he said them in a poem, and that line has to be reached by reading through the
poem which it closes, resolving the tensions of the poem by its repetition. It is not sepa-
rately assertible, not something Frost held. This is to treat literature as if oblique. It is indeed
to treat it as literature! (Danto 1996, 93–4).
There are no bottom-line takeaways, no asserted and assessable conclusions. The aim is
to enter imaginatively into the experience the poem embodies.
More broadly, Danto argues in favor of a view of literature as to-be-experienced and
against views of literature either as involving reference (to denizens of possible worlds,
Meinongian subsistent entities, and so on) or as empty of content (mere textual and
intertextual play). The former, “vertical” view of literature as referential, typically pro-
pounded by cognition-obsessed philosophers, founders on the fact that we have no
knowledge of the nature or existence of the putative referents apart from the literary
work and no possibility of taking any interest in them apart from it. “The sorts of things
philosophy has laid down to connect literature in order to give it meaning – Gegenstände,
intensions, fictive worlds – are themselves as much in need of ontological redemption as
the beings to whose rescue they were enlisted – Don Quixote, Mr. Pickwick, Gandalf the
Grey” (Danto 1984, 144). But the latter, “horizontal” view of literary works as nothing
but “intricate networks of reciprocal [textual] effects” is no better: on this view, “it is
difficult to locate literature in the plane of human concern at all” (Danto 1984, 150).
Contra this horizontal view, we should not abandon the thought that literature
somehow casts light on things that matter.
But how so? “Clearly we need a z coordinate,… a dimension of reference that neither
vertical nor horizontal reference quite reveal” (Danto 1984, 150). That z coordinate, according
to Danto is the reader. Literature is neither about obscure possibilia nor only about other texts
and words. Rather, “literature is… universal in the sense of being …about each reader who
experiences it; … it is literature when, for each reader I, I is the subject of the story. The work
finds its subject only when read” (Danto 1984, 154, 155). Metaphorically, when I read,
I am Achilles, or Leopold Bloom, or Anna or Oedipus or King Lear or Hyacinth Robinson or

Strether or Lady Glencora: or a man hounded by an abstract bureaucracy because of an
unspecified or suspected accusation, or the sexual slave O, or the raft-rider responsible to a
moral being an unspeakable nation refuses to countenance as a man (Danto 1984, 155).2
210
Danto chooses as the epigraph for this essay a remark from Hegel’s Aesthetics: “By dis-
playing what is subjective, the work, in its whole presentation, reveals its purpose as
existing for the subject, for the spectator, and not on its own account. The spectator is,
as it were, in it from the beginning, is counted in with it, and the work exists only for this
point, i.e. for the individual apprehending it” (Danto 1984, 134, citing Hegel 1975,
805–6). In one obvious sense, like all vehicles of any form of communication, literary
works exist essentially for a reader: they are to be read. But there is more to Danto’s
point than this. Literature works upon and transforms the reader’s self-consciousness
in a way that is in general different from the effects of other things we read. In particular,
literature affords us something different from the knowledge of existing particulars that
we get from history and the knowledge of necessary truths about essences that we get
from philosophy. Instead, literature uniquely works by “transforming the self-con-
sciousness of the reader who in virtue of identifying with the image recognizes who he
is” (Danto 1984, 156) – metaphorically identifying, of course, since literal identification
would be madness (cf. Cohen 2009). Each reader, one might say, comes while reading
to inhabit a particular possibility of human being, and so comes to know the subjec-
tivity of Lear or Elizabeth Bennett or Eve from the inside, as it were, through recognizing
possibilities of egocentric fear of intimacy, prejudice modulating into love via learning
to read, or pride in self-assertion within her- or himself.3 Or as Danto develops the point
in contrasting the perceptually indistinguishable novel Silas Marner by George Eliot
with the parish register narrative Silas Marner by George Elliott (they are word for word
identical): where the parish register narrative is referential rather than an incarnation
of ideas, the novel is “a parable of love and meaning” that is “about whoever reads it,”
where “reading is more than understanding the words” in involving letting the parable
work upon you, letting your metaphorical transformation into Silas Marner happen
(Danto 1986b, 179–80).
In philosophy, too, however, and especially in its greatest practitioners, something
other than the communication of information is going on. As in literature, in philos-
ophy “something is intended to happen to the reader other than or in addition to being
informed,” and this transformation is to take place essentially via the reader’s engage-
ment with “the forms it may have seemed inevitable that the work be presented in”
(Danto 1984, 140) – markedly distinct forms such as
dialogues, lecture notes, fragments, poems, examinations, essays, aphorisms, meditations,

discourses, hymns, critiques, letters, suummae, encyclopedias, testaments, commentaries,
investigations, tractatuses, Vorlesungen, Aufbauen, prolegomena, parerga, pensées, sermons,
supplements, confessions, sentential, inquiries, diaries, outlines, sketches, commonplace
books, and … addresses (Danto 1984, 141).4
Philosophy, at least as a matter of its defining ambitions and at the highest reach of its
achievements, is, in Danto’s perception, essentially written for the sake of transfigura-
tion; its very life is lost when its texts are “flattened into papers” (Danto 1984, 140). The
kind of truth – transformation of the reader through engagement with form – that phi-
losophy seeks differs from the neutral description of person-independent states of
affairs. We would do well to acknowledge “that the concept of philosophical truth and
the form of philosophical expression are internally enough related that we may want to
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RICHARD ELDRIDGE
recognize that when we turn to other forms we may also be turning to other concep-
tions of philosophical truth” (Danto 1984, 140). Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and
Duns Scotus, Descartes and Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Quine, could not be who
they are as philosophers and achieve their distinctive effects without writing in such
distinctive ways.
But then, as Danto himself worries, “I seem to have argued myself into something of
a quandary, having incompatible attitudes on voice” (Danto 1996, 102) in philosophy.
Like literature, philosophy must be distinctively voiced, stylized, and written in order to
achieve its transfigurations of the reader, and yet its truths are also impersonal,
necessary, and absolute – matters of bottom-line renderings of how things are that are
utterly unlike literature. How is this possible?
Danto’s answer is that while philosophy does aim “to reveal us for what we are in
virtue of our reading,” through which we are to be essentially transformed, it also aims
“really to reveal us, however, not metaphorically” (Danto 1984, 160; emphasis added)
– to get us and our doings and interests right, once and for all, from a hitherto unsus-
pected but now universally apt and disclosive angle of vision. This is possible insofar as
it may happen in philosophy that “what looks like a metaphor in the beginning ends as
a fact, and it [the metaphor] may be eliminated in favor of a technical term, as Locke
begins with the natural light – with ‘the candle within us’ – and ends with the technical
term intuition” (Danto 1984, 159). What is proposed by metaphors modulating into
technical terms are not simply senses of what it is like to be Achilles or Molly Bloom or
Marcel, but instead senses of what it is like to be anyone who is clear about fundamental
human interests and how to pursue them effectively. That is, philosophical texts pro-
pose what Danto calls structural hypotheses (Danto 1984, 159) or accounts not of naked
physical quiddities as such, but rather of who we in general are, and what our powers
and possibilities of their effective realization in practice are. If these proposals fail, then
what is left are metaphors, which may retain literary interest in virtue of their “vivacity
and power” as a kind of “consolation prize for failing to be true” (Danto 1984, 159). But
if they succeed, then they correctly, literally, describe and disclose what we are doing or
may do effectively when we are, for example, trafficking in art or politics or literature or
science.
This view entails that the practice of philosophy is a struggle to overcome its
reduction to what it regards as mere literature, that is, to achieve genuine philosophy as
transformative disclosure of the literal truth about ourselves, as against literature’s

transformative disclosures of inner interests and powers only as they are particularized
in distinct individuals.5 It further entails that there are not many works of authentic
philosophy. How many philosophers – Plato? Augustine? Descartes? Kant? – can plau-
sibly be regarded as moving us all into a clearer conception of our essentially shared
interests and powers, as opposed to giving us instead access only to their experiences of
what it is to think about that topic, thereby yielding nothing but metaphorical disclo-
sures and collapse into mere literariness? “In general … it will be the strength of the
philosophy that has allowed the voice to emerge” (Danto 1996, 99) rather than vice
versa, to the extent that genuine philosophy emerges at all.
One way of achieving genuinely philosophical, universal voice – perhaps a necessary
condition of doing so – is figuring out what art and literature are, in order to distinguish
212
what one is doing as a philosopher from what those disciplines do. Philosophy has, as
Danto puts it, “a dignity of its own that can only be claimed by distinguishing it from
that of art, … one reenfranchisement [of art and literature as philosophy’s others in
doing what they distinctively do] being the condition for the other [of philosophy as suc-
ceeding in speaking with a universal voice]. The destiny of philosophy’s own identity is
complicated by what philosophers, characteristically of their scorn for art, should have
dismissed as philosophy’s most peripheral and frivolous branch” (Danto 1986b, 169;
emphasis added): namely aesthetics, wherein the natures and achievements of litera-
ture and art are established. The philosopher is, as it were, elected by reason to speak
with a universal voice from out of the mass of otherwise merely literary writers, and
that election is manifested essentially in the philosopher’s distinguishing of philosophy
from art and literature: “on my view,” Danto tells us, “the philosophy of art is the heart
of philosophy” (Danto 1986b, 169).
Whatever transformations it seeks, metaphorical-literary or literal-philosophical,
“writing is never not the transcription of the political order in which it is done, [so] that
all art [and philosophy] is political in consequence, even if politics should not be its
immediate content” (Danto 1988, 3–4). In aiming at universal engagement and trans-
formation, philosophy must then seek not only individual identification with particular
characters, and not only universal disclosure of essential truths, but also “acquiescence
in a certain form of initiation and life” (Danto 1984, 141). If philosophy is to succeed,
then we must change in coming more effectively to take responsibility for our commit-
ments and practices under objective values, not only individually and aggregatively, but
collectively in what we do. “Becoming conscious of ourselves as objects is not like
becoming conscious of just another object: it is a new kind of object, and indeed all the
old relationships and objects are redefined” (Danto 1986a, 205), as we are brought into
a clearer and more apt sense of what we are jointly doing.
This is an exalted picture of philosophy’s aims and achievements – so exalted that
one may wonder whether they are ever fully realized: whether philosophy ever manages
to lift itself out of metaphorical identifications and the literary, into the genuinely
philosophical, as well as whether humanity ever manages fully to lift itself via philos-
ophy out of confusion and into the clear light of joint rational life under a shared under-
standing of objective values. With, for example, Adorno, we might want to ask, against
or with Danto.
whether philosophy is itself at all actual [wirklich: effective and current]. By “actuality” is
understood not its vague “maturity” or immaturity on the basis of non-binding concep-
tions regarding the general intellectual situation, but much more: whether, after the failure
of the last great efforts, there exists an adequacy between the philosophic questions and
the possibility of their being answered at all; whether the authentic results of the recent
history of these problems is the essential unanswerability of the cardinal philosophic ques-
tions (Adorno 1977, 124).
Danto himself moves interestingly into the optative mood in characterizing the defining
ambition of philosophy as he sees it to distinguish itself from literature as an effect of merely
personal voice (however powerful or interesting). Philosophy as literature, he writes, “is not
the way I want to think about philosophical writing or voice” (Danto 191, 94).
213
RICHARD ELDRIDGE
Here in casting his point as an expression of his desire rather than as a simply asserted
matter of fact, Danto is foregrounding his own persona as the bearer of a desire for com-
pleteness of orientation under an absolute understanding of fully rational defensible
commitments and values – a desire that is yet to be fulfilled. (Perhaps human reason has
this peculiar fate.)
In thus expressing his desire and its continuing force, as made manifest in his
authorial persona, Danto may be enacting in his writing an aspect of what it is to be
human as such. If we identify with this enactment, then, paradoxically, and apart
from his philosophical theses about literature and philosophy, Danto will have suc-
ceeded in speaking in a universal voice precisely by presenting himself dramatically as
a fully actualized speaking individual in being the exemplary bearer of a wish. This
will amount, if it is successful, to an embodied achievement of philosophical under-
standing of what it essentially is to be a person that is also inextricably bound up with
the historical, literary, and political achievement of developing and sustaining a per-
sona that leads us out of confusion and into the light of self-understanding of our
continuing desires and hopes along its particular paths. Stanley Cavell once wrote that
“philosophy, of a certain ambition, tends perpetually to intersect the autobiograph-
ical” (Cavell 2010, 2). In arguably leading us into participation in his wishes, ambi-
tions, and courses of incomplete reflection, comparison, and argument, Danto has,
perhaps, transfigured us, his readers, (inadvertently?) by moving us out of our
commonplace conceptions of personhood, philosophy, and knowledge and into recog-
nizing ourselves in his image as those who desire to know, therein catching the
philosophical consciences of us all.
Notes
1 Note the fun Danto allows himself in placing “like parentheses” within parentheses.
2 It is both curious and mistaken that Danto restricts the object of identification to characters in
the fictional narratives we read, when in fact we are likely also to identify with both actual
authors and enacted narrating personae (which are in turn complexly related to each other),
especially, for example, when reading lyric poetry, where character, persona, and author are
less clearly distinct from one another.

3 One might wonder whether Danto undervalues the efforts of at least literary writers both to
embody and to make manifest angles of visions of things that are not merely those of
particular characters. Danto’s examples here are all fictional characters in extended narra-
tive works. But what is going on in, for example, lyric poetry, where the speaking persona and
historical author are not so clearly distinct from one another and where there is an effort at
least sometimes to arrive at a quite generalized sense of possibilities of value in life?
4 Danto goes on to extend this list of forms of philosophical writing to yet more singular cases
(Holzwege, Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, etc.) as well as to Chinese aphorisms and to the
generically literary texts composed by philosophers such as the plays of Sartre or the novels
of Murdoch.
5 On this point, compare Stanley Cavell’s famous concluding question in The Claim of Reason:
“Can philosophy become literature and still know itself?” (Cavell 1979, 496).
214
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1977. “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Translated by Benjamin Snow. Telos
31: 120–33.
Carroll, Noël. 2015. “Danto’s Comic Vision: Philosophical Method and Literary Style.” Philosophy
and Literature 39(2): 554–63.
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The Claim of Reason. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2010. Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Cohen, Ted. 2009. Thinking of Others. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
University Press.
———. 1984. “Philosophy/as/and/of Literature.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American
Philosophical Association 58(1): 5–10, reprinted in (Danto, 1986, 135–61).
———. 1986a. “Art Evolution and the Consciousness of History.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism XLIV(3): 223–33, reprinted in (Danto, 1986b, 187–210).
———. 1986b. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press.
———.1988. “The Politics of Imagination.” The Lindley Lecture presented at the University of
Kansas, October 29, 1987. Lawrence, KA: Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas:
1–15.
———. 1994. Embodied Meanings. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
———. 1996. “Their Own Voice: Philosophical Writing and Actual Experience.” In Beyond
Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination, edited by Richard Eldridge, 90–106.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1975. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. II. Translated by
Thomas Malcolm Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
215
24
Moving Pictures
FRED RUSH
Danto’s philosophy of film is contained almost entirely in a single, rich, but unruly essay,
“Moving Pictures” (Danto 1979), chock full of examples but digressive to the point of
distraction. That the essay is a reduction of an unpublished book manuscript (Danto
1976) no doubt accounts for its ungainliness. Danto republished the essay twenty years
later in an expanded version. He is interested in fundamental questions of what makes
film the art that it is; he is concerned, that is, with the ontology of film. Moreover, he
holds that the proper ontological approach to film is to attempt to define it, to forward
and defend necessary and sufficient conditions for film being film. This conforms to
Danto’s general program in the philosophy of art, which treats definition as central.
Danto’s method is to address senses in which pictures generally may be said to be
“moving” and to determine in which sense, indicative only of it, might film be said to be
so. Twenty years or so after its invention, film laid claim to artistic credentials in virtue
of its kinship to photography and theater. This provides the point of departure for
Danto’s treatment. Tracing the artistic pedigree of film back to photography can seem
self-recommending. Film is, after all, mostly a photographic medium. But in the 1890s,
when the idea that film could be an art came into currency, the artistic credentials of
photography were hardly secure. Depending on what date one assigns to its invention,
photography had existed since the late 1820s or 30s, but early photographers – and
here one needs to have a capacious understanding of that term, as many of the repro-
ductive techniques are not photography as it is now known – like Niépce, Daguerre, and
Fox Talbot were experimental scientists and hobbyists, not artists. Art photography
originates in Victorianism but did not emerge in full force until the 1920s. Several in the
first wave of these photographers likewise were concerned to garner prestige from an
adjunct art, painting. (It is not for nothing that one of the first artistic movements in the
history of photography is called “pictorialism.”) Theater, on the other hand, enjoyed as
much artistic standing as one might like. Most early films that aspired to be art were
“dramatic” – narrative, fictional, and performed – and one might well think that such
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Moving Pictures
films were something on the order of photographed plays. Additionally, movies

graduated from their beginnings in black boxes in arcades to become entertainments
shown to large groups in theaters, pleasure palaces built as spectacle for the sake of
spectacle. If, as is often argued, theatrical viewing instills a collective group experience,
it seems plausible that this would transfer to the context of film. Still, it seems an ineluc-
table feature of theater’s impact that it is live, that it is performed before one. This lively
presence, however, is constitutively absent in watching a movie, and that can seem to
threaten to increase the distance of the fictional world from one’s own, dampening
aesthetic effect in the bargain.
Danto dismisses out-of-hand communal viewing as a basis for understanding film on
a purely theatrical model. The criterion is simply too broad. Music, circuses, and church
services are also performed before large audiences in buildings designed for such pur-
poses but only count as “theatrical” in extended senses or in particular cases. The rela-
tion to theater through fictional viewing – that is, the viewing of fictions – is a better
candidate. It too fails, however, but not for the reason that there is a greater separation
between the fictional world and the world of the audience. Danto would be open, per-
haps, to accounts like Stanley Cavell’s that posit psychological processes that compen-
sate for the distance to achieve film’s own form of watchful immersion, or perhaps even
use the distance to that effect. Danto instead makes a point rather like Walter Benjamin’s
concerning the significance of the inherent iterability of film. While there must be a
causal origin for the various prints of the film (the internegative), there is no such thing
as an autograph of the film. So long as a print is an adequate reproduction, one is as
good as another. Correlatively, adjusting ceteris paribus for viewing conditions, one
showing of a film is as good as any other. This is not true of theatrical performances
(Danto 1999a, 209). Cate Blanchett’s performance as Hedda will be different night to
night and so, therefore, will the play. It is also the case – although Danto does not raise
the point – that the sense of performances being invariantly grounded in the script in
theater is, as a general matter, less strict than the effect of the final screenplay in film.
Danto’s use of the term “autograph” in this context may be a nod to Nelson Goodman,
who was thinking of the relation of performances to works more formally in his
Languages of Art at about this time.
Danto’s discussion of photography as a basis for film begins with a brief contrast
with painting, the art that provides the hub of his general account of the ontology of
art. Danto introduces reflection on painting to raise an issue that has been determina-
tive in philosophical and art-theoretical reflection on photography, that is, its realism.
What is meant here is not that photography must be or even mostly is stylistically
realist; it is, rather, that what a photograph is of – its subject matter – both must have
existed and, at least with regard to the negative, be represented as it existed. (There may
be exceptions due to lens focus, but set them aside.) This is not necessarily true of
painting, although sometimes it is. Films also have this property – as theorists like
André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer have differently stressed. So, realism is not a
defining characteristic of film over and against its photographic cousin. More prom-
ising is another property: movement. Moving pictures might be said to “move” in at
least three relevant senses. First, a film moves cell to cell; this is how films appear at all.
But this is not itself a representational idea, and Danto quickly dispatches it as insuffi-
cient for purposes of definition. Second, film has the capacity to represent something
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moving. Paintings and photographs can depict movement, but not objects as they move
(Danto 1999a, 226). This is, indeed, a standard understanding of the sense in which a
moving picture is a unique art, a sense that was historically important to film’s early
history. The Lumière brothers’ L’arrivée d’un train en Gare de la Ciolat (1896) was a sen-
sation in large part due to the shock it caused to its first audiences on account of its
representation of a train moving as if toward them. But, as Danto points out, such an
effect could be had by non-photographic means. One could imagine non-photographed
painted cells shown at the requisite rate of frames per second that would represent
movement just as well. It is also the case that a moving picture might involve no repre-
sented movement at all. Danto came to see Warhol’s films as a key part of understanding
his work, and credited works such as Empire (1964) with a revolution in the “applied
ontology” of film on a par with the impact of Brillo Box on the plastic arts (Danto
1999b, 65–8; cf. Danto 2009, 77–9).
Strictly speaking, there is movement in Empire. The movie is a continuous take of a
night in the life of the Empire State Building, filmed from a stationary point many city
blocks away. The time-lapse in filming was approximately six and one-half hours, shot
at the standard twenty-four frames per second. A screening of the film, however, lasts
eight hours and five minutes due to its being projected at sixteen frames per second.
During the film, one can discern room lights flickering in the building, floodlights going
on and off, the sun setting, and other changes. Such alterations are sometimes subtle
and difficult to make out, but they are there for the attentive viewer to take in. Danto
also discusses, in this connection, James Coleman’s La tache aveugle (1978), which he
calls a “reversal” of Empire. Depending on version, the work consists of thirteen to fif-
teen frames (well less than a second of footage) culled from the classic Universal Studios
horror film The Invisible Man (dir. J. Whale, 1933), each transferred to a slide and then
re-projected at excruciatingly slow speed. The showing lasts eight hours, one slide dis-
solving into the next so gradually that it is difficult to discriminate one from the other.
When Danto says that this is a reversal of Warhol, what he has in mind is that one expe-
riences Empire as a continuous projection of a single object over time. The image
changes over great spans of time in ways that are legible if one has the Sitzfleisch
required to see the film through. It is, in essence, an exquisitely long take. La tache
aveugle, on the other hand, cannot be a long take since fifteen frames cannot qualify as a
“take” under any standard understanding of the term. But of course, the work is very
long. Coleman has taken the aspect of film that allows for the representation of any
movement in it – the quickness with which the frames course through the projector –
and slowed them down to the point where the continuity of the event filmed breaks
down and, with it, the film’s mode of representation (Danto 2000, 80–2). La tache aveu-
gle has stepped outside the bounds of filmic motion altogether.
Because Empire depicts attenuated motion, it is not strictly indiscernible from a still
photograph. La tache aveugle comes closer to the mark but fails for the reason stated
above. Definition requires determinacy; so, Danto compensates by constructing a
thought experiment meant to capture pure cinematic stasis: the case of an eight-hour
film, a single shot from a stationary point of view with unshifting focus, consisting
solely of the title page of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Danto 1999a, 210). (Danto switches
the example to the title page of Kierkegaard’s Either/Or in another essay (Danto 1999b,
64–8)). Danto argues that such a film would count as a moving picture, albeit one in
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Moving Pictures
which nothing represented actually moves. The key point of divergence of such a film
from a photograph is that in the film it is possible that something move. This makes the
non-movement in the film thematic, whereas non-movement could not be so in a pho-
tograph. This also draws attention to the material base of the film as thematic for it; by
withholding movement where it is possible, the incidental markings on the film surface
become more noticeable. Given this, one might think that Danto could state a necessary
condition on something being a film, namely that it is possible that what the film repre-
sents be represented moving. There is philosophical precedent for claims of this form:
possible P is necessary for x. This is what Kant holds true with regard to apperception
and cognition, for instance.
Why would such a condition not be satisfactory, at least as a partial definition of
film? It seems clear and intuitive enough. Danto demurs. He propounds a counterex-
ample that he takes to preserve indiscernibility and, therefore, block the proposed defi-
nition of film as the representation of possible object movement. He notes that film is
not the only medium in which representation of moving things as moving is possible.
The way film represents the movement of things is by extremely quick, sequentially
projected, single photographic exposures. The pre-photographic history of cinema is
populated with drawing-based technologies that give the illusion of movement:
z oetrope, phenakistiscope, praxinoscope, and others. Moreover, there are counterparts
to such a process more broadly in what one might call “kinetic drawing.” Think of stick
figures drawn at the bottom margin of a child’s flipbook in slightly different but pro-
gressive states of being-in-motion, so that when the pages are fanned quickly enough,
one has the representation of the movement of the figures. This is a rudimentary,
non-film correlate to stop-motion animation. That there might be kinetic drawing
correlating to films such as Empire is easy to see; where there is actual movement there
is possible movement. A flip book in which movement was merely possible, where the
figures went unchanged page to page so that no actual object movement would be
represented, is readily conceivable.
This brings one to the third sense in which movies “move.” “Where photography
opens up a new dimension is when, instead of objects moving past a fixed camera, the
camera moves amongst objects fixed or moving” (Danto 1999a, 228). Again, in itself
this is not an original point; Bazin and others made it. That camera movement is consti-
tutive of the world that film depicts is a virtual commonplace today, with enhanced effect
thanks to Steadicams and GoPro. But the venerable tracking shot suffices to make the
point. Danto allows that drawing can also accomplish this to a degree. Recall the flip
book: it is possible to shift the implied perspective from which the figures are being seen
in the drawing of them. CGI accomplishes this with even greater ease. In order to estab-
lish the needed distinction, therefore, Danto shifts to a more psychological or phenome-
nological register. This is the point in Danto’s analysis at which film’s relation to theater
reasserts itself. “I tend to feel that when the camera moves the experience is of ourselves
moving […].” (Danto 1999a, 228). This Danto denies to drawing. The first thing to mark
is the note of hesitation – or, is it one of modesty? In any case, this is a suggestion, not a
definition. Is it a good suggestion? Put aside the question of whether it is right to deny this
response to the shift in perspective internal to kinetic drawings. Bracket also similar
questions with regard to CGI and virtual reality technologies. Is it the case that changes
in camera position relative to the objects within the filmworld result in movements
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within the world that are not movements of objects within the world but rather, so to
speak, of that world itself, that world as it is experienced by us as if from within? There is
an extensive literature abutting the topic within fictional narrative film theory. It is not
possible here to adjudicate cases. It is important, nevertheless, to distinguish a stronger
from a weaker claim that one might make. The stronger claim concerns the phenomenon
of audience identification with elements of the film. One type of such identification,
much discussed, is the experience of being surrogate to the perspective of the shot. Some
shots – those commonly called “point of view” or “POV” shots – present a univocal sense
of the scene being perceived in the first-person by a character within the world of the
film. The case for identification is strongest with such shots, although questions
concerning the nature of the psychological mechanism that undergirds identification
are as old as Aristotle’s Poetics. But POV shots are not the only shots that might implicate
the perspective of the moving camera as one’s own, and Danto’s statement is unlimited
as to its scope within the category “camera shot.” Let’s say that the identification with
the moving perspective from which representation is rendered and which becomes, in
the rendering, movement within that world requires that the moving perspective be
linked either experientially or inferentially with an intrafilm agency of some sort. In the
POV shot, this is expressed in, for example, Jeff ’s looking at Thorvald through his
long-range camera lens in Rear Window (dir. A. Hitchcock, 1954), or it may be implied
when one cannot identify any agent within the film whose view it is. If one wished to
broaden the idea of identification to include every shot, one would have to ascribe to the
vast majority of shots anonymous perceptual viewpoints, products of implied agents
with whom one could identify. This seems theoretically extravagant, although it is not
unprecedented. Some theorists have posited the existence of implicit narrators both of
and not of the filmworld, a concept that has interest but is difficult to make precise.
But is Danto’s point about audience identification? He does not broach the subject by
name. Rather, he fixes on the idea of movement simpliciter. This is a weaker claim, one
that does not take on the burden of linking the experience of perspectival movement
with audience identification. Danto deploys an architectural analogy here: moving
through a film is like moving through a cathedral. Buildings are built in order to be
moved through; that is part of their meaning. Notwithstanding this, the analogy is only
partial. The camera itself, Danto writes, is “a-kinetic” or “Cartesian,” logically speaking;
it is outside the space of intra-film movement (Danto 1999a, 229). It is what makes
such movement possible in the first place and, for that reason, cannot be a moving part
of the world it represents. Put slightly differently, the camera creates a world of which it
cannot be a proper part, transcending its creation as a creator must. The key in the for-
mulation – and the reason I have recast the point in its terms – is the word “proper.” The
creator of a world cannot compromise the grounding of the world by placing itself in
full within the world it creates. The world cannot house that plenitude, given its lesser
ontological status. Creators transcend creations in this sense, but that does not rule out
creation’s being imbued with traces of its origins – traces that may be present and active
in the world. It is not an altogether clear idea, but it has been quite formative for a whole
range of ontology and metaphysics. In their own ways, Plotinus, Fichte, and Heidegger
all struggle to formulate the point in a way that does not commit the error of reducing
world to ground. Danto does not discuss such arcane ontotheological points. But it is in
their spirit that he writes that the ground for the filmworld, the camera-eye, “thrust[s]
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Moving Pictures
us like movable ghosts into scenes.” There may be a constitutive ambiguity in film,
Danto speculates, one that blurs the line “between spectator and scene” (Danto 1999a,
229). A film audience can have no role in the drama but is there nonetheless. This sense
of “is” will be familiar to readers of Danto’s other work – the “is” of “artistic
identification,” that is, of interpretation (see Danto 1964).
In the end, it is also not easy to make good on the weaker claim. Is there a sense in which
it does not follow from the proposition “we are moving (as does the point of view within the
filmworld)” that “we are seeing (as does the point of view within the filmworld)?” An open
question. Danto does not, however, leave off here. He wishes to situate film in a historical
narrative conditioned by the foregoing ontological analysis. To that end, he proposes that
film is inherently self-referential in virtue of the inclusion of its mode of representation
within the representation itself via perspectival movement within the world it creates. This
is the closest the essay comes to definition. It is a vaguely Idealist thing to say: representa-
tion seeds its products with the faint presence of its operations. But it also permits a quin-
tessential Danto-thought: film is a modern all-too-modern art born out of the possibility of
its self-reference. When I first read this passage in the essay, what came immediately to
mind is the whaling scene from Man from Aran (dir. R. Flaherty, 1934), shot from a roughly
bobbing boat of another bobbing boat. Flaherty’s film is controversially a documentary –
much of the dialogue was staged and tracked in post-production, persons filmed who were
passed off as not acting were indeed doing so, and so on – but it is safe to say that the film
qualifies as non-fictional. Flaherty, then, was not playing games by including the camera
in the action. Yet there it is, its own movement unmistakably not the movement of what is
being filmed. Representational self-reference is implicit to the filmmaking. Perhaps I am
not giving Flaherty enough credit – or credit of the right kind. Perhaps the point was to
include the film crew as a part of the film, thereby plunging it into the dangerous action
and crowning it with the very same elemental heroism that is the subject of the film.
Perhaps Flaherty was a Herzog avant la lettre. Of course, this case involves an overt effect;
Danto’s point goes beyond that. Self-reference in virtue of movement of filmed perspective
is always in play. It would be so in Empire as well.
That the “camera within” is an implacable component of film’s native modernity
also has stylistic ramifications, according to Danto. The reflexive character of filmic rep-
resentation presents not only the artist’s vision of a particular subject matter but also
the artist’s mode of vision (Danto 1999a, 231). The view gives one not merely its “object
but a perception of that object, a world and a way of seeing that world at once […].”
That film can do this – perhaps can uniquely do this – is tantamount to the idea that
there is a specific kind of filmic experience, in which seeing a thing and experiencing a
way of seeing the thing are superimposed. Danto develops the thought no further and,
to my knowledge, never returned to it. It was enough to identify the possibility: working
out the phenomenology was not his philosophical aim. It is striking, nonetheless, that
the filmmakers whose ways of seeing are most involving – for example, Antonioni,
Kubrick, Malick, Mizoguchi, Tarkovsky, Tarr, Teshigaharu – are not for the most part
interested in reflexive effects. As with much of Danto’s work, it can seem that the film to
which he is most philosophically attracted is aesthetically lean. That said, the conclusion
of “Moving Pictures” suggests that it is not so much making plain the reflexive nature
of filmic representation that matters, but rather the exploitation of that structure in
terms of the filmmaker’s sensibility.
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References
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61: 571–84.
———. 1976. Moving Pictures: A Speculation in Philosophical Optics. Unpublished book manuscript.
———. 1999a. “Moving Pictures.” In Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays, 205–32. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press. reprinting, in revised form, “Moving Pictures,” Quarterly Review
of Film Studies 4 (1979): 1–21.
———. 1999b. “The Philosopher as Andy Warhol.” In Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays, 61–83.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
———. 2000. “James Coleman, Slide Artist.” In The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic
Art World, 77–85. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
———. 2009. Andy Warhol. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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25
Photography and Danto’s Craft of the Mind
SCOTT WALDEN
It is remarkable that The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981), which marks the
midpoint of Arthur Danto’s career, does not include “photography” in its index, and yet
What Art Is (2013), whose copyright page bears the year of his passing, is imbued with
consideration of the medium. What caused Danto’s late-career interest in
photography?
Certainly, his quarter century as art critic for The Nation was crucial in this regard, as
photography had, by the 1980s and ‘90s, become very much in vogue in the New York
artworld that was his beat. A watershed year appears to have been 1987. Within the
space of a few weeks, Danto saw an exhibition of photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson
at the Museum of Modern Art and an exhibition of Cindy Sherman’s 1977–1980
Untitled Film Stills at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The review occasioned by
the former is characteristically edifying but somewhat dutiful. His response to the latter,
contrarily, is an exclamation by someone emotionally ambushed by what they had
expected to be just another photography exhibition. Exiting the Whitney, Danto found
himself “seeing Sherman, like a figural aftereffect, absolutely everywhere – in the jeans
ads on the back of buses, on the television screens in the video shops, on the front pages
of tabloids” (Danto 1986, 126). He warned his readers to “decompress before hitting
the street” (Danto 1986, 126).
Early the following year, Danto visited the career retrospective of Robert
Mapplethorpe’s photographs, again at the Whitney. His review conveyed not so much
awe as disquiet, concluding that visiting the exhibition was “not an easy experience,
but a crucial one” (Danto 1996, 138). Seeds had been sown, seeds that germinated
seven years later in the form of an entire monograph devoted to Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre.
In 1993, the Guggenheim Museum SoHo mounted a group exhibition entitled
Photography in Contemporary German Art. Danto’s review indicates neither awe nor
disquiet, but something more important. In his concluding description of “a demanding
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and…rewarding show” (Danto 1993, 427), one in which the reward is nothing short of
“coming to know, philosophically, what art is” (Danto 1993, 427), we find a settled
acceptance of photography as a medium holding a central place in his thinking about
the ontology of art.
The next year found Danto back at the Whitney, viewing a career retrospective of
Richard Avedon’s photographs. Face-to-face with two portraits, one of his friend Isaiah
Berlin and the other of Andy Warhol and his entourage, Danto’s response was outrage.
The portrait of Berlin “in no sense captured how Isaiah looked to anyone who knew
him, but instead shows an unrecognizable and invisible sourpuss” (Danto 2013, 106).
The large polyptych of the Warhol entourage included the transgender Candy Darling,
who, in wig and makeup, had evidently been required to remove her dress so that her
penis was revealed, rendering “an exceedingly cruel image” (Danto 2008, 296). This
exhibition seemed to cement in Danto’s psyche an intense ambivalence towards pho-
tography, fueling much of his later philosophical writing on the medium.
Danto never produced a monograph on photography, only a somewhat messy record,
creative and dynamic, full of stops and starts, gaps and irrelevancies. While delightful,
the record would have benefitted from some tidying up, as I offer in this essay.
1 Photography and Ethics
(i) Stills Versus Natural Drawings

Eadweard Muybridge famously sought to discover the actual configurations of a horse’s
legs during a gallop, something that had been a matter of dispute for centuries, as the
appearance yielded by unaided human vision is of but a blur. Using the finest photo-
graphic technology of the 1870s, Muybridge produced a dozen instantaneous images
depicting a single cycle of a horse’s gait, images that were quickly accepted as authori-
tative by painters such as Edgar Degas and Thomas Eakins, who henceforth rendered
their depictions to correspond to the reality revealed by the camera (see Szarkowski
1989, 131–2).
But not all artists so conformed. Muybridge’s revelations arrived against the back-
drop of a lively debate about the function of art, with figures such as Charles Baudelaire
having argued that, whereas science is in the business of describing reality, art is instead
in the business of conveying how that reality appears to us in perceptual experience,
and that if photography, with its mechanistic essence, is wedded to depictions of reality,
then photographic depictions are foreign to art (see Baudelaire 1990). Upping the ante
on Baudelaire, Auguste Rodin declared that “[i]t is the artist who is truthful and it is
photography which lies” (Gsell 1983, 34), adopting as his metric for truth fidelity to
experience rather than reality. Danto called the fidelity yielded by Muybridge’s images
“optical truth” and the kind yielded by a Rodin sculpture “visual truth” (Danto 2013,
105). One might expect that Danto would have sided with Muybridge, but he does not
and rather sides with Rodin. Everyone who has seen themselves in photographs is
familiar with the camera’s capacity to reveal the otherwise invisible transient facial
configurations that take place during the course of expression. An ill-timed press of the
shutter release leads to a depiction with eyes half-closed and lips and cheeks contorted
224
in ways that are wholly alien to our ordinary perceptions of one another. Pictures con-
veying such optical truths are quickly deleted, leaving behind only visual truths, depic-
tions that conform to how we appear to one another, given the character of our
perceptual capacities. Such tendency to assign greater value to visual truths than to
optical truths furnishes an entrée to understanding Danto’s ambivalence towards
photography.
Danto invites us to compare two portraits of the Andy Warhol film star Candy
Darling, one by Richard Avedon and the other by the photographic chronicler of the
New York “downtown,” Peter Hujar (Danto 2008, 296–8). As already noted, in
Avedon’s 1969 Andy Warhol and Members of The Factory, Candy Darling appears in her
wig and makeup but is otherwise disrobed so that her penis is revealed. In Hujar’s 1973
Candy Darling on Her Deathbed, she is contrarily shown in wig, makeup, and dress, pre-
senting herself as a Hollywood actress. The sexual reality is that Candy Darling is male,
while the gender reality is that she is female. Whereas Avedon uses his camera to reveal
something akin to an optical truth, Hujar uses his camera to yield something akin to a
visual truth.
I say “akin,” as the notions are not exactly coincident. In the case of optical versus
visual truths, the character of our perceptual capacities constitutes the essence of the
distinction, a distinction that assumes a reality apart from the limited capacities of our
human visual system, and that furthermore assumes that the photographic process,
with its high shutter speeds and other mechanism-based qualities, affords epistemic
advantages which can bypass such limited capacities. In the case of the Avedon and
Hujar portraits, contrarily, the distinction lies instead in the character of human interac-
tion and in desires constituting a substantial portion of this interaction. Persons have
desires about how they present themselves to one another, as Candy Darling desired to
present herself, photographically, in a manner congruent with her female gender.
Avedon ignored her desires and used his camera to reveal a reality hidden behind what
he took to be a mere appearance, an instance of what the critic Andy Grundberg calls
“inverted fashion” (see Grundberg 1999). Hujar used his camera differently to respect
Darling’s desires.
Danto marks this difference terminologically. The Avedon portrait is a still, a
photograph that depicts in a way that is foreign to the realm of human perception and
interaction, a realm that I will in what follows refer to simply as the “human realm.”
The Hujar portrait is a natural drawing, natural in Henry Fox Talbot’s sense that photog-
raphy is the “pencil of nature” (Talbot 1844–1846), but a drawing in the sense that
Hujar chose how to use that pencil to depict in a respectful way a fellow participant in
the human realm.1 An optical truth is thus a type of still in that it depicts something
that is foreign to our ordinary understanding of one another, and a visual truth is a
type of natural drawing in that it depicts how we experience one another in the course
of ordinary human interaction. For Danto, Rodin was right on track in accusing pho-
tographers who use their cameras to create stills of lying, but wrong to assume that
cameras can be used to produce stills only. As the Hujar portrait shows, properly han-
dled, the camera can be used to create a natural drawing. Danto regarded that portrait
as a “masterpiece, and one of the truly great photographs of the century” (Danto
2008, 297).
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(ii) Kantian Ethics

In her introduction to The Democratic Forest, Eudora Welty hones in on a feature that
renders William Eggleston’s photographs so compelling:
The extraordinary thing is that…you will look in vain for the presence of a human being.
This isn’t to say that the photographs deny man’s existence. That is exactly what they don’t
do. Everywhere you find the vividness of his presence (Welty 1989, 10).
There is a similar irony in Danto’s discussions of stills and natural drawings insofar as
the reader will search in vain for an occurrence of Immanuel Kant’s name, even though
the influence of his ethical philosophy is vividly present. It is a cornerstone of Kantian
ethics that interacting persons permit one another to exercise their respective capacities
for autonomous action. For the Kantian, it is ethical to pursue one’s goals, expressive or
otherwise, with the aid of another person, provided that that aid is furnished autono-
mously. To do so is to treat others as ends, and to fail to do so is to treat them as means.
For Danto, this categorical imperative is woven into the fabric of the human realm in
which the photographers he considers and their subjects participate, and it is a viola-
tion of this command that underlies much of his condemnation of the Avedon portrait.
Avedon had as his artistic goal the practice of inverted fashion. The Kantian would have
no objection to the pursuit of this goal in portraiture, provided that the subjects of his
photographs autonomously chose to participate in the project. But, in the case of Candy
Darling, at least, it is far from clear that she understood the difference between Avedon’s
artistic practice and his fashion-photography practice, and that she autonomously
agreed to participate in an instance of the former. Instead, Candy Darling had autono-
mously decided to present herself as a Hollywood actress, and Avedon’s coopting her do
otherwise thus constituted a violation of that autonomy. Hujar, on the other hand, had
as his artistic goal the creation of photographic portraits that depict his subjects conso-
nantly with the presentations they had autonomously chosen, and his general success
in doing so can be regarded as the key to understanding his oeuvre’s “power and truth”
(Danto 2008, 301).
If the capacity for autonomous action generates the right to exercise that capacity,
Danto sees “an evenly matched contest between the right of an artist over his images
and the right of the subject over his appearances” (Danto 2008, 295). But perhaps
Danto is overly pessimistic in construing such rights as being in a contest, where that
notion comes burdened connotations of a zero-sum game. The Hujar portrait, after
all, shows that the goals of the artist and of the subject can be in harmony. And even
if Candy Darling had little interest in Avedon’s practice of inverted fashion, one won-
ders whether, had he explained to her the nature of his artistic practice and her
potential role in its realization, she might have autonomously agreed to participate in
the project, perhaps in exchange for later receiving the fashion-photography
treatment she so much desired. If so, there would have been no violation of Kantian
scruples.
Still, problems remain. Participation is autonomous only if participants have
adequate understanding of the project in which they are engaged. Othello declares
Desdemona unfaithful but does so non-autonomously because his understanding has
been corroded by Iago’s lies. Likewise, subjects of portraits participate autonomously
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only if they understand the goals of their artists, goals which can be complex and,
especially in the early stages of an undertaking, not clear even to those artists them-
selves. The worry arises that the complexity of artistic practice renders it necessarily
suspect from the Kantian ethical perspective.
(iii) Trust and Autonomy
Like Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe made portraits of ‘70s-New York downtown denizens.
Unlike Hujar, Mapplethorpe frequently took as his subject matter the practice of gay
S&M sex that was so prevalent in that celebrated demimonde. Exercising his love of
beauty as manifested in classical sculpture, Mapplethorpe used sophisticated cameras
and lighting equipment to create portraits which, in formal terms, exhibit astounding
composition and tonality but which, in terms of content, frequently depict participants
engaging in sexual practices that can leave some taken aback even those who suppose
themselves to be sexually adventuresome.
For Danto, the central ethical question is not that which came to transfix politicians
and the press when Mapplethorpe’s portraits were scheduled to be exhibited at the
Corcoran Gallery in Washington, that of the morality of the sexual practices and the
depictions of them. The question, rather, was with Mapplethorpe’s relationship to his
subjects. Did they autonomously agree to participate in the practice of revealing, in
Danto’s terms, Dionysiac sexual truth through the filter of Apollonian classical compo-
sition, with its resultant “dissonance between content and form”? (Danto 1996, 24)
All of Mapplethorpe’s portraits are staged, a fact indicated by the frequent direct eye
contact between his subjects and the camera or, if eye contact is absent, by the obvious
preparation necessary to manifest the compositional perfection. Such staging estab-
lishes that, unlike in works such as Garry Winogrand’s candid street photography (see
especially Winogrand 1975), all parties were willing participants. But, as noted above,
mere willing participation is not sufficient to guarantee autonomous participation. The
worry remains that Mapplethorpe’s subjects did not adequately understand the
character of the project in which they were engaged.
It is clear from interviews that Mapplethorpe himself had a robust understanding of
his project, or at least that he did so in his later years (see Dunne 1989). The subjects
who knew him and his work well likely also had an adequate understanding of the
project. Nevertheless, there were some subjects who would have been unfamiliar with
Mapplethorpe’s developing oeuvre, subjects he met at clubs in the Meatpacking District

and invited back to his nearby studio for sex and photography. Perhaps such subjects
were coopted in the way that Avedon apparently coopted Candy Darling.
But Danto thinks not, and his reason for this is that he finds Mapplethorpe’s interac-
tions with his subjects to be imbued with trust (Danto 1996, 33–74). Sexual practices,
in general, require a substantial degree of trust, and this fact applies especially to the
S&M variety, with its paraphernalia frequently designed to render one party helpless.
According to Danto, Mapplethorpe, a “participant observer” (Danto 1996, 43),
extended this sexual trust to portraiture, so that his subjects, even if they did not always
fully understand his artistic practice, nonetheless understood him to be a trustworthy
portraitist and, on the basis of this understanding, autonomously participated in his
project. They knew that Mapplethorpe would take into consideration how they wished
to be presented, and that he would build an acknowledgment of those desires into the
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project, whatever the exact character of that project might be. Candy Darling likewise
placed her trust in Avedon, but in that case her belief that he was trustworthy was false,
as evidenced by his betrayal of her trust at the crucial moment of exposure. This false
belief was sufficient to undermine her understanding and, therefore, her autonomy.
Whether Danto is right about Mapplethorpe’s personal character, one can extract
from this case a potential solution to the ethical problem of artistic portraiture of auton-
omous subjects. While it may be that frequently subjects fail adequately to understand
the details of a project in which they are engaged, nonetheless it might be sufficient that
they have true beliefs about the character of the artist, beliefs to the effect that, however
the project might develop, that artist will weave their interests into its fabric. Autonomy
is then exercised in the act of selecting a trustworthy artist, as when, in a medical con-
text, a patient’s autonomy is exercised in the selection of a physician on the basis of
records of past performance, while remaining ignorant of the exact nature of the illness
and the best course of treatment.
This general solution would, of course, apply to all artistic media, but for Danto it is
especially important that it be recognized in the context of photography, as viewers of
photographs tend to ascribe a “natural authority” (Danto 2008, 302) to them and are
thus likely to form beliefs about a subject’s character on the basis of stills, even if those
stills evoke a character that is radically at odds with their actual character.
2 Photography and the Ontology of Art
Readers familiar with the corpus of Danto’s writing might infer from the preceding
discussion that his interest in photography is peripheral to his larger investigation into
the ontology of artworks. Consideration of the distinction between stills and natural
drawings, or of Kantian ethical concerns, appears foreign to his well-known
consideration of Warhol’s 1964 Brillo Box (Soap Pads) (see Danto 1981). But in fact
Danto’s investigations into photography are central to his larger project, or at least they
came to be central in the later years, once that larger project had matured. Two points
of intersection are crucial in this regard.
(i) Craft, Aesthetics and Embodied Meanings
Historically, art has been intertwined with craft. In ancient Greece, art was under-
stood as skilled manipulation of materials akin to that required for making shoes or
building houses. In the medieval, renaissance, and classical eras, becoming an artist
required years of training, often within the context of the kinds of guilds that were oth-
erwise devoted to training to become a blacksmith or a leatherworker. By the 19th
century, European art was dominated by the art academies, schools that required stu-
dents to undergo years of rigorous training in the use of perspective, line, and color
before they were declared artists. The historical connection between art and craft is
indeed so tight that it is tempting to declare skilled manipulation of materials to be a
necessary condition for art.
If art is a craft it has to be one with an aim that differs from those of the artisan, and
it is natural to assume that its aim is instead creations that exemplify beauty. Whereas
artisans learn to skillfully manipulate materials in ways that yield good horseshoes or
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saddles, artists learn to skillfully manipulate materials in ways that yield objects that
engender aesthetic experiences. In this way, the historical connection between art and
craft is paralleled by one between art and the aesthetic.
The history of photography, in contrast, is one of ambivalence towards both craft
and aesthetic considerations. On the one hand, the technology involved lends itself to
those who have an interest in lighting, exposure, image processing, and printing and in
the ways these can be used to create pictures with beautiful contrasts and tonalities.
Figures such as Edward Weston and Ansel Adams were renowned for their knowledge
of equipment and materials and celebrated for the beautiful prints they produced by the
exercise of their craft. These days there are entire websites devoted to the discussion of
the technical minutiae of digital photography and how these can be pressed into the
service of making eye-catching prints.
At the same time, however, there has been steady movement in the direction of
de-skilling photography. Beginning with George Eastman’s promise that “you press the
button; we do the rest” (Szarkowski 1989, 144), continuing through the development
of the Land camera, and now arriving at the cellphone camera, the aesthetically
impoverished and easily produced snapshot has come to dominate most of our encoun-
ters with photographs. Taking ordinary pictures requires no technical skills beyond
pointing the camera and pressing the shutter release. And even the camera itself has
become inessential. By the early decades of the 20th century, offset printing allowed for
the mass reproduction of photographic images in inexpensive newspapers or maga-
zines, images whose purpose was remote from aesthetics, and which could be harvested
and rearranged by anyone with scissors and glue. Today a Google-image search yields
an essentially unlimited selection of prosaic photographs ready to be collected with a
click of the mouse.
Bringing these historical observations together, one would expect to find that it is
photography in its craft form that historically has yielded images that are artworks.
And, indeed, we find that photographic movements with artistic ambitions as divergent
in character as Pictorialism and Modernism had in common an emphasis on the need
for photographers to be highly skilled at using their materials in ways that yielded aes-
thetically pleasing prints. Given that skill and effort were required to produce such
prints, they were rare, and such scarcity led to value, especially monetary value.
But, beginning in the early decades of 20th century, a wholly different current
emerged. Danto draws our attention especially to the 1920 First International Dada Fair,
an art exhibition replete with photographs, but in the form of collages of photographic
images cut from magazines and newspapers rather than in the form of unique fine-art
prints (Danto 1993, 424). The Dadaists saw themselves as creating a new kind of art,
one in opposition to the art woven into the fabric of cultures that had brought on the
horrors of the First World War. By creating artworks using inexpensive, mass-produced
photographic images, in a single stroke they rendered inessential to the definition of art
the qualities of craft and aesthetics that had been part of that definition for centuries.
Later in the 20th century, when the center of Western art moved from a war-exhausted
Europe to New York, a new generation of artists picked up where the Dadaists had left
off, incorporating inexpensive snapshots in their artworks in ways that set up a dramatic
contrast with the practices of photographers who continued working in the craft tradi-
tion. To take an example noted at the outset, in the late 1970s Cindy Sherman placed
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her 35 mm camera on a tripod and used a lengthy shutter-release cable to create a

series of autoportraits, each depicting her in the guise of female characters of the sort
to which she had been exposed in B movies and magazines during her formative years.
Sherman had no interest in using expensive cameras or in fussing over film, exposure,
development, or printing. Nor does the value of these Untitled Film Stills lie in any of the
approximately 70 photographs taken individually; rather, it is “the total project…that is
the least artistic unit of her work” (Danto 1986, 121–2). The craft dimension of pho-
tography is attenuated, aesthetics is hardly the point, and there is no unique, precious
object in which the art is concentrated.
Danto introduces terminology to distinguish these two currents in photography that
came to dominate the 20th century, and that are still very much with us today. Those
working in the craft tradition hold onto the title of photographers, but those who use
photographs in art, rather than as art, are labeled photographists (Danto 1993, 424).
Weston and Adams are photographers; the Dadaists and Sherman are photographists.
While this distinction is handy for art-historical purposes, Danto finds an even deeper
importance lurking within it. The use of the human foot has always been irrelevant to
the definition of art, but the hand, by virtue of its role in craft, and the eye, by virtue of
its role in aesthetics, have both been central. However, the widespread acceptance as art
of photography in its de-skilled and de-aestheticized form establishes that neither the
hand nor the eye are essential either (Danto 2013, 113). Danto concludes that we must
look to something in addition to the material realm for characteristics essential to art,
and mind is the only alternative. Art is a blending with materials of the meanings gen-
erated by the agency of the mind. Those materials may be manipulated with skill in
ways that lead to aesthetic experiences when viewed, but the creations of photogra-
phists establish that such skills and experiences are optional. The essence of art lies in
matter informed by thought, or, as Danto prefers, in “embodied meanings” (Danto
2013, 128).
(ii) Embodied Meanings and the Realm of Human Interaction
The idea that art is embodied meaning is both vague and, to the extent to which it is
meaningful, too broad. Donald Trump’s building a wall along the US–Mexico border
would be both materially substantial and replete with meaning, but it would not be a
work of art. How does consideration of photography help Danto both to clarify his
mature statement on the ontology of art and to differentiate embodied meanings that
are not artworks from those that are?
For it to do so is a tall order. Clarification of the idea requires teasing out some
necessary conditions that an embodied meaning must satisfy in order to constitute a
work of art but, at the same time, that clarification would have to place no a priori con-
straints on which meanings future artists might embody, and no constraints on the
ways in which they might embody them. I conclude by considering ways in which
Danto’s reflections on the oeuvres of the photographers discussed above furnish
guidance toward a resolution of this delicate task.
During the mid-century, “street photography,” as practiced by figures such as
Winogrand and Cartier-Bresson, was socially acceptable, and encouraged even. But by
the 1970s, attitudes toward the practice had begun to change. One basis for such
change was that the Kantian ethical considerations discussed above came to occupy a
230
more central place in American life. Hujar’s oeuvre, in contrast with Avedon’s, embodies
this shift in our realm of human interaction insofar as he depicts his subjects in the
ways they autonomously chose to be depicted. Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills likewise
embody this change. Whereas Winogrand gave no consideration to whether or not his
subjects, who were almost always women, agreed to have themselves presented in the
manner he wished, Sherman used the practice of autoportraiture to place full control
of her presentation in her own hands.
Yet Sherman’s work has an even more important function than that of deciding who
has control over how women are presented. On Danto’s interpretation, Sherman’s
project is an instance of performance art, an artform that functions to erode the barrier
between artist and audience in ways that will bring about something “transfigurative
and even sublime … raising her and her audience to a higher plane” (Danto 1986, 123).
By presenting herself in the guises of female roles that all of us within our realm of
human interaction have been exposed to, we are made conscious of those presentations
and roles and the ways they have shaped our expectations about what women are and
may be. In viewing the series of photographs, all of us together, both artist and audi-
ence, find hiding in plain sight within our consciousness these roles, thus triggering our
awareness of their arbitrariness and malleability. Together we are changed in positive
ways, ways that bring us collectively to the higher plane to which Danto refers.
The 1970s were also a time in which sex generally, and the sexual practices of perse-
cuted groups in particular, were becoming more openly acknowledged. Danto’s inter-
pretation of Mapplethorpe’s erotic photographs in terms of the trust and autonomy
discussed above situate him “not as voyeur, but rather as the agent through which the
ordinarily hidden is revealed” (Danto 1996, 35). The subjects of those photographs are
“demonstrating something they have allowed [Mapplethorpe] to witness” (Danto 1996,
35). Mapplethorpe’s erotic photographs in this way embody not only changing views
about the importance of autonomy but changing views regarding what may be pre-
sented openly, and what must remain hidden.
Abstracting from these examples, the sought-after necessary conditions appear to be
that the successful artist is one who is, consciously or unconsciously, attuned to the ear-
liest signs of fluctuations in the realm of human interaction in which they and their
audience are embedded, and who can then inform their chosen materials with those
fluctuations, and do so in ways that introduce further fluctuations, ones that constitute
positive change. Trump’s wall would embody a meaning, but it would be one that takes
us back to a stale aspect of a bygone way of life, and would thus be the antithesis of the
sort of function so well exemplified by the work of Sherman.
But the most important lesson Danto extracts from the contrasting examples of
Hujar, Mapplethorpe and Sherman, on the one hand, and Avedon and Winogrand, on
the other, arises from the ways they establish photography’s unique capacity to breach
the confines of our realm of human interaction and to depict that which is foreign to it.
This capacity, which is the source of Danto’s ambivalence toward the medium, both
highlights the sense in which that realm is real and important and reinforces the
Baudelaireian idea that it, and it only, is the proper subject of art.2 Danto’s consideration
of photography thus reveals that art does essentially involve craft, but it is a craft
involving sensitivity to, and dexterity in relation to, aspects of a realm of human inter-
action, rather than necessarily to materials. Further research may be directed toward
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refining this new craft and, especially, toward the development of pedagogical tech-
niques suitable to it. If art colleges of the past were substantially devoted to teaching
material craft, art colleges of the future may be substantially devoted to teaching this
new craft of the mind.
Notes
1 The distinction between stills and natural drawings is first made in Danto 2008, 300 and
then elaborated on in Danto 2013, 105–6.
2 Very late in his career Danto finds in Kant’s Critique of Judgement a conception of art not dissim-
ilar to Danto’s own conception as embodied meaning. In Kantian terms, an embodied meaning
becomes an “aesthetic idea,” and the kind of sensitivity to the human realm and fluctuations
within it discussed here becomes “spirit.” If this is correct, then we have a second irony in rela-
tion to Kant, not one of presence through absence, as in the ethical considerations discussed
above, but one arising from the contrast between the formalism generally associated with
Kantian thought on art, on the one hand, and the strikingly anti-formalist understanding of art
reflected in embodied meanings or aesthetic ideas on the other. See Danto 2013, 128–33.
References
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the Present, edited by Vicki Goldberg, 123–6. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico
Press.
Danto, Arthur. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge
MA.: Harvard University Press.
———. 1986. “Cindy Sherman.” In Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present, edited
by Arthur Danto, 120–125. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
———. 1993. “Photographism.” The Nation, 29 March, 423–7.
———. 1996. Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe.
———. 2008. “The Naked Truth.” In Photography and Philosophy: Essays on the Pencil of Nature,
edited by Scott Walden, 284–308. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

———. 2013. What Art Is. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Dunne, Dominick. 1989. “Robert Mapplethorpe’s Proud Finale.” Vanity Fair, February, 124–30.
Grundberg, Andy. 1999. “Richard Avedon’s Portraits: Inverted Fashion, Fashionable Mud.” In
Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography since 1974, edited by Andy Grundberg, 92–94. New
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Szarkowski, John. 1989. Photography Until Now. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Talbot, Henry Fox. 1844–1846. The Pencil of Nature. London: Longman, Brown, Green and
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Welty, Eudora. 1989. “Introduction.” In The Democratic Forest, edited by William Eggleston, 9–15.
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Winogrand, Garry. 1975. Women Are Beautiful. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
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26
Transfiguration/Transubstantiation
SIXTO J. CASTRO
In Beyond the Brillo Box, Danto quotes from a conversation between Wittgenstein and
Maurice Drury – as recounted by Ray Monk in his biography – in which Wittgenstein
claimed: “Hegel seems to me always wanting to say that things which look different are
really the same, whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are
really different.” Danto adds: “when I read that, I thought: That’s my whole philosophy
of art in a nutshell, finding the deep differences between art and craft, artworks and
mere things, when members from either class look exactly similar” (1992, 53). Theology
has been doing exactly this from its very beginning: seeking the differences that cannot
simply be seen between sacred and profane realities. This might explain why Danto
makes central to his thinking so many theological concepts and religious terms that
indeed show the sort of structural community between art, religion, and philosophy, as
Hegel theorized this through Absolute Spirit. Had Danto been a theologian of another
age, he would probably have been burned at the stake, so creative he was with his use of
certain theological concepts. Nevertheless, his theory of art contains a theological way
of thinking about indiscernible realities that have been the subject of theological dis-
pute for almost two millennia. This long tradition raises new questions for how to
understand that theory.
Danto points out in his 1964 essay “The Artworld” that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box
impressed on him not whether the piece is good art but the fact it is considered art at all.
Danto references Warhol’s work repeatedly to illustrate the fact that what makes
something art, as well as the particular work of art it is, is not its “aesthetic” or percep-
tual features but its having and embodying some meaning. Unlike James Harvey’s
original design, Warhol’s Brillo Box is about something, and something different from
Mike Bidlo’s indiscernible Not Warhol (Brillo Box 1964). Even if the three are indiscern-
ible, two are artworks while the third is merely commonplace.
Danto notes that the question of indiscernibles is a constant in the history of philos-
ophy (1986, 170). He refers to Descartes’ First Meditation, to the lack of internal marks
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to distinguish between dreaming and waking; to Kant, who distinguishes a moral

action from one that looks outwardly the same but lacks the proper motive to be morally
right; and to Heidegger’s differentiation between authentic and inauthentic existence
(Danto 1997, 35). Danto does not explicitly claim that indiscernibility is also the form
of some of the most important theological problems – if not all, from the very inception
of theology: he assumes this from the outset. “The Artworld” makes explicit theological
references to the Transfiguration, as well as to Augustine’s theology of history, as
depicted in The City of God, to explain the “double citizenship” of artworks in the worlds
of art and of “mere things” (Danto 1964, 582). Danto theorizes as if this analogous –
or even identical – structure between artworks and religious realities is explainable
through the same concepts. Returning to the question of indiscernibles in art in one of
his last books, Andy Warhol, he regards it as similar to the “religious question” regarding
the difference between a man that is a god and a man that is not (Danto 2009, 23).
Danto has us imagine not now Warhol’s Brillo Box or his own red squares, but a man in
ancient Jerusalem “who looked enough like Jesus that the two were often confused for
one another, even by those who knew them well. The difference could not have been
more momentous than that! Confusing a god with a mere human being is, toutes propor-
tions gardées, like confusing a work of art with a mere real thing – a thing defined
through its meaning with a thing defined through its use” (137). The pair “meaning-
use” is analogous to the Augustinian couple frui (what is loved for its own sake, when
the volitive act has reached its goal) and uti (what is used in order to get what must be
loved). Instead of focusing on the theological aspect of this dilemma (frui refers to God,
uti to mundane things), Danto insists on the semantic and interpretive side of the
analogy between works of art-real things/God-mere things.
The reference to Jesus figures often in Danto’s writings. He finds the idea of
“transfiguration” – a concept which gives the title to one of his most famous works, The
Transfiguration of the Commonplace – as the perfect device to develop the religious
analogy. He drew the title of that work from a fictional one described in a novel by the
Catholic novelist Muriel Spark (Danto 1981, 1997, 129), asserting that the idea derives
from the Catholic concept of “transubstantiation.” These, however, are distinct
theological concepts. While sometimes it seems that Danto is ignorant of this fact, he
elsewhere consciously and explicitly selects the term “transfiguration” rather than
“transubstantiation” (1992, 137), even though, I should like to suggest, the latter con-
cept would have proven much more productive for achieving his theoretical goal.
What then does Danto mean by transfiguration? He says: “transfiguration is a reli-
gious concept. It means the adoration of the ordinary, as in its original appearance in the
Gospel of Saint Matthew it meant adoring a man as a god” (Danto 1997, 128–9). Danto
is referring to Matthew 17, 1–7. A story also related in Mark1 and Luke, which reads:
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up
a high mountain by themselves. There in their presence he was transfigured: his face
shone like the sun and his clothes became as dazzling as light. And suddenly Moses and
Elijah appeared to them; they were talking with him […]. Suddenly a bright cloud covered
them with shadow, and suddenly from the cloud there came a voice which said, “This is
my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour. Listen to him.” When they heard this, the dis-
ciples fell on their faces, overcome with fear. But Jesus came up and touched them, saying,
“Stand up, do not be afraid.” And when they raised their eyes they saw no one but Jesus.
234
According to this pericope, the apostles recognized Jesus as being God by means of
visible changes: the whiteness of his clothes, the shine of his face, the august person-
ages surrounding Him, the voice from the cloud. Transfiguration – metamorphosis –
necessarily involves a change at some point in appearance or in what Danto treats as
aesthetic properties inessential to the being of art. The title of Danto’s book thus runs
directly contrary to its theory, which is anything but an aesthetic theory of art. As the
cliché goes, don’t read a book by its cover, except that Danto chose many of his covers
carefully. Since we cannot rely on perceptible features to know whether something is a
work of art, it seems that the concept of transubstantiation lends itself to a much more
accurate understanding of Danto’s view. It has to do less with how things look than
with what things are. Transubstantiation means an ontological change that excludes a
priori any perceptible difference. Danto often insists on this very particular aspect when
he explains the relationship between artworks and commonplace objects: a non-art
object can look exactly like an artwork. This is tantamount to admitting the possibility
of different realities under exactly the same appearance. In this regard, his theory seems
to be transubstantiative rather than transfigurative. But The Transubstantiation of the
Commonplace does not make for a smoother title.
The question of transubstantiation, and the disputes concerning it, date to the
Carolingian period. The matter of contention surrounded the events that occur dur-
ing the Sacrament of the Eucharist, wherein the bread and wine become the Body and
Blood of Christ. Among many views, a strong position, defended for example by
Berengar of Tours, argues that bread and wine are not truly the Body and Blood of
Christ but a similitudo (similarity) or figura (figure/representation). This mimetic way
of understanding the sacrament was challenged by Hugo of St. Victor, who noted that
the bread and the wine of the sacrament of the altar are both truth and figure. In this
way, he anticipates the idea of transubstantiation later developed by Aquinas: the
appearance (accidents) of bread and wine, which is subject to physical analysis and
somehow to the judgment of the eye, remains while the substance (not so subject)
changes. Hugo also rejected the theory of annihilation, that the bread and wine are
destroyed at the time of consecration, and the theory of consubstantiation later
endorsed by Luther. This latter claim presents a hotly debated alternative to transub-
stantiation: Christ is present in the bread and wine just as the heat is present in an
iron, that is, with no substantial change at all (Van Nieuwenhove 2012, 131–2). Like
Berengar, the more radical Reformers, such as Zwingli, held that bread and wine are
merely a symbol. Zwingli spoke of the “Real Presence” of Christ in the Eucharist (“this
is that”) not to claim that the “is” should be taken literally, such that the Body of
Christ must be visibly and physically present in the Eucharist. He understood the “is,”
rather, as tantamount to “means.” It names a form of symbolization or signification
that Danto replicates, though modifies, by what he terms “the ‘is’ of artistic
identification.”
Danto often claims to be concerned by “the logic of artistic identification,” related to
“the ‘is’ of artistic identification” (1964, 576; 1981, 126), the sort of logic we ordi-
narily employ when we say that a figure of a painting “is” – symbolizes/represents –
Icarus. Someone could claim, like Danto’s character Testadura, that he sees nothing but
paint. He does not see a painting. He is right insofar as he overlooks nothing material,
while wrong to restrict reality only to this. Until “he has mastered the is of artistic
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SIXTO J. CASTRO
identification and so constitutes it a work of art,” Danto writes, “he will never look upon
artworks: he will be like a child who sees sticks as sticks” (1964, 579). This early
approach strongly resembles the Protestant way of understanding the “Real Presence.”
Such artistic identification is functionally equivalent to the “is” of religious identification
(this piece of bread “is” – means/is a symbol of – the Body of Christ) in the Zwinglian
approach. Moreover, just as this “is” of artistic identification requires some mastery of
art theory that – notice the religious topology – “takes it up into the world of art, and
keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is,” to see bread and wine as Body
and Blood one must belong to a tradition in which faith allows one to identify better the
symbolic (Zwinglian) or real (Catholic) character of an allegedly banal object. Faith, as
Aquinas puts it, is “to think with assent” what a tradition proposes as revealed by God
(1947, II-II, q. 2, a.1). Mastering the “is” of artistic identification requires similarly
thinking and assenting within an Artworld.
This fideistic view – depending to some extent on faith – becomes clearer when Danto
compares contemporary museums to cathedrals. They both contain “relics,” either a
Brillo box or the knucklebone of a saint, vested with its aura of holiness. What makes it
possible to erect both the museum and the cathedral is “the eye of faith and not neces-
sarily the eye of aesthetic delectation. We are talking,” Danto says, “about meaningful-
ness rather than gratification” (1992, 167–8).
This “is” of artistic identification is, according to Danto, consistent with the literal
falsehood of the identification, as it is the case of the Zwinglian approach to the species.
In this – as Danto claims – the “is” resembles metaphorical identification (Juliet is the
sun) but differs from the sort of identification proposed by magic (a wooden doll is the
enemy who will feel the pin-stick), myth identification (the sun is Phoebus’ chariot),
and religion (the bread and the wine are the Body and Blood of Christ). In all these
cases, literal falsity is inconceivable (Danto 1981, 126). This last difference holds, how-
ever, only to repeat, if religious identification is understood along lines more Catholic
than Zwinglian.
The truly interesting question is how something becomes an artwork in the first
place. Danto states: “interpretation is the agency of what I have spoken of as transfig-
uration, that process whereby even quite commonplace objects are raised to the level
of art” (1986, 78). Interpretation transfigures or, better perhaps, transubstantiates
and, in some way, christens realities, as the words in the Christian sacraments.2 Words
in the Christian sacraments make that sacrament manifest. Their use is parallel to the
word from the cloud in the Transfiguration narrative. The liturgical action does not
interpret but re-presents and speaks something into existence, not unlike what Austin
called speech acts. Danto draws on both this theological and this philosophical heri-
tage when he claims that “as a transformative procedure, interpretation is something
like baptism,” alluding to George Dickie’s institutional theory of art, a view he rejects.3
Danto goes on to describe such a baptism as giving “a new identity, participation in
the community of the elect” (1981, 126), and criticizes Dickie for identifying only
what makes artworks possible according to this procedure in a particular institution.
Danto is interested by what makes an artwork actual (1992, 38). Interpretation
rather than procedure is what lies behind this ontological difference that does not
involve any different appearance. Dickie’s approach resembles the Catholic Church;
Danto’s constitutive interpretation has a more Lutheran flavor (Castro 2017).
236
The schema of Catholic Sacramentology may be useful to understand Danto’s view. As put
forward by Aquinas, one thing is the visible and external element of the sacrament
(sacramentum tantum, sign only), the material sign of the sacrament, the sensible and material
thing (water poured during the baptism, bread, and wine of the Eucharist). Quite another
thing, though accompanying this external element, is the res et sacramentum, the thing and
the sign. This is the union of the outward sign and that which it signifies, for example, the
Body and Blood of Christ after the consecration, the baptismal character, and so forth. At the
same time, however, this union denotes the res tantum, a reality no longer a sign but the
spiritual effect of the sacrament, the grace conferred by the performance of the sacrament
according to its own formality, such as incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ in the
Eucharist or the forgiveness of sins in baptism (cf. Aquinas (1947), III, q. 73 a 6). Danto’s
approach to indiscernible realities seems to fit in this sacramental view. The banal object is the
visible and external element, the everyday object that might be indiscernible of a work of art:
the brillo box in the case of Warhol, the urinal in the case of Duchamp, or even pigment
applied to canvas. Their artistic counterparts have been transubstantiated by means of inter-
pretation, akin to the form of the sacrament (the word). That means: the banal object does not
remain a commonplace object plus something else, as in Luther’s theory of consubstantiation.
The artwork is something other. Meaningfully enough, Danto says that the “form” of the
work would be a manipulated section of the object, selected by the interpretation: “Without
the interpretation that portion lapses invisibly back into the object, or simply disappears, for it
is given existence by the interpretation. This is the germ of truth in saying that without the
artworld there is no art” (1981, 125). Thus, the artworks that extensionally define it make
the artworld possible and present, as the sacraments make the Church real. There is no art-
world apart from artworks, and the artworld is made manifest in every work, through it and
by it. So, artworks seem to have a symbolic character, not only in the sense Zwingli under-
stood the symbolic “is” of transubstantiation, but as the real presence of what they are about.
Symbols, unlike signs, do not just refer to something external; they embody their meaning, as
a kiss means love and makes it present and real. Sacraments signify and, at the same time,
make present the reality they are about. Likewise, an artwork makes its meaning present by
way of embodiment. The enormous significance of artworks in our world derives partly from
this fact: an artwork is a “real presence.” Artworks are not about something else. They are “all
that is,” as Danto’s reinterpretation of Hamlet quoted as the epigraph to “The Artworld” inti-
mates. We have moved slightly away from the Zwinglian world, where symbols were under-
stood rather as signs pointing towards something else, and, in some way, deprived of “real”
value: their significance is always being “instead of.”
Furthermore, in the Catholic tradition, transubstantiation can occur only if those
performing the sacrament act faithfully and in conformity to a tradition. That is exactly
how Danto addresses the problem of the creation of the artworks, conceived as “objects
thrust into the world with the intention that they be works of art” (1986, 39). The
question of artistic creation can be answered from the theological template: in order to
make an artwork one needs to have the intention of doing what the artworld does, in
the same way as, in order to perform a sacrament, the priest must have the intention of
doing what the Church does. The artist needs to have something like an “institutional
intention.” The analogy does not mean that artworks only repeat what has been done
by the artworld. “Doing what the artworld does” implies precisely carrying out that
“institutional intention” in whatever new form artworks can adopt.
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SIXTO J. CASTRO
Danto’s theory is understand better by reference to transubstantiation than to trans-

figuration. But what about transformation? In transfiguration it is the outward sign
that is made other, whereas transubstantiation declares that it is the inward substance
that is changed. Moreover, transubstantiation implies an inner change in the substance
whereby a hitherto non-present “something” becomes present to make the artistic
response possible. As Anscombe (1981, 107–12) claims, transubstantiation is “a
conversion of one physical reality into another which already exists” (the living Jesus
Christ), not a coming to-be of a new substance out of the stuff of an old one, as in the
case of a chemical change. Clearly, Danto is not thinking of this kind of conversion, but
of something brought about by means of a constitutive interpretation: not the appear-
ing of a new entity, but the belonging of that entity to a different realm, the artworld, a
world of interpreted things. Furthermore, Danto never provides a transubstantiative
“procedure” because that would take him too close to George Dickie’s institutional
theory, which, at least in its early formulations, states that something is a work of art if
it follows the right procedure in the appropriate institution: transubstantiation takes
place when the right ritual is performed. If we recall, Danto’s concern is not how
something becomes an artwork, but what makes that artwork real in its own terms.
Danto’s attempt to steer clear of this unwelcome reading of his own theory sheds
some light on why he ultimately speaks of transfiguration. The passage from Matthew
that Danto quotes presents Jesus transfigured while accompanied by Moses and Elijah,
the embodiments of the religious tradition, representing the Law and the Prophets.4
The central message is not that there is no perceptible difference between a god and a
man, but that Jesus can appear as the God he really is only within the religious tradition
to which he belongs, exactly like an artwork can only be an artwork, indeed the artwork
it is, within an artworld. Jesus is part of the Jewish tradition, continues it, and finally
overcomes it in a new way that, while deeply rooted in a tradition, must be understood
as a revolution of that tradition: “Do not imagine that I have come to abolish the Law or
the Prophets. I have come not to abolish but to complete them” (Matthew 5, 17). Such
is the achievement for Danto of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box within the history of art.
There is still another, more surprising affinity. Exegetes agree that the narrative of
transfiguration is an eschatological account, concerned, that is, with a final state of
affairs at the end of human history. The text from Matthew to which Danto refers to
concludes (v. 9): “As they came down from the mountain Jesus gave them this order,
‘Tell no one about this vision until the Son of man has risen from the dead.’” Only at the
end of history, when all humanity shares the destiny of Christ, “the first-born from the
dead” (Colossians 1, 18) will the transfigured commonplace be understood as an
embodiment of what is yet to come. Danto’s account of the history of art is also in its
way an eschatological narrative (Castro 2017). Until the advent of Pop Art, art history
was structured in narratives of progressive discoveries and interruptions, exemplifying
art’s pursuit of its own philosophical essence. These came to an end when Pop Art posed
the definitive question, the question of the difference between artworks and real things,
and handed the question over to philosophy. With this, art history ended (Danto 1997,
113) giving way to a post-historical age in which, as far as the appearances are
concerned, anything could be a work of art. Danto might be thought as reading Pop art
not only in a literal or an analogical sense, but also in an anagogical one. That is to say,
he would take Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box as a text that can be read as an index of what
238
we can expect once history is over. As the resurrection of Christ is a promise of the
freedom to come for everyone, Warhol’s Brillo Box is a symbol of the artistic freedom
central to this new period, a symbol, like Wittgenstein’s ladder, we can throw away once
it has fulfilled its purpose. And, if we take Danto to be an eschatologist, the best is yet to
be expected, even though he never speaks in these terms. So, maybe Danto was after all
right in his election of the term “transfiguration” for the title of his book.
Notes
1 Most exegetes hold Mark’s version to be the original, and there it is only the clothes of Jesus
that are transformed.
2 Aquinas holds that words constitute the form of sacraments, and sensitive things the matter
thereof (1947, III, q.60, a.7). Augustine (1954, 80, 3) holds a similar view of baptism.
3 Note the theological register, too, in Dickie’s reflection on his theory: “What I have been
saying may sound like saying, “‘a work of art is an object of which someone has said, “I
christen this object a work of art”’” (1969, 256).
4 Patristic commentary usually sees Moses and Elijah as representative of the Law and Prophets,
confirming Jesus as Messiah. But they could just as well represent two figures who are known
to have been bodily assumed into heaven and who will appear at the end time (see Rev 11:4–
12). Deut 18:15 & 18 (I will raise up one like you [=Moses]; him they shall heed) points to an
eschatological prophet. Mal 3:23 declares the sending of Elijah before the great and terrible
day. So Moses and Elijah could also be symbolic of Jesus’s being taken up into heaven and sent
again at the last days. There is much in the Transfiguration narrative that is multivalent.
References
Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret. 1981. “On Transubstantiation.” In her The Collected
Philosophical Papers of G.E.M. Anscombe, Vol. III, Ethics, Politics and Religion, 107–12. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Aquinas, Thomas. 1947. Summa Theologica. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province.
New York: Benziger Brothers.
Augustine. 1954. In Iohannis evangelium tractatus CXXIV. Corpus Christianorum series Latina.
Turnhout: Brepols.
Castro, Sixto J. 2017. “Art via Theology. Eschatology and Tradition in Arthur C. Danto’s
Philosophy of Art.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91(2): 229–316.
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61: 571–84.
———. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA:
———. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1992. Beyond the Brillo Box. The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective. Berkeley, CA and
Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
———. 1997. After the End of Art, Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ:
———. 2009. Andy Warhol. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.
Dickie, George. 1969. “Defining Art.” American Philosophical Quarterly 6(3): 253–56.
Van Nieuwenhove, Rik. 2012. An Introduction to Medieval Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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27
Embodiment and Medium
TIZIANA ANDINA
The concepts of embodiment and medium lie at the core of Arthur Danto’s philosophy.
While the latter concept is of fundamental importance to the philosophy of art, the
former extends also to his philosophies of body and mind.
As Danto underlines in Connections to the World (1997), one speaks of embodiment
when describing a state in which two objects with different properties constitute a single
object, as the mind and body together constitute the human being. If, as in traditional
theories, embodiment is posited to explain the nature of mind, the very idea bears a
commitment to some necessary relationship between mind and body.1 Embodiment is
just giving “body” to the mind. Referring to the classical Cartesian mind/body problem
of how an extended substance – the body – is related to a putatively non-extended sub-
stance – the mind – Danto posed what he called “the body/body problem” (Danto
1973a, 1973b, 1999). He sought an explanation for how one extended substance, the
body, hosts another distinct substance, the mind.
Descartes had considered the mind and the body as two diverse substances: “Even
though there may be a body that is very closely joined to me, I have a vivid and clear
idea of myself as something that thinks and isn’t extended, and one of body as
something that is extended and does not think. So it is certain that I am really distinct
from my body and can exist without it” (Descartes 2007). He thereafter proceeded met-
aphorically and negatively: the relationship between mind and body is different from
that between the helmsman and his ship (Ibid, 81). The close relationship between
mind and body make it such that they constitute a unity, albeit of one of two different
kinds of substances. The distinction between the two remains, contra Danto’s sugges-
tion to read the Meditations so as to make it far less pronounced (1999, 184 ff.). Danto
was not persuaded by a materialist or idealist reduction of mind to body (or physical
brain state) or body to mind. Both, he argued, rested on the fundamental error of
misattributing the properties of one to the other, say, the represented object to the
thought of the object.
240
For Danto, a mental representation and what the thought is about – its intentional
content – are distinct. The idea of green is not green just as the idea of an equilateral
triangle is not itself composed of three equal sides. Such attributes belong to objects as
known or represented via the idea or thought (Danto 1973b, 408–9). The subject may
have the idea of green or of a winged horse independently even if the ideas were derived
from existent objects to whom such predicates may or may not be attached. The idea
derives, in some cases, from a mental abstraction or, in the case of the winged horse,
from the imaginative faculty. In Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge (1968, 90 ff.), Danto
defends the thesis that beliefs are propositional (sentential states), and that while one
may be aware of what one perceives, one may not know how one’s perception is struc-
tured. Neither mental states nor perceptions necessarily share properties with the con-
tents of thoughts or what is perceived.
It is no coincidence that Danto, in his philosophy of knowledge, explains the concept
of embodiment using examples from the visual arts. For, just as a state of mind takes as
its object the thought of something, mimesis takes the reproduction of something
within the artistic domain. Danto follows Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy in recon-
structing mimesis in genealogical terms so as to focus on its aspect of representation
contra depiction. While inspired by Plato’s remarks on mimesis and Wittgenstein’s
theory of language as a representation of thought (Wittgenstein 1961), Danto argues
that artistic creation – mistakenly construed as merely a representation of the external
world – belies what art does not duplicate when it stands to what is represented through
a necessary medium and embodiment of the representation. Representation embodies
the interpretation of what is represented. A church may be artistically represented by a
cross.
Before being a vehicle of meaning, according to Danto, mimetic representation was
understood as a re-presentation: a veritable embodiment of the object, a re-presenta-
tion of a particular medium, chosen for the specific necessities of the artistic produc-
tion. Danto finds a reference to the early meaning of mimesis, which originated in
religion and symbolism, again both in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1993) and in
Plato’s double meaning of the term “form.” He interprets Platonic mimesis (Danto
1981, 25 ff., 1982, 3 ff.) as a process of embodiment and transfiguration whose most
evident output is the iconic representation of the divine. This kind of depiction – which
is also the simplest stage of representation, as Nietzsche shows when discussing the
dynamics of religious processions – is nevertheless problematic. The dual nature of

Christ cannot be represented simply through depiction without obscuring his divine
status. Thus icons are not considered simple depictions, but rather depictions that
somehow “contain” the thing depicted, because the image captures the very essence of
what it represents, or because between the image and the thing depicted there is
something identical. As Wittgenstein put it: “There must be something identical in a
picture and what it depicts, to enable the one to be a picture of the other at all. What a
picture must have in common with reality, in order to be able to depict it-correctly or
incorrectly-in the way it does, is its pictorial form” (Wittgenstein 1961, 2.161, 2.17).
Following Edmund Burke (1958) and Nelson Goodman (1968), Danto points out
that what is embodied via the artistic processes of embodiment does not correspond to
what is “embodied” through mere depiction. Rather, what artistic embodiment of a
given x results in, through many different processes, is an artistic representation of a
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TIZIANA ANDINA
given x. As Frank Ankersmit has shown (1998), when one embodies something that
stands for x, one does not embody a y that resembles x, but a y that replaces and
functions as x. “This is the second sense of representation, then: a representation is
something that stands in the place of something else as our representative in Congress
stand proxy for ourselves” (Danto 1981, 19). Danto’s three fundamental philosophical
notions, embodiment, representation and medium, should thus be understood together.
Humans are basically entes rapresentantes (Danto 1949, 1968, 2008) as their repre-
sentative ability, their ability to process thoughts and incorporate them in language
and, ultimately, their willingness to produce and enjoy art, are key elements to their
nature. It is important here that, for Danto, representation should be considered, first,
as distinguished from depiction, as a true replacement of the elements represented. And
second, its structure should be examined in relation to the medium in which it is
embodied. The medium is not only the condition of possibility of embodiment, but more
fundamentally the condition of possibility of representation itself, because the prop-
erties of the medium determine significant properties of the representation.
Danto’s concept of representation has two elements: first, a representation “stands
for” the represented object; the representation of the object implies that the representa-
tion replaces the object. Second, the representation must have certain characteristics
for that replacement to be possible. Danto tends to trace these constraints on represen-
tation back to semantics (as in his “is” of artistic identification in The Artworld, 1964,
577 ff., 1981, 165 ff.), although the achievement of an artistic representation bears an
essential dependence on the properties of its medium. This gives rise to puzzles related
to representation, its structure and embodiment. What, say, is the structure of (artistic)
representation and how can its meaning be embedded? Is it necessary to imply any
specified dependence between medium and representation? How does the medium
employed influence the possibilities of representation? Can any medium be used to rep-
resent any object?
Considering the representation of x not as a depiction of x (that is, as something
resembling x as much as possible) but as something that can actually “stand for” x,
means for Danto that representation implies a degree of recognition. This is the ability
to recognize the traits and properties that characterize x, so as to be able to reconstruct
it when the original is not present. This is important, as Gombrich described (1960),
when persons of varying cultures and training approach representations. There is also
a step of typification, the ability to make standard assumptions about what is being
represented.
Following Gombrich further (1960): if one wants to represent a horse, a detailed rep-
resentation of a very rare species of horses might not be the best way to do it. A well-
functioning crudely carved horse made of wood might be enough – if not even better
than a detailed representation of a rare horse. One needs to capture two elements: a
physical specification referring to the “horse” species and an idea of movement, because
horses are characterized by their mobility. To give the idea of motion is as important as
outlining the characteristic shape of the head. A horse can obviously be represented in
many different ways, according to whether one is treating it in a scientific treatise,
praising it in a sonnet, or painting it on a canvas. Existing in space and time, unlike a
fictional hippogriff, its representation will draw inspiration and the salient properties of
the animal from various life models, ones typically shared by every specimen.
242
Representation becomes functional when, seeing a representation of a horse, a viewer

thinks of any horse. But not every representation is functional.
Sometimes, instead of grasping the characteristics of x at a given time, one grasps
some of the properties that identify x over time, as when the aim of the representation,
be it mental, linguistic or pictorial, is to capture, say, the lifespan of a horse, The tempo-
rality may be accelerated and compressed for this or that purpose. Overall, therefore,
representation replaces the represented object with something else as it condenses, crys-
tallizes, or configures selected properties of an object. There is always a margin of toler-
ance and variability, as when a horse is rendered more or less tall, or slender, or in this
or that color: how far the imagination can run depends on the aim of the representa-
tion, say, how serious or comic it is.
To enumerate the characteristics of representation, it is possible to say that: [1] each
representation is derived from the selection of a chosen and defined set of properties; [2]
these properties are relevant to the functioning of the representation, that is, they are
necessary conditions for the representation to “function” correctly and perform the
function of reference for which it has been designed; [3] the properties that make the
representation work (in other words, the properties that make the representation of x,
that is y, properly refer to x) often need to be strengthened by a prior agreement between
those who have to use the representation or simply understand it. The possible success
of the representation is bound to several conditions. For example, it is quite counterintu-
itive to use an apple to signify a ship, unless there is an agreement on the fact that apples,
within a certain language, denote ships. Even when the speakers of a given language
decide that apples also denote ships, objects with different characteristics (leaves, for
example) may very likely be more suitable for the purpose. This happens because the first
function of ships is to float, while apples, because of their shape and mass, are generally
associated with the idea of heaviness, a characteristic that does not facilitate flotation.2
I would like to explore, drawing on Danto’s account of embodiment, how some of the
properties that are attributed to a representation depend on how it is embodied. This
would mean that, according to Danto’s view, these properties depend not only on the
features of the represented object (real or fictitious), but also on the medium that allows
for the embodiment of the representation. Here are some examples. The mental repre-
sentation of a horse depends on how the mental images are elaborated, drawing them
from the data of our perception and possibly from the fact that the perceptual data can
be further processed through imagination. The results of this process are half realistic
and half fantastic representations, such as winged horses. According to Danto, the
mental representations of both normal horses and winged horses belong to our
cognitive stock. On a first level, the linguistic representation of a horse depends on the
structure of human perception and on the grammar of the language of reference. On a
second level, representation depends on what kind of writing has been chosen for the
representation in question: clearly, a newspaper article, a scientific treatise and a sonnet
are completely different things. Each mode of writing will elaborate its own typical
description of a horse. Furthermore, each description will represent the object in a
unique way.
Yet still, the pictorial representation (figurative or abstract) of a horse will attach to
the representation new properties that depend on the technical possibilities and the
characteristics of the medium. By technical possibilities of the medium, I mean first, the
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TIZIANA ANDINA
internal possibilities of languages, or their contamination, which are generally investi-

gated by poetry; and second, the possibilities derived from the historical evolution of a
language or practice. Hence, the different elaborations of pictorial representations may
be affected by the technical possibilities related to painting as well as the historical
development of painting as a specific technical method and theoretical discipline. In
summary, representation allows one to replace, in a given context, x with y (the repre-
sentation of x), while the medium allows for embodiment (representation would not be
possible without the medium since, according to Danto, representation is always
registered in material form). Furthermore, there are two types of embodied representa-
tions: representations that are embodied within the minds of living beings (both
humans and non-humans) and representations that are embodied within a medium
other than the mind. Within this second group, Danto includes various forms of
knowledge that use language (e.g., the historical knowledge, which is structured
through narrative propositions) and, in particular, works of art. The latter are represen-
tations embodied in a medium different from the mind, although, at least with regard to
their genesis, they are mind-dependent.
Danto deals with the visual arts in a particular way, although he always believed that
his philosophy of art was essentialist and universally applicable to any form of art. The
artworks that, to repeat, exemplify the second category of representations have two
fundamental characteristics: first, the semantic layer that identifies them is always strat-
ified and usually goes beyond simple denotation; second, the artistic representation –
and therefore the artwork – cannot be understood without a specific reading of the
medium that, through its specific properties, completes the semantics of the representa-
tion. These two features mark a profound difference between the representations of the
visual art and art of other kinds. As Umberto Eco masterfully explained in Opera aperta:
art, as structuring of forms, has its own ways of talking about the world and man; it may
happen that a work of art makes statements about the world through its topic – as in the
subject of a novel or a poem – but first of all, as form, art makes statements about how it is
structured, showing the historical and personal trends that have led to it and the implicit
worldview manifested by a certain form.
Indeed, as Eco specifies:

Mantegna’s altarpiece of San Zeno has the same subject as many medieval depictions and
‘says’ outwardly the same things; but it belongs to the Renaissance for its new building
modules, for the earthiness of its forms and the cultured taste of its archaeology; the sense
of matter, weight, volume. The first discourse of an artwork comes from the way in which
it is made (Eco 1962 (2006), 6).
Although Danto’s idea is similar to Eco’s, he adds a third group of properties to those of
representation and medium. The argument is developed, as often happens, through a
curious example of indiscernibility (imagined for the first time in Borges’ Fictions of
1993): two identical versions of Don Quixote, the former written by Cervantes, the latter
by Pierre Menard (Danto 1981, 36 ff.). Although the two works, as imagined by Borges,
are orthographically identical, they instantiate Quixotes with three types of properties.
First, the properties that are identical in the two works depend on the medium (the
244
language); second, they depend on the narrative structure of the story (the semantic-
representational content, the style, the narrative articulation); third, they depend on
the historical and cultural context in which that story has been developed – in the
Quixote example, in Cervantes’s version first and then in Menard’s. I will define the lat-
ter as “contextual” properties.
Together, these three types of properties (that is, the properties of the representa-
tions that create the artistic narration, the properties of the medium relative to a specific
artistic narration, and the contextual properties) make up the work of art as a whole,
that is, what the embodiment realizes. There is no fixed rule in the creation or union of
these three types of features. In fact, their composition can vary significantly. For in-
stance, it is universally recognized that many avant-garde works have accentuated the
presence or the impact of a type of property over the others. In the example of
Mantegna’s altarpiece discussed by Eco, the properties of the medium overlap to some
extent with the contextual properties in the sense that the structure and language of
the medium are also bearers of that set of features. However, this does not happen in
many avant-garde works, where the contextual properties are very weakly embodied in
the medium or, better, are embodied in the medium is such a way as to require interpre-
tation. This hermeneutical work generally engages the spectator both in a historical
reading and in a determination of semantic meaning.
That contextual properties can be very weakly embodied in a medium is particularly
salient in those works of art which are perceptually indiscernible but classified as non-
identical. A familiar example is that of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box and Mike Bidlo’s This
is not a Brillo Box, which is intentionally about Warhol’s Brillo. The two works, materi-
ally indiscernible, are characterized by partially different representational properties
(Warhol’s Brillo is about the original designer James Harvey’s actual boxes of Brillo soap
pads and much more, while Bidlo’s Brillo is about Warhol’s Brillo and much more3), a
medium of identical structure and, as in the case of the two Quixotes, different contex-
tual properties. The latter create a series of relationships between the object, the social
world, and the cultural context in which the work was created. As a consequence, This
is not a Brillo Box realizes a considerable part of its identity through the reconstruction
of the historical and artistic relationship between three Brillo works. In fact, only those
who know the relationship between Warhol’s, Harvey’s and Bidlo’s works can com-
pletely and truly understand the intentio operis.
This intentio operis suggests a very broad but not limitless scope to the interpretation
and reading of the works. In other words, interpretation has precise boundaries, given
by the structure and the set of properties that constitute the works. However, despite
being subject to a finite interpretation, the works of art give the imagination a much
wider space than what logical thought, by its very nature, can offer. This is certainly the
distinctive feature of artistic creation and entails the universality of art’s meaning.
Understood this way, Danto’s view suggests a confirmation of what Kant affirmed in
§49 of the Critique of Judgment. “The aesthetical idea is a representation of the
Imagination associated with a given concept, which is bound up with such a multi-
plicity of partial representations in its free employment, that for it no expression mark-
ing a definite concept can be found, and such a representation, therefore, adds to a
concept much ineffable thought, the feeling of which quickens the cognitive faculties,
and with language, which is the mere letter, binds up spirit also” (Kant 2008, §49).
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TIZIANA ANDINA
In Danto’s theory of embodiment, we can see how artistic representation, irrespec-

tive of its medium, presents some traits of openness and vagueness that are, at the same
time, its limit and its strength compared to logical thinking. Mike Bidlo’s Brillo refers to
two very similar works and represents them by incorporating their distinctive features
and, simultaneously, by carrying out a citational dynamic: it cites Andy Warhol’s work
just as a writer uses quotation marks to cite someone else’s text, where the quotation
marks indicate that the quote is a suspended text to which different rules must be
applied. The representational properties, the properties of the medium and the contex-
tual properties are incorporated by the artist and arranged in a simple and wise way.
How much wonder hides in a simple box!
Notes
1 Cf. Gibbs 2006; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Shapiro 2004.

2 For a detailed study on the limits of the interpretations, cf. Eco 1992.
3 See also Andina 2011.
References
Andina, Tiziana. 2011. Arthur Danto: Philosopher of Pop. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars.
Ankersmit, Frank R. 1998. “Danto on Representation, Identity, and Indiscernibles.” History and
Theory 37(4): 44–70.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1993. Fictions, Everyman’s Library. New York: A.A. Knopf.
Burke, Edmund. 1958. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful. New York: Columbia University Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 1949. Georges Sorel: Unreason, Moral Sublimity and the Philosophy of Violence.
New York: Columbia University Press.
–––––. 1964. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61(19): 571–84. DOI: 10.2307/2022937.
–––––. Arthur C. 1968. Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
–––––. 1973a. Analytical Philosophy of Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

–––––. 1973b. “Representational Properties and Mind-Body Identity.” The Review of Metaphysics
26(3): 401–11.
–––––. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA:
–––––. 1982. “Depiction and Description.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43(1): 1–
19. DOI: 10.2307/2107509.
–––––. 1997. Connections to the World. Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of
California Press.
–––––. 1999. The Body/body Problem: Selected Essays. Berkeley, CA, Los Angeles, CA and London:
–––––. 2008. “Lectio Magistralis.” Rivista di estetica XLVIII(38): 11–19.
Descartes, René. 2007. Meditations on First Philosophy: In Which the Existence of God and
Immortality of the Soul are Demonstrated. Arlington, TX: Richer Resources Publications.
246
Eco, Umberto. 1962. Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee. Milano:
Bompiani.
–––––. 1992. Interpretation and Overinterpretation. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Gibbs, Raymond W. 2006. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Gombrich, Ernst. 1960. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. New
York: Pantheon Books.
Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, IN:
Bobbs-Merrill.
Kant, Immanuel. 2008. Critique of Judgement, Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its
Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1993. The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. London and
New York: Penguin.
Shapiro, Lawrence A. 2004. The Mind Incarnate. Life and Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961. Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. New York: Humanities Press.
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28
The Style Matrix
SONDRA BACHARACH
Danto’s style matrix brings together many facets of his thinking about philosophy and
about art, particularly his intentionalism, art criticism, and historicism. It underscores
the systematicity of his approach. This chapter presents the mechanics of the style
matrix and offers modifications of the view in the light of certain criticisms. But do the
modifications, I ask, support or challenge other claims in his philosophy of art and art
criticism? The style matrix is offered to support Danto’s general views about the nature of
artworks and their properties. It is offered in his “The Artworld” essay of 1964, although,
for reasons we will see, it is not taken up again in his later work that draws on that essay.
An object can be transformed into an artwork and can be differentiated from an indis-
cernible object or artwork via its art historical context (Danto 1964, 571–84). The
matrix provides a space within which to map the varieties of representation, a context in
which to situate artworks historically and by style. But it also shows how earlier artworks
can be re-characterized or re-predicated given new artworks that are created later.
Specifically, the matrix is a grid with different rows and columns showing possible
style predicates. On any given row, either the predicate in some column will or will not
apply to the artwork in question. If the predicate does apply, we may place a “+” on the
row under the appropriate column to indicate that the artwork possesses that predicate.
If not, a “-” indicates the artwork does not possess that predicate. Construed as oppo-
sites, for any predicate P, either an artwork possesses P or not-P.1 With new artworks,
the kinds of predicates may change. Artistically relevant (what Danto sometimes calls
“being marked”), they come to apply not only to new artworks but older artworks. He
writes: “let F and non-F be an opposite pair of such predicates. Now it might happen
that, throughout an entire period of time, every artwork is non-F. But since nothing
thus far is both an artwork and F, it might never occur to anyone that non-F is an artis-
tically relevant predicate. The non-F-ness of artworks goes unmarked. By contrast, all
works up to a given time might be G, it never occurring to anyone until that time that
something might both be an artwork and non-G…” (Danto 1964, 583).
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The Style Matrix
Suppose that sometime around 1950 we attempt to construct a style matrix to rep-
resent the styles of Monet’s Waterlilies, Duchamp’s Fountain, and Picasso’s Guernica. We
may imagine constructing a matrix whose columns have the following possible predi-
cates: impressionist, conceptual, and cubist. The Monet may possess the first, but not the
other two; Duchamp, however, possesses only the second predicate, while Picasso’s
work possesses only the last. So our matrix will look like this:2
impressionist cubist conceptual

Waterlilies + - -
Fountain - - +
Guernica - + -
As new artworks are created, new predicates may enter into those constituting the style
matrix. If the new artwork contains features that previous artworks did not, then those
new predicates may be added to the style matrix. From that point forward, all previous
and future artworks can be characterized in terms of those new predicates.
The style matrix has an interesting consequence for the range of artistic properties
that can apply to artworks. When a new artistic feature is discovered, the artworld does
not simply gain a single new way of describing art. Rather, two new features are added
to the style matrix, viz., the property in question and its negation (Danto 1964, 584).
All artworks prior to the work in which P exists become characterized as not-P, and all
future artworks will possess either P or not-P.
If, now, we reconsidered our style matrix from 1950 at a later moment in time, for
example, in 1965, in light of the Pop art movement, new predicates with which to char-
acterize earlier artworks would be introduced. Warhol’s artworks require new predi-
cates with which to characterize his art. On at least one interpretation of his work, his
art celebrates a mass-market consumer society. Celebrating such consumerism is a fea-
ture that has been previously absent from art. In light of the new developments in the
artworld brought about by Pop art, we come to see previous artworks as not-consumer-
ist, as insulated from their environment in a way that Pop art was not.3 So, a style
matrix highlighting the relationships among our same three artworks will be different,
if it were created in 1950 or in 1965. In 1965, there would be an additional predicate
with which to describe these three artworks: celebration of consumer society. All three
of these artworks would lack such a feature, while the Pop art would possess it. So, as
new predicates are revealed, the number of stylistic characteristics with which to
describe earlier artworks increases. The overall goal of the style matrix is to provide us
with a way of comparing stylistic features from one period to the next and seeing how
possibly latent features from earlier periods may come to be revealed by later art. But
comparisons are possible only if more than one style matrix is examined. To make com-
parisons that help us understand the evolution of art history, we need at least two
matrices.4
If successful, the style matrix would enable Danto to explain some of his key ideas in
the philosophy of art graphically. First, the style matrix explains why a given work could
not have been art at any given point in time, as Danto frequently reminds us – because
the relevant properties were not artistically available.
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SONDRA BACHARACH
Second, the style matrix explains why two perceptually indiscernible objects might
have fundamentally different interpretations – because they arose in different art his-
torical contexts, which endowed the works with different properties. Finally, the style
matrix shows us why the way we see a given artwork seems to change with respect not
to its being art, but to its meaning over time - because the class of predicates available to
us is slowly expanded and enriched over time.
This is what Danto aspired to, at any rate:5
The vision the style matrix underwrites-or which underwrites it-is the way works of art
form a kind of organic community, and release latencies in one another merely by virtue of
their existence. I was thinking of the world of artworks as a kind of community of inter-
nally related objects. To be a work of art was to be a member of the art world, and to stand
in different kinds of relationship to works of art than to any other kind of thing. I even had
a kind of political vision that all works of art were equal, in the sense that each artwork
had the same number of stylistic qualities as any other. When a new style row was added
to the matrix, everyone got richer by one property (Danto 1997, 163–4).
Latent features are supposed to be revealed when an artist creates an artwork whose
description requires making use of a new artistically relevant predicate, say, Q. Q would
then be applied to the new artwork in question. But, Q would have an effect on all
previous art: not-Q would become artistically relevant in describing all previous art,
too.6 When this happens, not-Q would then be a latent feature of earlier artworks which
would be released by the artwork that possesses Q. Not-Q would be a latent feature of
previous artworks because it could not have been seen at the time of their creation, but
only once an artwork was created, where Q is an artistically relevant property. So, as we
discover new artistically relevant predicates, we can attribute their negation to earlier
artworks that were not accessible at the time of its creation. As a result, the spectator’s
interaction with the artworks is rendered more complex.
In later writings, Danto worried that the style matrix failed to achieve its goals –
namely, understanding art history’s development over time – because it classified art-
works on the basis of visual features alone, which stands in tension with his fundamental
views about art’s value and ontology. “A tall thin effigy from Africa,” he wrote, “doubt-
less has some ‘affinity’ with a characteristic Giacometti, but affinity overlooks the rea-
sons why either of them is tall and thin, and that must do great damage to our
perception of either. But that is one of the problems with affinities, and it is, I am afraid,
one of the problems, perhaps one of the main problems, with the style matrix itself ”
(Danto 1997, 162).
He further wrote that “Claiming an affinity is the very opposite of inferential art
criticism, for it entails no historical explanations at all…” (Danto 1992, 50–1). Since
the style matrix, as he understood it, relates artworks on the basis of what they look
like, it cannot differentiate these artworks on the basis of their underwritten theory and
history. A proper interpretation of the style matrix would be inspired by the lessons
drawn from Danto’s general philosophy of art: namely, that the nonmanifest properties
of artworks – in particular their art historical and art theoretical context - are artisti-
cally relevant, as he insists repeatedly in his later writings. Aesthetic qualities are a
function of their own historical identity, so that one may have to revise one’s assessment
250
The Style Matrix
of a work in the light of what one comes to know about a work later; (it may not even
be the work one thought it was in the light of inapt historical information) (Danto
1981, 111).
In describing the style matrix, Danto relies on causal relations among artworks as a
way of identifying stylistic properties. If causal relations are used to identify the style
predicates that apply to artworks, then as those causal relations among artworks evolve,
new stylistic predicates might apply to the artworks in question. For example, as new
artworks are created, these artworks will enter into new causal relations with previous
artworks, causal relations that did not, and could not have existed earlier. The stylistic
predicates that apply to the earlier artworks will then evolve to reflect these newly
established casual relations. But, since the particular causal relations among artworks
determine the stylistic predicates that apply to those artworks, artworks will gain sty-
listic predicates as they enter into new causal relations with future artworks. Our
inquiry then turns to understanding the nature of these causal relations: are they
metaphysical ones about the existence of aesthetic properties, or are they epistemic
relations that trace our discovery of these (already existing) properties?
Inherent in Danto’s style matrix is a deep ambiguity: when Danto says that the style
matrix renders new artistic properties aesthetically relevant, does this imply a weaker,
epistemic interpretation according to which these aesthetic properties existed all along,
but were simply not relevant (and hence unnoticed), or does it imply a stronger, meta-
physical interpretation according to which the style matrix charts how new artworks
literally enrich the artwork with new, artistically relevant properties (ones that were
unnoticed, because non-existent)? In this section, I consider three of the most influen-
tial Danto scholars and their interpretations of Danto’s style matrix in relation to the
debate about epistemic and metaphysical nature of the properties of artworks.7
Noël Carroll interprets the style matrix in a metaphysically robust manner, according
to which the creation of new works causes an earlier work to gain new properties. On
the face of it, this sounds like a wildly implausible form of anachronistic backward cau-
sation: Danto’s idea of a style matrix, like T.S. Eliot’s view of perpetually readjusting
artistic traditions, is dubious insofar as it suggests the possibility of backward causation.
Both views have artworks acquiring essential properties after they have been loosed upon the
world and after their makers are long dead.8
I agree that the style matrix allows us to attribute properties to earlier artwork, even
though those properties were only discovered later on (and hence would be unknown to
the artist of that earlier work). But, contra Carroll, the style matrix does not suggest that
later artworks literally cause an earlier artwork to acquire new artistically relevant prop-
erties, for the simple reason that the style matrix is not intended to establish a causal
relation between artworks.9 Rather, the causal relation is between a later artwork, and
a claim about or attribution of the artistically relevant properties that an artwork pos-
sesses. So, it is misleading to characterize the style matrix as a mechanism in which
artworks literally cause other artworks to acquire new artistically relevant properties.
At most, we can say that the style matrix enables artworks to cause people to make
claims about or attributions of an artwork’s artistically relevant properties.10 But such a
statement is philosophically unproblematic.
Carroll’s criticisms miss the mark: his target is a metaphysical interpretation of the
style matrix, but this is not what Danto claims. Jerrold Levinson denies that Danto should
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SONDRA BACHARACH
be interpreted this way. Instead, Levinson supports an epistemic interpretation: new art
causes us to discover latent properties in earlier works. As he writes, Danto does not claim
that it is only when F-ness is first exemplified that all earlier works become non-F; he
admits that earlier work was non-F all along, just that this went unremarked.11
For Danto, new art does not change the actual properties of earlier art, just those to which
we have access. We understand earlier art in light of later artworks. This view – which
Levinson calls “backward retroactivism”12 – is a form of epistemic historicism, for the claims
involved are purely epistemic. This is a benign and unproblematic approach to thinking
about aesthetic properties, because it merely notes that later developments provide access to
features of earlier artworks that were previously inaccessible and in virtue of which we
appreciate the past: “[N]ew work may restructure the artistic past in making us view that
past with refocused eyes, so as to grasp such new work aright, but it does not therefore make
the artistic future of earlier work a necessary part of understanding such of such earlier
work. The artistic lines of the past may well be redrawn with every new development, but
only from the appreciative point of view of each new phase” (Levinson 1990, 195).
This epistemic interpretation is also consistent with Danto’s intentionalism, which
Danto presupposes in many of his writings, and explicitly endorses in Transfiguration of the
Commonplace. Danto argues that interpretations of an artwork’s meaning must be con-
strained by what the artist could have intended. In his view, we cannot attribute to an art-
work a meaning that the artist could not have known about: “…the work-as-interpreted
must be such that the artist believed to have made it could have intended the interpretation
of it, in terms of the concepts available to him and the times in which he worked. … [I]t is
difficult to know what could govern the concept of a correct or incorrect interpretation if
not reference to what could and could not have been intended” (Danto 1981, 129–30).
Frank Boardman has also recently revived the debate about how to interpret the style
matrix, by defending what he calls an integrated matrix.13 In his view, the style matrix
reflects two activities: the adding of stylistic properties (a metaphysical fact about the
second-order properties of an artwork), and our epistemic access to those properties (an
epistemic fact about us) (Boardman 2015, 444). Here’s how he describes it: “The adding
of a column represents the epistemic fact that we have come to recognize the property in
question as one that may or may not be truly ascribed to artworks. … But it also repre-
sents the metaphysical fact that the property in question has gained the second-order
property of being stylistic. … The integrated matrix, then, presents to us this close rela-
tionship between the epistemic and metaphysical events” (Boardman 2015, 445).
Boardman claims to combine an epistemic interpretation with a metaphysical
account of the conditions under which an artistically relevant property gains the sec-
ond-order property of being stylistic.14 But, notice that on Boardman’s account, the
properties of an artwork do not change over time: “they are the same properties
throughout. What changes over time is a second-order property of those properties”
(Boardman 2015, 445).
Boardman here seems to be assuming that an artwork, and the artwork’s first-order
properties can remain fixed, even if the second-order properties of the artwork change
over time. But, no argument is given for this assumption; it seems just as plausible to
suggest, contra Boardman, that a metaphysical change to the second-order properties of
an artwork entails a change to the artwork itself or to the artwork’s properties. For
example, we might reasonably also believe that if a property P of an artwork A comes
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to acquire the new second-order property “stylistic,” then a case could be made for
saying that A’s properties have changed from not stylistic to being stylistic. This is an
interesting question whose examination should be reserved for another occasion. The
upshot here, however, is that Boardman’s interpretation as endorsing an epistemic or
metaphysical interpretation of the style matrix stands or falls by answering this question
about second-order properties and their causal relationship to the artwork.
Our examination of the style matrix suggests morals to be drawn for everyone
involved in this debate – Danto, Boardman, Carroll, and Levinson. In saying that the
style matrix allows us to discover new properties, Danto appears to mislead his readers.
New properties are not being created; rather, we are simply discovering new properties
as artistically relevant (that were there all along).15 Strictly speaking, the style matrix
allows the artworld to become richer only in the sense that it enables new predicates to
become artistically relevant (or to acquire the second-order property of being stylistic,
as Boardman would have it) – even though those predicates were there all along. Of
course, this poses a problem for Carroll: while he may find the view that artworks
acquire essential properties long after their makers are dead to be objectionable, this
objection does not seem to apply to the style matrix. And although Levinson himself is
critical of a metaphysical interpretation of the style matrix, he acknowledges that this
interpretation need not apply to Danto’s original construal of the style matrix.
But I’m not convinced that the epistemic interpretation of the style matrix is correct.
I think it is better read according to a metaphysical interpretation of the style matrix
inspired by the conclusions drawn from Danto’s philosophy of art.16 The nonmanifest
properties of artworks are relevant to classifying artworks. Relying on the art-historical
context, we might suggest that stylistic properties be determined not by visual affinities
but rather by the causal relations among artworks. If we allow that causal relations can
be used to identify an artwork’s properties, then as the causal relations among artworks
evolve, new properties might apply to the works. For example, as new works are created,
they will enter into new causal relations with previous art-causal relations that did not,
and could not have existed earlier. But, since the particular causal relations among art-
works determine the predicates that apply to those works, the artworks will gain prop-
erties as they enter into new causal relations with future art. In other words, at least
some of an artwork’s style is a product of what succeeds it.
This alternative proposal could explain why, for example, an effigy from Africa and a
Giacometti are different artworks: they’re different because of the different art-histori-
cal contexts to which both works make reference. This would also explain why the prop-
erties shared by artworks whose visual features may vary. So, a style matrix emphasizing
these nonmanifest properties would help us explain how such visually different art-
works can be classified as sharing the same properties.
In this picture, the stylistic predicates that may apply to an artwork are restricted to
those determined by the causal relations between it and other works. Of course, since
we cannot change the past, predicates stemming from previous causal relations remain
fixed. And, if past causal relations do contribute to the meaning of an artwork, then
only some restricted portion of stylistic predicates will be a product of what succeeds it.
Constructing a style matrix using causal relations among artworks allows us to find
a solution for some other problems facing Danto’s original foundation of the style
matrix. Let us turn to these benefits next. We noted that the style matrix is intended to
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capture how our conception of styles changes over time by allowing us to see how dif-
ferent stylistic predicates characterize artworks over time. One problem we encountered
was that it does not seem that we can always meaningfully compare two different
matrices. But since the style matrix is intended to reflect the causal relations among
artworks, and to reveal how the evolution of stylistic predicates is the result of chang-
ing causal relations among artworks. It follows that only matrices referencing artworks
that are causally related to one another will yield any insight.
Adopting a metaphysical interpretation of the style matrix also allows us to under-
stand another, more general claim that Danto defends about the evolution of art. Danto
has repeatedly suggested that as art history evolves, the essence of art is revealed; how-
ever, he also claims that we still have not yet discovered the essence of art. But why not?
If epistemic historicism is correct, the best explanation is sheer ignorance – some fea-
tures of artworks are still latent, and we just can’t have access to them yet.
Once we grant the possibility that a metaphysical interpretation of the style matrix is
correct, a more plausible explanation for why we have not yet discovered the essence of
art offers itself: the evolution of art theory and art history is what makes possible the
creation of essential features of art. As art history and art theory evolve, certain fea-
tures and properties of the nature of art that have not previously existed will be created.
If art history evolves, resulting in new causal relations among artworks, then it is pos-
sible that these new causal relations result in new aesthetic predicates – perhaps one or
more of which completes the definition.
This alternative, metaphysical interpretation of the style matrix is sketched here
simply to motivate the possibility that prima facie, it is a legitimate interpretation of the
style matrix that appears compatible also with much in Danto’s views about art, art
history, and art theory. The correct interpretation of the style matrix now hangs on ade-
quate defenses of epistemic and metaphysical historicism.
Notes
1 In his description of the style matrix in “The Artworld”, Danto assumes that predicates are
opposites or contraries, rather than contradictories.
2 This style matrix differs slightly to Danto’s original, to mine only to the degree this matrix
reflects how the columns added to the right are the direct result of new artworks being cre-
ated, which I indicate with new rows added below. This provides additional detail to explain
why Danto’s rows get longer as new artworks are created.
3 You might find it strange, even wrong, to construe previous art as “not-consumerist”, since
this feature may have been “beyond the ken” of earlier artists. I agree, but whether Danto is
committed to this implication depends on how we interpret him, as we’ll see later.
4 Frank Boardman’s interpretation of Danto reflects this point by offering what he calls an
integrated style matrix, viz, one which modes how the properties of artworks gain new sec-
ond-order features (some, but not all, properties become stylistic ones). See his “Back in
Style,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73:4: 441–448.
5 Again, note the ambiguity here between the epistemic and metaphysical interpretations of
this passage. according to the epistemic reading, artworks have latent properties, viz., prop-
erties that exist but which are unavailable to us. New developments in art simply release those
latent properties. On the stronger reading, however, when a new style row is added to the
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matrix (that is, whenever new art is created with new properties), artworks literally gain a
new property that did not previously exist. We shall return to this later.
6 Carroll, in his “Danto, Style and Intention” seems to imply that these new predicates allow us
to apply that predicate (and not its lack) to earlier artworks. This would imply that such pred-
icates did in fact exist, and we simply did not realize they did. Of course, this may be right; but
if so, then it is infelicitous to call them new and constitutive of an artistic breakthrough. After
all, if those predicates legitimately apply to the earlier art, the predicates themselves are not
new. What is new is only our use of such predicates.
7 Although I believe that Danto is best interpreted as endorsing an epistemic account of artisti-
cally relevant properties in his style matrix, I myself defend metaphysical historicism in my
“Toward a Metaphysical Historicism”.
8 Noël Carroll, “Danto, Style, and Intention,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53.3 (1995):
256, my emphasis.
9 This point is discussed in detail in Boardman’s recent work.
10 I think this is similar to Boardman’s interpretation, where he notes, “the adding of a column
represents the epistemic fact that we have come to recognize the property in question as one
that may or may not be truly ascribed to artworks” (445) .
11 Jerrold Levinson, “Artworks and the Future,” in Music, Art and Metaphysics (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1990), 194.
12 I shall refer to what Levinson terms “backward retroactivism” and “forward retroactivism” as
epistemic historicism and metaphysical historicism respectively.
13 Frank Boardman, “Back in Style,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73.4 (2015): 441–448.
14 Whether Boardman is correct in his claim that gaining the second-order property of being
stylistic is in fact a metaphysical event depends ultimately on how a property gains the sec-
ond-order property of being stylistic. And this is something that Boardman recognizes as an
important question, but one that he does not need to address, as he acknowledges in his foot-
note (3): “I have not said what else is required to provide a sufficient condition for a property
to be stylistic. This is an important question to be sure, though we do not need to answer it
here to get out the present account.” (Boardman 2015, 448).
15 Or, as Boardman would say, discovering that a particular property has gained the second-
order property of being stylistic.
16 For a full defense of the metaphysical account of properties, which underwrites this way of
interpreting the style matrix, see my “Towards a Metaphysical Historicism.” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism Spring 63(2): 165–73.
References
Bacharach, Sondra. 2005. “Towards a Metaphysical Historicism.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism Spring 63(2): 165–73.
Boardman, Frank. 2015. “Back in Style.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73(4): 441–448.
Carroll, Noël. 1995. “Danto, Style and Intention.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53(3):
251–7.
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy 61(19): 571–84.
–––––. 1981. Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
–––––. 1992. Beyond the Brillo Box. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
–––––. 1997. After the End of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Levinson, Jerrold. 1990. Music, Art and Metaphysics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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29
Disenfranchisement
JANE FORSEY
In 1984, Arthur C. Danto wrote two essays, both with enormously provocative themes.
One, “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,” chronicles aggressive strategies
of philosophy to contain and control art, and calls for art’s re-enfranchisement. The
second, “The End of Art,” offers a Hegelian model of art history in which art necessarily
comes to an end with its own philosophical self-consciousness. Both essays appeared in
a volume of Danto’s essays in 1986, entitled The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.
“The End of Art” caused an explosion of almost unanimously negative response in sym-
posia, conferences, papers, and books by a veritable “who’s who” of the philosophy of
art. “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art” caused little more than a ripple.
A retrospective look at these works engenders a certain amount of bewilderment.
First, it is odd that the critical response by the philosophical community focused only on
“The End of Art.” “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art” – with its provoca-
tion to defend the discipline of philosophy – should have been an equal candidate for
making noise in academic circles. More puzzling, though, is that these two essays have
not been considered together. That they are seemingly contradictory is interesting
enough: art as oppressed by philosophy in one, and in the other, art looking into a
mirror and seeing philosophy as its own reflection. For all their seeming disparity,
though, it appears that Danto intended them to be taken together. In his introduction to
the volume in which they appear, Danto states that these essays “form a natural narra-
tive order, almost as though they were chapters in a single book with an overarching
theme.” This theme, the relation between art, philosophy, and historical consciousness,
begins with disenfranchisement but ends with liberation. “The End of Art,” claims
Danto, is an effort to re-enfranchise art through its separation from philosophy. This divi-
sion, he asserts, will lead to freedom for both.
Thus, the one essay cannot be properly assessed without the other. Yet while the
thesis and argument of “The End of Art” has been criticized on the grounds that art has
not in fact ended, a more important question regarding the project as a whole has not
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been asked: does “The End of Art” succeed in its liberational goal and put a stop to the
disenfranchising strategies found in the history of philosophy? Alas, no. I will argue that
“The End of Art” is an astonishing confirmation of Danto’s thesis in “The Philosophical
Disenfranchisement of Art.” Whatever else he set out to do, “The End of Art” amounts
to the most comprehensive disenfranchising strategy ever launched against art. I’ll
begin by laying out the general thrust of both essays to demonstrate their narrative con-
tinuity before considering them together in light of my broader claim.
“The history of art is the history of the suppression of art,” states Danto in “The
Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.” It is a “massive collaborative effort” to neu-
tralize art, to render it impotent to effect change in the world. Underlying this suppres-
sive effort is some sense that art is potentially dangerous; to insist that art “can make
nothing happen” is to fear that it can. This is a grave charge to make against philos-
ophy. It suggests that art may have potential power to move the human spirit but that
this power has been systematically stripped away. In fact, Danto notes that we cannot
know what art can or cannot do, because it and philosophy have become so intricately
linked that art is in part “constituted by what it is philosophically believed to be.” What
is required, he claims, in order to properly assess the potential of art – in order to learn
what it is – is that we must first “archeologiz[e] these disenfranchising theories” in
order to discover their political subtext. This is the task of the essay (Danto 1986, 4–5).
The history of oppression springs from Plato’s theory of art and consists of two dis-
tinct lines to what Danto calls the “Platonic attack.” The first, “ephemeralization,”
strives to separate art from life or reality by making an ontological distinction between
the two: if art is not part of life, it cannot affect us in any real way. Plato’s conception of
art as imitation twice removed from the reality of the Forms is echoed for Danto by
Kant, for whom our attitude toward art must be disinterested. This Danto contrasts
with “having an interest” or with the “human order” itself, since “to be human is very
largely to have interests.” Art is thus “a kind of ontological vacation place from our
defining concerns as human.” Our responses to art differ from our responses to the real
world: set off from all cognitive, practical, and moral pursuits, art is separate from life,
ephemeral. On the Kantian view, art is “purposiveness without any specific purpose”: it
may look as though it has use, but it does not; compared to other human purposes and
concerns, art indeed “can make nothing happen” (7–10).
The ontological marginalization of art continues to the present day in the philosophy
of art, and Danto provides examples, among them the works of Santayana, Bullough
(with his theory of aesthetic distance), Stolnitz (with his disinterested attention), and
George Dickie (with his institutional theory of art whereby an object’s status as art is con-
ferred on it and contained by the institutions of an artworld.) Many of the theories that
Danto slots into this line of art’s suppression attempt to define art in essentialist terms,
rendering it a special category of objects or activities that can be distinguished from “real”
life. This enterprise serves to put “art in a box,” as one respondent to this thesis has noted
(Shusterman 1993, 164). Plato’s definition of art as mere appearance, then, is less a
theory of art than it is a strategy for showing art to be metaphysically defective. And it is
this political motivation that, for Danto, lies behind all ephemeralizing strategies.
The second line of the attack on art – the “takeover” – is an attempt to substitute phi-
losophy for art by allowing art “a degree of validity,” suggesting it is a primitive form of
philosophy, doing what philosophy does, albeit “uncouthly.” This, for Danto, is the
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political subtext of the Hegelian system. In the internal logic of Hegel’s dialectic,
Consciousness (or Geist) moves through necessary “moments” or stages in its development
toward Absolute knowledge, the final three of these being art, religion, and philosophy,
respectively. All three reveal the Absolute or express the same “content” but in different
“forms”: art in sensory form; religion in pictorial imagery; and philosophy in the form of
conceptual thought. Art is thus an ultimately inadequate or primitive stage of Geist. As
Geist approaches the Absolute, the need for sensory expression drops away, to be replaced
by the purity of conceptual thought. Danto interprets this to imply that it is the “histor-
ical mission of art to make philosophy possible,” after which art no longer has any role to
play. “Art cannot speak philosophy,” although the converse is possible, indeed necessary;
its “mission” ends by its revealing “the philosophical essence at its heart.” Thus art, if it
is not already an inadequate form of philosophy, becomes philosophy: its “fulfillment and
fruition,” on Danto’s reading of Hegel, “is the philosophy of art” (Danto 1986, 7–16).
The attempt to supersede art does not play out in the philosophy of art in the same
way as does the ephemeralizing tactic: it is not a matter of essentialist theories being
imposed by philosophy onto art. Rather, Danto traces the “takeover” of art from within
the artworld itself, suggesting that art is somehow complicit in its own oppression. The
history of art can be read as the gradual transformation of art into philosophy, com-
pleted when art poses the philosophical question of its own nature. And this history is
the point at which Danto’s second essay takes over from the first.
“The End of Art” has three overlapping aims. First, it offers a certain model of art
history characterized by the same Hegelian theme that, while noting that it is one form
of the disenfranchisement of art, Danto supports as the most plausible model available
that will account for the breadth and change of artistic practices over time. Second, the
essay shows how this history of art made possible and necessary the philosophy of art
and operates as a defense of the discipline, in particular of Danto’s own theory of art.
Third, this essay somewhat ambiguously attempts to liberate art from philosophy’s dis-
enfranchising attacks. Danto would develop this program more clearly in later writings,
though it is nevertheless apparent in the original.
Art has a history, and this history is for Danto developmental or progressive. As with
eschatological models of time, a linear history of art implies that it might come to an
end, as indeed Danto believes it has done. The art history he traces begins with art as
imitation, in both theory and practice. Art, in this narrative, moved toward ever more
realistic semblances of things until the advent of cinema, which effectively took over this
task. Robbed of the purpose it once had, Danto claims that art in the twentieth century
can be characterized by its inward turn, becoming reflexive as it sought new direction
and meaning. The proliferation of new art movements, fauvism, cubism, surrealism,
Dadaism, abstract expressionism, and pop art, among others, raised the philosophical
question “What is art?” to which each offered itself as a possible final answer.
Each artistic movement generated a theory of art as it explored art’s nature in greater
and greater depth. Successive schools depended “more and more upon theory for [their]
existence as art” until “virtually all there is at the end is theory.” The end of the history
of art is art’s becoming philosophy at the moment that it is “vaporized in a dazzle of
pure thought about itself,” and sensory form becomes unnecessary (111). This moment
of transformation apparently occurred in 1964 with Andy Warhol’s exhibition of Brillo
Box, which asked not simply “What is art?” but “Why is something a work of art when
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Disenfranchisement
something exactly like it is not?” For Danto, Brillo Box finally posed the question of art’s
nature in its proper philosophical form; for him the philosophical problem par excellence
is the problem of explaining how two indiscernible items could be ontologically distinct.
The task of answering this question is the proper task of the philosophy of art, because
it alone “is equipped to cope with its own nature directly and definitively” (16; cf. 111).
In this adaptation of Hegel’s system, the philosophy of art is both a natural outcome of
the history of art and the only possible medium in which to explore art’s essence. For
Danto, the “importance of art then lies in the fact that it makes philosophy of art pos-
sible and important… . [T]he historical stage of art is done with when it is known what
art is and means.” Art can set up the philosophical problem, make “the way open for
philosophy” (111), but it cannot answer the question it raises.
Handing over the task of its definition to philosophy liberates art. While art may
have ended, the practices of painting, sculpting, and so on will not stop: they will simply
cease to move toward any totalizing goal for art as a whole. We have arrived, in the pre-
sent day, at a “post-historical” era of art-making when our artistic activities no longer
have any historical significance. In this age of artistic pluralism, one direction is as good
as another, because “there is no concept of direction any longer to apply” (115). In
transferring the weight of self-definition to philosophy, art is for Danto “liberated from
history” and enters an “era of freedom.” What happens next, he does not know, sug-
gesting confusion, a return to simplicity and entertainment, or a return to art’s serving
human needs as “an enhancement of human life” (113). But these future directions
only become possible through art’s participation in its own disenfranchising history up
until the moment of its release.
To understand the two essays in terms of a single and broader emancipatory project is to
recognize more fully the subtlety and sophistication of Danto’s work. His argument in “The
End of Art” is a continuation of the thesis of “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of
Art.” Using Hegelian ideas of historical necessity, Danto imagines that he is re-enfranchising
art when he claims it has ended: the completion of its historical mission is the only way it
can be freed from oppression from within and from without, by philosophy. Danto works to
convince us that this has occurred. Once Danto’s goals are clearer, his work can be properly
assessed in light of them. The question of whether “The End of Art” has been successful no
longer means only “Is art really over?” but “Is its end really its liberation?” And it is not.
Ironically, perhaps, the disenfranchising effect of “The End of Art” occurs along both
lines of the “Platonic attack” as Danto had characterized them. The ephemeralizing
strategy, which sought an ontological distinction between art and life, can initially be
seen to operate in Danto’s philosophy of art. Danto elsewhere states, “My aim has been
essentialist – to find a definition of art everywhere and always true” (1998, 130). This
essentialist theory begins with the problem of indiscernibles and isolates two necessary
conditions for a definition of art. First, unlike real things, artworks possess “aboutness”
or “affirm some thesis,” on which basis interpretation proceeds. Real things, by contrast,
are not about anything at all and do not require interpretation to be intelligible. Second,
an artwork “embodies” what it is about, its meaning, in its sensory presentation. The
model of art history Danto sketches is intended to support his theory against counterex-
amples (a major problem for essentialist theories): once the question of art’s nature is
framed in terms of indiscernibles, and thus once art ends, no further theoretical break-
throughs can come from the artworld, and it finally becomes possible to pronounce an
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essentialist theory – Danto’s own – that can cover the full extension of the concept of
art, all art that has been and will be made.
To frame a theory of art in terms of the problem of indiscernibles, however, is imme-
diately to ephemeralize art: Danto seeks the conditions by which artworks are not “mere
real things,” and these conditions ensure that our response to art (interpretation) differs
from our response to the rest of the world, just as Kant’s notion of disinterest or
Bullough’s theory of aesthetic distance had apparently done before. “The End of Art”
further ephemeralizes art in its interpretation of Hegel’s system. For Hegel, the telos of
Consciousness is cognitive, leading toward Absolute knowledge, and for Danto the his-
tory of art likewise has a cognitive goal. However, while for Hegel art is a stage in the
internal development of Consciousness, Danto refers only to the stages of art’s progress,
as though this history were a separate trajectory from the history of other human prac-
tices, its progressive path affecting us and being affected by us only incidentally. This
implies that art can presumably reach self-consciousness ahead of, or without, the larger
culture also reaching this goal. At the end of The Phenomenology of Spirit, Absolute
knowledge is Geist knowing itself as Geist; it is a philosophy of Mind that is nothing other
than complete self-knowledge, which contains within it all prior dialectical moments,
including religion, art, and social history in general. But for Danto, the philosophy at the
end of history is specifically his philosophy of art. While he adopts Hegel’s narrative
model of the Bildungsroman, Danto moves art from its place as a stage through which
Geist passes in the process of self-disclosure to center stage: art becomes the protagonist
of the story and the subject of a separate history. The end of this story is not, however, a
Hegelian reconciliation of Mind with itself in full encompassing self-consciousness; nor
is it a quasi-Hegelian self-consciousness of art in Absolute knowledge of its own nature.
Danto’s end of the story includes a substitution of heroes: art makes way for the philos-
ophy of art, as philosophy alone can divine the nature of art and bring it to fruition.
There is thus a twofold ephemeralizing strategy at work in “The End of Art”: art things
are not real things according to Danto’s theory (although indiscernible from them), and
art history is an internal dialectic that unfolds at best alongside our other human con-
cerns, but certainly according to a logic of its own. In both cases, the product is, as Danto
asserts in the first essay, “an ontology in which reality is logically immunized against art”
(7). Art is separate from life – different in kind from mere real things, with a history of its
own, and is thereby effectively neutralized. If art is “liberated” in this scheme, it is liberated
only through its successful marginalization: finally and fully shown to be ontologically
distinct from the sphere of life, art sheds the burden of self-understanding and can now go
on its own way; artists can create as they wish, in the rarefied air of an ephemeral realm.
Turning to the second line of the Platonic attack, it is Danto’s characterization of both
art and philosophy that in the end allows the latter to take over the former. Danto needs to
make (or “force,” in his terms) a clear distinction between the two disciplines in order to
support his art history, to defend the need for a philosophy of art, and to bring forth his lib-
eratory message. One of the things Danto takes from Hegel is a sense of art’s ineffectiveness
and failure. While art had always had “a set of problems,” it was after the advent of cinema
that it became a “problem for itself.” But art as art cannot solve this final problem – it cannot
arrive at knowledge of its own essence. Posing the question of what art is is as far as it can
go. It fails in the task of answering the question, and this failure, rather than the fulfillment
of its historical mission, is the reason it hands itself over to philosophy (111).
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But consider this notion of failure in a little more detail. The ineffectiveness of art lies
for Danto in the fact that it is a nonverbal or non-discursive activity (“painting [as the
avant-garde art that reveals the condition of all art] remains nonverbal activity, even if
more and more verbality began to be incorporated into works of art” (Danto 1987,
216)), and this inability to verbalize has limited it. Philosophy, by contrast, is discursive
and alone operates on the “level of abstract self-consciousness” required for the task of
definition. This echoes Hegel’s characterization of philosophy as pure conceptual
thought. Art “can make nothing happen” because here it lacks the tools to do so.
However, in spite of this liability, up to the moment of its astounding failure, Danto
grants that art has accomplished much: it has not only nonverbally raised the question
of its nature, but nonverbally has raised it in “proper philosophical form,” that of indis-
cernibles. As Michael Kelly has noted, Danto is actually suggesting, oddly, that art is
“incapable of answering a question it is capable of asking” (Kelly 1998, 39). Moreover,
Danto does not explain his certainty that Brillo Box was, indeed, asking a question at
all. The reflexive stage of art until 1964 was characterized by Danto as a number of
movements, each of which was a projected definition of art that offered itself as a pos-
sible final answer. Art prior to Warhol, as it became dependent more and more upon
theory, had been engaged in more than raising questions: by Danto’s own admission, it
had been speculating, hypothesizing, conjecturing, and theorizing. And all of these
activities, including questioning itself, are activities in the purview of philosophy as well
as, it would seem, art. Brillo Box, then, like its earlier counterparts, could have been
questioning its own nature, but it could also have been conjecturing or exploring or
proffering a theory of its nature as well. And this blurs the line between the two disci-
plines that the idea of verbal ability does nothing to clear up.
Danto’s claim cannot be that art does not treat philosophical issues, although this
would be the easiest way to force a juncture between the two. But nor can his claim be
that art does not treat philosophical issues effectively enough. On his own terms, art has
had an important role to play in its own final definition, for although philosophy can
answer the question of art’s essence, it was incapable of asking it. That is, the question
of art’s identity is only properly posed once an art object exists that is indistinguishable
from an ordinary object (“the Brillo Box asked in effect, why it was art when something
just like it was not” (Danto 1987, 216)). This requires artists to produce works that are
indistinguishable in this way. Only once these objects exist can philosophy see that they
are indeed art and then ask why they are art. Thus, through Warhol, art made a crucial
contribution to its cognitive goal, without which philosophy could not have taken over
the task. If this is the case, however, Danto faces a dilemma: if art is ineffective or fails
philosophically, then Brillo Box is deprived of the momentous force he claims it had. But
if art can treat philosophical issues, and do so in proper form, Danto no longer has
grounds to support the superiority of, and need for, a philosophy of art.
The takeover of art by philosophy is neither necessary nor historically inevitable in
the way Danto needs it to be, because art has much greater philosophical effectiveness
than he wishes to acknowledge. One critic has observed that the import Danto ascribes
to Brillo Box indicates that “from the possibility of a work of visual art being philosophy,
we can gather that philosophy itself is not restricted to language” (Hilmer 1998, 85).
Indeed, Danto’s first condition of a thing’s being art, that of its “aboutness,” holds the
kernel of this idea. For if artworks are about something, then they are not just different
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JANE FORSEY
sorts of things, but different sorts of signs. They are, as Martin Seel has suggested, “say-
ings about and showings of the world” that do not have meaning in the way linguistic
signs do, as they embody their meanings in a way that is singular and perhaps untrans-
latable. And if this condition is part of what constitutes a work of art, then one point of
art is that it offers what Seel calls “unique appearances in the world which in turn
display unique interpretations of the world” (Seel 1998, 113, 103). Danto’s adoption of
Hegel’s conception of philosophy is, in effect, a privileging of the rational, discursive,
and conceptual elements of the philosophical enterprise. But philosophical activity can
be, indeed arguably is, carried on in alternative forms.
Danto’s characterization of philosophy includes an assumption that only these ele-
ments form the appropriate methodology for the task of self-understanding. Whether
that is true, the point becomes moot, because we have seen that Danto has changed the
story from one of self-understanding (of art, as of philosophy once it takes over from art)
to an understanding and definition of the other. Philosophy defines art, and this task of
definition, as Danto has asserted of essentialist theories, is nothing more than putting
“art in a box” to contain and control it. The “takeover” by philosophy, if not the natural
outcome of art’s development, must be reattributed to the political motivation Danto had
suggested in the beginning and had sought to overcome. And the consequence of this is a
failure of Danto’s project. For if there is liberation here, it is through not only the ephem-
eralization of art but also the stripping away of its identity and potential cognitive power.
A proper re-enfranchisement of art will require the reattribution to it of some of its
power. It may not be that art is “dangerous” but that art is useful. If art has the cognitive
function both Hegel and Danto ascribe to it, philosophy must move from its historical
project of defining – and pigeon-holing – art to a broader one of attempting to “read” –
and learn from – the meaning it embodies. This will lead to a better understanding of
art, and perhaps of philosophy as well, if the two disciplines are as intricately linked as
Danto contends they are. We do not need the complex project Danto undertakes in order
to “return” art to the service of human needs and practices; we have only to acknowl-
edge that this may have been its role all along. And with this acknowledgement, we may
find that these disenfranchising strategies have not only alienated art, but philosophy
itself, from a more central role that it can play in human self-understanding.
References
Danto, Arthur C. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia
University Press.
———. 1987. “Approaching the End of Art.” In State of the Art, 202–20. New York: Prentice
Hall.
———. 1998. “The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense.” History and Theory 37: 127–43.
Hilmer, Brigitte. 1998. “Being Hegelian After Danto.” History and Theory 37: 71–86.
Theory 37: 30–43.
Seel, Martin. 1998. “Art as Appearance: Two Comments on Arthur C. Danto’s after the End of
Art.” History and Theory 37: 102–14.
Shusterman, Richard. 1993. “Art in a Box.” In Danto and His Critics, edited by Mark Rollins, 30–43.
Oxford: Blackwell.
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30
Definition
KARLHEINZ LÜDEKING
Friday, September 27, 1985

“Definition doesn’t seem to be your foremost concern.” It might seem a bit impertinent
to confront Arthur Danto with this conjecture, given that we had met only half an hour
ago for the very first time. We had an appointment at the university, but then a hurri-
cane named “Gloria” began to paralyze the city of New York. At my hotel, they passed
me a note saying: “Columbia is closed. Meet me at 420 Riverside Drive!” So I took a cab,
and after a fast ride through empty avenues with shuttered shop fronts, we reached the
given address. I took the entrance from 114th Street, and the doorman gestured me up
to apartment 1c. So, there he was, Arthur Danto, the famous philosopher, with his wife,
Barbara Westman, who cheerfully seized the opportunity to give me a vivid report about
the drawing lessons she once took in Munich. Now we are discussing the problem of
defining art.
“Well, you have a certain point,” Danto explains. “In my book – (his masterpiece, The
Transfiguration of the Commonplace, which, at that time, was just four years young) – I
worked toward a definition, but I did not explicitly state it.”
“My suspicion is that you deliberately avoid – or unconsciously refrain from – pro-
claiming a clear-cut definition because defining art is such a delicate issue. We must,
after all, face the fact that no definition of art has ever been received with unanimous
assent and general acceptance.”

“Ah, it seems as though a Wittgensteinian dissident has sneaked up to our peaceful
residence. Are you ready to confess?”
“Yes,” I answer bravely, well aware that Danto disapproved of the theories of Weitz
and Kennick, who had both taken their clues from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations in their attempts to show that the concept of art could be used without
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KARLHEINZ LÜDEKING
fixed criteria. “These theories,” I quickly assure Danto, “as you have conclusively dem-
onstrated, are completely unconvincing, of course.”
“On the one hand, you are skeptical of definitions but, on the other hand, you think
that the main alternatives have done no better. What would then be the next step?”
“First of all, it would be necessary to admit that all distinctions between artworks
and other things are ultimately based on value judgments.”
“Is that so? An artwork is always identified as such in relation to a certain theory and
a particular context. I emphasized this in my very first paper on the philosophy of art,
published more than twenty years ago. Still, I don’t see why value judgments should
necessarily be involved.”
“Otherwise it is hard to explain why the criteria for calling something a work of art
are so relentlessly disputed.”
“But look, we must distinguish two aspects. There is, admittedly, a permanent dispute
about the merits of singular works, but that does not mean that there is also dissent
concerning the question whether the objects of dispute are works of art or not. Usually
people disagree about specific qualities only because they agree that they are dealing
with a work of art.”
“Evaluation is not totally independent from classification. If you imagine moving
down a scale of quality so that the works are getting worse and worse, you will reach a
point where you would no longer call them works of art at all.”
“Well,” Arthur concludes, “we have to keep thinking thoroughly about these mat-
ters, that’s for sure.” Obviously, it is time to leave, and having said goodbye I get the
feeling that this conversation might have been the beginning of a wonderful friendship.
The hurricane, meanwhile, had moved on and dissolved.
Wednesday, October 23, 1991

The tape recorder is switched off at about eight p.m., and now it preserves a treasure: a
long interview with Danto. It is going to be broadcast by the Bavarian radio station in
Munich and will later also be published in print.
During our exchange we, naturally, also touched upon the problem of defining art,
and Danto declared that he would go for the most traditional kind of definition with
genus proximum and differentia specifica. Accordingly, he named two conditions for being
an artwork, both necessary and, hopefully, jointly sufficient: First of all, an artwork
must have some meaning, it must “say” something, be “about” something, represent,
exemplify or denote something. Since this would be too inclusive, a second requirement
is needed that demands that an artwork must not only have but also “embody” its
meaning; it must draw attention to the way in which it says what it says.
Danto’s definition may, then, be summarized like this: “An artwork is an object that
has something to say and at the same time reveals how it says it.” Expressed like this, the
sentence contains information about things we already know to be artworks. Now, only
minimal modifications are needed to obtain a grammatical equivalent sentence that
reads as follows: “Something is an artwork if it has something to say and at the same
time reveals how it says it.” This version has a slightly different ring. It does not presup-
pose that we are already able to distinguish artworks from other things. It rather tells us
how to classify them as such.
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Definition
“You surely prefer the first version, the type that usually goes by the name of a ‘real’
definition?” I query, and Arthur nods. “Well, for me the second, the so-called ‘nominal’
or ‘conceptual’ definition is much more interesting,”
“Is this really an important distinction?” Danto thinks aloud. “We have the same
features singled out in both cases, and now we are free to use our knowledge of these
features for whatever purpose we want.”
“But the features used for recognizing works of art are not necessarily the same as
those thought to be the most essential.”
“I am surprised that you emphasize that. It is exactly what I would say. The essence
of art cannot be reduced to the lowest common denominator. And recognizing art-
works is of no interest in itself. You have to pick out a work, sure, but then you have to
understand it.”
“So, your definition of art as ‘embodied meaning’ has to be taken as a statement of
essential properties, because, if you will pardon my saying so, as a means of recognizing
artworks it will, anyhow, be completely ineffective.”
“It has never been my aim to develop a hundred percent reliable test that will detect
each and every artwork of this world. I rather ask what such things have to offer.”
“But exactly this question must already be answered in order to decide whether
something is a work of art in the first place. Distinguishing artworks from other things
is not as simple as telling larks apart from nightingales. In order to justify the claim that
something is an artwork you must specify its merits, and for this purpose it does not suf-
fice to say that it embodies some meaning or other. This, as you yourself declare, can be
said of every work of art whatsoever. Therefore, it doesn’t prove anything. What counts,
instead, are concrete qualities of individual works. Therefore, a general definition is of
no use.”
“To my mind it is precisely the other way round. You can only give a concrete inter-
pretation if you already know whether the object at hand really is a work of art or not.
You even have to know when and where it was created.”
“In any case, a formula like ‘art is embodied meaning’ neither helps to identify
artworks nor does it help to discover their specific peculiarities.” At this point, I reach
for the reworked version of my dissertation that has meanwhile been published. Its last
page concludes by claiming that neither traditional nor analytic theories of art have
convincingly explained the role that the concept of art actually plays in our language.
Then, the text ends with a quote from paragraph 182 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations: “This role is what we need to understand in order to resolve philosophical
paradoxes. And hence definitions usually fail to resolve them; and so, a fortiori does the
assertion that a word is ‘indefinable.’”
“Okay,” Danto continues, “let us, for the moment, take for granted what you say.
Defining art or not defining art: that is not the question. One is just as useless the other.
Then we have a right to be shown a way out of this dilemma. And simply quoting
Wittgenstein does not suffice. You have to tell us what the ‘role’ of the concept of art
actually consists in.”
“That is not so easy. If it is correct that the concept of art is used on the basis of value
judgments, then we have to cope with the problem that there will be a huge variety of
judgments differing widely from one person to the other and from one occasion to the
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KARLHEINZ LÜDEKING
next. There will be a chaos of countless judgments, most of them incompatible and
even contradictory. Furthermore, none of those judgments will have truth-value. It will
not even be possible to differentiate degrees of credibility. This means that we are in a
situation where philosophy can no longer tell us what to do.”
“This is precisely why I cannot sympathize with your view.”
Wednesday, August 2, 1995

It is almost midnight in Lahti, sixty miles north of Helsinki, and the sun will soon reap-
pear in the sky. We are on a nocturnal boat trip organized as a side-event of the XIII.
Congress of the International Association for Aesthetics. Our ship is gliding silently on the
mirror-smooth surface of the water. From time to time a man plays a tango on his
accordion.
“What’s your take on definition, meanwhile?” Danto teases me, alluding to our old
disputes.
“There is nothing really new,” I report. “Only one thing has recently become clearer,
namely that judgments about value can nevertheless lead to simple facts. Even though
an object can only be transfigured into an artwork due to some positive evaluation, it
will, having once received such an evaluation, be a mere matter of fact that it actually
is an artwork now. From this point of view, the task of recognizing artworks is a purely
empirical affair. It is a consequence of the fact that the normative distinction between
art and non-art has already taken place.”
“It was high time for you to realize this,” Danto comments, “because now you can
admit that any serious philosophy of art must be based on the acceptance of the fact
that there is a certain class of objects actually treated as artworks. If philosophy did not
take it for granted that such a class of things exists and that it is composed of the things
it actually contains, it would lose its credibility right from the start. A philosopher may
not be happy with everything he meets within the noble precincts of art; nevertheless it
would be fatally wrong to start by propagating one’s own private predilections.”
“I agree. It’s not the business of philosophy to include or exclude members of the
class of artworks. And a definition, for that matter, will only be convincing if it covers
all – and only – things commonly accepted as artworks. But this principle has a severe
disadvantage, as well. If the range of objects that philosophy can take into account
depends on the factual classification at a given time and place, a definition of art, as
Adorno observed, can only be an ‘extract of the accustomed,’ a formula affirming the
predominance of the past over the future.”
“Wasted words. You always judge on the basis of what you have learned in the past.”
“But the past might force you to turn against it and look for something new. In this
respect, Morris Weitz had a good intuition. The basic problem of contemporary art phi-
losophy is really that of dealing with new works that would never have been considered
artworks before.”
“Even the most unexpected work, I’m afraid, must still have some relation to the
things we have hitherto called art.”
The man with the accordion sings Kuumat Tuulet, a very sad song about the hot
winds of love that all too soon cool down and die.
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Definition
Friday, April 18, 1997
Barbara Westman and Arthur Danto, courtesy of Barbara Westman
The University of Bielefeld sustains a prestigious institute called Center for Interdisciplinary
Research. In the vicinity, we had visited my hometown, my birthplace and a nearby spa,
.
driving around in my old spacious Mercedes Benz, and now Arthur and Barbara have
settled in apartment # 5, where we relax and wait for the twenty scholars that have
been invited to discuss Danto’s Mellon Lectures recently published as a well-designed
book with the title After the End of Art.
“It might seem paradoxical,” Danto muses, “that I am now so deeply engaged in the
history of art in spite of the fact that I stubbornly cling to my essentialist notion of art
philosophy.”
“The paradox,” I dare to throw in, “gets comfortably dissolved, however, by adopting
Hegel’s thesis of the end of art. If art has come to an end, if it does not develop any
more, if it stays as it is, there is nothing that could prevent you from ascribing an essence
to it. The essence of art is displayed in its present – and final – state. You turned to his-
tory only to eliminate it.”
“Wait a minute, the insight that art has come to an end is not a mere invention to secure
theoretical consistency. There is a real standstill. You can observe it everywhere in reality.”
“True or not, it does, in any case, suit your views very well. You can, for instance,
neglect the problem of new works, because there will be no new works. And nothing
can challenge your definition of art as “embodied meaning” so long as art will remain
what it is now and how it is now.”
“You envisage a rather gloomy scenario, but the uniformity you seem to fear will not
ensue because openness and tolerance prevail. We live in a post-historical paradise of
cheerful multiplicity, diversity and plurality. There are no serious constraints. Everything
is possible, nothing is excluded. What else can you ask for?”
“I could, for instance, sympathize with Hegel’s idea that art in its highest vocation
allows mankind to understand itself, even if, as Hegel himself had sensed, it might no
longer be possible to accomplish this. In your view, by contrast, art must be attested to
have actually entered the phase of its highest vocation already for the last thirty years,
since 1964, to be precise, although its most noble mission does not really seem to consist
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KARLHEINZ LÜDEKING
in enhancing our – or its own – consciousness and understanding. This, however, was
exactly your own view originally derived from your encounter with Warhol’s Brillo Box.”
“Absolutely. My initial observation was that the Brillo Box was posing exactly the same
question it was forcing me to ask as well: ‘How is it possible that this can be a work of art?’
And the answer was that it was a work of art just by posing that very question. At that
moment it seemed as though art was for the first time seriously aiming at
self-consciousness.”
“Thereby it would, however, have become a rival for philosophy. But subsequently
art was not able to answer the question and eventually stopped asking it. The threat for
philosophy disappeared. And hence you also re-adjusted your interpretation of the
Brillo Box. Now it no longer asks a question about its own precarious status as a
would-be work of art. It turns into an assertion about aspects of reality in general: the
American Way of Life or, more specifically, Andy’s childhood in Pittsburgh. It has
become a work like all the others and therefore its meaning can perfectly well be
exposed by using the methods of iconological interpretation as they were established
by Erwin Panofsky.”
The magic of the Brillo Box is unexpectedly revitalized the next day by Boris Groys
who, in a stunning impromptu, shows that its mystery resembles that of Jesus Christ.
Just as it is impossible (at least for Danto) to distinguish Brillo Box from ordinary card-
board packages, it is also impossible to perceive a difference between Jesus and other
men of his age. When his disciples, in spite of that, consider him to be the Son of God,
they can only do this out of blind faith. And is it not the same with art? Either you
believe in it, or you don’t.
Monday, May 13, 2002

An enormous crowd has gathered in a building at the corner of 57th Street and Fifth
Avenue in order to attend an auction of Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg. Fourteen ready-
mades, a complete set of remakes manufactured in 1964 for Arturo Schwarz under the
supervision of Duchamp himself, are offered piece by piece. The catalogue contains an
essay of exactly 2.000 words written by Arthur Danto. Commercially, the sale is a
disaster. None of the lots fetches more than its estimated maximum price, most of them
hardly reach half of the minimum, and some objects are not sold at all.
Later, we have a drink at the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel (still in existence at that
time). “I would have bid on lot number five,” I say, “the comb, the only readymade of
which the original still exists. It is also the one that had to wait the longest time for its
first exhibition, forty-seven years. According to the most recent research, it might not
even be a readymade at all, an object, that is to say, you could have come across and
bought in a shop in 1916. It rather seems to be a meticulously fabricated object dis-
guised as a simple commodity. If this were true, then Duchamp’s Comb and Warhol’s
Brillo Box would be much more similar than we had thought before. Both would then
be objects created with a lot of effort in order to make them look like ordinary things.”
“Isn’t that fascinating?” Voiced by Danto, this usually means that he is getting bored
with a topic. So I contrive a fictitious example, as he has so often done himself.
“What would you say if I were to go to a locksmith tomorrow to commission my own
new variation of the comb, also made of metal, same size, same number of teeth, but
with a new inscription?”
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Definition
“I would write about it in my column in the The Nation and forcefully promote it.”
(Arthur refers to the prestigious weekly magazine that, in 1984, invited him to be its
official art critic, a position once also held by Clement Greenberg.)
“That would certainly help to convert my comb into a work of art. I will also give it a
title. No Comb No. One. That sounds sufficiently ambitious. And for the inscription I ima-
gine: ‘Three or four drops of bodily fluids do not suffice to embody my meaning’ or something
like that.”
“Don’t make fun of my definition.”
“I would never dare. But seriously, in your review, you must, of course, reveal the
complex theoretical background of this brand new work and explain all of its sophisti-
cated allusions. No one will be convinced by the information that it has some meaning
and in addition even embodies this meaning. Even I myself would be disappointed if I
was told that my work has been positively assessed in the category of objects that suc-
cessfully embody their meaning.”
“Why, you should be proud if your comb falls into this category. It is, after all, the
category to which all the artworks of the world belong. But anyhow, you’d better stop
complaining about my definition. I admit that it does not ensure instant recognition
and that it cannot replace close inspection. But neither the one nor the other was ever
intended. My definition only draws attention to those aspects of a work of art that are
most important.”
“You have convinced me. I surrender. But if it goes on like this there will soon be no
more occasions for us to quarrel.”
Saturday, June 11, 2005

Arthur is in Berlin, but only for two days. So, first of all, we visit Charlottenburg Palace to
examine a famous painting and an equally famous advertising board, both created by
Antoine Watteau shortly before he died in 1721.
“It is hard to believe that this wonderful canvas was really meant to be a shop sign
and was, in this function, actually installed above Gersaint’s gallery – in fact no more
than a little booth – on the Pont Notre Dame. Fortunately it did not take long until it was
– just as Duchamp’s readymades – transferred from the world of useful things into the
sphere of art.”
“… which is one more proof that being an artwork it is not a matter of substance, but
of function.”
“And functions cannot be detected by eye-sight alone.”
“And functions cannot be used for defining art, not even the function of providing a
semantic content embodied in its material substratum.”
“And why not?”
“Because being an artwork is a status, not a function. Let’s take an example. You are
not only a philosopher but also a professor – no matter if you still teach or not. A philos-
opher you are simply because you are such a brilliant thinker, but that alone would not
yet make you a professor. A professor has to be selected by a regular procedure and
appointed with the authority of some institution. Therefore – if I may adopt your
method of indiscernibles – two persons might both have all the merits required to be a
professor although only one of them really is a professor whereas the other is not.
Having a certain status is not the same as fulfilling the requirements for attaining it.”
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KARLHEINZ LÜDEKING
“Evidently. And I admit that being an artwork is a status as well, but, as I always feel
obliged to add, a status that can only be achieved if there are good reasons to bestow it.”
“That means that in every single case specific merits have to be named, but not to
define the status, only as preconditions for gaining it.”
“And gaining this status is certainly worthwhile because it entails some invaluable
privileges. Contrary to other things, artworks will always be treated carefully and with
respect. It will not end up in a trash bin, but in clean showcases. An artwork is immor-
talized. It is, so to speak, admitted to the heaven of material objects. It may not always
have the same significance as Jesus Christ but compared to ordinary things artworks
can at least claim the dignity of angels.”
Saturday, January 14, 2012

Answering an electronic message from Arthur I make a proposal to settle our long-
standing dispute. “I feel that our different views are simply due to different interests. I
am perplexed by the problem of understanding how a given object can acquire the
status of a work of art (the problem of the art student.) You, by contrast, are interested
in the question of what is so special about those things that have already acquired the
status (the problem of the philosopher). So there is no real conflict here, because
whereas you aim at a theory about the things that have actually been accepted as works
of art, I focus on the procedures of admitting something as a member of this class in the
first place. Would you agree with this?”
Not really. “Thanks for the thought,” Arthur writes back the next day, and he
explains that “probably the two interests are co-dependent. Your interest is centered on
Duchamp, and the comb and its confreres. Is there a narrative of how the comb attained
the status of art? I should think one would need to say what it had in common with
other works of art: hence my problem.”
The “problem” that Arthur, sharp-mindedly as ever, identifies is not his problem,
however, but mine. The problem is to find out whether it might be misleading to sepa-
rate the two questions at stake: ‘What do all the members of the class of artworks have
in common?’ and ‘How is it possible to become a member of this class?’
Concerning the second question, one might be tempted to compare it to the question
of how to get into a fancy nightclub. There will be a doorman who has the power to
decide whether he will let you in or brush you off. His job resembles that of an art critic.
The critic acts at the boundaries of art, whereas the philosopher prefers to stay in the
hinterland where he calmly inspects the things that have managed to enter the pre-
cincts of art. The critic’s task, by contrast, is more risky. He is permanently under attack
because all sorts of objects – a comb called No Comb No. One, for example – insist on
their right to be admitted even though they never could have been admitted before. So
the critic, the doorman of the art world, must decide whether they should now be
admitted for the first time. If the new works are allowed to enter, their newly achieved
presence must, of course, also be taken into account by the philosopher who, in order to
cope with them, might even be forced to modify his generalizing statements. But he will,
nevertheless, stick to his aim of understanding.
The critic, by contrast, is chiefly engaged in decision-making. And his decisions
need not necessarily be guided by philosophy. That is very likely the reason why Danto,
for all his openness, was not really interested in the details of the dirty work that has
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Definition
to be done at the frontiers of art. Danto was such an inveterate philosopher that he
preferred not to delve into problems that cannot be solved by philosophy. Comparing
the class of artworks with a fancy nightclub safeguarded by doormen, however,
clearly points to other disciplines, sociology, for instance, maybe even cybernetics.
The distinction of artworks and other things, after all, need not necessarily be under-
stood as the result of the – primarily mental – process of applying the concept of art.
It might just as well be based on brute power. It might even be brought about as a
result of market mechanisms that evade not only cognition but also volition
altogether.
Friday, December 5, 2014

Lydia Goehr, who inherited Danto’s position after his retirement, gives an impressive
lecture about her predecessor. She sketches him as an uncompromising advocate of
democratic pluralism, in art as well as in politics. In both fields, Danto demanded that
absolutely nothing should a priori, or by definition, be excluded from consideration. Is
there anything in art that can safely be neglected? No, absolutely nothing. Before pro-
nouncing the words “absolutely nothing” Lydia pauses for a moment so that the
public is seduced to form these words in the mind before they are actually spoken. In
this way, the two words acquire the force of a refrain punctuating her celebration of
Danto’s open-mindedness.
A few days later, we are sipping red wine at Paris Bar, the traditional West-Berlin art-
ist’s hangout, and Lydia recalls the last days before Arthur died on October 25, 2013. I
had not been able to travel to New York for the funeral celebration. It was, I am told,
attended by a huge number of friends and colleagues and admirers.
“That doesn’t surprise me,” I say, “because Arthur really was such an amiable
person. And he was generous. He was so generous even to invite me, almost thirty years
ago, right into his home, a student from Germany he had never heard of before and who
had not even published his dissertation yet. He was always open to everything.”
“That gave him strength.”
“Yes, his optimism kept him going, as Barbara once said.”
“Even the end of art was, for him, nothing to worry about. It only meant that we are
liberated from all historical necessities and, therefore, free to do whatever we want.
Absolutely nothing was forbidden.”
“But this,” I object, “is a rather blurred view from the ivory tower. In principle it is
undoubtedly true that under the present conditions of the art-world absolutely nothing
is excluded right from the start. Everything whatsoever might become a work of art. But
not everything really does become a work of art. Danto did not want to see that so
clearly. He went to museums and well-established galleries, but he did not seek out
unknown talents in their shabby studios. Thus, he was not forced to observe how many
things actually are excluded. And when Arthur, in his sympathetic endeavor to make
sure that “absolutely nothing” is excluded, tries to keep his definition vague enough to
include everything whatsoever, that can only be a nice and well-meaning and utterly
impractical gesture.”
“But still, following Fichte, one might say that the definition of art that you have
reveals what kind of person you are.”
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Sunday, August 6, 2017

If Warhol had not died in 1986, it would have been his eighty-ninth birthday, today.
Eighty-nine was also Danto’s age when he died in 2013. And if we could still have asked
him today what art is, he would probably have replied that it is “embodied meaning.”
Warhol, however, might have answered the question in a completely different way.
“Art?” he might have said (as he really once did), “Art? Isn’t that a man’s name?” Yes it
is, and, amazingly, it is not so often noticed that Art was actually the shortening for
Danto’s first name.
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31
Danto and Dickie: Artworld and Institution
MICHALLE GAL
Time and again George Dickie quotes Arthur Danto’s proposition from his 1964 “The
Artworld” that “to see something as art requires something the eye cannot de[s]cry –
an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld” (Danto
1964, 580). The [s] is added by Dickie, changing the original “decry” to “descry,” thus
shifting the meaning to have a less refined gesture toward the inferiority of the eye in
the apparatus of aesthetic perception and classification.
To recall, the eye was the central tool of perception which contemporary modernist-
formalist art invited the beholder to use. In 1960 Clement Greenberg characterized
modernist painting as that which “can only be seen into; can be traveled through liter-
ally or figuratively, only with the eye” (Greenberg 1995, 90). The aimed-at-the-eye
painting being committed to spatial flat forms was considered the ultimate embodiment
of the essence of painting. Greenberg further deemed modernist painting paradigmatic
of all art that aspires to reach an irreducible uniqueness. Greenberg’s theory of art is
criticized by Danto in After the End of Art as insufficiently general to serve as a definition
of art: “what Greenberg had done was to identify a certain local style of abstraction
with the philosophical truth of art, when the philosophical truth, once found, would
have to be consistent with art appearing in every possible way” (Danto 1997, 14). This
critique of Greenberg and the subsequent imperative to invert the modernist method
comprise Danto’s and Dickie’s shared philosophical motivation. While modernist for-
malism identified the “philosophical truth of art” with aesthetic composition, Danto
and Dickie identified it with a non-visual essence, in virtue of which works that were
excluded by the modernists would be reclaimed as art.
When art started to appear in every possible way, according to Danto, the period of
modernist-formalist art reached a kind of conclusion. Indeed, Danto asserted that that
moment marked the end of art and the beginning of the philosophy of art (Danto 1981,
vii, among others). The latter assertion is debatable, given that pre-modernism and
modernism supplied fairly substantial and abstract definitions of art that could be used
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MICHALLE GAL
later on. Although, undeniably, at the end of modernism the philosophy of art took an
anti-modernist turn. Shortly after “The Artworld” was published, Dickie embraced
Danto’s strong proposition about the new openness of the category of “art.” The modi-
fied “decry” to “descry” in Danto’s assertion about the eye became the version that
ended up repeatedly cited by analytic aestheticians. Semantic nuances aside, Dickie
used Danto’s proposition as a premise for a wide-ranging definition of visual art that
would apply to the ever-changing artworld and its items. Interestingly, the capacious
scope of the extensions of the new definition of visual art is achieved by an “attack on
the senses.” Parallel to it emerged the aesthetic turn from the visual to the non-visual in
contemporary practices of art.
Danto preceded Dickie in this path, and it is from him that Dickie borrowed the con-
cept of the “artworld” for the non-visuality condition in the definition of art. Their
artworld-related accounts were developed into anti-formalist theories toward the end of
the modernist era and were actually part of its demise and that of an aesthetic wave
starting in the 1960s. But then, through different analyses of the concept of the “art-
world” – as an intellectual sphere by Danto versus an institutional one by Dickie – they
parted ways to pursue opposing ontologies of the artwork. One may claim that Danto
formulated an internalist/intentionalist ontology, developed around his concept of
embodiment, while Dickie presented an externalist one. The juxtaposition of the two
theories is illuminating given the depth of their shared philosophical motivation, which
is sometimes overlooked in the literature.
Danto characterized the modernist-formalist ontology of the artwork as “too mate-
rialist,” because it was “concerned … with shape, surface, pigment, and the like as
defining painting in its purity” (Danto 1997, 14). These material-visual features were
classified by the formalists under internal properties of the artwork. They left the non-
visual properties to be construed as external to the artwork – that is, irrelevant to the
arthood of the artifact. Both Danto and Dickie inverted the formalist distinction bet-
ween internal and external properties of the artwork. Both classified properties that the
modernist deemed external to the artwork as essential and material properties as
external or subjugated. Nonetheless, in Danto’s ontology, the artwork comprises a
myriad of properties. That is, the properties of the artwork, according to Danto, include
the conceptual, intentional mental content of the artist, saturated with the intellectual
Zeitgeist. The artwork is the embodied meaning or idea, rationally planned and exe-
cuted by the artist, and tasked to the interpreter to grasp. The mental properties are
internal, rendering the artwork in its entirety, including both non-visual and visual
properties, as an “intellectual product” (Danto 2004, 93). For Dickie, what essentially
constitutes an artwork are social practices. Unlike Danto, Dickie draws away from what
was traditionally deemed the ontological boundaries of the artwork and its medium
toward the institutional elements in its sphere. Yet Danto’s ontology of the artwork
itself is more versatile than Dickie’s. It explains how, by subjugating the material prop-
erties to the intellectual ones, the work is structurally ontologically transfigured to be
art. For Dickie, in an almost diametric opposition, a work is attributed the status of “art-
hood” by agents in its social sphere. Dickie seems to expand the ontological domain of
the artwork as wider than the one presented by Danto, advancing from what is usually
considered the artwork to its social apparatus and to a “multi-placed network of much
greater complexity than anything envisaged by the earlier theories,” as he puts it in The
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Art Circle (Dickie 1984, 6). But at the end of the day, unlike Danto’s, Dickie’s theory
leaves the structure of the artwork itself unanalyzed.
Dickie used Danto’s then-innovative identification and classification of works of art to
formulate a theory that refers to both nonexhibited and exhibited properties of the art-
work – the former referring to the intellectual or immaterial properties, the latter to
easily perceived properties. In Dickie’s 1969 “Defining Art,” he introduced the early ver-
sion of his institutional theory of art that comprises two necessary conditions which are
jointly sufficient to characterize an object as a work of art: an artwork is, first, an artifact,
which is, secondly, conferred by an artworld agent or institution a status of a candidate
for appreciation. Dickie’s first version of the institutional theory, fully presented in Art
and the Aesthetic (1974), is externalist through and through: both conditions for
something to belong to the group of artworks, artifactuality and status, are external to
the mind. This version was modified in The Art Circle (1984) and Art and Value (2001),
smoothing the externalist edges to a relatively more intentionalist definition by adding
the condition that an intention for the artifact should be appropriately related to the art
social circle. The combination of intentionalist elements with public ones characterizes
Danto’s theory of art as well. Still, the nonexhibited content – the mental intention –
Dickie notes, is not an integral part of the structure of the artwork but is rather appended
to it. In that respect, it is not crucially different from the conferring of status.
Despite the modification, Dickie seems to have remained content with the wide
extension of the concept of “art” as he analyzed it right from the beginning. It nicely
coped with the challenge set by the post-modern artists who, Dickie claims, contrary to
the modernist artists, “regard art genres as loose guidelines rather than rigid specifica-
tions” (Dickie 1997, 86). Dickie’s theory, similarly to Danto’s, did more than just meet
this challenge – it emerged from this challenge.
Methodically and as a matter of philosophical ideology, Danto and Dickie share four
logically related elements. I will present these first and then discuss the difference bet-
ween their ontologies.
Danto and Dickie’s first shared standpoint is that contemporary artistic pluralism –
where art “appears in every possible way” (Danto) because it “regards art genre as loose
guidelines” (Dickie) – is an integral part of the very artworld. Namely, both deemed this
pluralism an element of creating works that remain under the category of “art,” rather
than transgressing the boundaries of art to philosophy, for example.
The second is that this pluralism enables a real and sufficiently general theory of art.
For Danto, the advent of art outside of the pale of history in the 1960s created a frame-
work within which the philosophy of art can reach its objectives. He re-expresses this
view 40 years after the publication of “The Artworld” in The Abuse of Beauty by claiming
that “what we now know is that only when the radical pluralism was registered in con-
sciousness was a definition finally possible.” It was only then that it became possible to
define art a-historically, Danto maintains. To be exact, it was possible to discover the
essence of art in what Danto describes as “properties which must always be present,
however various the class of artworks turns out to be” (Danto 2004, xx). These prop-
erties are the nonexhibited ones: internal-mental for Danto, external-social for Dickie.
Equally, in his Art and Value (2001) Dickie explains that the great diversity of the class
of artworks sets a barrier to traditional theories since these theories tried to extract the
intension of “art” from exhibited properties.
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MICHALLE GAL
The same diversity led Dickie in the opposite direction, to an “attempt to discover the
underlying nature of the extension of works of art – the underlying nature being the
nonexhibited feature of works of art that ties them together” (italics in original, Dickie
2001, 27). So this is the third standpoint Danto and Dickie share: the aspiration to for-
mulate an art theory that would account for pluralism and be able to apply to future
ontologically challenging works. Hence, we see a mutual enabling: pluralist art enables
philosophy of art, and philosophy enables pluralist art, as Lydia Goehr presents it in her
writings on Danto: “history’s openness is the social condition that, sustained by an ana-
lytical philosophy, makes art’s pluralism possible” (Goehr 2007, 27).
The fourth point is the contention that pluralism necessitates a definition of art. The
contemporary artistic pluralism alongside constant changes in the discipline of art
drove Neo-Wittgensteinians such as Morris Weitz, William Kennick, and Paul Ziff1 to
conclude that art has no essence. They claimed that “art” is therefore undefinable in
terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. “Art,” then, must be an open concept or,
specifically, a family resemblance concept. In contrast, Danto and Dickie found this plu-
ralism to be revealing of the essence of art, directing philosophy to art’s nonexhibited
infrastructure – beyond the reach of the eye. This meant that the openness of appear-
ances no longer implied an open concept of art. Danto attacked Wittgenstein’s exter-
nalist “look and see” approach of describing different phenomena and refused to accept
the “Wittgensteinian commonplace that instances can be culled out successfully
without benefit of definition” (Danto 2004, 22), as well as Kennick’s version, that we
simply recognize art as art when we see it while definitions stand in our way. Since no
criterion was available for visually distinguishing a readymade artwork from its coun-
terpart, Danto reflected, “the question of definition became urgent after all.”
Dickie took a parallel approach. In his Art and the Aesthetic he joined Maurice
Mandelbaum’s repudiation of the Neo-Wittgensteinian aesthetics, introducing a
method of denoting the nonexhibited properties shared by members of a group.
Mandelbaum rejects Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous claim that the concept of “game”
cannot be defined, since there is no property which is common to all games, and the
argument that Morris Weitz derived from it about the impossibility of defining art.
According to Mandelbaum, Wittgenstein’s mistake was to focus on exhibited prop-
erties; Dickie applies this insight to art, using Danto’s argument that the essential
element of the artwork is not material. This leads to Dickie’s and Danto’s aforemen-
tioned attacks on the senses. They assert that the senses by themselves are not only
incapable of recognizing an art object as art, rather than a mere object, but unable to
detect which of the object’s visible properties belong also to the artwork. This is where
Danto’s assertion about the thing “the eye cannot descry” serves Dickie. Danto’s propo-
sitions in “The Artworld” and “Art Works and Real Things,” Dickie explains in 1974,
“are consistent with and can be incorporated into an institutional account” (Dickie
1974, 29, footnote 9).
Dickie is not alone in thinking of Danto’s early theory formulated in “The Artworld”
as institutional. Stephen Davies, in his Definitions of Art, claims that Danto shifts the
attention from artistic properties to the social context that allows artworks to present
their properties, even though he acknowledges that Danto rejects Dickie’s interpreta-
tion (Davies 1991, 69, 81). However, this line of interpretation misses Danto’s
fundamental focus: the transfigured structure of the artwork itself. Danto appreciated
276
the fact that Dickie was not discouraged by the Neo-Wittgensteinian approach in his
quest for definition of art, but he did not endorse Dickie’s reformulation of his artworld
theory as a social ontology of art. “I saluted Dickie for his daring but faulted his defini-
tion, which is institutionalist: something is an artwork if the Art World decrees it so,”
he pointed out in What Art Is (Danto 2013, 145).
Mandelbaum’s approach, opening a vent to anti-modernist definitions of art, inter-
estingly brought about opposing accounts of the boundaries of the art object. Danto
recounts in 2004 that “self-critique in the arts, as understood by Greenberg, consisted
in purifying the medium unique to any art of whatever was extrinsic to it” (Danto
2004, 19).
While both Danto and Dickie re-classified “extrinsic,” what Danto refers to when he
writes about (Mandelbaum’s) nonexhibited properties is very different from what Dickie
refers to. Danto’s artwork begins with the mental and stretches to its embodying
material, which is transfigured by the mental content. This content is the organizing
factor of the work. For Dickie, the artwork begins and ends with social categorization,
which is merely conferred to the work, and actually does not penetrate the material fea-
tures. In that respect, Dickie’s externalism leaves the artwork, as the modernist classi-
fied it, theoretically intact.
Perhaps Dickie’s theory is over-criticized here or at least undersold. Like Danto,
Dickie holds a constructivist realist position, differentiating between the intrinsic nature
of things (“being gold”) and cultural nature (“being a bachelor”), and therefore bet-
ween natural kinds and cultural kinds (Dickie 2001, 29). The ontological openness of
his account of artifactuality allows the analysis of crucial or liminal cases. This is exem-
plified by the case of the driftwood. The first version of the institutional theory allows
artifactuality to be a conferred property of the cultural type. But in the second version
Dickie retreats from this radical proposition. Taking a functional stance, he converts the
conferring to use: a driftwood may acquire artifactuality by being picked up and dis-
played “in the way that a painting or a sculpture is displayed,” that is to say, “being used
as an artistic medium and thereby becomes part of the more complex object of art”
(Dickie 1997, 87). Still, use is external to the artwork, and in his 2013 What Art Is,
Danto still acknowledges no critical difference between the early and late institutional
versions. Despite the functionalist shift in those versions, Danto claims that, in Dickie,
arthood is determined by a process akin to knighthood, and this is a position he cannot
abide. Institutionalism “basically states that determining what is art is altogether a

matter to be decided by his designation of the Art World, which he defines differently
than I do. For Dickie, the Art World is a sort of social network, consisting of curators,
collectors, art critics, artists (of course), and others whose life is connected to art in
some way” (Danto 2013, 33). According to Danto, what keeps Dickie’s theory distant
from the depth of the ontological structure of the artwork is exactly this externalist
approach.
The main point in Danto’s internalist criticism, expressed in The Abuse of Beauty, is
that Dickie’s theory is not cognitive enough. Dickie indeed rejects the mentalist definitions
of art. The ontological controversy with Danto is well shown in Art and Value, where his
externalist method categorizes most of the theories of art, mimeticist as well as expres-
sionist, as psychologist. They address, Dickie claims, “innate mechanism of imitating”
or the “psychological mechanisms of controlled expression of emotion,” and regard
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MICHALLE GAL
those as sufficient conditions for the creation of art, its ontological status, and its under-
standing; psychological mechanisms fail to take into account the cultural context of the
artist and the viewer (Dickie 2001, 3–4). Dickie finds this psychologism in, among
others, Plato, Aristotle, Dewey, Collingwood, and Beardsley.2 Fortunately, he claims,
aesthetics took a cultural turn, promoting definitions of art as embedded in cultural
context rather than as “genetically determined” (Dickie 2001, 24). Dickie argues that
Danto’s theory emerged within this framework, using “cultural-sounding language,”
and “talking about what would be, if it occurred, cultural phenomena, although he
does not explicitly characterize it as such” (Dickie 2001, 6). Danto, in Dickie’s interpre-
tation, ends up with a meta-theory which denotes as a necessary condition the presence
of art theories that are contemporaneous with the artwork in question; and in expand-
ing his definition of art to include aboutness as a necessary condition of art, he makes
art linguistic by nature. This definition, according to Dickie, is therefore both
psychological and cultural, and its necessary conditions are jointly sufficient. Dickie
acknowledges his indebtedness to what he perceives as Danto’s cultural analysis of art,
which in his version takes a socio-philosophical bent.
Dickie criticizes the psychologist philosophers for assuming “that human beings
come equipped with faculties, dispositions, and/or characteristics that suffice for the
creation of art” (Dickie 2001, 9). He and Danto agree that for the creation and experi-
ence of art, a pre-cultural innate mechanism will not suffice. The artist, according to
Danto, must possess internalized contemporary artistic ideologies, style and theories,
which comprise the historical moment. Moreover, Danto argues that those are integral
to the ontology of the work; they are embodied by it. Danto explains in The Transfiguration
of the Commonplace that “You cannot isolate these factors [intention, concept, idea,
meaning] from the work since they penetrate, so to speak, to the essence of the work”
(italics in original): materially indiscernible artworks might be ontologically different.
Thus, “graphic congruities notwithstanding,” Danto argues, similarly looking works,
may be “deeply different” (Danto 1981, 36). The artwork is, therefore, a cognitive prod-
uct emerging from the artist’s cognition to transfigure external commonplace and be
embodied by it, whereas, according to Dickie, the artist is first and foremost a social-cul-
tural agent, working within, and logically dependent on, a social practice. This is the
core of Danto’s internalist criticism of Dickie’s externalist model for not being cognitive
enough, captured by the concept of “embodiment.”
Danto emphasizes that “embodiment is a philosophical idea of some weight and

lineage” (Danto 1986, 18), and it allows him to make sense of the idea that the
constitution of the artwork is intentional mental content, which is materialized, not
merely represented, by it. The artifact is not just tenuously connected to the idea but
contains the idea and is used to make a point. This is well manifested by the attempt “to
differentiate artworks from other vehicles of representation,” or between artwork and
mere representations, in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Danto 1981, 165).
Here, too, nonexhibited properties are the differentiating factor. Roy Lichtenstein’s
Portrait of Madame Cézanne (1962), which reuses Erle Loran’s diagram of Cézanne’s
painting, “self-consciously exploits the format of the diagram to make a point, and of
course it itself is not a diagram” (Danto 1981, 147). The process of embodiment of an
idea is rational in kind. Consequently, the work is supposed to be perceived intellectually
first by interpreting the idea. Only then can the eye be directed at the material properties
278
that are relevant to the artwork. The idea is the unifying operator of the artwork, and
Danto takes it as far as claiming that having beauty as part of its idea is a necessary
condition for an artwork to be beautiful. This is because (contrary to the modernist
view) a property is internal to artwork only if it is “internal to the meaning of the work”
(Danto 2004, 9, 13, 101, 110). Therefore, he argues, an object might be beautiful,
while the artwork made of the object is not beautiful because it is not meant to be
beautiful; and the artwork is beautiful only if it is conceptually structured to be beautiful
– that is, only if it is about beauty.
Dickie’s intentionality is philosophically different: rather than embedded in the art-
work as an internal property, it is an intention of applying a label (Dickie 1974, 35–6).
The artist’s intention may have bearing merely on the external conditions of the art-
work. In 2001 he ends up shunning Danto’s advanced theory, with the admission that
“the accounts that Danto and I have given of the artworld are very different” (Dickie
2001, 18). He claims that Danto’s concept of aboutness is reductionist, and as such a
part of the traditional sensuous model of art: “Danto’s attempt to characterize art in
terms of aboutness in an example of the traditional search for the intensional meaning
of ‘work of art’ among exhibited characteristics” (Dickie 2001, 27). Dickie’s quasi-
empirical argument that many works are not about anything is anticipated by Danto’s
claim that even abstract or non-objective artworks are about art, but it does not annul
Dickie’s (externalist) doubt regarding the ability of an intention of an author to pour
meaning into artworks. For Dickie, meanings are resultant of public conventions, while
Danto, from this standpoint, is forcing aboutness, or meaningfulness, on abstract works
inauthentically, merely to fulfill a philosophical demand that he himself created.
Comparing flag stripes, whose semanticity is based on rigid conventions, and stripes on
a painting, Dickie critically notes that “how an artist’s intention can make stripes be
about life, love, or death Danto does not say, and I do not see how it could” (Dickie 2001,
37); thus he actually excludes the very concept of embodiment to return back to the
artworld which is a sphere of conventions, procedures, and authorities.
Could these social entities have any explanatory power regarding the very object of
art? Doesn’t Dickie confuse that object with the world surrounding it? Dickie’s critics
such as Davies and Richard Wollheim think that he does, that “his proposed definition
pays no heed to the role that gives art its significance in cultural life of a community”
(Davies 1991, 45). But this is not Danto’s complaint, which focuses on ontology. And
here, as hard as one tries, there is no escape from returning to the piece about which the
discussion has become somewhat of a platitude: Fountain, by Marcel Duchamp
(1917/1964). This is where both Danto and Dickie begin – in attempting to explain
what makes readymades and their likes art, and trying to use the windows they opened
to pluralism in order to formulate new definitions of art. Both referred to Fountain in
their first canonical essays. However, for Danto it was a paradigmatic manifestation of
embodiment of an idea, which meant that most of the urinal’s material properties were
external to fountain, while other, intellectual properties made it an artwork. For Dickie,
on the other hand, it was a paradigmatic example of the authority of Duchamp; an
authority that, in a certain institutional setting, he enjoys and the salesman of the
plumbing supplies lacks, and which allows what Dickie terms “a conversion” of the
original urinal to artwork. For Danto conversion does not suffice; it is not a deep trans-
figuration and does not make Fountain any different from the original urinal. Dickie’s
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MICHALLE GAL
emphasis, Danto concludes, was on “how something gets to be a work of art, which
may be institutional.” But, institutionalism “neglected the question of what qualities
constitute an artwork once something is one” (Danto 1981, 94). It does not touch any
internal, substantial, property of the artwork itself.
Notes
1 See Carroll 2010.

2 This categorization is a bit superficial and reductionist, since Beardsley’s starting point is the
artistic object and artistic action combined with the aesthetic intention.
References
Carroll, Noël. 2010. “Identifying Art.” In Institutions of Art: Reconsiderations of George Dickie’s
Philosophy, edited by Robert J. Yanal. Penn State University State, pp. 3–38.
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy 61(19): 571–84.
–––––. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA:
–––––. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press.
–––––. 1997. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
–––––. 2004. The Abuse of Beauty. Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Davies, Stephen. 1991. Definitions of Art. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
Dickie, George. 1974. Art and the Aesthetic. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press.
–––––. 1984. The Art Circle. New York: Haven Publications.
–––––. 1997. Introduction to Aesthetics: An Analytic Approach. New York: Oxford University Press.
–––––. 2001. Art and Value. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc.
Goehr, Lydia. 2007. “An Introduction to Arthur Danto’s Philosophies of History and Art.” History
and Theory 46(1): 1–28, 27.
Greenberg, Clement. 1995. The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a
Vengeance 1957–1969, 90. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
280
32
Danto and Wittgenstein: History and Essence
SONIA SEDIVY
Danto understands his core position that art has an essence that we can discover and
define as a repudiation of the Wittgensteinian view that in some cases definitions may
be distorting or so broad as to be nearly vacuous. Yet, he is also deeply sympathetic to
Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the contextual and hence historical nature of language and
other meaningful dimensions of human life. To understand the nature of their dis-
agreement, we need to be clear about the agreement made explicit in Danto’s later
work: we need to understand how their shared historicism about the contextual nature
of meaning divides into distinct approaches to the relationships between history,
essence, and generality.
This overview is different from the standard narrative about the relationship bet-
ween Danto’s work and Wittgenstein’s, which Danto avows. That narrative concerns
Danto’s response to the theoretical context of analytic philosophy of art in the late
1950s and early 1960s. In the 1950s, neo-Wittgensteinians (Kennick 1958; Weitz
1956; Ziff 1953) extrapolated from Wittgenstein’s work to deny that the concept of art
can be defined in terms of necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. Critical debate
ensued over their proposal that art is better understood in terms of sufficient conditions
or relationships of similarities, which might be illustrated by Wittgenstein’s example of
family resemblances. But the critical debate misconstrued both the neo-Wittgenstei-
nian proposals as well as Wittgenstein’s text, so that Danto’s response to this debate is
not a good guide to his relationship with Wittgenstein. The problem is that the neo-
Wittgensteinian position has been cast as arguing that the respects in which artworks
are similar must be manifest, sensory or perceptual properties – that “the eye can de[s]
cry,” as Danto famously put it (Danto 1964, 580).1 Danto repeatedly argues that
because an artwork might be indiscernible from a counterpart non-art object, what
makes one an artwork are not its manifest features but that it embodies and conveys a
certain content. This is Danto’s ontological point, but it brings historicism to art because
meaning and embodiment are both tied to historical context: “Works are embodied
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SONIA SEDIVY
meanings. What meanings are possible is a matter of historical contingency” (Danto

1993 and 2012, 299). This historically contextual analysis is a point of agreement
rather than disagreement with Wittgenstein and the neo-Wittgensteinians.
Wittgenstein’s work also needs to be disentangled from the standard narrative. The
“family resemblance” passages are but one strand in the Philosophical Investigations’s
attempt to re-orient philosophical focus away from the representational essence of lan-
guage toward the diversity of uses of language in the context of human activities
(Wittgenstein 2009). The passages are not a self-standing nugget whose import can be
understood independently of their place in these interweaving considerations, which
go on to examine how our uses of language in “language games” are both contextual
and rule-informed.2 It is Wittgenstein’s many stranded re-orientation to meaning as
integral in language use that is relevant for Danto’s focus on the meaningfulness of
artworks.
This chapter proceeds in three steps. The first section reconstructs the neo-Wittgen-
steinian proposals, and the second re-examines the “family resemblances” passages
from the Philosophical Investigations. This makes it possible to take a fresh look at Danto’s
considered view in later works such as After the End of Art (Danto 1997) and its rela-
tionship to Wittgenstein’s thought in the third and final section. Thirty years after his
epiphany that the neo-Wittgensteinian view “was entirely wrong” (Danto 2005, 8),
Danto chooses to explain the historically contextual nature of art in some of the same
terms as Wittgenstein sketches for language. Yet disagreement over essence and defini-
tion remains. Danto argues that historicism and essentialism are “co-implicated” in art.
The essence of art and the intension of the term can be specified by necessary and
sufficient conditions – “eternally the same … regardless of time and place” (Danto
1998, 128) – even though realization of art’s essence changes historically and is “his-
torically indexed” (Danto 1997, 95).3
I will argue that the deep innovation in Danto’s approach to art lies not so much in
its contextual or relational nature as in its attempt to broker a compromise between
essentialism and historicism: his essentialist definition allows for history’s role while
keeping essence and contingency distinct. In contrast, Wittgenstein’s thought moves us
toward the view that norm governed “wholes” consisting of life activities and uses of
language are bound to specific historical context so that a standard definition that
leaves out the role of contingency would be distorting. This is the instructive impasse
between Danto’s thought and Wittgenstein’s.
1 Neo-Wittgensteinian Case against Definitions of Art
The neo-Wittgenstein view is typically reconstructed as a conjunction of two claims

about the concept of art: (i) the concept is not definable and (ii) it needs to be under-
stood along the lines of Wittgenstein’s discussion of “family resemblances.” The positive
proposal is presented as claiming that artworks resemble one another like members of a
family – they are similar in ways that are discernible or manifest, where none of these
resemblances is necessary though they might provide sufficient conditions for art.
Critics such as Maurice Mandelbaum (1956, 219–28) and raconteurs of the debate
such as Noël Carroll (2000, 3–24) hold that the resembling features are manifest or
282
decontextualized properties shared by individual works and paradigmatic ones. This is

a point both about ontology, about the identity conditions of works of art, and about the
epistemology or decision procedure concerning them – novel cases are adjudicated in
terms of decontextualized similarities to paradigm cases.
To be clear that emphasis on visual similarities was no part of the neo-Wittgenstei-
nian proposal, let’s go back to the three principal statements of the view.
In 1953, Paul Ziff argues that works of art can be defined through “various sub-
sets of a set of characteristics.” His view is that “a definition in terms of necessary
and sufficient conditions is merely one kind of definition, one way of describing the
use of a word or phrase” and that this type of definition is not appropriate for art
since there are no necessary conditions for a work of art (Ziff 1953, 64). But
sufficient conditions may be gleaned by examining “clear cut” or “characteristic”
cases of art works.
For example, Ziff suggests that someone in the West in the 1950s would agree that a
particular painting by Nicolas Poussin was a clear-cut case of a visual work, and that
such a clear cut work has six conditions that are sufficient but not necessary. It is impor-
tant to note that though Ziff considers similarities to a “clear-cut” case, he writes that
this is to illustrate “in less exotic language” that a definition may offer only “subsets of
characteristics” (rather than to suggest that artworks are determined by similarities to
such cases). Consider three of the six conditions. A clear cut case of a visual work in the
1950s might be:
(I) “intentionally and self-consciously made with skill”;

(II) intended to be treated as “works of art are customarily treated,” which includes
attending to the “look and feel” as well as to the “expressive, significant, and
symbolic aspect of the work,” to the “subject matter, … the scene depicted, and to
the interrelations between the formal structure and the scene depicted”;
(III) treated in such a way (Ziff, 60–1.)4
Since a work might lack one or more of these features – for example, found objects may
be artworks even though they lack intentional self-conscious production – the condi-
tions are sufficient in a specific historical context but not necessary.
Ziff examines critical battles over post-impressionism to illustrate that assessing a
work is always specific to a context and that debates about novel approaches are over
the broader social consequences of accepting innovative works. Ziff contends that: “To
ask ‘What are the consequences and implications of something’s being considered a
work of art?’ is to ask an equivocal question to which there can be no univocal answer.
We must first know in what context we are to suppose the phrase ‘work of art’ is being
used” (p. 72). Because taking something to be a work of art has consequences for the
larger functions of art in society, it is the larger context and what we take to be the pur-
poses of art in that context that are at issue when we argue over “whether a particular
use of the phrase ‘work of art’ is reasonable or not” (p. 73).
In 1956, Morris Weitz offers a different account of the way aesthetic theories have
been misunderstood. The definitions such theories offer need to be understood as “sum-
maries of seriously made recommendations to attend in certain ways to certain features
of art” (Weitz 1956, 35). Theories examine the reasons for excellence in art – such as
283
SONIA SEDIVY
“emotional depth, [or] profound truth” – to direct us to these characteristics. Disputes

over the concept of art are not over the descriptive use of the concept but over the eval-
uative use since they propose criteria of artistic excellence that are perhaps overlooked
or sidelined in a particular historical context.
Like Ziff, Weitz suggests that there are “strands of similarities” between different art-
works which make it possible for us to recognize and understand them. But he does not
suggest that there are definitions in terms of sufficient conditions. Weitz briefly points
to the Philosophical Investigations to suggest that the model for the logical description of
the “conditions under which we correctly use” the concept of art derives from
Wittgenstein’s discussion of games in the family resemblance passages.
Unlike Ziff, Weitz offers a general reason for his view that is not specific to art: all
empirically descriptive and normative concepts allow for decisions about how to extend
the use of the concept. That is, all concepts except those of logic and mathematics
“which are constructed and completely defined” allow for the possibility of decisions
about application. To illustrate that the logic of the concept of art is “open,” Weitz con-
siders the novel rather than visual art. He asks us to suppose that a new work “is narra-
tive, fictional, contains character delineation and dialogue but (say) it has no regular
time-sequence in the plot or is interspersed with actual newspaper reports” (pp. 31–32).
This example shows how some conditions that one might think are important for a
novel might be omitted, and others that do not belong might be countenanced.
From our perspective, this list is important because if one were to extrapolate from
Weitz’s discussion of novels to visual works, there is no ground for suggesting that the
strands of similarities are manifest or simple perceptible features that one could just
“look and see” in the restricted sense that the standard narrative maintains. The fea-
tures of novels – such as narrative, fictionality, character delineation – are not manifest
and restricted to a sensory faculty from which interpretation is distinct.
Finally, William Kennick argues in 1958 that in any specific historical context, peo-
ple have the ability to recognize artworks though they may be stumped by strange or
innovative cases. This is a competence in use that does not derive from grasping a nature
common to works in different arts. Rather, the concept of art evolves historically with
different uses and conditions of application in different historical contexts.
To show that our ability to identify artworks is a skillful competence, Kennick sug-
gests that if one were asked to select only the artworks from a warehouse filled with
works and diverse objects of other kinds, they would emerge with paintings, scripts,
scores, recordings, novels, poems, and so forth. This argument seems to invite Danto’s
realization in front of Warhol’s Brillo Box that the neo-Wittgensteinian view was
“entirely wrong.” Surely in 1964 one could not enter such a warehouse to re-emerge
only with works of art.5
Yet Kennick’s example needs to be treated with the historical specificity he advo-
cates. Ordinary competence with artworks across the decades of the second half of
the twentieth century would follow the changing nature of the works. Kennick and
Danto can agree that ordinary competence or know-how would be in trouble with
the works on offer from the visual and other arts in the 1960s. But Kennick’s view
allows that ordinary competence would come to include the fact that one cannot
rely on an antecedent identity for artworks (which might be indiscernible from
ordinary objects or movements or sounds, etc.). By the 1980s, if one were asked to
284
go into such a warehouse – which might include Warhol’s Brillo Box and Fluxus
collections of dime store items – one would respond that the task would not be fea-
sible without labels or contextual clues; many artworks might not be identifiable by
visual inspection alone.
Finally, like both Ziff and Weitz, Kennick proposes that aestheticians offer something
of value even if they misunderstand their effort as proposing a definition. He suggests
that we might “torture a phrase of Wittgenstein’s” – of family resemblances – to rec-
ognize that aestheticians identify different appreciative perspectives, which propose
different ways of being interested in artworks and offer different reasons for valuing
them (p. 323).6
At least four key points are evident about the neo-Wittgenstein approach:
(I) Each theorist denies – making a universal negative claim – that artworks have a
common nature or essence that can be defined in terms of necessary and jointly
sufficient conditions.
(II) None of the theorists argues that what is at issue are manifest, perceptible, sensory,
or even decontextualized properties that “the eye can descry.”
(III) Each theorist argues that proposed definitions of art make important contribu-
tions whose nature is misunderstood.
(IV) Each theorist is circumspect in their use of the “family resemblance” passages in
Wittgenstein: Ziff leaves them unmentioned, Weitz brings up the example of
games briefly, Kennick gestures with the caveat that doing so is “to torture a
phrase of Wittgenstein’s” (p. 323).
Throughout their discussions, each theorist emphasizes the contextual nature of

uses of the concept of art. It cannot be fairly claimed that Danto’s emphasis on the con-
textual nature of visual art is a point of disagreement with the neo-Wittgensteinians.
2 Wittgenstein and the “Family Resemblance” Passages
Wittgenstein appeals to “different kinds of affinity” between “all that we call language”
to help explain that we use the one concept without our diverse uses of language hav-
ing “one thing in common” (2009, §65–7). He offers two further illustrative examples
of concepts that apply to a group of diverse phenomena without a common essence:
games and numbers. Wittgenstein writes, “Don’t say: ‘[Games] must have something in
common, or they would not be called games’ – but ‘look and see’ whether there is
anything common to all.” The invocation to “look and see” needs to be understood the
way Wittgenstein uses this phrase in the Philosophical Investigations to make one of his
key points: to enjoin us to examine specific cases rather than to abstract from them for
certain kinds of theory formation that treat detail much like the “noise” that obstructs
an informational signal. That Wittgensteinian is not enjoining us to focus on simple
manifest properties is borne out by the subsequent list of features of games – such as
winning or losing, competition, or the roles of skill or luck. The point of “looking and
seeing” particular cases is that “we see a complicated network of similarities overlap-
ping and criss-crossing: similarities in the large and in the small.”
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SONIA SEDIVY
Wittgenstein briefly invokes resemblances among family members to characterize

such networks of overlapping similarities and immediately proceeds to apply the idea to
numbers. Here is the key transition in full.
PI 67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than “family
resemblances”; for the various resemblances between members of a family – build, fea-
tures, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth – overlap and criss-cross in
the same way. – And I shall say: “games” form a family.
And likewise the kinds of number, for example, form a family. Why do we call something
a “number”? Well, perhaps because it has a – direct – affinity with several things that have
hitherto been called “number”; and this can be said to give it an indirect affinity with other
things that we also call “numbers.” And we extend our concept of number, as in spinning
a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread resides not in the fact that
some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.
Wittgenstein suggests that “the kinds of number ... form a family.” Yet no one could suppose
that “kinds of number” are determined by the perceptible properties of numerals, which
would be analogous to the eye color or gait of family members. The passage proceeds from
the illustrative example of resemblances between family members – which is the focus of
criticism – to similarities among kinds of number – about which there is a resounding
silence in philosophy of art since it does not fit the standard narrative about neo-Wittgen-
steinian proposals. It does not fit the script that Wittgenstein suggests that there are family
resemblance concepts determined by manifest similarities to prototypes.7
Wittgenstein’s suggestion that “we call something a ‘number’ … because it has a –
direct – affinity with several things that have hitherto been called ‘number’” needs to be
understood in relation to the preceding sections of the Philosophical Investigations,
which introduce the notion of language-games to highlight the interdependence bet-
ween what we can say and what we can do in evolving historical and natural circum-
stances. As he writes at PI §7: “I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and
the activities into which it is woven, a ‘language-game.’” His view is that to examine all
that we call “number” we need to examine the “wholes” in which uses of numbers fig-
ures. The relationships at issue concern what we can do with numbers in practices that
involve numbers. Since the injunction to “look and see” continues to apply, we are being
enjoined to look and see what we actually do with numbers in our life activities.
3 Danto and Wittgenstein’s Views of Historical Human Kinds
Setting aside the mistaken view that a Wittgensteinian approach restricts us to manifest,
sensory, perceptible, or decontextualized properties allows us to take a fresh look at the
relationship between Danto and Wittgenstein. First, we need to re-consider whether
Wittgenstein’s worries about generality raise concerns for Danto’s approach. Second, I
will focus on their views of historicity – of art and of language uses.
Wittgenstein worries that when it comes to the diverse uses of language, subsuming
the variety in terms of a shared essence may be (i) distorting; and (ii) nearly vacuous
without specification of diverse cases.
286
Wittgenstein’s first worry is illustrated by the suggestion that “All tools serve to
modify something,” which assimilates all tools, even those where the claim does not
seem apt to those where it does. PI §14 … “And what is modified by a rule, a glue-pot and
nails? – ‘Our knowledge of a thing’s length, the temperature of the glue, and the solidity
of a box.’ – Would anything be gained by this assimilation of expressions?”
Danto is confident that his definition avoids such mis-assimilation because embodi-
ment of meaning is both sufficiently general to capture all art without distortion and
can be narrowed down without distorting assimilations. On one hand, it seems safe to
say that all artworks convey something by means of their embodiment. On the other
hand, Danto (1993 and 2012, 285–311) is enthusiastic that Noël Carroll (1993 and
2012, 118–45) draws out two further necessary conditions that he had not himself
explicitly recognized: that artworks have content by offering a point of view and that
this point of view is offered through metaphorical ellipsis (pp. 300–301).
Yet these additional conditions render Danto’s theory a form of expressivism, so that
his definition of art becomes more restrictive and vulnerable to counterexamples, just
as Carroll argues. This may be the reason why in subsequent works Danto writes that
he has hit upon only two core conditions of the concept of art – embodiment and
meaning. He likens his proposal to Plato’s discovery that knowledge is true belief, which
puts us on the right track though it leaves the justification condition outstanding (Danto
1998, 130). Yet Danto’s analogy is not without its own difficulties. Emphasis on belief
may be distorting, for example, it leaves “knowing how” out of consideration.
Moreover, conceptual art seems to challenge Danto’s confidence that the two core con-
ditions of his definition are sufficiently general. This is because some works do away with
an object altogether in favor of a brief linguistic text whose embodiment is insignificant to
its meaning. Does Danto’s proposal that artworks embody meanings mis-assimilate
conceptual art’s attempt to de-emphasize embodiment?8 Would it be more helpful to
understand conceptual art along the lines suggested by the neo-Wittgensteinians: such
artworks try to change our view of art’s purpose in society, to shift focus from embodiment
to meaning as a criterion of excellence, or to teach us a new way of attending to works?
Wittgenstein’s second worry is that in some cases, a sufficiently general definition of
a highly diverse category would be almost uninformative without further specification
of the differences among its members. Here, Wittgenstein’s illustrative example in PI
§12 is “handles” – which look “more or less alike ... since they are supposed to be han-
dled,” but which need to be “handled” differently to be understood: pulled or pumped or

switched from one position to another to perform different functions. This brings us
closer to the heart of Danto and Wittgenstein’s disagreement.
Danto’s considered view is that the diversity of art is a matter of the historicity of
both meaning and embodiment.9 His richly illustrative writing allows us to “handle the
handles” as it were, to countenance the diversity of artworks in terms of what they
convey and how they do so. Danto increasingly recognizes that Wittgenstein’s view is
deeply historical in its emphasis that language use is integral to human life activities. In
After the End of Art, he chooses Wittgenstein’s notion of “form of life” to explain the his-
torical nature of both embodiment and meaning in art. Quoting from PI §19, “to ima-
gine a language is to imagine a form of life,” Danto draws an explicit analogy: “the same
thing must be said about art: to imagine a work of art is to imagine a form of life in
which it plays a role” (1997, 202).
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SONIA SEDIVY
His point is that Wittgenstein’s notion of “form of life” explains two key respects in
which art is historical. First, embodiment and content are integral to a particular form
of life. Second and more specifically, artworks are bound to particular historical con-
texts where embodied meanings can be “lived” rather than merely “known about” in an
“altogether external” way “unless and until we can find a way of fitting it into our form
of life.” Here is one illustration:
The art of the Counter-Reformation had as its charge … that [viewers] had not merely to see
that there was suffering, not merely to infer that someone in the situations depicted would in
fact suffer: they had to feel the suffering. And ways had to be found to convey this … by means
of paint and carving. But once the stylistic strategies of the baroque had evolved, they could
be put to different uses – to cause viewers to feel, for example, … the cool slickness of a satin
garment. And so the imperatives to which Bernini’s art was a response allowed Terborch to
say things inaccessible to a “linear” artist who may not even have entertained the thoughts
that such things could be said. There is a philosophically instructive asymmetry in thinking of
the way in which sixteenth-century artists could not so much as conceive of expressing
certain things in art that really required the painterly vocabulary of the baroque style, and in
thinking how a baroque artist would be frustrated were he obliged to try to say whatever he
had to say in the linear style of his immediate predecessors (pp. 200–201).10
Yet Danto’s sympathy with Wittgenstein’s contextual approach leaves room for dis-
agreement over essence and definition. Danto proposes that historicism and essen-
tialism are co-implicated in art. Artworks have an essence and they are historically
indexed: “The concept of art, as essentialist, is timeless. But the extension of the term is
historically indexed – it really reveals itself through history” (1997, 196). This means
that artworks may be defined – the conditions that artworks are embodiments of
meaning give the intension of the term or its meaning – while as a matter of fact, the
extension of the term, the things it applies to, varies with historical change: “History
belongs to the extension rather than the intension of the concept of art” (1997, 196).
Danto holds more generally that there are concepts with historical extensions; art is
one such concept among others. Gender or racial concepts also have complex histories
because what counts as being “fitting or appropriate” “varies sharply from period to
period and place to place.” To elaborate this view and to defend his approach from the
“polemicization” of the notion of essence, Danto attempts to resolve criticisms of essen-
tialism in debates over gender and race. These debates turn on an unfortunate misun-
derstanding, he suggests, since essence in these cases is compatible with whatever traits
are historically extant as a matter of fact (1997, 197). The kind “woman” has a defin-
able essence – presumably in biological or genetic terms – and the realization of that
essence differs in different historical contexts. “[E]ssentialism … entails pluralism,
whether pluralism in fact is historically realized or not” (1997, 197).
But the rejoinder would be that dispute over racial and gender kinds extends to the
question of whether biology determines what it is to be a woman even if we recognize
that historical realization of a biological kind may change. To show how one may broker
a compromise – an essence “eternally the same … regardless of time and place” (1997,
95)11 that is realized differently across historical contexts – does not address the
substantive issue whether what it is to be a woman is determined by historical norms
that take biology into account.
288
Wittgenstein’s investigations of the historically evolving nature of language games

incline us to question the assumption that, in all such cases, historical diversity can be
explained in terms of an essence. In so doing, they come together with the way Danto’s
approach helps to crystallize the issue: do historical differences lie in how art is realized
in different times and places, or does “all that we call” art change with historical norms?
Danto’s proposal to split the essence of art from its historical extension holds firm to
a distinction between what is essential and what is contingent. As he puts it, recog-
nizing that historical kinds have both definable conditions and historically changing
extension “means … that the essence cannot contain anything that is historically or
culturally contingent” (1997, 197). Commitment to this distinction undergirds and
informs his approach. This is where his disagreement with Wittgenstein lies.
Thinking about language, Wittgenstein submits that our ways of living in the world
may change so that an entirely new kind of sentence or use of language might be pos-
sible.12 This is because norm-governed use changes in ways specifically bound to ways
of living and historical circumstances.
Wittgenstein’s game analogy – for language use or norm-governed activities more
generally – directs us to other potentially relevant subjects, such as the distinction bet-
ween constitutive and regulative rules. Constitutive rules individuate different games,
such as chess or go, and the force of constitutive rules is specific to a game. This suggests
that human life activities may be governed by constitutive norms that are specifically
bound to the activity and its context.13 Insofar as (i) norms play a constitutive role in an
activity and (ii) norms are bound to historical circumstances; historical contingencies
enter into the constitutive conditions of the activity and the entities it involves – such as
Baroque art in Danto’s example – rather than being distinct from the timeless essence in
its historical realization.
Wittgenstein’s notion of “language-games,” together with his extensive investiga-
tions of rules, highlights the absence of explicit consideration of norms in Danto’s
work. Danto stays firmly committed to writing about the conditions of art rather than
its norms. His focus is understandable from a historical perspective. In the 1960s, Danto
conceives his view of art in the terms extant in that historical context, where theorists
of modern art had tried to explain art’s nature in an inclusive way, and neo-Wittgen-
steinians had denied the possibility of a general definition. It was not until the 1980s
that the floodgates would open to extensive discussion of Wittgenstein’s “rule-following
considerations” in philosophy of language and mind. By this point, the narrative about
theories of art had largely set without showing signs that discussions of rule-following
in philosophy of language and mind might be pertinent.
Nevertheless, if one were to ask Danto how he envisions the role of norms in art, I think
he would have a ready answer: norms are part of the historical conditions for how art is
realized. The essence of art contains no “whiff of contingency” while the role of norms is
allocated to the contingent conditions for the extension but not the intension of the con-
cept of art. This seems clear from his discussion of womankind, where he writes that
“what counts as fitting for women” varies historically, so that “essentialism here, as else-
where, entails a pluralism of gender traits, male and female, leaving it a matter of social or
moral policy which if any traits to incorporate into the ideals that go with gender. These
will not be a part of the essence for obvious reasons, for what belongs to essences, in art or
in gender, has nothing to do with social or moral policy” (1997, 197).
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SONIA SEDIVY
This is the crux of the disagreement between Danto and Wittgenstein’s later thought.
It yields hard questions about historicism in art. How should we understand the role of
norms in the diversity of art? As constitutive and bound to specific historical, contin-
gent contexts? Or as part of the contingent conditions for the realization of art’s time-
less essence?
Notes
1 Here is the full quotation: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot decry
[sic]–an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld”.
2 For a recent discussion see Michael Forster, “Wittgenstein on Family Resemblance Concepts,”
2010, 66–87.
3 For Danto’s detailed discussion of this part of his view see “Modalities of History: Possibility
and Comedy” in After the End of Art, 193–219.
4 The other three characteristics are that a clear cut case is representational; has a complex
formal structure; and is “good” .
5 See Danto’s discussion in “The World as Warehouse: Fluxus and Philosophy” in Unnatural
Wonders, 1994, 333–47.
6 For example, Kennick suggests that Clive Bell “had discovered something for himself. Not the
essence of Art … although he thought that this is what he found, but a new way of looking at
pictures. … “Art is Significant Form” is a slogan, the epitome of a platform of aesthetic reform.
It has work to do. Not the work which the philosophers assign it, but a work of teaching peo-
ple a new way of looking at pictures” (p. 325).
7 Though this part of the standard narrative is not part of my focus, it is important to note that
there is no mention of prototypes; Wittgenstein writes that the concept of number holds
together through the overlapping of many fibers.
8 Danto’s art criticism is telling in the joy it takes in conceptual works that involve interesting
embodiments, such as “snap line” wall drawings made by others from Sol LeWitt’s instruc-
tions. Danto 2005, “Sol LeWitt” 93–100.
9 Danto’s view of the way in which historical understanding enters into artworks evolves from
his initial suggestion that artworks depend on art historical theory to be the kind of entity that
they are (so that this might a third necessary condition in addition to meaning and embodi-
ment) to his considered view that meaning and embodiment both involve historical context,
which I focus on here.

10 Danto’s point is similar to Ziff ’s about the historical evolution of the ends and means of art.
Ziff (1953) argues that as society changes, new means are developed in art which will make
new ends possible, and there will be new ends for art that require new means. See especially
74–76.
11 Danto highlights that it follows that the definition would be “always and everywhere true,”
1998, 128.
12 See especially PI § 18 and 23. Section 18 questions the idea that our natural language might
be “complete”–“before or after the symbolism of chemistry or the notation of the infinitesimal
calculus were incorporated into it”? Section 23 examines the diversity of language uses or
kinds of sentence with a long list of examples that show that “this diversity is not something
fixed, given once for all, but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say,
come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten. (We can get a rough picture
of this from the changes in mathematics.)” Wittgenstein emphasizes that “The word ‘lan-
290
guage-game’ is used here to emphasize the fact that the speaking of language is part of an
activity, or of a form of life …”.
13 A significant point of disanalogy is that human activities, including uses of language are not
closed systems like games, so that one needs to take their evolving nature into account.
References
Carroll, Noël 2012 [1993]. “Essence, Expression, and History.” In Danto and His Critics, edited by
M. Rollins, 2nd edn., 118–45. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, Chichester, West
Sussex, UK and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
–––––. 2000. “Introduction.” In Theories of Art Today, edited by N. Carroll, 3–24. Madison, WI:
University of Wisconsin Press.
–––––. 1993 and 2012. “Replies.” In Danto and His Critics, edited by M. Rollins, 2nd edn., 285–
311. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, Chichester, West Sussex, UK and Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
–––––. 1997. After the End of Art, Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ:
–––––. 1998. “The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense.” In Danto and His Critics: Art History,
Historiography and After the End of Art. History and Theory, Theme Issue, edited by D. Carrier, 37
(4), 127–43. Blackwell Publishers.
–––––. 2005. Unnatural Wonders. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
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Philosophical Investigations, edited by A. Ahmed, 66–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Kennick, William. 1958. “Does Traditional Aesthetics Rest on a Mistake?” Mind 67(267):
317–34.
Mandelbaum, Maurice. 1956. “Family Resemblances and Generalizations Concerning the Arts.”
American Philosophical Quarterly 2(3): 219–28.
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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, M. S.
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291
33
Censorship and Subsidy
BRIAN SOUCEK
I am for U.S. Government Inspected Art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, … Best-for-less
art, Ready-to-cook art, Fully cleaned art, Spend Less art. (Claes Oldenburg, 1961)
Two controversies shook the art world in the years when Arthur Danto was becoming
one of its leading commentators. First was the fight to remove Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc
from the Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan. The controversy pitted area workers, whose
use of the Plaza was disrupted by Serra’s wall of steel, against the artists, curators, and
critics who defended Serra’s work as a masterpiece. In his first year as art critic for The
Nation, Danto sided with the “philistines.” He called for the removal of a work which, he
wrote in 1985, “transmits the message that the government puts the value of high art
above the rights and interests of those who find its presence offensive.” Removing the
work would instead convey “the crucial message that the will of the public matters and
that ours is a responsive government” (1985a, 776).
The years immediately following brought a second controversy, the near demise of
the National Endowment for the Arts after it funded an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s
homoerotic photography and Andres Serrano’s equally controversial Piss Christ. Calls
to defund the NEA were rebuffed, but not before Congress passed legislation in 1990
ensuring that future grants would be awarded on the basis of artistic merit, “taking into
consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values
of the American people” (20 U.S.C. § 954(d)(1)).
Artists such as Karen Finley, denied funding under the new rule, alleged government
censorship. Finley’s case made it to the Supreme Court, where she lost in 1998.
Throughout the controversy, Danto wrote essay after essay arguing for government
subsidies unencumbered by censorship. The NEA’s choice to deny Finley funding – or as
Danto wrote in 1998, “to have made it impossible for her to practice her art, whatever
we may think of it” – turned it into “a federal office of censorship” (1998, 5).
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That art should be subsidized but not censored; that refusing to subsidize art consti-
tutes censorship; that public art is art subsidized, not least by its placement in public
spaces; and that public art can be removed from those spaces when the public doesn’t
like it – these are seemingly inconsistent claims. Yet Danto argued for them all. This
chapter seeks to understand how that happened.
1 Non-Subsidy as Censorship
Danto’s pro-subsidy, anti-censorship liberalism was fairly predictable but hardly inevita-
ble. As Danto observed in a major lecture turned essay, “Censorship and Subsidy in the
Arts,” three other positions are logically possible. There is the view of libertarians, that
art should be neither subsidized nor censored; the fundamentalist’s view that art should
be censored and unsubsidized; and, finally, the view that art should be both subsidized
and subject to censorship (1993, 26–7). This last is the view Danto attributed to the NEA.
But notice the unargued assumption on which this attribution, like Danto’s own
view, depends. Both equate a selective refusal to subsidize with censorship. Danto, in
other words, presented his disagreement with the NEA as one about the appropriate-
ness of censoring art. Yet to be clear, the Endowment did not ban any artworks, imprison
any artists, or order any shows canceled during the tumult of the early 1990s. The
Endowment simply refused to support certain artists with grants. This is a distinction
we might have expected Danto to draw, given how, at the same time, he was writing
passionately about an undeniable attempt at censorship, the criminal obscenity charges
brought against Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center and its director for their exhibit
of Mapplethorpe’s photographs.
Some refusals to subsidize can, admittedly, blur into the more active restrictions
which many would reserve for the word “censorship.” Had the obscenity charge in
Cincinnati resulted in a significant fine rather than in jail time or a court order closing
the exhibit, we might still say that Mapplethorpe’s work was being censored. But if so,
why shouldn’t the denial of a significant subsidy count as similarly censorious? The gal-
lery is out of the same amount of money either way. Still, there has to be some distinc-
tion between prohibiting artistic expression and choosing not to fund it. Were there not,
programs like the NEA would become constitutionally impossible, at least in a country
whose constitution forbids the abridgment of free speech. If avoiding censorship requires
the state to choose between funding everything or nothing, nothing will win out.
The problem goes well beyond direct funding programs like the NEA, itself a drop in
the bucket compared to the money spent by local governments, states, and public uni-
versities on libraries, theaters, and museums. (The Pentagon’s military bands receive
three times more money than does the NEA.) Still larger subsidies come from the tax
and tariff exemptions on which artists and nonprofit arts organizations depend. Again,
some selectivity is required; to treat selection as “censorship” is to call the entire subsidy
scheme into question. States would not be able to subsidize the ballet – as New York does
with its sales tax exemption for tickets to “choreographic performances” – without also
subsidizing pole dancing at topless bars, the subject of a recent lawsuit. Surely in this
context, “censorship” is what happens when the law criminalizes nude dancing, not
when it fails to offer tax breaks for lap dances.
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If we aren’t to discard all selective subsidies as unconstitutional censorship, the

necessary distinction between permissible and impermissible non-subsidies will likely
turn in part on how widespread or common the subsidy has come to be. As the legal
scholar Robert Post has pointed out, a rule preventing certain magazines from using
bulk rate postage based on their content or quality would surely be unconstitutional
(Post 1996, 157). For periodicals, subsidized postage is the rule, and non-subsidy would
be the exception. Given the NEA’s notoriously limited budget, the same can hardly be
said of federal arts funding.
A decision not to subsidize might also veer into impermissible censorship based on
the reason for the denial. A decision to fund Democratic but not Republican artists, or
Christian artists but not Atheist ones, would hardly be saved by the argument that
Republicans and Atheists could still produce art on their own dime. Similarly, as Seth
Kreimer has suggested, providing arts funding to cubists but not to pointillists is a far
different thing than giving food stamps to one but not to the other (Kreimer 1984,
1351). Subsidies may be a privilege rather than a right, but the government still can’t
deny the privilege on discriminatory or irrelevant grounds.
To return to Danto: nowhere in his many essays on government-subsidized art does he
draw distinctions like these. On the contrary, as we have seen, he wrote of the NEA making
it “impossible” for Karen Finley to practice her art (1998, 5); elsewhere, he described non-
subsidy as a failure to “tolerate” art’s freedom (1993, 40). Perhaps this is because the
decisions he was protesting in the 1990s were ones that so clearly smacked of
discrimination. His moving descriptions in “Censorship and Subsidy” of the Whitney’s
Mapplethorpe exhibit and Serrano’s Piss Christ – what might otherwise be considered
digressions from that essay’s argument – can both be read as retorts to that discrimination.
To describe in such detail the deeply human concerns of Mapplethorpe’s photography was
to rebuke the dehumanizing animus that motivated the many calls to cut off its funding. For
Serrano’s photograph, like Chris Ofili’s dung-covered Madonna later, Danto’s somewhat dif-
ferent strategy was to describe the deep currents of Christian theology within the work.
Danto might never have distinguished non-subsidy from censorship because the
particular decisions not to subsidize that drew his attention so clearly constituted cen-
sorship. But if so, this was because they rested on discriminatory considerations, not on
irrelevant ones. This last point is crucial for understanding Danto’s views on both sub-
sidy and censorship.
2 Art Should Be Subsidized, Not Censored
Danto’s chief enemy against censorship was often not the censor so much as those who
would save art from censorship by denying or downplaying its meaning – those who
treated the censor’s content discrimination as a kind of category mistake. As he wrote:
if we addressed art simply as Kantian formalists, […] artists would be judged on abstract
criteria, like symmetry and proportion and classical composition, and there would be little
difference between bringing artillery before ballistics experts and artworks before aesthetic
ones, and we would not speak of rejection as censorship, any more than when we finally
terminate the production of a Stealth bomber (1993, 40).
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Central to Danto’s arguments on censorship, like his philosophy of art in general, was
his insistence that works of art are about something: that it no longer makes sense, and
disenfranchises art as well, to address art “simply as Kantian formalists” might.
Thus, in Cincinnati, Danto wrote that he “hated the experts” trying to save the gal-
lery from obscenity charges. They went about their defense as “arrogant Kantians,”
highlighting only the formalist beauty of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, ignoring the
sexuality – the man urinating into another man’s mouth, which they called a “figure
study.” For Danto, the experts’ formalism undermined the very basis for subsidizing the
arts. The NEA, he later wrote, “exists for the spiritual enhancement of plain men and
women” like the members of the Cincinnati jury. “[I]f they have no idea of how to look
at art, even how to describe what is clearly the content of a photograph, then why
should the Endowment be continued? What reasons have the ordinary taxpayers for
supporting what only experts understand?” (1996, 89).
Subsidies for the arts were justified, Danto thought, because art is “pivotal in mean-
ingful lives.” And even though “[n]obody is especially able to explain why” art should
rank with love among “the highest values that secular existence acknowledges” (1993,
33), Danto contented himself with observing its universal appeal. A practice dating back
to Neolithic caves could hardly be dismissed as the preoccupation of elites. Danto pointed,
in fact, to the desire to censor – the age-old impulse to condemn, exclude, destroy, or riot
over art – as evidence of art’s human importance, and thus its worthiness of subsidy.
Nevertheless, this does not answer the question of what sort of art or which art-
works should be subsidized, given scarce resources and the variety of other human
needs. In several places, Danto suggests that public funding should go to art that
wouldn’t otherwise be made: art the private sector fails to support. (This provides
another explanation for Danto’s elision of non-subsidy and censorship: work that can’t
be produced without subsidy is effectively prohibited when it is not subsidized.)
In other places, though, Danto offered a different argument, claiming that as tax-
payers, rather than as individuals who pay taxes, our interest is in supporting freedom,
not advancing our individual aesthetic preferences. “The taxpayer supports the free-
dom to make and show art,” he maintained, “even when it is art of a kind that this or
that individual finds repugnant” (1989, 192). It is freedom, he wrote in “Censorship
and Subsidy,” that is celebrated “when we allow or even support works” – again the eli-
sion – “whatever their content” (1993, 41). These arguments aren’t Danto’s best. Much
of the art that wouldn’t be made without subsidy shouldn’t be made. And the argument
that we support freedom when we support art, no matter its content, is just the stan-
dard claim about the First Amendment: we express American values when we protect
the speech we hate. The argument does nothing to suggest why we should subsidize the
speech we hate. And it fails to draw on the distinctive value that Danto claims for art.
The embodied meanings that, on Danto’s account, have been so essential to human-
kind throughout our history are treated no differently than any other expression – a
tweet, for example, or my last sentence. Having so famously defined art in terms of its
“aboutness,” Danto is the last person we might expect to make content irrelevant to our
decisions about what art to support.
Here again, Danto’s best argument may be not his actual arguments but his criti-
cism: how can work that occasions experiences like those he describes having of
Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Whitney not deserve public funding?
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3 Public Art Is Subsidized Art
Danto’s claims about subsidies become more perplexing, and intriguing, when placed aside
his stance on public art – most famously, on Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc. Serra’s site-specific
work was commissioned in 1979 by the General Services Administration, which paid him
$175,000 for the 75-ton sculpture. Criticism came soon after the work’s installation in
1981, mostly from area workers whose path across lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza was
blocked by the 12-foot high, 120-foot long wall of rusting steel. At a hearing called in 1985,
over 150 people debated whether Titled Arc should be removed. The GSA decided to remove
the work, which it owned. Serra sued to stop it but lost. His work was dismantled in 1989.
In his lawsuit, Serra claimed that removing the work would destroy it, and that doing
so because his work made members of the public uncomfortable violated the First
Amendment. The courts, to the contrary, found it important that the federal government
was making decisions about what to do with its own property rather than restricting
private expression. If one puts restraints on what the government can do with the work
it has purchased, one court said, the government will likely stop purchasing so much
art. The same court went on to claim, more questionably, that the GSA’s decision to
remove Serra’s work was prompted by its placement, not by its content. (This, despite
Serra’s claim that his site-specific work was largely about its placement.) In the
alternative, the court found that the government’s concerns about Tilted Arc’s content,
if any, were just that it was “ugly.” To find a work aesthetically unsuitable, the court
held, is not to censor an artist’s idea or a work’s message.
The Danto of the NEA controversies would have rejected each of these claims. Here,
after all, was work that could only exist through government subsidy. If anything, art
created for a public space like Serra’s depended on government largesse even more than
Mapplethorpe’s or Finley’s did. Serra needed the government not only to pay for his
work but also to provide the physical site that he thought so central to its meaning.
Denying these forms of state support meant that Serra’s work would arguably cease to
be – Danto’s criterion of censorship in the context of government funding.
Second, the court’s distinction between the “aesthetics” and “content” of Serra’s
work corresponded precisely to the Kantian formalist view that Danto rejected in
defending Mapplethorpe’s work. The hulking mass and other properties that led the
court to refer to Tilted Arc’s “lack of aesthetic appeal” were surely (to use a distinction
central to Danto’s later work on beauty) properties internal to the work’s meaning.
Finally, the Danto of the NEA controversies thought that we celebrate freedom, and
thus our shared values as Americans, whenever we the taxpayers support art that we
personally hate: “however divided individuals are on matters of taste, freedom is in the
interest of every citizen,” he had written. Yet, it was the repugnance felt by these very
individuals that was said to justify Tilted Arc’s removal.
4 Public Art Can Be Removed When the Public Doesn’t Like It
Danto sided nonetheless with those who clamored for the removal of Serra’s work. And he
did so neither because he disliked Tilted Arc as art nor because he thought the artworld was
wrong to praise it. The problem, he wrote in 1985, was the artworld’s assumption that
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“art is good, so it must be good for people to have it, without anybody making much of an
effort to translate the goodness of works that are not self-evidently good into terms people
can grasp.” Whereas Serra’s lawyer worried about art being put to a vote and “judged by
a common denominator,” Danto maintained that a work’s “candidacy for public commis-
sions must be seriously compromised” by its distance from the common denominator.
Clearly, there could be scant justification for placing, at public cost in public space, a work
that means nothing to the public beyond the fact that those who are supposed to under-
stand such things insist upon its excellence (1985a, 289).
When it came to Mapplethorpe, the fact that his values were offensive to much of the
public was, for Danto, no reason to deny funding; to the contrary, funding Mapplethorpe’s art
was an expression of our national commitment to freedom. Here, by contrast, Danto worried
that keeping Serra’s work in place “transmits the message that the government puts the value
of high art above the rights and interests of those who find its presence offensive” (1985a,
776). Public preferences provided sufficient reason for moving, even destroying, the work.
It is worth noting how, in both cases, Danto pitted the view of the public against that of
artworld elites. Recall the experts in Cincinnati, whose formalism turned Mapplethorpe’s
sadomasochism into abstractions, baffling the ordinary men and women of the jury. Danto’s
claim about Serra was importantly and revealingly different. Aestheticization was not
imposed upon Tilted Arc by experts; it was part of Serra’s own conception. Where the
Mapplethorpe “experts” told the public not to see what they clearly saw, Serra and his band
of experts wanted the public only to see what was given to their eyes. Serra, complained
Danto, reduced the public to “viewers”; he construed the site of his site-specific work “entirely
in optical terms” (2003, 106). On those terms, Danto found Serra’s work a great success. But
those terms were not the public’s – and that was the problem. “The public has an interest in
the existence of museums,” Danto wrote, “but it also has an interest in not having all of its
open spaces treated as though they were museums, in which esthetic interests rightly domi-
nate” (1985a, 776). How, he later asked, could the public not resent a work that “had been
imposed on the basis of almost purely visual considerations by those expert in such matters,
on people for whom visual considerations were only part of the story?” (2003, 106).
The placement of art in the midst of life is not always an unqualified good, and it is still
insufficiently appreciated that the right of people to participate in the decisions that affect
their lives extends to art when it impinges on their lives as lived (ibid).
It might seem as though Danto was worried about what lawyers call the captive audi-
ence problem. The First Amendment allows more leeway for restrictions on speech that
can’t be avoided: the protesters camped outside one’s house as opposed to those marching
down Fifth Avenue. Perhaps Danto was more protective of Mapplethorpe than Serra
because the public had to seek out the one but couldn’t even reach the subway without
running into the other. But this isn’t quite right. The difference in location – museum or
gallery versus public plaza – concerned more than place. For Danto, “art in public
spaces” and “public art” weren’t synonymous. You can take the Mapplethorpe out of
the gallery, but you can’t take the gallery out of the Mapplethorpe, in other words. Or, in
Danto’s words: “Specific unto a site is the form of life therein” (ibid.).
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Tilted Arc, according to Danto, was good art, but it was not good public art. And in
seeking as he did “a criterion for public art that justifies its removal if it does not meet
it” (1985a, 775), Danto insisted that works of public art are those in which the public
has “invested … its feelings, beliefs, and values. They in effect are the public in the
medium of art” (1985b, 289). Or again: “Public art is the public transfigured” (1985a,
776). Grant’s Tomb, the St. Louis Arch, and, especially, Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans
Memorial provided Danto his examples. Tilted Arc disregarded the feelings and inter-
ests of its public. It expressed and demanded a commitment to the aesthetic that could
only count in its favor as a work of public art if ours were a public whose deepest
values were themselves aesthetic. “What Serra has insisted,” Danto concluded, “is that
the esthetic override the political, which it cannot do when the art is public” (1985a,
776).
Discussing another Serra controversy, one surrounding a piece called Twain in
downtown St. Louis, Danto considered further the relevance of public preferences. A
referendum on public art, Danto said, would be appropriate as to its public quality,
not to its artistic quality. It would make no more sense to consult the public on the
question of whether the work was good as art than it would make sense to take a poll
“on the technologies of sanitation or traffic flow.” Better would be to “call in an
expert – in this instance, a philosopher of art” (1985b, 289). (Danto was kind
enough to offer his own expertise for free – or at least for the price of an issue of The
Nation.)
In this perhaps unexpected endorsement of artworld expertise, we see again how
Danto’s criticism of experts differed in the case of Serra as opposed to Mapplethorpe.
The Mapplethorpe experts, he thought, got Mapplethorpe’s art wrong; they aestheti-
cized it. The Serra experts, by contrast, interpreted his art correctly, at least qua art;
what they got wrong was the fact that works like Tilted Arc and Twain were not just art,
but public art – something categorically distinct.
This, then, is the reason Danto could, without contradiction, decry “censorship” in
the public funding wars even as he supported the public’s efforts to remove Tilted Arc.
Different standards applied because different forms of expression were at issue. In this,
Danto seemed to intuit a legal distinction that was becoming especially salient around
the same time: the category of “government speech,” which the Supreme Court began
employing in 1991. Government speech is a realm in which the First Amendment holds
no sway, for as the state gives expression to the will of the public, it must necessarily
promote some viewpoints over others. If the public doesn’t like what the government is
saying, it can demand a new message. Heeding this demand isn’t censorship but
democratic accountability.
Danto’s complex view of public art offers lessons for a present in which monuments
to the Confederacy keep getting pulled from their pedestals. If public art is, as Danto
claimed, “us, in the medium of artistic transformation” (1985a, 776), it makes sense
that as “we” change, so should our public art. Demanding that public artworks serve
the public’s interests is far different from a demand that artworks across the board
reflect “our” values if they are to receive our money. Art that is not public art, even if
publicly subsidized, is one of the means through which we contest what is “ours” and
who are “we.” Public art is one result of this contestation.
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5 Conclusion: How Not to Escape Danto’s Dilemma
Arthur Danto proclaimed himself pro-subsidy and anti-censorship. In truth, his posi-
tion was rather more nuanced. He supported a national arts endowment yet, as he
admitted in 1987, found less obvious the need for “art in public spaces, unless it is a
genuinely public art, serving genuinely social needs” (1987, 208). Placing art in public,
he thought, all-too-often seeks only to “transform the public into aesthetes” (1986, 56)
– the best use neither of public subsidies nor of public spaces. Similarly, his stance
against censorship was itself more complicated than his defenses of Mapplethorpe and
Serrano suggest. Often, he worried, artists and their defenders fight censorship by
invoking the formalist sanctity of art, and in the process they end up disenfranchising
it, making art innocuous by refusing it its aboutness. In the lecture that followed
“Censorship and Subsidy,” “Dangerous Art,” Danto described a trade-off: a more secu-
larized view of art makes space for artists to engage in politics, but risks counteraction,
including efforts to shut down their work (1992, 196).
Art has the privileges of freedom only because it is a form of expression. And to be seriously
interested in making an expression is to be seriously prepared to endure the consequences
of making it. It is also not an offense to counter outrage with outrage. On the contrary, it is
taking art seriously to do so (1989, 192).
Danto obviously took art seriously, both in his criticism and in his philosophy. Yet this
made his arguments against censorship more difficult. If artworks are embodied meanings,
governments that fund the arts are involved in meaning-making. Influencing what meaning
gets made is a dangerous business. Some might even call it censorship. And importantly,
someone like Danto cannot avoid this charge by protesting that the government is merely
making purely formal or aesthetic, rather than content-based, distinctions when it chooses
what art to subsidize. In his essays, Danto seemed less worried and certainly had less to say
about whether subsidies and the non-subsidies they entail could coexist with non-censor-
ship. More concerning to him were those who sought to escape this dilemma by confining
art within what he called the prison of pure aestheticism (1989, 192, 1992, 186).
For Danto, to understand art as something worth subsidizing was, in the end, to
understand why art might also be something worth censoring.
References
Danto, Arthur C. 1985a. “Public Art and the General Will.” The Nation, September 28, 288.
–––––. 1985b. “Tilted Arc and Public Art.” The Nation, June 22, 775.
–––––. 1986. “Diego Rivera: A Retrospective.” The Nation, July 19/26, 56.
–––––. 1987. “On Public Art and the Public Interest.” ARTnews, October, 208.
–––––. 1989. “Art and Taxpayers.” The Nation, August 21/28, 192.
–––––. 1992. “Dangerous Art.” In Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective,
179–97. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
–––––. 1993. “Censorship and Subsidy in the Arts.” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences 47(1): 25–41.
–––––. 1996. Playing with the Edge: The Photographic Achievement of Robert Mapplethorpe.
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–––––. 1998. “Art for Speech’s Sake.” The Nation, July 20, 4.
–––––. 2003. “The Removal of Tilted Arc.” Artforum, April, 106.
Kreimer, Seth. 1984. “Allocational Sanctions: The Problem of Negative Rights in a Positive State.”
University of Pennsylvania Law Review 132: 1293–397.
Oldenburg, Claes. 1961. “I Am for an Art….” In Environments, Situations, Spaces. New York:
Martha Jackson Gallery.
Post, Robert. 1996. “Subsidized Speech.” Yale Law Journal 106: 151–95.
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34
Amnesty International and Human Rights
EMMA STONE MACKINNON
One morning in 1968, Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Sidney Morgenbesser climbed
into a Land Rover and drove north toward Walden Pond. The trip was arranged and
recorded by David Brooks, an emerging filmmaker and a former undergraduate student
of both Danto and Morgenbesser, for what became his “The Wind Is Driving Him
Toward the Open Sea.” In the film, the three play a trio of car-pooling philosophers en
route to a conference, with Brooks, in the role of hitchhiker, along for the ride.
Many of the scenes that feature the three men take place in a field near Walden Pond
where they appear to have stopped for a break. They stand in the sun, kicking a can,
talking about skepticism. As Danto later recounted in undated notes under the title
“Philosophical Red”: “The idea was that the philosophers would be discussing the
Problem of the External World with great intensity, paying no attention whatever to the
External World, as symbolized by the hitch-hiker” (Box 2 Unprocessed, Danto Papers).
Scenes from the meadow are interspersed with shots from the car at sunrise on the FDR
Drive, then arriving by ferry on Martha’s Vineyard. There, residents interviewed on
camera recount the travails of a local character known as Chandler, a veteran recently
returned from Vietnam who is haunted by, and in a sense continuously reliving, mem-
ories of the war. As one woman close to him describes: “He was there in some sense, his
spirit was there.” His doctor says that “It’s the war that ruined him,” and laments that
he is one of “so many boys” in small American towns for whom doctors can do only so
much: “If you see him now, he’s all shot to pieces. Whose fault is it? It’s our fault, our
civilization.” We cut back to the quarreling philosophers and their banter: can one
prove that grass exists; is that even an interesting question; haven’t philosophers settled
this by now. Morgenbesser riffs: “When philosophers really talk about grass, they don’t
have doubts about grass in the way in which I might have doubts … if they had doubts,
they were misconceived doubts, they were not doubts which come from, which would
ordinarily come from grounds for doubt … philosophical doubt should never … have to
do with one’s heart” (Brooks, 1969).
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It’s an easy joke: the head-in-the-clouds absurdity of the philosophers’ inquiries as,
caught up in their argument, they appear to feel none of what we classically associate
with that pond. And yet matters of the heart catch up with them in their very enjoy-
ment of their craft: shots of the can-kicking men are followed by shots of children kick-
ing a can, delighting in their game. Describing the film in “Philosophical Red,” Danto
registered a similar irony: “There was something magic about the day, as there was
something mythic about a wayfarer’s encounter with three philosophers, who debated
the existence of what no one could seriously doubt.” After their road trip, when Brooks
began editing, he discovered he had put the film into the camera incorrectly: the scenes
of the philosophers had come out entirely in red. On Danto’s telling, he resolved to use
the film anyway, and in the end “turned disaster into triumph.” Danto explains: “The
philosophers were a monochrome parenthesis in a world reeling in color.” The red of
the film, as he tells it, served as a frame for the trio, further marking their separation
from the world (Box 2 Unprocessed, Danto Papers).
In real life, Danto was quite engaged in the world, through campus activism at
Columbia and as an early member of Amnesty International USA (AIUSA). In 1968,
when student radicals took over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and held the dean hostage,
Danto recounts that he, that can-kicking philosopher, received a call from the occupiers
asking for advice (Danto 2013, 33–4). Danto also worked with AIUSA, as part of both
the executive board and the Riverside Chapter, to free what Amnesty famously termed
“prisoners of conscience.” He attended meetings, took minutes, and wrote letters to
prisoners, their families, and any government official who was thought to have some
possible strategic relevance.
Assuming we don’t view Danto as the comically oblivious character from Brooks’
film, how should we understand the relationship between his philosophy and his
engagements with the external world? The most straightforward approach would be to
see him as rejecting any separation between the work of the philosopher and the rest of
the world, and to treat his political work as flowing from his philosophical commit-
ments, exemplifying and illustrating them. In a new preface to his 1965 Nietzsche as
Philosopher, Danto asks, “How often, after all, does a philosopher, acting in the line of
duty, actually help save lives?” (Danto 2005, xviii). The question appears as a reflection
on his own effort to, in his words, “slay the Minotaur” contained in Nietzsche’s philos-
ophy, as he tries to grapple with news reports citing the influence of Nietzsche’s work on
school shootings. (In an early draft contained in his papers, he is responding to one in
Pearl, Mississippi, and in a revised version to those in Columbine, Colorado, as well. See
Danto Papers, Box 2 Unprocessed.) Can we understand his political work as an effort to
offer an ethical basis to guide politics and so to put philosophy into practice?
There are moments when he seems to invite such an interpretation. On the phone
with the Columbia students in 1968, he expressed sympathy with their cause, though
he said he wouldn’t help them until they agreed to release the dean, appealing to what
he described as “Kantian grounds”: he felt that one shouldn’t use another person only
as a means to an end. After all, reading Danto’s involvement in Amnesty as an effort to
put into practice an ethical defense of human dignity and opposition to suffering would
be consistent with how Amnesty’s political significance is usually understood. Describing
Amnesty to his later Columbia colleague, historian Samuel Moyn, Danto explained the
task as that of “saving the world one individual at a time” (Moyn 2008, 132). Danto’s
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line seems to betray a deeply felt humanism that guided his practical politics. For Moyn,
Amnesty is thought to have inaugurated, almost accidentally, a version of human rights
politics premised on an ethical commitment to the sanctity of the individual, aiming to
create “a better world of dignity and respect” (4). Danto certainly held views that he
described as humanist in this sense, and he was a signatory to the Humanist Manifesto
II. Perhaps his work with Amnesty was an effort to make philosophical ideals of human
dignity and respect a reality in the external world, to bring his ethical convictions to
bear, and so to save that world, one person at a time, from its worst monsters.
I want to resist this reading of Danto’s involvement in Amnesty, and, with it, the
treatment of politics as the practical extension of philosophy. At the same time, I want
to avoid treating politics and philosophy as simply separate, the former requiring action
based on ethical ideals or matters of the heart, the latter endlessly scrutinizing and try-
ing to parse “what no one could seriously doubt.” Drawing on Danto’s philosophy of
history, his activism, and two pieces he published on war and morality, I argue that, in
his view, political action, the external world, and matters of the heart are necessarily
characterized by a certain not-knowing, a lack of knowledge that defines the experi-
ence of acting in history. For Danto, engaging in direct political action required not that
one ground politics in stable ethical principles or substantive absolutes, but that one
embrace that lack of knowledge and act from it. Correspondingly, for philosophy to be
truly of the world, it must respond to the lack of knowledge felt by historical actors,
rather than seek to apply some externally derived principle.
In Narration and Knowledge, Danto describes what he terms a “narrative sentence”: a
sentence that describes an earlier event through reference to a later one, and so offers
an account of that earlier event that would have been unavailable when it first took
place. Among his most frequent examples is the “Thirty Years War” – a designation
that describes a war through reference to its ending, and would have been impossible
for its actual participants to give. If the description of an event is not knowable in the
moment in which it is experienced, writing history is not a project of understanding
what it was like to live in a particular period but instead a project of narration. If his-
tory takes the form of retroactive narration, the lived experience of historical events is
characterized by ignorance of the meaning of those same events (Danto 2007).
Reflecting on his experience of the student occupations of 1968, Danto writes: “I
learned what it is like to live in history. It is not knowing how things are going to come
out” (Danto 2013, 32–4).

That sense of ignorance and improvisation comes through in Danto’s work with
Amnesty International. Danto was a long-time member of the Riverside Group of
Amnesty International, named for Manhattan’s Riverside Drive (home to several of the
group’s members; Danto lived at number 420). Riverside first registered as Group 3 but
later took on an additional registration, as Group 16, in order to double the quota of
prisoners it could “adopt.” Members of other Amnesty groups frequently sat in on their
meetings to observe and learn – as did outside spectators, until the group decided to
prohibit such “voyeurs.” In a 1976 tenth anniversary accounting, the group claimed
eight current prisoner “adoptees,” and 45 past adoptees; all but 6 of the 45 had been
released, and several of those released had been re-arrested, re-adopted, and re-released
(minutes and other materials from the group are in Box 5, Folder “Riverside,” Ivan
Morris Papers).
303
As Danto describes it, “We met monthly up and down Riverside Drive, and dreamt up
strategies, with limited but definite success, to get ‘prisoners of conscience’ freed”
(Danto 2013, 15). Each current adoptee was assigned to between two and four group
members who took primary responsibility for work on the case and reported to the
group each month. At the meetings, they would request resources or contacts from
other members, discuss possible new strategies, or offer “special appeals” for additional
involvement (ask each person in the group to mail a particular prisoner a birthday card,
for example). Over the years, the cases on which Danto worked personally ranged
widely, including those of Antonin Rusek, from Czechoslovakia; Enrique Erro, from
Uruguay and imprisoned in Argentina; Geneveva Forest, from Spain; Reggie Pakiry
Vandajar, from South Africa; Jose Luis Verdejo Duarte, from Chile; and Ben Hacem
Mohammed Lahbib, from Morocco (see Ivan Morris Papers as well as Box IV.2.2, Folder
“Riverside Group,” AIUSA National Office Records).
Some of the work involved the letter-writing for which Amnesty is known best: for
Erro’s case, for example, Danto wrote to then-Argentinean President Maria Estela
Martínez de Perón after she had returned to the presidency following an illness, con-
gratulating her on her return and then referencing Erro’s imprisonment, “a matter of
human rights, which I would hope you could rectify in the spirit of humanitarianism
and amnesty which is appropriate to your return to presidential duty.” For Duarte’s
case, at the group’s meeting on January 20, 1975, they had decided that alongside “the
usual letter-writing, visits to Chilean authorities, etc.,” an effort would be made by
another member to arrange for the group to make a presentation about the case before
the Organization of American States’ meeting in April, and that Danto and Ainslee
Embree (a fellow Columbia professor and Riverside member) would write to Secretary
of State Henry Kissinger, “expressing our gratitude concerning his efforts for Chilean
prisoners and urging him to do more.” The tone of the actual letter is more sly than the
minutes convey:
We noted with pleasure the implication in your conversation with Mr. Moyers that you are
actively intervening in the release of political prisoners in Chile. We cannot completely
agree that public knowledge of the fact would be detrimental in its success – after all you
just have publicized it – and we cannot help but feel that in view of our dismal record in
recent times on matters of human rights, a whiff of humanitarianism might earn us
friends in the moral community. But in any case we look forward to news of actual releases
in Chile, where our information is that the treatment of prisoners grows daily more
horrendous.
Such a multi-front approach was characteristic of Riverside’s work. The reference to

the United States’ “dismal record” on human rights was less characteristic, at least of
AIUSA as a whole, given Amnesty’s rule against allowing any group to lobby their own
government (which may be why Danto and Embree sent the letter not on Amnesty’s
letterhead but Columbia’s; the letters to Perón and to Kissinger are in Danto’s personal
papers).
From 1972 to 1975, Danto also served on the national board of AIUSA, with some
of that time spent on the board’s executive committee. Riverside’s membership over-
lapped heavily, and controversially, with the leadership of AIUSA (see notes from June
304
23, 1975, Riverside Group meeting, Ivan Morris Papers, as well as “Minutes of the
Annual Meeting and the Board of Directors Held March 4, 1972,” National Office
Records). Objections to the outsize role of this single group, and presumably the sense
of exclusion felt by other board members, resulted in a new rule intended to limit such
overlap, which helped occasion Danto’s resignation from the board. His resignation
was submitted in a letter to the AIUSA Board of Directors and recorded at their
December 17, 1975 meeting (Box I.1.1 Folder 12, AIUSA National Office Records).
The rule limited the number of members of any particular Amnesty group who could
simultaneously be on the national board – what Danto referred to in his resignation
letter as a “lunatic law.” In a letter to Morris, he wrote that he was sorry to see the
“politicians” take over but was glad to be able to return his focus to the direct cam-
paigning of the Riverside Group; after all, he wrote, he had “no particular talent for
the larger political and organizational questions the board has devoted itself to, and
candidly no great interest either” (Box 4, Folder “Correspondence,” Ivan Morris
Papers; also see Morris’ October 24, 1975 reply, Box 4, Folder “Board of Directors,”
Ivan Morris Papers).
Danto’s work with Amnesty was motivated in part by a brief glimpse into France’s
violence during the war in Algeria. He writes about being in Paris during the 1961
October Massacre and seeing the bodies of Algerian protesters, killed by police, floating
in the Seine. He notes that he viewed the French use of torture in its effort to suppress
the Algerian rebellion as the “source” of the “epidemic of torture throughout the Third
World,” and that “it was especially because of its antitorture campaign that I became
active in Amnesty International” (Danto 2013, 7). Danto also felt a deep camaraderie
with his Amnesty cohort: in his letter to Morris, conveying his decision to leave the
board, Danto compared the Riverside Group to a family, and described it as an “organic
and spiritually cohesive [organization]…which, apart from the good work it does, on
behalf of prisoners, enriches all our lives: just working with the sort of people who work
that way is an enriching experience.” Lest this paint the attachments within the group
as entirely harmonious, note Danto’s description to Morris in a June 19, 1974 letter of
one Riverside colleague: “she has … only an abstract sort of heart, and makes the
severest demands on people just because I do not think she perceives humans quite as
humans, with quite the charity they merit: but she is, even so, a remarkable person, and
the group would be poorer without her, Lord knows” (Box 4, Folder “Correspondence
1974,” Ivan Morris Papers).

For the group’s tenth anniversary in 1976, Danto was overseas in a visiting faculty
position in Dubrovnik but wrote a letter to Barbara Sproul with a message to the group
(“and especially to Ivan”). He writes:
Ten years of nagging at governments … is a dubious occasion for celebration: one wishes
we did not have to exist. In terms of what we exist in response to, I should wish, more than
anything, that we not exist ten years hence – not even a year hence – and that in a sense it
is a matter for tears that we should have existed at all. Still, pessimism is in obvious order,
and given the dismal realities of the world, congratulations are also in order, it being a
redemptive fact that we are, and that we have functioned responsively and effectively and
with a hint of group conscience and heart. My love to everyone there (Box 5, Folder
“Riverside Group,” Ivan Morris Papers; emphasis original).
305
Far from painting an image of a humanist utopia to come, or offering guiding ideals
to motivate their efforts, Danto expresses a wish for an ending. Seeking some affirma-
tion amidst his pessimism, he does not register hope for the future, nor does he lapse
into commiseration exactly. Instead, he invokes the group members’ bonds with each
other, and their shared efforts to respond adequately to the “dismal realities of the
world.”
That ethic of responsiveness, as well as the desire to be able to narrate the present as
past, was something Danto carried over to his philosophy as well. In 1978, Danto’s
essay, “On Moral Codes and Modern War” – perhaps the closest thing he published to a
philosophical theory of human rights – appeared in the journal Social Research. The
piece explicitly defends the rights of “prisoners of conscience,” arguing that, even if a
war is being fought for just ends, there are boundaries to what can be done for the sake
of those ends. He identifies those boundaries not as the consequence of some absolute
and inviolable moral baseline, but instead as internal to the very idea of a war fought for
moral ends – indeed, internal to any notion of war understood through its “central
case,” which he defines as “the resort to armed violence as a means to modify political
policy” (Danto 1978, 176). On July 17, 1986, Danto sent a copy of the piece to Ben
Sonnenberg, his editor at Grand Street and a fellow Riverside Drive resident, noting: “I
enclose a piece I once wrote about war. One way or another, everything that has hap-
pened to me has found its way into philosophy, and this piece cost me an immense energy
to write. It is of the greatest importance to me that it is studied in the freshman course at
West Point” (Subseries II.1, Box 43, Folder 15, Grand Street Publications, Inc. Records).
Given his response to those students holding the dean hostage, one might expect
Danto to oppose any notion of a just war: wouldn’t that, too, imply using people as a
means? But in the piece, Danto rejects such an argument: “the pacifist … thinks the tak-
ing of life as a means to political change outweighs in the scale of moral condemnability
any consideration of the moral quality of life. So in a way he is not of this world” (Danto
1978, 177). He expands on this later: “To be of the world is to think it possible that the
quality of life can justify the taking of life as a means to changing or preserving it”
(179). For philosophy to be of the world, it would seem, requires not that it set out stan-
dards applicable in practice, with clear consequences for policy (an absolute opposition
to war, say), but rather that it be responsive to the world, in all its variety. Along these
lines, he does not attempt to delineate what sorts of reasons, what concerns about the
quality of life, would count as legitimate. Instead, he notes that people will fight for all
sorts of ideals, including “hideous” ones – and that, especially in light of this, anyone
concerned with morality would be hard-pressed to justify pacifism in all cases.
Danto argues, contra Hobbes, that war is not natural, as violence might be, but is
instead conventional, something that can only exist once there are states. As a consequence,
certain things can be criminal, or against the rules. More profoundly, this also means that,
as he puts it, war is in a sense a game, and that therefore the idea that “all is fair” simply
can’t apply. The rules are necessarily a matter of convention, and yet not simply deter-
mined by past agreement: they arise from the nature of the game itself. It is unfair to do
things that would either unduly help one’s opponent, or disproportionately savage them.
Danto cites Kant’s concern that a war with no rules could end only in the “perpetual
peace” of the graveyard. To fight a war in which all is fair, in which rules don’t apply – in
which the consequences of one’s actions are taken as irrelevant to the greater cause
306
because the ends can endlessly justify the means – would make a meaningful future
peace impossible, as war itself would never end. We would have to accept war itself as “a
perpetual state rather than a means to anything.” Such an approach would, Danto
claims, indicate that one, like the pacifist, is not truly of this world (a position he likens
to that of Arjuna in the Bhagavat Gita, a text he taught for several years with Ivan
Morris in Columbia’s Oriental Humanities core curriculum). Instead, he says, for the
kinds of wars that he is interested in, “just because they are means they imply an end in
both senses” (178). That is, they are means to an end, and must come to an end; they do
not aim to transform the world entirely, but to change particular political conditions.
Danto claims that the means of fighting are therefore limited to those that would not
prevent the war itself from ending and peace from beginning again. Living through the
Thirty Years War, one might not have known what to call it, but one could still work to
make peace possible afterward. This is also how Danto justifies prohibitions on torture
and other human rights protections:
The Hague convention of 1907, the Nuremburg [sic] principles, the four Geneva conven-
tions of 1949, the United Nations declaration on human rights imply a belief that, while
war itself may not be abolished, wars terminate, and men and nations should in fighting
them be exposed to such costs and danger as are consistent with returning to a state of
peace in conditions as much like those under which they left it as is consistent with making
war: to take up life again (185).
These are also the reasons he gives for opposing the American use of napalm in Vietnam,
practices of “saturation bombing,” or any use of nuclear weapons: they would preclude
a return to peaceful life after war’s end. As Danto argues, the problem with napalm was
not the immediate physical suffering it inflicted; the problem was that the deforestation
and destruction it caused made it nearly impossible for the war to truly come to an end,
for the country to mark the end of the war and return to peace.
Danto sent “On Moral Codes and Modern War” to Sonnenberg because he was
working on a piece for Grand Street that he saw as related, which appeared in the maga-
zine in 1987 as “Gettysburg.” The latter piece underscores the sense in which war is
characterized by a sense of not-knowing, a kind of ignorance. In a Heideggerian vein,
Danto writes that a certain area of ground becomes a “battlefield,” a set of events a
“battle,” only when thematized as such. The battle of Gettysburg took place in the fog,
on a particular stretch of land that “was nowhere, of no importance and no consequence.”

This is what Danto calls, again recalling Heidegger, “the sheer Geworfenheit of war,” that
we find ourselves thrown into it; “the essence of war is accident” (Danto 1987, 104–8).
He ties this to the feeling he had as a soldier in World War II, landing at night on Italian
beaches, “with no clear idea of what lay ahead of us” (Danto 2013, 51).
Looking back, historians describe Gettysburg as a victory for the North, perhaps the
beginning of the end of the war. Yet Gettysburg for Danto evokes both “pity and terror”
not because of its role in the Union victory, but because “of the tragedy inherent in that
terrible juxtaposition of the most deadly armaments and ordnance known up to that
time, with…the most vulnerably clad soldiery in history” (Danto 1987, 98). In the stan-
dard Civil War memorial, depicting a soldier with a cloth cap, the soldier displays in his
dress the presence of a “code of military conduct,” a nod to chivalry that was absent in
his gun, a rifled musket “indifferent to any consideration other than maiming and
307
death.” After Gettysburg, as Danto tells it, “the triumph of slaughter over chivalry gave
rise to Sherman’s horrifying march…to total war, to the fire-bombing of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, to the rolled grenade in the fueled jetliner” (111). To praise Gettysburg is to
miss the significance of the story it began, the rise of a new kind of warfare that would
not be governed by chivalry but by slaughter, and that has not yet, as Danto sees it,
come to an end. To the extent that Gettysburg might speak to “what is universal and
human,” and so “address humanity,” this is not because of what the North represented,
but because it provides a beginning point to understand the horror of total war, of mis-
matched and disproportionate battles (116). While Danto might seem to be advocating
a return to chivalry, he is instead arguing that war should be a means only to an end,
and so must be able to be brought to an end.
What Danto opposed was not suffering as such, but the situation, in Brooks’s film, of
Chandler: stuck forever in a moment of horror, unable to move on. The horror inflicted
on Chandler by his civilization was not simply his evident suffering and need for medical
care, but that he was still there, still at war, and could never fully be at peace. Danto
sought the release of political prisoners not in the service of a higher moral absolute, but
because he didn’t know how things were going to come out. In his advocacy and his phi-
losophy, he sought to help create a future in which present horrors could become past.
References
Brooks, David Brooks, dir. 1969. The Wind Is Driving Him Toward the Open Sea. New York:
Anthology Film Archives.
Danto, Arthur C. 1978. “On Moral Codes and Modern War.” Social Research 45(1) Spring:
176–90.
–––––. 1987. “Gettysburg.” Grand Street 6(3) Spring: 98–116.
–––––. 2005. Nietzsche as Philosopher, Expanded edn. New York: Columbia University Press.
–––––. 2007. Narration and Knowledge, 3rd edn. New York: Columbia University Press.
–––––. 2013. “Intellectual Autobiography of Arthur C. Danto.” In The Philosophy of Arthur C.
Danto, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 1–70. Library of Living Philosophers.
Moyn, Samuel. 2008. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Archival Sources
A.C. Danto Papers. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Amnesty International of the USA, Inc. National Office Records. Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Columbia University.
Grand Street Publications, Inc. Records. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Ivan I. Morris Papers. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Personal papers of Arthur C. Danto shared with author by Lydia Goehr.
308
35
Random Noise, Radical Silence
MARLIES DE MUNCK
“Pop was more philosophically radical than Cage” (Danto 2004, 57). It is hard to find a
statement more paradigmatic of Arthur Danto’s take on the arts. He is not just express-
ing a preference for the visual arts. He writes the statement with almost a logical
necessity. It also follows from his deep involvement with the avant-garde of the sixties
and his philosophical endeavor to discern the difference among indiscernibles. By pit-
ting John Cage against Andy Warhol, Danto shows how the arts themselves were
gripped by a progressive logic that aimed at only one goal: to overcome the gap between
art and life. At the same time, there are reasons to believe that this statement exhibits a
certain blindness – or deafness – to the kind of revolution that Cage advocated for his
music. Cage’s view on the relation between art and life radically differed from the vision
of Pop artists. The question is whether Danto was right about the radicalism of Cage’s
artistic endeavors. While giving Danto the last word, I will explore the different sides of
this issue.
In Danto’s view, Cage was a precursor to Warhol, on the same track but less radical.
Both were searching for ways to close the gap between art and life. Romantic artists had
so widened this gap as to trigger a counter movement, led in part by Duchamp with his
readymades, but also by many others who questioned what they saw as the isolated
nature and antisocial status of the fine arts. By the 1950s, the counter movement
attained a great momentum in the experimental art scene. By trying to overcome the
gap, the gap itself became the core concept in both art-writing and philosophy: even a
battle line. Robert Rauschenberg, in Danto’s reading, made art precisely in the gap bet-
ween art and life when he made art out of anything. Painting with a pair of socks was
just as good as using brushes (Danto 2005, xvii). Others, like Warhol, brought
commonplace objects from life to give the now artworks an asylum in the gallery.
Playing with the gap was a liberation from traditional strictures in the artworld. Taking
on the gap, Danto asked after the ontology or metaphysics of the crossing. He used the
word “transfiguration.” Did then the artwork live on one side or on both sides at once?
309
MARLIES DE MUNCK
In his essay “Upper West Side Buddhism,” Danto explains how the aim of over-
coming the gap was inspired by Zen Buddhism. The reconciliation of religion and daily
life triggered the imagination of many New Yorkers who, in the mid-fifties, sought an
alternative to Abstract Expressionism. Dr. Suzuki taught classes at Columbia University.
With a revolutionary ring, his suggestions for the overcoming, reconciling, and trans-
figuring of ordinary objects were taken up not only by Danto but also by his classmate,
John Cage. Cage’s musical experiments were infused with the spirit of Zen, as were the
productions of the emerging Fluxus movement.
During the three movements of Cage’s by now classic composition 4’33”, the per-
former closes and opens the piano lid, to reverse the traditional order of actions. Titled
for its time span, it is known as a piece not of sound or noise but of silence, but a silencing
of what one expects to hear as music in a concert hall. It opens up a space on the stage
for all the contingent noises: coughs, laughs, traffic noises, creaky chairs, occasional
snores, to ask why this material is not also musical. For Danto, the composition is
accordingly about overcoming the sometimes or potentially indiscernible differences
between musical sounds and mere noise, and in this sense anticipates Warhol’s Brillo
installation (Danto 2004, 57). Cage asks not whether commonplace sounds become
music, as perhaps suggested by Danto’s appeal to transfiguration, but why we do not
consider them music from the get go.
To point out that 4’33” lacks the true radicalism of Pop, Danto provides a curious
thought experiment, asking us to “[i]magine that in a rehearsal room nearby, just when
the performer closes the lid to begin 4’33”, someone plays Humoresque on the violin.
That would still be like coughs and snoring, since it was unintended by Cage. The latter
are ‘musical’ only in the context of performance of 4’33” – although one of the things
Cage intended to teach us was how to listen to the unintended music of everyday noise”
(Danto 2004, 57–8). Danto thinks that the unintended Humoresque shows that Cage
wanted not to do away with high art music but to extend its domain to any and all
sound. Through the material extension, the gap presumably between intended and
unintended sounds would be overcome. Yet Danto concludes contrarily, that, with
4’33”, Cage “left unaffected the difference between the kinds of sounds traditionally
counted as musical and such noises as coughs and snoring, or the crying of a baby”
(Danto 2004, 57). So what then did Cage’s composition offer?
In Warhol’s Brillo Box, everything was fully intended. Total control, for Danto, ren-
dered the artwork visually indiscernible from the commonplace counterparts. The
indiscernibility was what led Danto to reassess the gap, not to erase it but to preserve it.
Imagine not now an unintended Humoresque, but a painting by Alphonse Mucha left
over in the space? For Danto, it could not have been included in Warhol’s installation.
Indiscernibility becomes the more telling philosophical gesture than all-inclusiveness.
So Cage did not provide the kind of top-notch puzzle – a “koan” – for philosophy that
Warhol did. In this sense, Warhol seems closer to the spirit of Zen, as he delivered a per-
fectly paradoxical riddle that calls for an enlightened concept of art: how can an object
be a work of art, while its indiscernible counterpart is not? The question, however, is
whether the philosophical radicalism of Cage’s work is to be found in such riddles at all.
Is there no deeper fundamental difference between the sound of coughs and laughs,
and a work of art composed of Brillo boxes? Was Cage only preparing the road for
Warhol’s game of indiscernibles?
310
Danto seemed to be struggling to keep Cage and Pop in line so as not to betray the
elemental insights that he first formulated in his seminal article “The Artworld.” There,
he argued that to be an artwork does not depend on (visual) aesthetic qualities at all, if
two objects look exactly alike and only one is a work of art. He concluded that there
must be another way to determine what art is, what he termed the “is of artistic
identification.” Unlike the hard-headed Testadura who sees a stick as a mere stick, the
informed audience sees that the art-stick is about, say, the dim condition of our planet
facing global warming. The “is of artistic identification” asserts that the stick is our
somber, withering future. It provides a bridge to cross (but mind) the gap between “mere
things” and art, because it allows commonplace objects to embody a meaning, and,
therefore, to be works of art. The question, however, is whether Cage created a similar
bridge by providing a stage for random sounds. Were the unintended sounds and noises
really meant to be transformed into Art?
To illustrate the idea of “transfiguration,” Danto repeatedly referred to a famous
thought of the Chinese Zen master Ch’ing Yuan:
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and waters as
waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that
mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got the very
substance I am at rest. For it is just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and
waters once again as waters (Danto 1964, 579, 2004, 58).
Zen Buddhism provided the terms to think about the philosophical problem of
indiscernibles: recognizing a work of art is all a matter of enlightenment of the viewer.
The only relevant question is how a viewer comes to understand the “aboutness” of a
work. According to Danto, this centrally involves knowing that a work of art stands at
a distance from the world of common things, even when an artist claims that his
painting is no more than white and black paint. It can still be a work of art, for by
rejecting every further interpretation, the work exemplifies that refusal and so remains
in the orbit of the history and theory of art. In Danto’s words, “this artist has returned
to the physicality of paint through an atmosphere compounded of artistic theories
and the history of recent and remote painting, elements of which he is trying to refine
out of his own work; and as a consequence of this his work belongs in this atmosphere
and is part of this history” (Danto 1964, 579). For Danto, a work of art cannot escape
its “aboutness.”
Just like seeing mountains as mountains and waters as waters, the statement “This
black paint is black paint” need not be a tautology. The non-tautological reading pre-
serves a fundamental, philosophical difference between commonplace and art objects.
It discerns indiscernibles and firmly places them on different sides of the gap. This is
why, according to Danto, Jasper Johns’ attempts to collapse the distance between the
vehicle and the content of his artworks is doomed. It is simply impossible, Danto main-
tains, to destroy the semantical space between artwork and reality (Danto 1974, 148).
In Danto’s philosophy, this is a logical impossibility. The semantical space accounts for
the aboutness of the work and is thus the necessary condition for something to be an
artwork. To recognize something as a work of art is to accept the existence of a gap bet-
ween art and life.
311
MARLIES DE MUNCK
If classifying something as a work of art (apart from any specific interpretation) is a

way of seeing (or hearing) the world, it requires a transformation of the viewer or lis-
tener so that the commonplace can be experienced as a world of art. At first sight, this
is precisely what Cage wanted to achieve with 4’33”. During those four minutes and
thirty-three seconds, hearing becomes listening, so that ambient sounds can become
music. But Cage was less interested in transfiguration than in experience and enlighten-
ment. On the one hand, he wanted to trigger a new, open-minded way of concert
listening. Sounds usually barred or (unconsciously) filtered out by the listener should be
permitted to re-enter the musical space. In this respect, 4’33” is a precursor to Warhol’s
Brillo Box when and if common materials and objects are granted access to the
Artworld. The second intended result is the realization that all daily sounds and ambient
noises are worth being listened to in an attentive artistic way. One can hear them as
music anywhere, at any time, even far away from concert halls or other performance
places. Here, Cage’s intentions fundamentally diverge from what Danto makes of them,
for what Cage wants is to demonstrate that there is music on the life side of the gap.
This has two possible implications: either the gap is no ontological requirement for
music as an art, or the concept of music does not necessarily coincide with the concept
of art. Danto remarks that Cage himself was not very clear on the philosophy of his
piece. He concludes that “when, finally, the philosophy was articulated, it was that the
distinction between art and life must somehow be overcome” (Danto 2004, 56). But to
what does “somehow” amount? Is there, in Cage’s work, room for a distinction between
music and natural sounds?
The same philosophical vagueness arises with regard to the artifacts of the Fluxus
movement. When in 1984 Danto first encounters Fluxus in a show at the Whitney
Museum, he sees it as a forerunner and ally of Pop Art, just like Cage. He calls the Fluxus
objects “cabinets of the commonplace”: “The ordinary is [already] wonderful enough”
(Danto 2005, 337). The only difference is that Pop artists were interested in turning
throwaway imagery into works of art, while Fluxus used the same kind of commonplace
images and objects without doing anything (artistic) to them. The only aim, Danto
noticed, was to reveal that everything is marvelous. In the words of George Brecht:
“Between art and everyday life, there’s no difference … I take a chair and I simply put it
in a gallery. The difference between a chair by Duchamp and one of my chairs is that
Duchamp’s is on a pedestal and mine can still be used” (Danto 2005, 340).
Fluxus was an anti-art movement. In his Fluxus Manifesto of 1966, Fluxus-founder

George Maciunas dismissed exclusiveness, individuality, significance, profundity, and
many more qualities traditionally associated with art (Danto 2005, 338). By reject-
ing all criteria that had formerly distinguished art from life, he seemed to be saying
that none of them were essential to the concept of art. For Danto, these Fluxus works
triggered the same question as Warhol’s Brillo Box had done twenty years earlier:
they are art – but by virtue of what? (Danto 2005, 337). His answer remained
unchanged: by denying all that has ever been associated with art, these commonplace
objects are transfigured into art. They become emblems of negation and stand to the
Artworld as exemplifications of the very denial. They are about what it means to be
or not to be art.
At the same time, one can sense a paradox: Fluxus objects are deliberately chosen or
assembled to abolish the distinction between art and life, while they can only “work,”
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according to Danto, because there is – and must be – a fundamental difference between

art and life. This is like having your cake and eating it. If there is a difference, then
Fluxus must be cheating. If not, then something must be wrong with Danto’s theory of
art. In “Upper West Side Buddhism,” Danto shows a possible way out of this dilemma.
He refers to Robert Rauschenberg, whose white paintings served as a source of inspira-
tion for Cage’s 4’33”: “Cage said that he saw them as ‘airports for shadows and dust’ –
or as ‘mirrors for air.’ The deep point was that they were no more empty than his own
1952 composition was silent. The panels themselves collaborated, one might say, with
the environment, so that the ambient lights and shadows became part of the art, instead
of being aesthetically erased in order to allow a response to the pure, unsullied blank. If
a wayward pigeon dropped shit on the white, that would be part of the work, at least in
Cage’s view (Rauschenberg, on the other hand, stipulated that the panels be repainted,
to keep them fresh.)” (Danto 2004, 56).
The way out is in the last lines. Why would Rauschenberg stipulate that the panels
be repainted? What does his disagreement with Cage amount to? In an interview about
his white paintings, Rauschenberg stated that he “did them to see how far, you know,
you could push an object, and yet it still means something.”1 This is perfectly in line
with Danto’s definition of art. However minimal their form and content, the panels are
meant to embody a meaning. If Rauschenberg aimed to question the gap between art
and life, his point was not to escape the world of art. Rather, he tested the artworld’s
boundaries by seeking its minimal limit. Perhaps the gap was displaced, but it was also
reaffirmed.
It is tempting to see the emptiness of Rauschenberg’s white paintings as a match
for the silence of Cage’s 4’33”. Still, Cage’s approach to the white canvasses shows a
different philosophical concern to Rauschenberg’s. The “deep point” of the white
canvasses, according to Cage, was that their emptiness invites the viewer to discover
the aesthetic qualities of ambient elements, like light and dust, that are usually
neglected when looking at a painting. This is in line with his aesthetic appreciation
of random noises. However, Rauschenberg did not want any possible aesthetic qual-
ities to contaminate his paintings. For him, the paintings had to remain dust-free
precisely because he wanted to prevent the dust from being experienced as an
aesthetic quality.
Danto was right to see both artists exploring the limits of art, but in the
Rauschenberg-example, we find another reason to question Danto’s reading of Cage.

While Rauschenberg and Warhol engaged in a conceptual revolution, Cage offered a
different kind of turn. Together with other Pop artists, Rauschenberg transformed the
Artworld, while Cage aimed at a re-enfranchisement of the commonplace. Not by sus-
pending it from its commonplace and turning it into art but simply by showing this
side of the gap to the audience. Perhaps Cage, more than Warhol, completed the long
history of emancipation by freeing the commonplace from its age-old inferior status as
“non-art.” But this was not Danto’s view. The commonplace as art is no longer merely
commonplace.
In “Upper West Side Buddhism,” Danto points out that, “when Cage talked about
the environment becoming art, he was not thinking about an agenda of beautifica-
tion. It was, one might say, like applying phenomenology’s ‘brackets’ to experience,
letting things be, just as they are, without imposing any interpretations” (Danto 2004,
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56). Cage left little semantical room for “aboutness.” The influence of Dr. Suzuki’s
teachings is confirmed by the chronology in Cage’s work. In 1937, Cage defended his
fascination for ambient sounds and noises from the point of view of the experimental
“maker.” “We want to capture and control these sounds,” he claimed, “to use them not
as sound effects but as musical instruments” (Cage 1973, 3). At this stage, his question
was how to control and manipulate sounds to produce music. His interest in elec-
tronics was a direct consequence of this approach. Electronic instruments, he wrote,
“provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises)
and […] make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration” (Cage
1973, 4). This reminds of Rauschenberg’s view on art as a strictly controllable
practice.
Twenty years later – after Dr. Suzuki had entered his life – Cage’s view had evolved.
Not the pleasure of manipulation, but the sound’s natural qualities now captured his
interest. His lecture “Experimental Music” is a plea for turning away from music as an
artificial art form: “This psychological turning leads to the world of nature, where,
gradually or suddenly, one sees that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this
world together; that nothing was lost when everything was given away” (Cage 1973,
8). Cage wanted to give away the Artworld itself: “(O)ne may give up the desire to con-
trol sound,” Cage wrote, “clear his mind of music, and set about discovering means to
let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories or expressions of
human sentiments” (Cage 1973, 10). As such, he defied the very existence of a gap bet-
ween art and life.2
Did Cage’s music reveal a fundamental flaw in Danto’s theory of art? After all, many
great thinkers have argued that music should be exempted from the burden to mean.
The content of pure instrumental music, Eduard Hanslick claimed in 1854, is nothing
more than “tonally moving forms” (Hanslick 1854/1986, 29). Here is the most per-
fectly tautological art form one can imagine. Similarly, one can argue that by collapsing
the semantical space, Fluxus only acted according to the well-known idea, professed by
Walter Pater, that all art “constantly aspires to the condition of music” (Pater
1873/2005, 90). This is the condition in which matter and form cannot be distin-
guished. “Art, then, is thus always striving,” Pater writes, “to become a matter of pure
perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material” (Pater 1873/2005,
92). How can Danto’s theory of art, with its requirement of semantical space and
“aboutness,” account for such “musical” art?

There are two things to reply here. On the one hand, as Lydia Goehr points out, this
idealized “musical condition” has also been a crucial reason for many great thinkers –
from Plato to Michel Serres – to exclude music from the pantheon of the Fine Arts
(Goehr 2017). Only as a metaphysical, divine principle did it enter the arena of the
competing sister arts, but not as an art in its own right, since it lacked the proper means
of reference or representation. Danto’s theory is not so different in this regard.
Consequently, he pays little attention to the art of music (except for Cage’s experiments).
He even excludes the musical as a condition to strive after, Goehr writes, because of its
disenfranchising tendencies as an inflated, metaphysical principle (Goehr 2017, 147).
So, one answer is that Danto simply did not want to account for an art that does not
really produce “meaningful” works.
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However, we should be careful not to misread theorists like Hanslick and Pater. They
made the case for a perfect unity of matter and form, but both authors retained the idea
that artworks are above all expressive. Artworks cannot be reduced to their mere physical
appearance. Pater, for instance, mentions the artwork’s appeal to the “imaginative reason”
(Pater 1873/2005, 92). And Hanslick, the godfather of musical formalism, does not cease
to speak of the spiritual content (der geistige Gehalt) of music. Their ideas are closer to
Danto’s philosophy than to Cage’s experimental sounds. The question is whether Cage
himself wanted his musical experiments to be counted as works of art or even as musical
works. The same goes for the artifacts of Fluxus. One of Maciunas’s ideas was that Fluxus
“could temporarily have the pedagogical function of teaching people the needlessness of
art including the needlessness of itself ” (Danto 2005, 344). Rather than proving Danto’s
theory of art wrong, all this suggests that he simply overlooked the true, “natural”
character of these experiments. As a reversed Testadura, he mistook them for Art.
But here is the last, ironic twist to the story. Remember that by the time Danto discov-
ered Fluxus, in 1984, the Fluxus-objects had ended up in a museum. They were already
swallowed by the Artworld. Even more than its sixties siblings, Fluxus demonstrated
Danto’s greatest insight, that the Artworld determines the eye (or ear) of the beholder.
While Cage and Fluxus believed in free ears and free eyes, untinged by art history or
theory, Danto unmasked them as naïve. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, he
already observed that human pleasures, “or at least those pleasures to which we attach
any special importance – are dependent upon certain cognitive presuppositions” (Danto
1974, 144). Without these presuppositions, Maciunas’s world-without-art would
relapse into an unenlightened place, the world of a real Testadura. Beds would be slept
in, and noise would be heard but not listened to.
What Danto teaches us runs parallel with a criticism later formulated against Dr.
Suzuki’s “Upper West Side” version of Buddhism. By turning it into a pure practice,
detached from its cultural and historical origins, Zen Buddhism is stripped of its sub-
stance. It was “a way of being religious without church or orthodoxy, sacred texts or
clergy, and in which the distinction between ordinary life and religious practice had
entirely disappeared” (Danto 2004, 59). Danto writes that his Buddhist phase came to
an end when he, as a philosopher, felt the need for theories (Danto 2004, 52). The works
of Fluxus and Cage, in the end, accepted asylum within the sanctuary of the Artworld,
where they became less radical, and perhaps less radical than Pop.
Notes
1 https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/98.308.A-C/.
2 In her essay “Explosive Experiments and the Fragility of the Experimental,” Lydia Goehr coins
the difference between the manipulative approach and the more open model of intercourse in
terms of the distinction between the experiment and the experimental. This is a distinction
made by Adorno and Goehr shows why he – just like Danto later – did not believe in the kind
of “open” experimental music that Cage propagated, precisely because it relied on a false iden-
tity-claim (Goehr 2008, 119–22).
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References
Cage, John. 1973. Silence. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

–––––. 1974. “The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 33(2): 139–48.
–––––. 2004. “Upper West Side Buddhism.” In Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, edited by
Jacquelynn Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, 49–59. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
–––––. 2005. Unnatural Wonders. Essays from the Gap between Art and Life. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Goehr, Lydia. 2008. “Explosive Experiments and the Fragility of the Experimental.” In Elective
Affinities. Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory, 108–35. New York: Columbia
University Press.
–––––. 2017. “‘All Art Constantly Aspires to the Condition of Music’—Except the Art of Music:
Reviewing the Contest of the Sister Arts.” In The Insistence of Art. Aesthetic Philosophy after
Early Modernity, edited by Paul A. Kottman, 140–69. New York: Fordham University Press.
Hanslick, Eduard. 1854/1986. On the Musically Beautiful. A Contribution Towards the Revision of
the Aesthetics of Music. Translated by Geoffrey Payzant. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing
Company.
Pater, Walter. 1873/2005. “The School of Giorgione.” In The Renaissance: Studies in Art and
Poetry, 87–102. Mineola: Dover Publications.
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1 Pop Art’s Puzzle
This essay explores Pop Art’s significance for Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art. I work
backward from what he wrote by way of commentary on essays published in The
Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto (Library of Living Philosophers) to his “The Artworld” essay,
written some fifty years earlier, to map the influence of Pop Art’s puzzle (its resemblance
to mere things) onto his ontology of art, intentionalism, and representationalism. I
refer also to his theories of action and knowledge (Danto 1997). Pop Art propelled him
to articulate art’s distinct place in society, which raised issues that could be treated as
vehicles for general philosophizing. To set the stage, I look at the views of British curator
Lawrence Alloway, Danto’s immediate predecessor at the Nation (1968–1981). Alloway
famously identified “mass popular art” in 1958 and may have furnished Danto, two
years his senior, material support. Nation readers were well-primed for Danto’s first-ever
review of “Blam! New York Art 1957-1964” (1984), given that pop-art pundit Alloway
had curated most of Pop Art’s earliest museum exhibitions.
In 1957, Alloway wrote, “All kinds of messages are transmitted to every kind of
audience along a multitude of channels. Art is one part of the field; another is adver-
tising,” thereby demarcating the field for Danto’s philosophical foray (Alloway 2006,
52–53). And in 1961, Alloway noted, “The urban environment is present, then, as the
source of objects, whether transfigured [emphasis mine] or left alone.” This, too, provided
Danto another clue. A bona fide maverick, Alloway wrested art away from the purview
of erudite esthetes, elite tastemakers, and arch formalists, such as Britain’s Roger Fry
and Herbert Read and America’s Clement Greenberg; critics who deemed it their
supreme duty to discern and safeguard modernist masterpieces. In 1974, Alloway
defined the core of Pop Art as “essentially, an art about [emphasis mine] signs and
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sign-systems” (Alloway 1974, 7). Richard Kalina credits Alloway with being first to
appreciate “the implicit malleability of media images” and “reproducibility [as] an
inherent property of all works of art” (Alloway 2006, 13).
2 Spurred to Interpret
In Season 2, Episode 7 of AMC’s “Mad Men” (2008), which is set in 1962, the same
year Danto was first exposed to Pop Art, a new secretary secretly invites several “Mad”
men to witness her boss’s recently hung painting by Mark Rothko. Sal Romano claims,
“I’m an artist, ok? It must mean something.” Ken Cosgrove corrects, “Maybe it doesn’t.
Maybe you’re just supposed to experience it. ‘Cuz when you look at it, you feel something,
right? It’s like looking into something very deep. You could fall in.” Romano responds,
“That’s true. Did someone tell you that?” Cosgrove replies, “How could someone tell you
that?” A third says, “This is pointless, let’s go.”
This “Mad Men” script sets the stage for George Dickie’s contribution to a 2013 col-
lection of essays on Danto. Echoing Ken Cosgrove from “Mad Men,” Dickie accused
Danto, our “meaning-oriented artist,” of repeatedly ignoring his (and Noël Carroll’s)
many refutations of the universality of aboutness in light of obvious counterexamples
such as nonobjective painting and Danto’s own hypothetical Untitled (1981), which
“happens only not to be about anything.” In Dickie’s words, “There is no argument
here, but Danto seems to be suggesting that paintings with any form or uniform col-
oring will be about something. It is not evident to me that this suggestion is true, and I
think Danto needs to show how a painting, say, Malevich’s White on White, is about
something” (Danto 2013, 316). Dickie erroneously attributes Danto’s aboutness thesis
(“art is necessarily/essentially about something”) to “Artworks and Real Things”
(1973), even though it was already in full swing in Danto’s “The Artworld” (1964), just
two years after Danto was first stunned by a reproduction of a pop painting.
Dickie claims that Danto’s professed intentionalism, which requires paintings to
mean whatever their painters intend them to mean, “destroys the aboutness thesis,”
since a painting that is “not about anything” is not/cannot be “about nothing” (Danto
2013, 317). Given the context of Dickie’s protest, in a book celebrating Danto’s life and
work, I was surprised by his tone and apparent intent either to publicly scold Danto or
to coax him to cough up the goods. Fortunately, Danto addressed Dickie’s misgivings.
Before earnestly explaining the meanings of various counterexamples (thanks to his
great talent for “postgame analysis”), Danto connects his distinguishing artworks from
mere things to his theory of action: “I proposed that the difference was in one being
about something and the other not – the one possessing meaning and the other lacking
it. This was in fact a systematic solution urged on me by the work I had done in the
theory of knowledge and the theory of action” (Danto 2013, 325). He further clarified:
“[I]n action, certain representations cause changes in the world through our mediation
[emphasis mine]. It is knowledge when the representation is true; it is action when the
representation is made true through our effort” (325). In short, we representational
beings connect to the world through various systems of meaning.
It thus appears that Pop Art’s puzzling resemblance to mere things stimulated not
only Danto’s brand of representationalism, but also his theories of knowledge and
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action. Conscious of the roles played by “our mediation” and “our efforts” as “beings
who represent,” he felt motivated to expand the classic billiard-ball model of cause and
effect to accommodate intentional actions, namely those underlying both art and
design. In Transfiguration, Danto characterizes artworks as belonging to a rather large
class of “representationally characterizable events,” which includes non-art examples
such as words, advertisements, billboards, posters, signs, packaging, maps, charts,
graphs, logos, illustrations, facial expressions, gestures, and other non-art actions
(Danto 1981, 83). Artworks, however, prompt additional “representationally charac-
terizable events,” such as interpretations, discussions, and conversations, while
designed objects (or real things in 1973 parlance) do not. Why aren’t we “beings who
represent” moved to “representationally characterize” non-art, like cars beautifully
aligned on lots, gorgeous arrays of multicolored cheese wheels, sublime billboards, or
exotic print ads with dazzling models? Danto’s answer is somewhat unclear, but he sees
such non-art as not requiring interpretation in order to be recognized or understood
(Spaid 2013).
Danto’s 80s-era “representation-talk” simply reworks earlier material. In 1973, he
noted that “the moment something is considered an artwork, it becomes subject to an
interpretation,” what G. E. M. Anscombe called an action “under a description” in
Intention (1957). When in 2013 he related his “theory” to her “description” he sug-
gested that their ideas first converged when he derived “having a theory [is] part of
what it mean[s] to see something as art” (1964) (Danto 2013, 29).
Like Ken Cosgrove, Danto realized along the way that feelings are not only mean-
ingful, but the urge to interpret artworks feels uncontrollable. Artworks like Gabriel
Orozco’s 1993 spliced Citroën and Jonathan Horowitz’s 2002 real block of tofu floating
in water, accompanied by its long list of collectors tapped to purchase it, inspire
discussion and debate over their meanings. That powerfully salient elicitation to inter-
pret points to the presence of art.
Keen to explain spectators’ apparently spontaneous responses, Danto reasoned that
artistic mediation (however unwittingly) triggers such reactions, which are part and
parcel of an artwork’s ontology, grounding both his intentionalism and representation-
alism. Implicit in this view is the idea that spectator reactions hinge on whatever the-
ories ground the work. Absent an awareness of such theories, spectators don’t feel
interpretative urges, and may not even register that they are in the presence of art.
3 Philosophizing Art
Danto characterized artworks as the kinds of things that prompt philosophizing, a point
that proves especially helpful when attempting to discern art-cars, art-cheese, art-bill-
boards, and art-photographs from mere things. Under Danto’s model, artworks
intended as art that fail to prompt interpretations are no different than car lots full of
snazzy sports cars. In the third episode of the first season of “Mad Men,” Sterling
Cooper’s team debates their competitor’s (actually DDB’s) 1960 “Lemon” campaign for
the VW Beetle. After scrutinizing its merits, Don Draper blurts out, “Love it or hate it,
we’ve been talking about it for the last 15 minutes.” Sterling Cooper’s team claims to
hate “it,” but this interlude illustrates what Danto called a “fluke.” Although never
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intended as art, DBB’s ad inspired the Creative Director to value it as art, just as “popular
art” prompted Alloway’s appraisal in “The Arts and the Mass Media” (1958).
One might say that this was the true “atmosphere of art theory” to which Danto
appealed, the atmosphere in which Pop Art, Anscombean descriptions, and Dantoesque
interpretations came to fruition. The dawning of film and print media in the late 19th
century, coupled with the eventual preponderance of art movements focused on
abstract painting and the post-war arrival of television, left the visual field susceptible
to the dissemination of commercial artists’ arresting pictures. Mad Men’s compelling
campaigns happily manipulated consumer preferences. It doesn’t take much to paint a
picture of artists taking tips from that era’s Mad Men, just as earlier artists found inspi-
ration in Biblical tales or historic events. Artists slightly younger than Danto’s age were
suddenly “media” obsessed, quoting what the uber-pluralist Alloway called mass
popular art, by which he meant that everyday material like comics, billboards, and print
ads (not just their later appropriation and reproduction in art) deserved the same status
as fine art.
That pop artists drew inspiration from Mad Men’s herculean efforts to mediate
human behaviors initially caught Danto off guard. This movement failed to strike this
trained printer, as “artistically substantial,” let alone “possible” sans some theory. But,
as Don Draper discovered, a little indignation helps to get the theories flowing. Recall
Danto’s description of his first romp with pop:
I remember driving up to Paris in early 1962 to go to the American Library, to check out
what was happening in New York by looking at recent issues of Art News. I was stunned to
see a painting by Roy Lichtenstein, called The Kiss, which looked like it came straight out of
a comic book. Stunned! It was like seeing a picture of a horse in the newspaper, and
read[ing] that it had been elected as the new Bishop of St. John the Divine. It just seemed
impossible. How could a picture like that be shown in a New York gallery, and reproduced
in what was at the time the defining art publication in America? But I thought of The Kiss
the rest of my time in France. I thought that if it was possible as art anything was possible
in art (Danto 2010).
All of this may be familiar to Danto’s readers. What may be less appreciated is the role
played by Alloway and artists other than “Mr. Andy Warhol, Pop artist” in prompting
Danto to discover the philosophical significance of Pop.
Danto regularly acknowledged the importance of Jasper Johns’ Flag (1954–1955)

and Gray Alphabets (1956), as well as Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1955–1959)
and Bed (1955) for Warhol’s development. Just as Cézanne had broken the world down
into simple geometric parts, which Picasso used to reassemble it, Rauschenberg pro-
posed the real as art, thus inspiring Warhol’s indiscernible Brillo Box (1964), which
further blurred the distinction between art and the real. According to Danto,
Rauschenberg “appropriated and transfigured ready-made textures that no one before
him could have regarded as fit for art” (Danto 2001, 276). He admired how
Rauschenberg and Johns could “Take an object. Do something to it, Do something else
to it,” fully transforming it; something he felt few artists capably achieved (Danto
2001, 273).
It almost seems paradoxical that Pop Art, America’s supposedly least cerebral art
movement, inspired Danto to imagine the role for philosophizing art. Perhaps Pop Art’s
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total vapidity (being “empty” like artworks seemingly lacking in content) inspired this
insight. Its very viability as a movement necessitated interpretations. It would, however,
take Danto another two decades before he would characterize artworks as symbolic
expressions held in an internal relation with their embodied meanings. No doubt, pop
protagonists in the US and abroad inspired this ontological distinction, even as its puta-
tive superficiality hid artistic thought of great depth.
By 1973, Danto was already grappling with issues inspired by Pop Art’s many
conundrums. He recalls artists’ low status since Plato for being imitators. He notes that
art fails if it is indiscernible from reality, yet it also fails if it is not. He points out the irony
that the purer art becomes, the greater its chances of “collapsing onto reality,” which
no doubt reflected art’s plight at the height of dematerialization in artworks of the late
1960s and early 1970s that seemed closer to ordinary objects and actions than
anything resembling high art. He finds it perplexing that the prices of forgeries and
fakes fall once the painter’s true identity is revealed. How could Rubens’ 32 “Titian
paintings” or the three Deaths of Marat (not by David, yet exhibited in museums all the
same) prove invaluable as quotations, yet worthless as copies? Pop Art’s resemblance to
real things, its dependence on media (non-art), and its precarious status as art; strad-
dling as it does the border between sophisticated representation (quotation) and pathetic
imitation (copies), induced philosophizing.
The more artists adopted imagery and formats familiar to commercial art, the more
philosophers needed models to discern, for example, James Rosenquist’s billboard size-
paintings publicizing pasta, lipstick, cars, and the like, from his actual roadside bill-
boards, hand-painted between 1957 and 1960. There are at least two well-known
solutions to this puzzle, and Dickie famously offered one of them. He suggested that
some artworld representative baptizes some as art, while the rest remain ordinary bill-
boards, a view Danto repeatedly rejected in his various replies to Dickie over the years.
As already noted, Danto sought an ontological justification/argument to differentiate
artworks from mere things. As some critics such as Dickie remain unconvinced of
Danto’s account of the ontological difference, let’s take a closer look at Rosenquist’s
Stuckey billboards and his subsequent large-scale paintings.
Would Rosenquist be justified in asking us to retroactively interpret his fifties-era bill-
board advertisements – seen then merely as advertisements – as public art? Dickie’s solu-
tion seems to green light such a move, while Danto’s insistence on the need for a
contemporaneous theory prompting such a reaction would block this possibility. Artists
weren’t presenting billboards as artworks in the 1950s and no predominant theory at
the time sanctioned seeing those billboards as art. Could some artistic activity’s inherent
value, such as a billboard originally painted by Rosenquist, overwhelm its extrinsic
value, as does Rauschenberg’s stuffed goat sporting a tire or Robert Smithson’s
Earthworks? Danto’s theory of action resolves these issues if one considers artworks to
be symbolic expressions that generate symbolic expressions (Case 1 “causal episodes”),
while designed things like billboards are symbolic expressions that don’t prompt inter-
pretations (Case 2 “causal episodes”). Stuckey’s roadside billboards advertising pecan
log rolls have no doubt veered millions of cars toward highway exits, but such bill-
boards’ symbolic capacities stop at each store. I doubt anyone thinks about, much less
discusses, Stuckey’s billboards except for when they’re hunting one down on the road
(or reminiscing about childhood road trips).
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Rosenquist’s charming billboards for movies and for Coca Cola billboards likely elic-
ited sales, but they didn’t stimulate symbolic expressions because, as Danto would
argue, Rosenquist painted them to be billboards, not art. But Danto would anticipate
someone else, say Lane Posenquist one day laying claim to Rosenquist’s historic bill-
boards as art, just as fictional artist J. “declared that contested red expanse a work of
art” (Danto 1981, 3) and Don Draper identified DDB’s ad worthy as art. Once Posenquist
admits Rosenquist’s billboard as art, people will spontaneously discuss the significance
of her bold and original move, both for Rosenquist’s oeuvre (non-art or not) and that of
others.
Finally, it’s difficult not to discuss, let alone ignore artworks that disgust, disappoint, or
astonish (Danto’s first reaction to Pop Art). As Don Draper discovered, artworks that hold
some inexplicable popularity, interest, or fascination for others tend to arouse indigna-
tion, inspiring conversations qua talk-therapy. Non-art rarely triggers such attachments.
Sometimes, artworks stump us so much that we exhibit them alongside known examples,
ideally helping us to grasp the unfamiliar but sometimes belittling all. Whether or not one
accepts Danto’s intentionalism, his insight that artworks prompt reflection, thoughts,
and reactions, indeed “philosophizing;” is an accurate bellwether of art’s presence.
Alternatively, mere things such as buildings, commercial art, or designed objects serve as
invaluable models, objects of study, or collectables. That Danto considered artworks
intended as art though not recognized as art “failures,” and things not intended as art
though recognized as art “flukes;” indicates that his intentionalism accommodates asym-
metries (Spaid 2016). I now turn to Alloway’s influence on Pop Art, and Danto.
4 All the Way with Alloway
By the time Danto happened upon “The Personality of the Artist” (1964), Warhol’s
second solo exhibition at New York’s Stable Gallery, artists had been referencing the
popular arts for nearly a decade. As early as 1956, Alloway decried graphic art,
commercial art, and applied art on par with “fine art” (Alloway 2006, 39). Admittedly,
it was a “heretical idea that the ads communicate as wide a range of visual experience
as any imaginary museum. Here is a wide-open arc of degrees of abstraction with intri-
cate relations of word and picture, emblems, diagrams, motion-studies, and what have
you” (Alloway 2006, 39).

Foreshadowing Danto’s Connections to the World, Alloway noted that “popular art
furnishes the symbols that organize our environment” (Alloway 2006, 49). In 1954,
members of the Independent Group, who regularly met between 1952 and 1955 at the
Institute of Contemporary Art, where Alloway was Assistant Director, studied American
mass culture (Western movies, cars, billboards, science fiction, and popular music) with
him. In 1956, most IG members joined one of twelve teams that were presenting collab-
orative installations during “This is Tomorrow” at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. This
is the first exhibition focused on popular art, the topic occupying Alloway’s ground-
breaking essay “The Arts and Mass Media” (1958). By 1961, Alloway was installed as
Senior Curator for the brand new Guggenheim. Bearing witness to the arrival of
Lichtenstein and Warhol’s comic-book paintings, Rosenquist’s necktie paintings, and
Alex Katz’s “cut-outs,” Alloway declared 1961 Pop Art’s first year, though AbEx’s last.
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Mad Men and Pop Art
Breaking with AbEx, pop artists increasingly disallowed drips, replicated manufactured
looks, and switched to silk-screening, so as to downplay the hand’s presence, which was
initially Pop Art’s hallmark.
In 1962, Warhol presented his 32 Campbell’s Soup Can paintings at Ferus in Los
Angeles. That fall, Sidney Janis Gallery presented the “International Exhibition of the
New Realists,” an exhibition that counted Warhol’s painting 200 Soup Cans among
scores of items by 54 American, British, French, Italian, and Swiss artists. On December
13, MoMA, which supposedly already owned six artworks associated with this bur-
geoning movement, organized an unexpected Pop Art symposium, which primarily
drew skeptics who voiced their concerns regarding Pop Art’s legitimacy. No longer in
France, Danto nowhere mentions this event, yet Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and
Marcel Duchamp were reportedly in the audience.
One of Alloway’s first Guggenheim exhibitions was “Six Painters and the Object”
(1963), which featured artworks by Jim Dine, Johns, Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg,
Rosenquist, and Warhol. He considered this coterie linked by their use of “objects drawn
from the communications network and physical environments of the city” (mass-pro-
duced objects such as “flags, magazines and newspaper photographs, mass-produced
objects, comic strips, advertisements”) (Alloway 2006, 90).
Alloway’s 1963 essay praises pop artists for selecting subject matter that is known to
all and expanding upon the Dadaists, who first “released the potential of use and
meaning for art in common objects and signs, but the assimilation of objects to a rig-
orous and delicate painting standard was a new development” (Alloway 2006, 90). His
focus on worldly content must have seemed at odds with that era’s prevailing percep-
tual ploys, such as Group Zero exhibitions (1957–1967), Roger Sterling’s trippy 1964
office in “Mad Men” (Season 4), or MoMA’s “Responsive Eye” (1965). “Six Painters and
the Object” traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it was accompa-
nied by “Six More,” a show of related west coast artists. In this exhibition’s catalog
essay, Alloway credits Pop artists’ interest in “paradoxes of representation [and] the
play of levels of signification,” anticipating Roland Barthes’ semiotics and Jacques
Derrida’s slew of 1967 texts. That same year, Warhol exhibited one Heinz Tomato
Ketchup and three yellow Brillo 3₵ Off boxes in “Boxes” (1964) at Los Angeles’ Virginia
Dwan Gallery.
If Alloway had one lingering influence on those, who like Clement Greenberg, Peter
Selz, and Alfred Barr aimed to keep tight tabs on admission, it was his inveterate plu-
ralism. In his March 27, 1965 “Art: View from the Guggenheim” column in Cue, the
museum’s newsletter, he remarked, “Now Pop Art, Op Art, and Abstract Expressionism
(still) are all available to an artist,” an observation one imagines Danto also proposing,
since he often expressed the view that art isn’t progressive like science.
By highlighting Pop Art’s focus on the process of communication itself, Alloway
expected scores of artists across the globe to produce artworks that critics, curators,
and dealers could read through the art historical lens of Pop Art, one of the rare art
movements to evolve into an actual genre. Leery of the “intentional fallacy,” Alloway
championed spectator-participation and affective theories (“audience-reception the-
ories”) over genetic ones, which credit artists’ artworks as the source of meaning. He
considered any notion of “mass audience” false, since audiences are highly diversified
(Alloway 2006, 63). Regarding intentionalism, he quotes Johns, who sounds
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downright Wittgensteinian: “Publicly a work becomes not just intention; but the way it
is used. … Meaning is determined by the use of the thing, the way an audience uses a
painting once it is put in public” (Alloway 1974, 66).
In Alloway’s 1966 catalogue essay “Systemic Painting,” he chastises art writers who
describe abstract artworks as either “expressive” or “powerful emotional statements,”
since “neither writer indicate[s] what was expressed nor what emotions might be
stated” (Alloway 1975, 84). The latter attitude strikes him as especially retrograde. A
few pages later, he remarks:
When we view art as an object we view it in opposition to the process of signification.

Meaning follows from the presence of the work of art, not from its capacity to signify
absent events or values (a landscape, the Passion, or whatever). This does not mean we are
faced with an art of nothingness or boredom as has been said with boring frequency. On
the contrary, it suggests that the experience of meaning has to be sought in other ways
(Alloway 1975, 87).
After further explaining how he believes abstract artworks gain their meaning, he con-
cludes, “Possibly, therefore, the evasiveness about meaning in [the Kenneth] Noland
already mentioned, may have to do with the expectation that a meaning is complete in
each single painting rather than located over a run or a set” (Alloway 1975, 89). So far
as I know, Danto didn’t broach this approach, but he would concur that “[t]he presence
of covert or spontaneous iconographic images is basic to abstract art, rather than the
purity and pictorial autonomy so often ascribed to it” (Alloway 1975, 91).
Alloway was among the first to recognize that “[t]he spread of Pop Art in the 60s
coincide[d] with the development of systemic abstract painting and there are parallels,”
for which he offers several surprising examples (Alloway 1975, 89–90). In 1968,
MoMA presented “The Art of the Real,” the first museum exhibition to connect Pop Art
to Minimalism. Curated by E.C. Goossen, it featured 57 artworks, including Johns’ Flag,
by 33 artists who were exploring the possibility of exhibiting real things like wooden
structures, brick lines, or metal boxes that refer only to themselves.
Indicative of Alloway’s commitment to representationalism, he treated all manmade
things, whether signs or nonobjective painting, as meaningful, thus confirming Danto’s
twin suspicions that Brillo cartons signify “Brillo pads, inside” and “not about anything”
must mean “feeling something.” As if to jumpstart the “Postmodern Condition,”

Alloway pushed representationalism to its logical conclusion, imagining it running
amok, such that: “The deceptive order is the analogue of malicious knowledge, a term
used to refer to knowledge about knowledge, signs used to discuss signs, and by
extension, art about art” (Alloway 1974, 70). Yet another nightmare has come true.
5 The Perfect Moment
Danto often remarked on his good fortune in being present in the artworld just as its
conditions were ripe for philosophical theorizing: “It would not have been possible to
explore the ontology of the artwork anywhere else or at any earlier time in art history.”
In the early sixties, New Yorkers witnessed the unpredictable collision of “factualists”
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Mad Men and Pop Art
(Sidney Janis’s term for Pop) and “literalists” (the derisive term critics applied to
Minimalism), two movements that could not have been more divergent, but which
together engendered the philosophical theory entwining representationalism and
intentionalism that occupied Danto for decades to come.
References
Alloway, Lawrence. 1974. American Pop Art. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.
–––––. 1975. Topics in American Art Since 1945. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
–––––. 1984. Network: Art and the Complex Present. Ann Arbor MI: UMI Research.
–––––. 2006. Imagining the Present: Context, Content, and the Role of the Critic, edited by R. Kalina.
New York: Routledge.
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Art World.” Journal of Philosophy 61(19): 571–84.
–––––. 1981. Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
–––––. 1997. Connections to the World: The Basic Concepts of Philosophy. Berkeley, CA: UC Press.
–––––. 2001. Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic World. Berkeley, CA: UC Press.
–––––. 2010. “Stop Making Art.” In: Arthur C. Danto’s Woodblock Prints: Capturing Art and Philosophy.
–––––. 2013. The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto. In: Library of Living Philosophers, edited by
Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
Spaid, Sue. 2013. “Being Here: Representationally Characterized Events or Not.” In The Philosophy
of Arthur C. Danto. Library of Living Philosophers, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin
Hahn, Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
–––––. 2016. “Danto’s Artworld: Nine Indiscernible Red Squares and Nine Different Contents.”
In Arte y Filosofía en Arthur Danto, edited by Sixto J. Castro and Francisca Pérez Carreño. Murcia:
Universidad de Murcia, Servicio de Publicaciones.
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37
Vija Celmins: Nature at Art’s End
SANDRA SHAPSHAY
1 Introduction
Danto’s famous quasi-Hegelian “end of art” thesis holds that around the late 1970s to
1980s a certain narrative of art had come to an end, having been “objectively realized
in the history of art”:
A story was over. It was not my view that there would be no more art … but that whatever
art there was to be would be made without benefit of a reassuring sort of narrative in
which it was seen as the appropriate next stage in the story. What had come to an end was
that narrative but not the subject of the narrative (Danto 1997, 4).
In a nutshell, art’s Bildungsroman begins with concern primarily for the imitation of
nature and life. Then art moves to greater expressiveness of the artist’s emotions and
ideas, before turning inward and focusing increasingly on the materiality of the artistic
medium. The story reaches a climax with the “Intractable Avant Garde,” which petu-
lantly forces the question of the difference between an artwork and mere ordinary
object, a question that is answered (again) emphatically in pop artists like Warhol who
usher in an era of radical pluralism. Thus the story ends roughly with Warhol’s Brillo
Box insofar as this work raised art to a moment of complete philosophical self-con-
sciousness, a moment “when it at last became clear that everything was possible as art”
(Danto 1997, xviii). By opening the floodgates on what could henceforth legitimately
be called ‘art,’ the story of art ends, and this is precisely when “the philosophy of art
[can] fully begin”(loc. cit.). And with this new beginning, Danto takes up another
Hegelian theme: It is only when a form of life (in this case, art-making and appreci-
ating) has grown old that “philosophy has all of the pieces it needs to offer an adequate
theory of art, namely, a theory of art that won’t be overturned in the course of
subsequent developments in art history” (loc. cit.).
326
Danto’s end of art thesis, as well as his admittedly partial definition of art as “embodied
meaning” have, of course, sparked much controversy, but I don’t want to quarrel with the
main lines of either here. Rather, my aim is to suggest that there was another distinct chapter
in the grand narrative described by Danto, one taking place right under his nose, as it were.
This was an environmental chapter, crystallized most forcefully in my view by the work of
Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins (1938–), especially by her work To Fix the Image in
Memory I-XI (1977–82), consisting of 11 pairs of perceptually indiscernible stones, one
found one made. Although Danto engaged with some of Celmins’s other work in the con-
text of his discussion of the sublime in The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art
(2003), without the benefit of seeing her first retrospective, held in 2019, it would have
been very hard to see how her own artistic narrative, culminating in these indiscernible
stone pair works, offers “the appropriate next stage in the story,” thereby adding a chapter
to the grand narrative. Inspired by Danto, this is exactly what I hope to do.
Celmins is an artist who has been well respected in the artworld since the 1960s as
“an artist’s artist”1 but who has only recently garnered much wider attention and criti-
cal acclaim with a retrospective jointly organized by curators at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2018–
2019, titled “To Fix the Image in Memory”).
As an art student at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and at the Yale Summer
School of Art and Music in the early 1960s, she was trained under the influence of the New
York School, but moving to Los Angeles to pursue an MA at UCLA, she started to distance
herself from Abstract Expressionism, reporting that there was “no meaning in it for me.” 2
She turned instead to “some basic thing, like looking at simple objects and painting them
straight, trying to rediscover if there was anything there that might be more authentic,”3
and painted a series of still lifes of ordinary objects lying around her studio (a space heater,
a lamp, an envelope). But beginning in 1968 she took on a new subject – the ocean (see
Figure 1) – that would preoccupy her through the 1970s. From photographs of the Pacific
Figure 37.1 Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1977. San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art. Matthew Marks Gallery.
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SANDRA SHAPSHAY
that she took off the Venice Pier near her studio, Celmins made a series of painstaking,
allover, horizonless, graphite drawings of the precise, undulating waves of the ocean.
With her almost decade-long preoccupation with a precise and faithful rendering of
the ocean’s texture, it seems that Celmins decisively turns her back on Modernism and
seeks to return to the original remit of Western art – the beginning of the great story –
namely imitation, and specifically, the imitation of nature. Yet this conclusion is too
quick, as she carefully characterizes her artistic process in these works as “redescrip-
tions” rather than “imitations.” In working from photographs rather than direct obser-
vation, the photograph arguably constitutes the first “description” and her meticulous
photo-realistic drawing is the “redescription.” In a 2011 interview, Celmins explicates
this process of “redescription” as follows: “I thought I was like a scribe. I was going over
the surface like a little ant, redescribing through my body, my intelligence, my eyes, my
hands. Remaking the image, leaving my traces, bringing it into another space and
another context.”4
Celmins emphasizes the etymology of “redescription” – she is like a scribe, re-writing
the image – highlighting the value added by the artist (the “re” of the original descrip-
tion) to the source material (the photograph). Along the lines of the camera – which
was called originally the “pencil of nature” – she aims faithfully to transmit the image,
but with a major difference: Instead of mechanical reproduction, it is her human body,
her human intelligence, which re-writes the image. And through her human-artistic
activity of looking and making, she thereby transposes the image into “another space
and another context,” leaving her indelible traces on it. In short, the characterization of
her process as “redescription” underscores the artist’s primal, very human activity of
looking and making, which spatially and semantically re-contextualizes the image.
In the late 1970s to 1980s, Celmins focused on drawings and paintings of the rocky,
desert floor as well as redescriptions of spider webs, but her main subject of the 1990s
was the starry night sky.
Her iconography is paradigmatically sublime. Yet, as Danto remarked on her pic-
tures of the ocean and the starry heavens, “we could not easily think of her paintings
themselves as sublime, mainly because they do not elicit in us any special feeling of
wonder on the scale that sublimity seems to require. And that in part is because of the
scale of the pictures themselves, which one could hold in one’s hands, as at a picture-
dealer’s.”5 Indeed, the scale of her works tends to be quite modest, most of the ocean
drawings are about 18ʺ × 22ʺ in size, as opposed to, for example, F.E. Church’s gigantic
Heart of the Andes which measures 5ʹ 6ʺ × 9ʹ 11ʺ. Furthermore, the overall mood of
Celmins’ work is rather different from those of Romantics like Caspar David Friedrich or
of the Hudson River School. In an interview at the Tate Modern, which put her work
into dialogue with that of J.M.W. Turner, she writes, “I think we [Turner and I] both like
wildness – the wilderness, the impossible image to capture and wrestle onto that small
piece of paper.”6 But unlike Turner, especially in his later sublime phase, the main thing
for Celmins is not to confront the viewer with something perceptually overwhelming,
formless, and awe-inspiring, but rather painstakingly to wrestle that complex, some-
times vast, irregularly patterned image onto paper or canvas in a manageable form. Her
paintings and drawings don’t aim to overwhelm the viewer and inspire awe at the subjects
328
Figure 37.2 Vija Celmins: Two Stones, 1977/2014–16, one found stone and one stone
made of bronze and alkyd oil. Courtesy of Vija Celmins and the Matthew Marks Gallery.
of those works, so much as at the meticulous, almost obsessive process of creating the
works, which itself inspires a sense of awe.
To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI (1977–1982) and Two Stones (1977/2014–16) –
works which display pairs of perceptually indiscernible stones (as in Figure 37.2), one
found, one made – in my view, constitute a narrative culmination in Celmins’ career of
redescribing natural objects and environments. It has only been quite recently that
Celmins has shifted her focus to making perceptually indiscernible copies of artifacts –
old-fashioned children’s school slates, and antique books – otherwise, for most of her
career, her iconography has focused on nature. And it is on these sculptural works that
I’d like to focus to show how they add a fitting next chapter in Danto’s grand narrative
of art, one that is distinct from the work of pop/conceptual artists like Warhol.
Celmins collected these “rather beautiful” stones in New Mexico, along the Rio
Grande, and over the course of approximately five years, she cast them in bronze and
meticulously hand-painted the surfaces to render astoundingly identical twins of the
stones. She describes these pairs in Duchampian terms as “readymades and mades.”7
More recently, Celmins has added another, solo set of paired stones to this series, titled
simply Two Stones (1977/2014-16).

The superficial game here is to tell the real from the copy. And when I saw Two Stones at
her retrospective at the Met Breuer, many spectators were happily and wondrously engaged
in doing just this, even though there was nothing at the exhibit to let us know if we had
gotten it right! Certainly, Celmins entices us to engage in this looking and guessing, writing
that “[the stones are] an invitation to look harder than you would look, normally. … And
so, somebody goes by and has a double take on it, and maybe a little smile comes out of it.”8
Yet the more profound task is to figure out what these displayed “readymade and
made” paired stones mean. And for that, the artist herself offers few hints. Modestly, she
holds that artists are not especially helpful in explicating the meaning of their works: In
an interview with artist Ken Price she explains, “I don’t mind talking about making
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SANDRA SHAPSHAY
work. What it is supposed to mean is what I can’t talk about. Can you give rational
explanations of your work?” In another interview, she cites Brancusi – a model of artis-
tic-discursive reticence – as saying “art should be like a well-planned crime,” meaning:
“you don’t discuss it before, and you don’t talk much about it afterward either.”9
So what do these displayed pairs of perceptually indiscernible stones mean? Pretty
clearly, the works do not reduce to a kind of game in which Celmins tries to trick us into
taking a fake stone for a real one. The interest of her work goes well beyond being a
three-dimensional trompe l’oeil, for she makes no secret of the presence of the artistic
twins. Just as in her photorealistic drawings of the ocean, she is offering a “redescrip-
tion” of nature, but unlike those drawings, and indeed unlike all of her previous work,
these sculptural works do away with the middleman (the photograph), and present
nature and art, indistinguishably, side-by-side, implying a kind of contest between them.
I think an important clue as to what this contest is about comes from Celmins’
description of the natural stone as a “readymade” and the bronze, painted copy as the
“made.”10 And it is fruitful to think through these works with Duchamp’s conceptual
provocations in mind. Indeed, according to Met Curator, Ian Alteveer, “Duchamp was a
particularly important figure to Celmins, for both his conceptual rigor and his radical
philosophy regarding the readymade, [and] Celmins has adopted and transformed this
gesture for her own purposes.”11
Recall that the readymades of Duchamp were factory or artisanally manufactured
objects such as urinals, bottle racks, and snow shovels, sometimes modified [and signed
R. Mutt in the case of Fountain (1917)] and sometimes simply displayed qua art, without
modification. The Dada aim of the readymade, according to Danto, is to “exemplify the
most radical dissociation of aesthetics from art.”12 In smuggling an aesthetically indif-
ferent, ordinary manufactured object into the temples of the artworld, Duchamp
accomplishes a great deal. He frustrates expectations of edification and pleasure,
cheekily questions the very nature of art, and encourages the complacent and complicit
World War I-making Bourgeoisie to go to hell!
In Celmins’s case, too, by her own account, there is something a bit Dada in her “con-
stellation” of paired stones, writing,
I developed this desire to try and put them [the found river stones] into an art context …
sort of mocking art in a way, but also to affirm the act of making: the act of looking and
making as a primal act of art.13
In addition to the very different political and artworld contexts, however, which makes
Duchamp’s mocking much more shocking and acerbic, there is another crucial
difference between Celmins’ readymades (the natural stones) and the readymades of
Duchamp: Hers aren’t made by any human artisan or manufactured by human
industrial processes; rather, they are “made” by nature. Ironically, this means that the
term readymade is extremely inapt – the natural stones are simply found among the pro-
fusion of lovely river rocks scattered along the Rio Grande. It is only if one employs a
notion akin to the Celestial Artisan, that these stones count literally as “readymades.”
Kant, for one, did think along these lines. In the 3rd Critique he explicated how natural
beauty specifically (in contrast to artistic beauty) invites the lover of nature to “find … an
330
ecstasy for his spirit in a line of thought that he can never fully develop.” That “line of
thought” is that there is “a lawful correspondence of [nature’s] products” and our moral
interests as human beings (Ak. 5:300). Thus, for Kant, while we may not conclude (as a
matter of theoretical knowledge) that the natural world is designed/made by a benevolent
creator and is therefore not hostile to our moral ends, we are justified in drawing hope from
natural beauty that this is the case. Although I don’t think that Celmins’ description of the
natural stone as a “readymade” suggests this Kantian link between natural beauty and
moral-theology, I do think that drawing our attention to the “readymade” status of natural
objects invites sustained reflection on the way nature “makes” things in a manner that is
rather different from the way an artist like Celmins makes things (cf. Shapshay 2020).
Another key difference between Celmins’ and Duchamp’s readymades is that the lat-
ter’s were displayed solo, presented to curators, juries and audiences themselves as
works of art – thus the major point was to “enfranchise” ordinary manufactured objects
as art. By contrast, Celmins’ readymades are displayed alongside their perceptually
indistinguishable “made” mates. It does not seem to be her point to artistically enfran-
chise the natural stone – Duchamp already did this for ordinary manufactured objects
and utilizing the term “readymade” for them implicitly acknowledges rather than pro-
claims them to be works of art. My sense is that by displaying the readymade natural
stone alongside the made artistic one, Celmins’ main point is to draw our attention to,
in her words, the “the act of looking and making as a primal act of art” in contrast to
the way of being of the natural (especially the inorganic) world.
Unlike the artistic stone, nature’s way of “making” stones is unintentional; the
natural stones were formed by geological happenings. Furthermore, the juxtaposition
highlights that nature’s way of “making” involves millennia, a mind-bogglingly long
process of shaping and smoothing through the hydraulic pressure of the river, by the
heat of the sun, and a host of other natural forces operating at the speed of geologic
time. From these forces came the beautiful stones, with their fortuitously pleasing if
irregular, dappled patterns, which could be appropriated into a work of (human) art in
the late twentieth century. By stark contrast, the artistically made stones were created
by an artist who looked closely and painstakingly “redescribed” the natural stone over
the course of a few years (a rather long time for art) but not millennia.
Another important difference between Celmins’ and Duchamp’s readymades con-
cerns aesthetics. Danto often quotes Duchamp on his insistence concerning the
aesthetic neutrality of his readymades: “the choice of these ‘readymades’ was never
dictated by aesthetic delectation … The choice was based on a reaction of visual indiffer-
ence with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste. … in fact a complete
anaesthesia.”14 In contrast, Celmins’ choice of subject matter in general seems to be
guided by a preference for the aesthetically sublime – in the case of the ocean, the starry
night sky, the expanse of the rocky desert floor – even if her handling of these subjects
is not aimed at provoking a sublime response. With respect to the paired stone works,
she shows a preference for intricately if irregularly patterned beautiful objects, and
reports that she selected stones in particular that had “galaxies”15 on them. This sug-
gests that even the beautiful stones she chose resonated with the paradigmatically sub-
lime. And the beauty of the stones does not seem to me to be incidental to the meaning
of the work; rather, in Danto’s terms, the beauty seems “internal” to the work insofar
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the juxtaposition of the natural and artistic stones sets up a kind of paragone – one
which occupied Kant and Hegel in the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries – a con-
test between natural and artistic beauty (more on which shortly).
So what is the point of this comparison between the “making” of nature and the
“making” of art? What do these paired stone works mean? On the one hand, it seems
that there could be an uplifting, humanistic message about the power of that primal act
of art – looking and making. One might reflect with awe on the fact that a mere human
artist (a tiny speck in nature) is just as capable of creating, and further has the advantage
of capturing, these beautiful natural forms and fixing them in individual and collective
memory. Furthermore, the human artist has the power, in redescribing nature, to trans-
pose the stone into another space and semantic context – the space of the artworld and
the context where it no longer simply attests to natural processes but also to human
cultural concerns. This is a very Hegelian message: “That art, not nature, is born of the
Spirit, and born again.” On this interpretation, pace Kant – who favored natural over
artistic beauty for a myriad of cognitive and moral reasons – perhaps Celmins’ work
signals that in the contest between natural and artistic beauty, the latter is actually far
more wondrous for its revelation of human power.
On the other hand, along more Kantian lines, Celmins may be drawing our attention
to the greater value of the natural stone: Only the natural stone has an aura of “age
value,” for it and not its artistic redescription testifies to millennia of geological processes,
to the wonder that there is something rather than nothing, and to the fact that some
things in our world seem “as if ” designed to please us through their lovely forms, colors,
and textures. Might the painstaking copy attest not so much to the power of human
intelligence and creativity but rather to the frailty of human making? After all, it takes
enormous artistic effort to make an indiscernible copy of something so promiscuously
available on any rocky riverbed around the world. Doesn’t this human creative power
really pale beside nature’s great fecundity of beautiful (and sublime) forms?
By inviting sustained reflection on the nature/art relationship, Celmins’ “readymade
and made” pairs are also quite different from another artist who took up the Duchampian
project, Andy Warhol. In the case of Warhol’s Brillo Box, the “made” box is a perceptu-
ally indistinguishable copy of a commercial product (the “readymade” Brillo box that one
might find in the 1960s on any supermarket shelf). Unlike Celmins, Warhol didn’t
display the commercial, utilitarian Brillo boxes alongside his artistically fashioned cop-
ies. Rather, the “made” Brillo boxes were exhibited on their own in the gallery. The key
difference in Warhol’s provocation from that of Duchamp’s readymade, it seems to me,
has to do with consumer capitalism. Building on Duchamp, Brillo Box says something
like this: “Nowadays, you can’t tell the difference between a work of art and a banal
(even crass), commercially ubiquitous consumer product. Art has entirely lost its aura; its
aesthetic appeal is no more special than that of the Brillo box carton you can buy in any
old supermarket. In fact, the art gallery might as well be a supermarket. Now, anything,
no matter how banal or crass, can be a work of art!”
Celmins seems to me to be taking a rather different path from Duchamp than that
taken by Warhol. Her route from Duchamp is decidedly not in the commercial, pop
direction. As suggested in an interview with Phong Bui, publisher and artistic director
of The Brooklyn Rail, she is self-consciously working in an older mimetic-representa-
tional painting lane:
332
Only later did I come to understand that we… [artists are] all stuck in between Cézanne and
Duchamp. Cézanne was probably the greatest painter … And there is Duchamp, who was
not a great painter, but was a wonderful thinker about art. He really opened up the new
century to artists who would never have gone in that direction.16
In my view, the alternative path from Duchamp that Celmins takes with her paired
stones is actually to put Cézanne and Duchamp into dialogue. Like Cézanne, Celmins’
aim is to “redescribe” nature – as generations of Western representational artists
before and after Cézanne have done. Here she displays the “redescriptions” alongside
the natural sources, so we can judge for ourselves how much the “made” stone looks
like the “found/readymade” natural stone. Like Duchamp, she draws our attention
to the question of the nature of art: What constitutes a work of art? Can a natural
stone be or become a part of a work of art? Yet by bringing in Cézanne – that is, by
bringing in the painterly practice of observing and redescribing nature – with the
“readymade” of nature, she raises the following sorts of questions raised neither by
Duchamp nor Warhol: What is the difference between natural and artistic “mak-
ing”? What is the difference between natural and artistic beauty? With their
emphasis on artisanally and/or industrially manufactured “readymades” of
consumer capitalism, these are questions that Warhol and Duchamp did not thema-
tize. In fact, these are the questions that an exclusive focus on the manufactured
object precisely obscures.
On my view, Celmins’ perceptually indiscernible paired stone works culminate a
genial narrative that she is building on the conceptual foundation of Duchamp, and
which offers a parallel but distinctly different development of art’s “grand narrative” to
that of Warhol. To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI (1977–1982) and Two Stones
(1977/2014–16), can be understood as a sustained artistic meditation on what distin-
guishes the values of art from those of nature. The perceptually indiscernible “rede-
scription” of the natural stone is not a provocation about what distinguishes a work of
art from a common manufactured artifact (Duchamp) or from an ordinary product of
consumer capitalism (Warhol); rather, Celmins, returns afresh to the original remit of
Western art – the imitation of nature.17 Taking up from Duchamp she forges an
alternative path to the one taken by Warhol, inviting us to contrast how we conceive of
and value a natural object, like a lovely, smooth, dappled natural stone, from how we
conceive of and value its painstakingly, artistically constructed twin. In raising these
questions, Celmins, in Danto’s words, offers “the appropriate next stage in the story” –
an environmental stage – and thus furthers the grand narrative and the self-conscious-
ness of art.
One might question, however, whether such an “environmental stage” of the
narrative is better represented by canonical works of environmental or land art like
Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969), Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), or
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence (1972–76). These works raise similar
questions about differences between nature and art but utilize the natural environ-
ment itself as the canvas, so to speak, rather than bringing bits of the natural world
into the studio, gallery, and museum. Arguably, environmental art adds another
distinct chapter to the narrative – one that is more conscious of nature as an environ-
ment than is evinced by Celmins’ stone pairs–but the move she makes in utilizing the
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SANDRA SHAPSHAY
strategy of indiscernible copies, and bringing the “readymade” natural stone into
the temples of the artworld, puts her more directly in dialogue with and in the nar-
rative unfolding of Duchamp and Warhol. Her strategy makes the contrast between
the “making” and values inherent in nature and art respectively – as well as the
contest of these values–especially salient (and much easier to transport!). Thus, I
suggest, we should inscribe Vija Celmins into the last chapter of the great story,
alongside Warhol, as furthering the Duchampian push toward art’s full
self-consciousness.
Notes
1 Art historian, Christina Bryan Rosenberger (2019), stresses this point on account of
Celmins’s mastery of many media, “Vija Celmins; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art”
Art in America, Feb. 2109, pp. 79–80.
2 Russell Ferguson “The Image Found Me: Vija Celmins in Los Angeles” in To Fix the Image in
Memory ed. Gary Garrels, 57–63, at 57.
3 Ferguson, 57.
4 Quoted in Frances Jacobus-Parker (2018) “Redescribing the Photograph,” in Vija Celmins,
To Fix the Image in Memory, 85.
5 Danto, Abuse, 150.
6 From the Chronology in Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory, 247–8.
7 Quoted from Ian Alteveer, “Longer than Anywhere in the World: Vija Celmins on the East
Coast” in Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory, 159.
8 Quoted in Garrels’ Introduction, Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory, 19.
9 Interview with Ken Price, in Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory, 235.
10 Ian Alteveer, “Longer than Anywhere in the World: Vija Celmins on the East Coast” in Vija
Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory, 159.
11 Alteveer, 160.
12 Danto, Abuse, 9–10.
13 Quoted in Garrels’s Introduction, 17.
14 Duchamp quoted in Danto, Abuse, 10.
15 Garrels, Introduction, 17.
16 Interview with Phong Bui, in Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory, 230, emphasis mine.
17 In a laudatory review in Artforum, Jordan Kantor makes a similar point, writing “Here
[with respect to To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI] it is as if Celmins has taken the initial
assignment of Western aesthetics – to imitate nature – literally. “Beginning to
Understand: Jordan Kantor on the Art of Vija Celmins,” 171.
References
Danto, Arthur C. 1997. After the End of Art, Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 2013. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open
Court.
Garrels, Gary. ed. 2018. Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory, New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
334
Kantor, Jordan. 2019. “Beginning to Understand: Jordan Kantor on the Art of Vija Celmins”
Artforum. January, 166–214.
Rosenberger, Christina B. 2019. “Vija Celmins: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art” Art in
America, 79–80.
Shapshay, Sandra. 2020. “Kant, Celmins and Art after the End of Art” Con-Textos Kantianos
Num 12.
335
38
The Meaning of Ugliness, The Authority of
Beauty
J.M. BERNSTEIN
In “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,” Arthur Danto argues that there

were two stages to the platonic critique of the arts: ephemeralization and takeover.
Plato’s effort to authorize philosophy in opposition to the arts was in part motivated by
his perception of their danger: artworks are sensuous particulars designed to affectively
move and even overwhelm the spectator; and, more importantly, tragedy and comedy
were themselves synoptic views of the world that, in underlining human finitude, made
life appear either grievable or laughable. Plato’s dialectical response was designed to
de-authorize art, and thereby to remove its threat. In claiming that only unchanging
ideas or forms are real, works of art that are imitations of temporally finite sensible
objects are shown to be ontologically deficient – imitations of imitations, mere sem-
blances. As semblances they become impotent; what sense can be made of binding
one’s powers of attention to illusory items whose fate is to simply go out of existence?
The second stage “consists so far as possible in rationalizing art, so that reason bit by bit
colonizes the domain of feelings,” thus effectively identifying beauty with reason in a
vision Nietzsche termed “aesthetic socratism” (Danto 1998, 68).
My own judgment joins Danto’s here: while art making continued apace throughout
the centuries, in reality the platonic delegitimation and disenfranchisement have never
been lifted; the arts, even when loved and prized, have never fully recovered from Plato’s
vanquishing them from the precincts of knowing, reason, meaning, and reality, even
when appropriately subsumed under sovereign reason, under an autonomous reason
that then became the determining and final authority over what does or does not have
significance. Aristotle’s concessionary strategy in the Poetics, for example, salvages
tragedy by harmonizing it with the demands of reason. In response to this long history,
Danto’s philosophy of art sought a rescue by detaching art from the philosophy of art
in a manner that would give back to the arts the very dangerousness that so alarmed
Plato in the first instance. It is a grand, bold, and generous project. Indeed, it is in some
sense patently a philosophy of art for our times since the artistic pluralism that Danto
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The Meaning of Ugliness, The Authority of Beauty
philosophically defended – there is no necessary visual feature an item must possess in

order to be a bona fide work of art – has come to pass. But here also is the worry: the
artistic pluralism Danto championed has itself become at least a symptom, if not a pri-
mary vehicle, of art’s continuing disenfranchisement. Artistic pluralism is not a sign of
art becoming dangerous in new and challenging ways, art becoming dangerous again,
but, apparently, one of the ways in which the arts continue to die, to stop mattering to
the cultures to which they belong. This is a prima facie indication that something in
Danto’s analysis misfired, something in his philosophical methodology and critical
diagnosis failed. In broad terms, I will argue that Danto’s classifying, truth-only
philosophical strategy, unbeknownst to itself, colludes with rather than restores the
lack of value traditionally ascribed to the arts; a lack that is only further underlined by
Danto’s making the sensible features of artworks pragmatic additions that are fully sep-
arate and distinct from their semantic core. In making these two claims, I will draw
Danto’s theory into conversation with Stanley Cavell’s and T.W. Adorno’s philosophies
of modernism. For reasons that will become evident, I want to focus on Danto’s 2003
work, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, as a way of bringing into
view these pivotal limitations of his theory.
Danto opens The Abuse of Beauty with the reminder of the contours of his theory.
With Hegelian brio, he contends that only at the end of art could an adequate definition
of art arise because, at least in part, the grand narrative of modern and modernist art
includes the internal effort of art, through its own acts of purification and creation, to
define what is essential to art – for example, all that Greenberg insistence on flatness
and the delimitation of flatness to account for the development of painting from Manet
to Abstract Expressionism to Frank Stella’s black stripe paintings. For Danto, Warhol’s
Brillo Box shredded this project by generating a philosophically fecund identity of indis-
cernibles question: What is the difference between Brillo Box and the visually identical
items we can buy in the supermarket? Because there is no perceptual difference, Brillo
Box immediately demonstrated that what distinguished a mere object from an artwork
could not be a sensible, visually perspicuous feature of the artwork. The historical quest
of modernist art was thus in vain; a new definition of art would have to be built on the
ruins of that history. Furthermore, if no sensible feature of an object by itself makes an
object an artwork, then, since beauty can reasonably be taken as either a sensible fea-
ture of an object or a fundamental way of responding to (judging) its sensible features,
beauty could not belong to the essence of art – a fact underlined by the numerous great
works of art, including modernist icons such as Matisse’s Blue Nude and Picasso’s Les
Demoiselles d’Avignon, that stake their aesthetic claim on their repudiation of the
beautiful. Ugliness or terribleness is constitutive of how these artworks mean to sustain
the acts of visual attention they invite.1
Danto can then remind us of his finally honed, minimalist definition of an artwork:
artworks are not ‘mere things’ because they have an irredeemable aboutness to them.
They must have some semantic property; but their mode of aboutness is not immediate
or transparent, the way some speech acts are meant to be, but embodied; and their
mode of embodiment inflects the way they mean, how they are about whatever they are
about. Hence, in brief, “x is an art work if it embodies a meaning” (Danto 2003, 25),
whose full intelligibility requires cognizance of an art historical context. What could
the works of Warhol and Duchamp be without that? This minimalist yet expansive
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J.M. BERNSTEIN
definition has initial plausibility since it synchronizes with the guiding gestures that
govern the interpretation of artworks: we typically commence interpreting a work of
art by specifying how the sensible properties of the work contribute to and inform the
meaning communicated.
Now compare Danto’s procedure with the startling opening of Stanley Cavell’s The
World Viewed, whose first sentence is this: “When Tolstoy asked, “What is art?” his
answer was to dismiss most of the great art of the past” (Cavell 1979, 3). After can-
vassing the obvious ways we may discount Tolstoy’s radical gesture, Cavell comes to the
thought that Tolstoy is not asking after the nature of art, not searching for a definition
or essence that holds true of all works at all times; on the contrary, he is inquiring after
the importance of art: “It was when I came to see that these are not separate questions
– that the answer to the question “What is the importance of art?” is grammatically
related to, or a way of answering, the question “What is art?” – that I came to an under-
standing of what Tolstoy was talking about” (Cavell, 1979, 4). Cavell takes Tolstoy’s
thought as a revelation: in asking after the nature of art what he, Cavell, in fact philo-
sophically desired was an account of the importance of art. What would an account of
art without its importance achieve? For whom? Would not an account of art without its
importance be like a mechanical description of an object without a designation of its
function, as though we could credulously state of a clock all its business of interlocking
gears that power a balance wheel without mention that it tells time? Isn’t the presump-
tion of extensionally replete essential definitions that: (a) there is no mattering or signif-
icance to an object being what it is apart from its classificatory identity; and (b) essential
classification is cognitively valuable because, ceteris paribus, it tracks causal powers,
which is what significance comes to in a value empty domain? My hypothesis that the
pluralism Danto envisioned for the contemporary artworld continues to disenfranchise
the arts gives the worry about his definitional procedure’s critical significance. Seeking
extensional sufficiency without value – a classificatory but decidedly not an evaluative
definition – would seem to perfectly cohere with a situation in which, as Cavell states it,
“music, painting, sculpture, poetry … are not generally important, except pretty much
for the men and women devoted to creating them” (Cavell 1979, 4).
Here, at least, the issue of the correct diagnosis of art’s disenfranchisement can
begin to come into view. In elaborating his conception of embodied meaning, Danto
routinely has recourse to the analogy between artworks and rhetoric (Danto 2003, xix;
1981, 165–72). Making the embodiment aspect of art like a rhetorical flourish cannot
be a way of salvaging art from platonic censure because art’s rhetorical character, its
seeking to induce an affective response, is precisely what makes the arts deserving of
censure. As a good rationalist might say: we should not have our minds or wills force-
fully bent by the winds of affect; rather, we should be persuaded only by the forceless
force of better argument. Scientific theories, mathematical proofs, and philosophical
arguments are not rationally improved if set to music or their validity enhanced with
the addition of a rhythm section. And if you insist upon affect, on grief being appro-
priate in some locales and patriotism essential in others, for example, then it can only be
truly the correct – right and appropriate – response if it has been directed by sovereign
reason, which is just the “aesthetic socratism” strategy. Nothing in Danto’s definition of
art fundamentally salvages art from the critical force of platonic ephemeralization or
takeover.
338
Of course, the very point of The Abuse of Beauty is to make good on the axiological
deficit of the semantic theory of art by bringing back into focal consideration beauty
and related features of works under the heading of “pragmatic properties,” namely,
those properties “intended to dispose an audience to have feelings of one sort or another
toward what the artwork represents” (Danto 2003, xv), without infringing upon the
conceptual hygiene of his original definition. Danto confesses that he would “like” to be
able to claim that possessing pragmatic features is a second condition of something
being an artwork “but I am not sure this would be true” (Danto 2003, xix).2 Because
the ambition of The Abuse of Beauty is deficit reduction and repair, Danto, in fact, says
much that is illuminating about the role of beauty in and outside the arts. However, the
issue is not whether beauty and related pragmatic properties have some even pervasive
role in the arts but whether the arts can be made intelligible in general apart from their
aesthetic aspects. Is Danto right to argue that the entire enterprise of aesthetics rests
upon a mistake and should be replaced by the philosophy of art? (Danto 2003, 59–60).
Again, because his concern lies primarily with extensional adequacy, Danto is content
to draw on simple counterexamples in order to demonstrate that where there is art there
need not be beauty or its pragmatic kin. Although all of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades
were designed partly to demonstrate that art could be severed from aesthetic signifi-
cance, “retinal flutter” as he had it, none succeeds as fully as Comb (1916). As Danto
quotes Calvin Tompkins: “the most serenely anaesthetic of all Duchamp’s readymades
… [it embodies the principle of the readymade:] no beauty, no ugliness, nothing particu-
larly aesthetic about it” (Danto 2003, 95). Note that because Fountain (1917) is too
proximate to an everyday Brancusi and Bottle-Rack (1914) too much like a novice David
Smith before he found surrealism, Comb turns out to be a hard-won counterexample,
one that fails for that very reason: it only makes sense as anaesthetic, as an effort to
dethrone or de-authorize aesthetic claiming. Indeed, all of Danto’s presumptive coun-
terexamples fail in exactly this direction, whether it is Damien Hirst’s maggot-infested
cow head, A Thousand Years (1990), or the late Gothic sandstone sculpture The Prince of
the World (1310) with its complacently princely front and worm-and-frog infested decay-
ing back; these works are in fierce conversation with the meaning and authority of
aesthetic beauty – they are about beauty (as, of course, are the seminal works of Matisse
and Picasso). But this is to say, the history of art on whose ruins Danto means to con-
struct his theory does not have quite the shape and significance he imputes to it. If it
had, art would have undergone a wondrous revolutionary rebirth after Warhol’s defiant
deconstruction.
Theodor W. Adorno, whose Aesthetic Theory is evidently bent in a direction directly
opposed to Danto’s, nonetheless agrees with him on the direction of modern art: “the
deaestheticization of art is immanent to art” (Adorno 1997, 59). Sensing something of
an ally in Adorno, Danto, boldly, uses the opening sentence of Aesthetic Theory as the
epigraph for Chapter One of The Abuse of Beauty: “It is self-evident that nothing
concerning art is self-evident any more, not its inner life, not its relation to the world,
not even its right to exist.” I can only hazard that Danto heard in the final phrase of this
sentence the thought that if art’s right to exist depended on visually capturing the
visual essence of art, then art would forfeit its right to existence. Once freed from that
demand, its right to exist can be affirmed simply in virtue of what art works are:
embodied meanings.
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J.M. BERNSTEIN
Put aside the fact that Adorno believes that all definitions are subject to substantive
historical transformation because the meaning and significance of all social phe-
nomena are subject to substantive historical transformation. Adorno’s plaint is still
decidedly darker. What the history of modernist art sought was not a definition of art,
but a vindication of art, an account in art of the authority of art. Modernist artworks
intended to be exemplary instances of the claim and hence the authority of art. Thus
the withdrawal from representation into abstraction was not in search of a definitional
minimalism – just pigment on a flat (canvas) surface – but rather for the sake of demon-
strating how the claim of art could be substantiated without being parasitic on any
extra-artistic mode of claiming, say, resemblance or geometric order or formal har-
mony. The further turn against the beautiful was for the sake of discriminating art
claiming from “culinary” (Adorno 1997, 347) charm or sensational excitation or easy
erotic attraction.
Again, like Danto, Adorno believes that art’s own quest-project has failed and per-
haps was bound to fail, but his understanding of the failure of modernism is different.
Adorno argues that the space of autonomous art – the space of art in its separation
from religion, politics, domestic celebration, and ideological posturing – is, by virtue of
its categorial separation from social practice, already de-authorized. Hence art’s quest
for (self-)authorization, because taking place in a domain that has been categorically
cut off from all platonically rationalized cognitive and normative modes of authority,
was necessarily aborted, amputated, partial; because since Plato being art is being pos-
ited as being without intrinsic authority, acts of attempted self-authorization will explo-
sively appear and then withdraw (into being just art). Art can only fail to demonstrate
the authority of art’s own forms and modes of claiming because being mere art is the
historical mechanism of art’s continuing disenfranchisement, which explains why one
school of the intractable avant-garde sought the immediate re-unification of art with
everyday practice in order to end art. Hence, in contrast to Danto’s censure of art’s
philosophical pretensions, Adorno considers the modernist quest not misguided, a
philosophical error, but aporetic. Modernism seeks in the mode of semblance to autho-
rize what was denied authority and practical import as purposively meaningful though
without practical purpose. Adorno took his own philosophical effort as the necessary
supplement to art’s practical effort; aesthetic theory discursively elaborates art’s claim to
authority in a manner that acknowledges the validity of that claim as simply what it
means to acknowledge that any work of art has lodged an authentic claim while, at the
same time, withdrawing discursive vindication in the face of the artwork’s performance.
Still, Adorno understood the history of despair lodged in the aporia; perhaps art should
end because it is an exercise in futility. Perhaps art should end in order that art, or what
art means to authorize, can begin. Something of these thoughts is at work in Duchamp’s
rush to push art over the edge. Adorno sought critical remembrance in the place of
nihilist destruction.
When Cavell asked after the importance of art, he meant by importance the idea that
art is the bearer of or proxy for a form of authority undergoing historical erasure; or
even more radically, that art is the placeholder for what authority itself must be against
the claims of platonic rationalism. The idea of acknowledgement in Cavell’s philosophical
lexicon works toward an idea of authority not subject to narrowly cognitive or nar-
rowly moral rational regimentation and reduction. For example:
340
Painting, being art, is revelation; it is revelation because it is acknowledgment; being

acknowledgement, it is knowledge, of itself and of its world. Modernism did not invent this
situation; it merely lives upon nothing else. In reasserting that acknowledgment is the
home of knowledge, it recalls what the remainder of culture is at pains to forget (Cavell
1979, 110).
The phrase “acknowledgment is the home of knowledge” is the pulse of the thought:
knowledge without acknowledgment exterminates the object of knowledge – the world
known is only what knowledge says it is, and nothing beyond that. The object has no
authority in itself; and that makes such knowledge without acknowledgment
worldless.
With this thought in place, Cavell can quickly locate modernism’s quest in a manner
that joins the idea of beauty with an idea of nature. Considering Morris Louis’s late
Unfurleds the way other writers, including Danto (Danto 2003, 143–5), speak of
Pollock or Barnett Newman, Cavell states that “only Sigma strikes me as of overpower-
ing beauty among the Unfurleds I have seen, though all are beautiful. … But to speak of
an automatism [an authentic art medium] which admits of a sometimes overpowering
beauty is a way of characterizing nature” (Cavell 1979, 113). No one quite sees that
last thought coming: an authentic art medium that can admit of works having over-
powering beauty is “a way of characterizing nature.”
Three over fast thoughts may help to motivate Cavell’s claim. First, Cavell takes as
obvious that the notions of the beautiful and the sublime are joined in modernist art;
beauty needs to be overpowering, sublime, if it is not to disintegrate into the culinary;
but, conversely, unlike the mathematical and dynamic sublime in Kant’s theory, mod-
ernist artworks are meant as difficult objects of visual attention. The modernist sublime
is a formation of beauty. Second, beauty functions to generate an authoritative claim
that cannot be further rationalized. If art is meant to house authority independently of
sovereign reason, if art is to be the anticipation of a formation of reason beyond the
platonic or idealist or rationalist conception of reason, beyond a reason that takes itself
to be sovereign and autonomous, and hence a reason not dependent on anything outside
of itself, then, in the first instance, beauty and its various surrogates and displacements
– sublimity, dissonance, ugliness – were authority functions that reason could not get on
level terms with, that evaded and parried rationalized reason’s grasp while still lodging
an overpowering claim, a claim to significance and mattering however initially opaque.

This corresponds to a structure of experience fully documented in Danto’s own
encounter with Robert Motherwell’s Elegies for the Spanish Republic No. 172 (Danto
2003, 101, 108–13). Third, if the idea of acknowledgment is to situate knowledge in
the world, to contextualize knowledge and knowing in manner that makes perspicuous
how knowledge must be dependent on its object, then the authority the beauty function
signifies is the authority of sensible and living nature; the experience delivered by mod-
ernist art in its American phase “is the release of nature from our private holds” (Cavell
1979, 114). Which is not the same as getting nature back; such art rather is the experi-
ence of that and how we have become lost to nature, and nature lost to us. At its height,
modernism intrigued experiences that entailed that that loss need not be final: “that
nature’s absence … is only the history of our turnings from it, in distraction or denial,
through history or industry with words and works” (Cavell 1979, 114).
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J.M. BERNSTEIN
That Morris Louis’s Unfurleds could be the bearer of such a claim might seem wildly
implausible; one can take Warhol’s Brillo Box and all it begat as the voice of this skep-
tical regard. Danto hears the skepticism but mistakes it object, despite the fact that his
own account of embodied meaning should have made him more sympathetic to the
stakes of medium specificity, and hence more attuned to the significance of art being
driven back into its medium-specific ways of sense-making.
Beauty is intrinsic to autonomous art because such art is the bearer of the delegiti-
mized authority of nature, of nature as something more than an object of scientific
knowledge or a raw material for manufacture or a source of energy or a tamed space for
recreation; living nature is the condition for the human form of life. Because it is the bare
claim of the authority of nature in opposition to what has happened to it, the claim
appears in the mode of contemplation rather than action – as natural beauty or art
beauty or as the successive inheritors of the claim of art beauty, including, of course,
the ugly, the abject, the anaesthetic, the remnants of abused nature after sovereign
reason has done its work. Beauty is the authority function of nature in itself in opposition to
a sovereign reason that allows nothing to remain outside it. There is no simple way of justi-
fying this claim – vindicating it is the singular effort of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.
However, one wedge into the issue is genealogy: how did beauty become harnessed
to the authority of nature in the first instance? Of course, any answer to this question
must be speculative. The value of speculation on origins is heuristic, helping to make
intelligible what is otherwise flatly puzzling. Adorno begins broaching the genealogical
question after noting how modernist works seem to engage in a dialectic of integration
and disintegration:
The utmost integration is the utmost semblance and this causes the former’s reversal: Ever
since Beethoven’s last works those artists who pushed integration to an extreme have
mobilized disintegration. The truth content of art, whose organon was integration, turns
against art and in this turn has its emphatic moments (Adorno 1997, 45).
Adorno’s thought here is that even classical autonomous works governed by the
ideals of beauty and harmony were for the sake of sensible meaning, irreducibly
embodied meaning as the continuing claim of the now delegitimized formation of sen-
sible rational meaning. However, because the modes of achieving beauty are themselves
modes of regulated ordering, then achieved sensible meaning is in danger of becoming

a remote colony of sovereign reason, and hence virtually insensible. In order to combat
this, and to break through the domain of semblance into which sensible meaning has
been consigned, autonomous art always promulgated a counter-movement, a stark
moment of disintegration, a moment of dissonance, a moment of flagrant sensible
insignificance, of bald material insistence, an irascible moment of anti-art that returns
to the sensible whole its sensible/sensuous orientation, its stake in being a formation of
embodied meaning.
If the disintegration of beauty is ugliness, then beauty requires ugliness, the negation
of beauty, for its realization. Adorno takes modern art’s dialectic of integration and dis-
integration as the transmission of the older and more insistent dialectic of beauty and
ugliness, the entwinement of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as Nietzsche records its
uprising in ancient Greece. Adorno’s genealogy generalizes Nietzsche’s: beauty (the
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Apollonian moment) originates in the ugly (the Dionysian moment). The ugly stands for
and is a reminder of terrifying, overpowering, and inassimilable nature. In this respect,
ugliness must come first; otherwise the beautiful colonizer would be antecedent to the
ugly colonized.
The image of beauty as that of a single and differentiated something originates with the
emancipation from the fear of the overpowering wholeness and undifferentiatedness of
nature. The shudder in the face of this is rescued by beauty into itself by making itself
impervious to the immediately existent; beauty establishes a sphere of untouchability;
works become beautiful by the force of their opposition to what simply exists. … The reduction
that beauty imposes on the terrifying, over and out of which beauty raises itself and which
it banishes from itself as from a sacred temple, has – in the face of the terrifying – something
powerless about it (Adorno 1997, 51; italics JMB).
Consider what “simply exists” as mere objects; in this locution, things that simply
exist mark out touchable things with use but no authority. Hence, in his phrasing here,
Adorno, like Danto, is considering the contrast between a mere (touchable) object and
an (untouchable) art object. On Adorno’s interpretation, lacking beauty or one of its
contraries or analogues is lacking authority, lacking what calls for acknowledgment
(what the experience of untouchability exemplifies) rather than use.
Beauty’s power is twofold. Beauty as form is the power of civilization against terri-
fying nature; but beauty is more than form, more than the cruelty and violence of
imposing form on formless matter. Beauty is also the power, exercised through form, to
halt, to hold in abeyance, and in the halting and overwhelming thereby, however implic-
itly, recognizing the terrifying wholeness and undifferentiatedness of nature. Part of
the evidence for this is that: (a) formal beauty without the power to halt fails as beauty;
and (b) beauty’s lapse into formalism, into complaisant harmonies and eye-candy
delight, can be righted, its claim sustained through ugliness or dissonance.
Adorno locates the second moment of halting and holding in abeyance in shudder
and untouchability, that is, in the moment of sublime acknowledgment. In most con-
texts, Adorno paces out the relation between these two moments as between two modes
of comportment: rationality (construction) and mimesis (A, 54). Mimetic responsive-
ness is, for Adorno, the dimension of rationality that sovereign reason eliminates.
Mimetic responsiveness can house acknowledgment and authority because mimetic

responsiveness to the other, the disposition to imitate the other, to take the other as
model, is the recognition of the other as authoritative. Art beauty binds form to mimesis,
thus revealing how form too can be acknowledgment.
The core of Danto’s art theory is deeply plausible: he understood the depth of the
platonic disenfranchisement of art and understood how artworks are modes of
embodied meaning. He was further right to grasp that with Warhol, with the coming to
be of Pop Art and minimalism, not only the heyday of modernism, but something more
central to the meaning of art ended. His generous and buoyant intellect saw this
moment in a triumphant and celebratory light. What in fact ended, however, was the
internal dynamic through which art sought to establish itself as an irreducible mode of
authority, namely, as the stand-in for the authority of occluded nature. Danto missed
this in part because he accepted a model of definition and answering the “What is X?”
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question that art itself was attempting to challenge through challenging the authority
of sovereign reason; and in part because he failed to see that the ugly, the cold, the indif-
ferent, the abject, and the anesthetic were not counterexamples to the role of beauty
and aesthetics in art but instantiations.
It could be argued that in our now fledgling urgent responses to global warming, cli-
mate change, and the growing disintegration of sustainable living habitats the recogni-
tion of the authority of living nature has passed, finally, from art to science and politics,
where it belongs. If this is so, then Cavell’s and Adorno’s melancholy over the end of art
can be set aside and art can move onto less fraught terrain, the very hope of Danto’s
genial pluralism. However, embodied meaning can only matter if it remains a mode of
meaning beyond the colony of sovereign reason.
Notes
1 For an analysis of Les Demoiselles on this precise question, see Bernstein 2010.
2 A direct, down and dirty way of refuting Danto’s theory would be, following the thought that
the meaning of a concept or word turns on the uses to which it is put, to deny that the
semantic/pragmatic distinction can be sustained. If the application of concepts requires sen-
sitivity to features of the sensible environment, capacities for discrimination and fine-grained
judgment, then aesthetic/normative judgment are a component cognitive judgment, not a
separate or fully separable capacity. I take something like this thought to be what Horowitz
and Huhn, in their introduction to The Wake of Art, are urging in their pressing on Danto’s
theory the necessity and inevitability of making judgments of taste. For a powerful defense of
the internal relation between semantics and pragmatics, see Alice Crary, Beyond Moral
Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). Because I am here interested in
the very issue of beauty itself, I am putting this wider issue aside.
References
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. 1997. Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bernstein Jay M. 2010. “‘The Demand for Ugliness’: Picasso’s Bodies.” In: Art and Aesthetics After
Adorno, edited by J.M. Bernstein, et al., 210–48. The Townsend Center for the Humanities.
Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The World Viewed, Enlarged Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Crary, Alice. 2009. Beyond Moral Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
University Press.
–––––. 1998. “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.” In: The Wake of Art: Criticism,
Philosophy and the Ends of Taste, edited by Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn, 63–80. Amsterdam:
G&B Arts International.
–––––. 2003. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open
Court.
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Feminist Criticism: On Disturbatory
Art and Beauty
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Arthur C. Danto – great philosopher, good friend, and feminist role model when few
could be found within the ranks of philosophical aesthetics and male philosophers in
general – was a paradigm of provocative thought about contemporary art. Beginning
in the 1980s, Danto offered interpretations of artworks by a wide array of artists,
including Eva Hesse, Judy Chicago, and Cindy Sherman, whose “disturbatory” works
were either ignored or denounced by mainstream critics at the time. Danto’s champion-
ing of feminist art was deliberate and delightful; he openly endorsed the Guerrilla Girls!
He was eager to promote what he saw as a revolutionary movement. His words were
especially appreciated in my early years in graduate school: studying aesthetics after
completing a master’s program in studio art. My reflections here honor the openness
and rigor that Danto brought to his many experiences of art as he perused the galleries
and museums of New York City and shared his recollections with devoted readers of The
Nation. He approached fresh feminist works within the context of newly emerging fem-
inist art criticism that ultimately shaped the early development of what has come to be
known as “feminist aesthetics.” I begin with Danto’s appreciation of women’s unique
contributions to art, including those of his beloved wife, Barbara Westman Danto. I
then highlight the role of female artists in his developing vocabulary of feminist art
criticism and finally note his transition to feminist aesthetics. Particularly interesting to
Danto were the many forms of defiance by female artists who sought to reclaim agency
and expression of the female body. He revived interest in the neglected topic of beauty
while simultaneously advancing radical political goals within the artworld. His call to
arms urged art viewers to experience the new – what he often called “art on the edge
and over” – wherein “[t]he experience of art becomes a moral adventure rather than
merely an aesthetic interlude” (Danto 1996, 16).
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1 Appreciating Women in Art
Now that we can look back upon his multifaceted career as philosopher, critic, and artist,
Danto’s feminist writings are highly relevant. He began as a philosopher of action theory
and metaphysics, returning later to the writings of Hegel on the end of art, in addition to
his many books and articles on philosophical aesthetics and ground-breaking work in
the philosophy of art. In addition, he was well known from 1984 to 2009 as the art critic
for the distinguished publication, The Nation, and the winner of many awards. As a
practicing artist, he specialized in woodcuts, a “hands on” medium. His capacious range
of intellectual interests – from the core of analytic philosophy to its feminist fringes –
refined and focused his point of view on the artist, her intentions, and ultimately, deep
meanings of her work. Creating his own art, particularly within the exciting postwar
years of Abstract Expressionism in New York City, must have been a heady endeavor. In
addition to the stimulation of an ever-present active art scene and academic colleagues
were the contributions of Barbara Westman Danto, also an accomplished artist.
Consider Westman Danto’s colorful and lively painting entitled Family Portrait.
Sitting comfortably and relaxed on a small sofa, life seems to emanate from the
couple as green ferns grow up and tan squiggles flow down. The stripes of shirts and
couch and the dots of Barbara’s socks add to the frenzy of lines and energy. The sitters,
anchored in blue and linked by their two attentive dogs, “pop” against the cadmium
yellow of the wall. At the center of the universe in their living room, they are comfort-
ably at home with their pets in a “family” setting. Arthur’s left hand rests affectionately
on Barbara’s shoulder. There is respect as he looks at her and intimacy as we too are
allowed into the space. On Arthur’s lap lie two of his books: The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace (1981) topped by What Philosophy Is: A Guide to the Elements (1968).
Barbara’s atypical “family of four” casts Arthur as a deep yet approachable scholar: a
dog lover relaxed in his home environment.
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Feminist Criticism: On Disturbatory Art and Beauty
A photo taken of the couple seated in front of the painting hanging in their residence
accompanied an article in The New York Times Magazine written by Elizabeth Frank enti-
tled, “Art’s Off-the-Wall Critic” (1989). In short order, Danto had become quite a sensa-
tion in the local art scene. He had praised Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box after first seeing it
at the Stable Gallery in 1964 and promoted his “end of art” theorizing, baffling many
New Yorkers. In spite of his “outsider,” that is, philosopher’s, status as art critic, he was
favorably compared to both Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Adopting a
decidedly idiosyncratic turn, one author wrote, “They look every inch the picture of
that sort of soaringly accomplished yet eccentric Manhattan couple, so blending the
highbrow with the bohemian …” (Hennessey 2016).
Within the 1989 feature, Elizabeth Frank described Danto as “one of the most vocal
and controversial art critics today … lucid and amusing, detached and disinterested. ...
Reveling in a kind of dandyish pedantry,” who was clearly seen to be having a great
deal of fun with serious New York art: “When you walk through an exhibition with
him you feel you are in the company of an updated 18th-century amateur who is inter-
ested in everything and rules nothing out.” She clearly enjoyed his style: “He is the art
world’s great flaneur, strolling the boulevards with a cheerful whistle, stopping to peer
in a shop window when something catches his eye.” And she sought to differentiate
him as an atypical critic: “The live-and-let-live attitude carries over into the criticism.
Danto readily admits to being non-confrontational and uncurmudgeonly” (1989).
Another author, writing a review in 2000 of Danto’s The Madonna of the Future: Essays
in a Pluralistic Art World (2000b), described him as “a pluralistic critic, willing to see
anything as art. … There is no one like Danto for making sense of a wad of pink clay
that looks like chewed bubble gum. There is no one else who can confidently say that
Damien Hirst’s dead lamb is better than his dead pig. ... He’s unbeatable at what he
does” (Boxer 2000, 9).
Who wouldn’t enjoy reading Danto’s reviews and reliving his impressions of art? I
return to the role of Barbara Westman Danto and her artistic accomplishments – covers
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for The New Yorker and numerous book illustrations – because of Arthur’s love for her as
his female and feminist companion-in-art. He mentioned her often: “Life in the art
world is filled with adventure and astonishments, and I am beyond expression happy to
have been able to share it with my high-spirited and affectionate sidekick and wife, the
artist Barbara Westman. There is no such thing as drabness or dreariness when she
comes along, and I hope the cocktail effervescence of her company is somehow com-
municated in the livelier passages and pages of this work” (Danto 1994, xvi). Later he
added: “My marvelous wife and companion, the artist Barbara Westman, blesses my
life. Her unfailing cheerfulness, humor, love, and high spirits are the elixir that explains
my happiness and productivity” (Danto 2003, xxii). Not only did they view art together,
but he empathized with how she felt to be an artist, to create. I suggest that his attention
to women in art was due in part to his relationship with Barbara, whereby women
posed no threat or aberration from the established canon of creativity and craft. Not
only did Barbara ground his art criticism and philosophy in artistic practice, but she
also reminded him, daily, that artists can be women too.
Frank’s article concluded with the inaccurate statement, “He’s not interested in
esthetics or in making judgments about esthetic quality” (1989). When Danto explained
the meaning of a work of art, he automatically judged it worthy of our shared attention
and possible admiration. Indeed, his ongoing attempts to define “art” were testament to
the fact that – unlike most art critics – he was a philosopher first and critic second. Let
us consider some of the women whose work he came to appreciate – a veritable history
of the feminist movement of the 1980s and following – as he ultimately returned to the
topic of beauty, around the turn of the millennium, to provide one type of model for
feminist aesthetics.
2 Female Artists and Feminist Art Criticism
The year 1987 was pivotal for what Danto considered a feminist revolution in art. He
found the work of Lee Krasner, student of Hans Hoffmann, less interesting than her
working relationship with her husband Jackson Pollock’s “genius” (Danto 1987, 35).
However, he judged Jennifer Bartlett’s early work “rich and demanding” but “difficult,”
eventually becoming “one of her enthusiasts” (Danto 1987, 165, 166, 170). In writing
about Cindy Sherman in August of 1987, Danto explained that photography was not
her medium; rather, it was “a means to her artistic ends” whereby “[h]er medium is
herself ” (Danto 1990, 120). In her early black and white film stills, she photographed
herself as an actress in various roles “subject to cosmetic modifications that are the
right of Western women: lipstick, eye shadow, hair coloring and of course the semiotics
of feminine dress” (Danto 1990, 121). We are unable to fully enter the illusion created
by the artist because she functioned as a type of performance artist whose “genius con-
sists in the discovery that one can be disturbatory through photography ... She has
found a way of penetrating the consciousness of her viewers, and in this way obliter-
ating the insulating distances between her self and our selves” (Danto 1990, 123).
“Disturbatory” was a label that would be applied to many female and feminist artists.
Years later, after her explosive color photography, Danto would write that Sherman’s
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early stills served “as a fulcrum for raising the deepest questions of what it meant to be
a woman in America in the late twentieth century” (Danto 1997, 148).
In November 1987, Danto shared some revelatory thoughts in a review of four
large-scale paintings of colorful, nested squares of the 1974 Diderot series by Frank
Stella: “The first word that entered my mind when I initially saw these pieces was ‘fem-
inist.’ With all due regard to the image of athletic machismo the artist projects through
his obsession with fast cars and competitive sports, these extraordinary works suggest
to me that a certain feminist sensibility has conquered artistic consciousness today”
(Danto 1990, 147). Clearly, Danto saw “a certain feminist sensibility” as liberating:
“The regimented squares express the regulative imperatives of the masculine will. The
vibrant colors, the enveloping space, the sensuous and teasing dilations that draw us in,
belong to the feminine side. Certain events in the art world of the 1970s and 1980s
enabled this other side to emerge” (Danto 1990, 147).
Danto was openly acknowledging that a feminist sensibility – “an idiom that was
very much on the periphery of the art world of the 1970s” – was already being copied
in the artworld; it “has infiltrated it to the point of now being available as a salon
style, and accessible to artists of whatever gender” (Danto 1990, 147). Stella, like
other male artists who witnessed the feminist revolution in art, had tapped into his
feminine side. But feminist artists soon radicalized their own style. “Women artists,
in the name of women’s art, aimed at a kind of impurity instead, messy, often
shocking, with an openness to rejected materials and crazy forms and provocative
juxtapositions and illogical sequences. It was as if they refused to be tidy, demure,
tasteful, dainty, clean, which after all were attributes of an imprisoning femininity. At
the same time, they were not anxious to preempt the attributes of masculinity”
(Danto 1990, 147–8).
Like his characterization of Cindy Sherman, Danto saw many women seeking to
destabilize accepted categories and disrespect borders through performance art. Even
when feminist creations “celebrated specifically female forms,” he wrote, “my sense is
that the deep impulses of feminism consisted in eloquent, if often angry repudiations; …
feminists pioneered media that would sooner or later be appealing to those who may not
have shared their ideology” (Danto 1990, 148). Danto not only saw the art world
renewed by their oppositional and subversive creativity, he suggested that it – and Stella
in particular – owed feminists a debt of gratitude. The revolution had begun, and his
new category of disturbational objects proved useful in explaining the power of feminist
art: “Disturbational objects are intended to bruise sensibilities, to offend good taste, to
jeer and sneer and trash the consciousness of viewers formed by the very values distur-
bation regards as oppressive. Its aim is to transform moral consciousness, not to gratify
the sense of beauty that implies privilege and position and inequalities of every order”
(Danto 1990, 274).
In a 1989 essay entitled “Bad Aesthetic Times,” the formation of Danto’s feminist art
criticism was nearly complete. He cited Linda Nochlin’s ground-breaking 1971 essay,
“Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” as the new strain of “feminist art
theory” revealing the elusive nature of the concept of “greatness” based on white male
privilege that had routinely excluded women and minorities (Nochlin 1988). These
were not bad aesthetic times, he argued, but rather quite extraordinary and even good
aesthetic times given the feminist upheaval of traditional norms: “the feminist artist is
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encouraged to identify herself with certain exceedingly primitivistic artistic postures,

using herself, often, as the medium and vehicle of her art, employing feathers and body
paint, even, drawing, like Carolee Schneeman, a text she held concealed in her vagina
– as if giving birth to art. She is like a priestess or a sorceress, and aspires to a powerful
relationship to her audience. Polemically, she repudiates a tradition of aesthetically
defined fine art widely institutionalized in our culture” (Danto 1990, 301).
Danto’s categorization of disturbatory art was thus exemplified by feminist performance
artists whose work “can be pretty scary” in its “frontal nudity, blood, menstrual fluids” but
which “also makes clear why traditional aesthetic categories will not apply to it. It is not
meant to be beautiful, symmetrical, composed, tasteful, let alone pretty or elegant or perfect”
(Danto 1990, 300–1). For Danto, feminist artists were leading the way in unprecedented
ways: “And the question is whether, exactly a century later [after the birth of Modernism], we
stand at the beginning of a new era whose pioneers are the feminist artists who repudiate a
tradition that, from a long perspective, we can now see that Van Gogh and Gauguin really
were continuing rather than disrupting” (Danto 1990, 302). Danto predicted that with the
success of this revolutionary art, “something extraordinary will have been achieved,” that is,
the “redemptive, finally hopeful, politically sublime” (Danto 1990, 301): “To be a feminist,
after all, is not just to want to paint some pictures that will get accepted and get you accepted
as a woman artist: it is to want to change the world in ways that matter to you most, politically
and in ways we hardly can imagine from where we are now” (Danto 1990, 300). Feminist
artists continue to push the boundaries of aesthetic imagination with artworks in the
twenty-first century dealing with femicide (Argüello Manresa 2017).
In reviewing, again in 1989, an exhibit titled, “Making Their Mark: Women Artists Move
into the Mainstream, 1970–85,” in which all eighty-seven artists were female, he saw Miriam
Schapiro as “the paradigm figure” whose work, such as Wonderland of 1983 was made of
“traditionally feminine items – frilled aprons, doilies, a sampler” (Danto 1994, 58). He noted
the scripted work of Nancy Spero, the appropriations (of Walker Evans photographs) by
Sherrie Levine, the subversive gender inversions painted by Sylvia Sleigh, the nude photo-
graphs of Hannah Wilke with “her skin covered with tiny vulvas (made, one reads, of chewing
gum)” as well as the “new language of sculpture” invented by Eva Hesse: all a “rebuke to aes-
theticism” (Danto 1994, 59). Indeed, Danto’s candor was on full display when he added, “It is
work that would have failed had I, as a male, not felt myself under assault” (Danto 1994, 59).
Finally, in 1989, he invoked “an old-fashioned word” – beauty – to describe a 1952
Helen Frankenthaler painting, Mountains and Sea, that revealed his joy in explaining the
messy process of staining a canvas with paint: “The string of drips in the upper right
corner, for example, allow an archipelago of vibrant dots to form, the brush having
discharged its delicate load and then, perhaps, descended to make the streak of pale
blue in which the archipelago reappears, faintly, as a dot and then another paler dot.
That is as beautiful as painting gets” (Danto 1994, 29). It was not until 1991, however,
when he noticed the play on gender in the work of the young German conceptual artist
Rosemarie Trockel – particularly her reference to the female identity of Marcel
Duchamp, Rose Sélavy – that Danto began to write explicitly about connections of
“male and female, art with politics, feminism with revolution” (Danto 1994, 215). And
by 1996, in a volume that introduced us to examples of “art on the edge and over,”
Danto announced two major changes that had clearly taken place since the mid-1960s
that had left most “viewers” unprepared for what he called the “intractably avant-garde
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… the abandonment of painting as the central form of artistic expression” and increased
political work devoted to social change (Danto 1996, 15).
With the influence of feminism rising, “the experience of art becomes a moral adven-
ture rather than merely an aesthetic interlude” (Danto 1996, 15). But a dilemma
remained for feminist artists who seemed to reject the mainstream while still seeking its
approval. In 1995 he commented upon “the somewhat paradoxical character of the
Guerrilla Girls” – the group of anonymous activists that picketed New York art museums
for under-representing women artists – in After the End of Art: “The group has been
exceedingly radical in its means and in its spirit. And the art of this superordinate entity
is certainly a form of direct action: its members plaster the walls of Soho with brilliant,
biting posters” (Danto 1997, 147). Their oppression and exclusion, however, moved
them toward acceptance and inclusion; Danto voiced a complaint that could only be
raised by a feminist from the inside: “But the message of the posters is that not enough
women are represented in museums, in major shows, in important galleries. So it envis-
ages artistic success in the traditional, let us say, using their concept, white male terms.
Its means are radical and deconstructive, but its goals are altogether conservative”
(Danto 1997, 147). Thus Danto comfortably noted the feminists’ dilemma, having
described and categorized their art. He was now poised to move forward with a revolu-
tionary feminist agenda of his own within aesthetics itself.
3 Feminist Aesthetics
Three notable events mark the change from Danto as feminist art critic to feminist aes-
thetician. First, Danto noted substantive theoretical changes in the creation and recep-
tion of feminist art and art criticism into mainstream philosophy, particularly with the
work of Judy Chicago. In a 2002 review titled “The Feminine Mystique,” Danto called
Chicago “one of the founders of the Feminist Art Movement” (Danto 2002, 32) and
referred to her monumental 1980 project, The Dinner Party, as “one of the major artistic
monuments of the second half of the twentieth century” (Danto 2002, 34). The title
“Feminine Mystique,” of course, referred to Betty Friedan’s 1963 ground-breaking
exposé of “the problem that had no name” – the malaise experienced by supposedly
happy women in the late 1950s and 1960s. Danto had cited Friedan earlier, in 1997,
when defending his claim that 1964 was a pivotal year in American politics in a Munich
talk entitled “Thirty Years After the End of Art.” “In 1964 a congressional committee
on women’s rights released its findings, giving support to the tremendous feminist
movement detonated with the publication of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique of
1963” (Danto 1997, 126). Titling his review of Chicago’s work after Friedan’s
well-known phrase paid tribute to both as “founding mothers.” He explained the impact
of Chicago’s uniquely creative strategy, starting with her early work in abstraction, pro-
duced when she felt severely marginalized as a woman in a man’s art world: “instead of
merely fitting in, she invented a whole new history, something entirely unexpected, in
which she transformed resentments into a movement of art by, for and of women, and
was carried into fame through historical urgencies themselves barely visible in the later
1960s” (Danto 2002, 32, 34).
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Danto saw Chicago as creating a new “feminine content” and hence, a “new feminist
philosophy” by which both artist and viewer were re-directed into “perceiving a work
under the perspective of gender” instead of under traditional aesthetic categories (Danto
2002, 34). For example, Chicago’s Pasadena Lifesavers – Red Series #4 of 1969–70 could
be read in formalist terms as simply circles but were clearly intended by the artist “to be
read as vaginal openings.” Quoting Chicago: “I was never thinking about the cunt as
only the vulva. I was thinking about the cunt in a metaphysical way.… Like what does it
mean to be organized around a center core?” (Danto 2002, 34). Danto concluded,
“Feminist art is not a movement defined by a single style, as most movements have been,
but by a philosophy of what it means to be in the world as a woman” (Danto 2002, 34).
Even as early as 2002, he astutely viewed the entire body of Chicago’s work as part of the
feminist “revolution” in art, criticism, theory, and by extension, feminist philosophy.
Second, Danto published “Beauty and Beautification” that identified a separate,
Hegelian, aesthetic Third Realm of beauty beyond natural beauty and artistic beauty:
one that played an inevitable role on a daily basis in our own human lives (Danto
2000a). Once Danto focused on the “enhancement” of the body that included orna-
ment and decoration, makeup and hairstyles, garments and tattoos, he was immersed
in a new way of identifying and appreciating beauty that included beautiful people as
well as the rituals in which they partook to beautify themselves and their worlds. Third
Realm beauty was no longer about how beauty operated within art but rather was art.
A paradigm example was a wedding dress deemed art entitled, “Le Mariage de Saint
Mauer à Saint Gallen” (1994) on display at the Kunsthaus in Zurich that was worn by
the French artist Marie-Ange Guilleminot “in a somewhat disturbatory performance
work,” based on several kilos of lead sewn into the dress under the skirt (Danto 2000a,
68). A wedding dress could certainly be considered a work of art in terms of its crafts-
manship; a bride wearing a wedding dress could look “like a work of art;” but in this
case, the embodied meaning of the dress was its use as a work of art: its whiteness sym-
bolizing purity disguising the hidden weight and burden of marriage (Danto 2000a,
68, 70). Like the 1964 Brillo Box by Andy Warhol, indiscernible from its real counter-
part, the wedding dress gains its status as art through its “aboutness” or meaning.
Danto’s focus on the beautification of the human body came to include the street per-
formances of Adrian Piper – a black woman passing as white – as well as the plastic sur-
gery of ORLAN – a French woman who underwent bodily alterations to resemble
depictions of beautiful women created by male artists. As in earlier writing about femi-
nist art, Danto saw “a deep connection between the aesthetics of the Third Realm and
the realm of ethics” that resulted in an endorsement of woman’s freedom to “appear as
she cares to” rather than how she thought she should, that is, she was “no longer under
the imperatives of attractiveness” that bring men pleasure: “Feminine beauty is thus
connected with the power to arouse and excite” but Danto prioritized women’s happiness
over men’s pleasure (Danto 2000a, 81). He predicted “a brave new world” where Third
Realm aesthetics would become “less and less frivolous every day” (Danto 2000a, 82).
Third, Danto delivered the Paul Carus lectures at the 2001 American Philosophical
Association meeting that more than sufficiently answered the question he had posed
back in 1992, “What Ever Happened to Beauty?” (Danto 1994) The lectures, under the
collective title, “The Revolt Against Beauty,” became the foundation of his 2003 publi-
cation, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art, that soundly redirected the
352
trajectory of both art criticism and aesthetics by not only reviving a full treatment of
beauty but also injecting a new, gendered life into the topic of beautification (Danto
2003). Danto’s conceptualization of a revolt against beauty became an abuse of beauty,
particularly with examples such as Picasso’s “perverse” depiction of beautiful women
who are portrayed as suffering (Danto 2003, 114) and Matisse’s depiction in Woman
with Hat (1905) of the power of female beauty by means of a woman who was not
beautiful at all (Danto 2003, 87–88). Most emphatic was his insistence that he had not
considered resurrecting an old-fashioned topic like beauty until he had witnessed “its
abuse at the hands of the art of the Intractable Avant-Garde” (Danto 2003, 80):
“Protected by what I have learned, I can begin once again to pick up, with the long for-
ceps of analytical philosophy, such toxic properties as beauty, sublimity, and the like”
(Danto 2003, xix).
The most revealing example Danto provides is brief yet powerful: the “innovative
sculptor” Eva Hesse, based on an interview before her untimely death at age 34 in 1970.
Known for her conceptual, performance, and abstracted sculptural work, she vehe-
mently rejected “prettiness” and beauty in art but revealed in her diaries a preoccupa-
tion with her own beauty (Danto 2003, 78–9). Danto interpreted this dissonance as a
complication of the lived experiences of women in the late 1960s who were routinely
judged by their looks after internalizing a male gaze. Her work was conflated with her
self-image: “The search for her artistic path was further complicated by the questions
women were then beginning to ask about their identity, though feminism as a movement
had not yet emerged” (Danto 2006, 32–3). Writing in general, Danto observed, “Women
sought – and by the evidence of the literature they still seek – to define female beauty as
men are perceived to define it, and hence become what men want them to be” (Danto
2003, 77). Danto cast the new-found freedom of women unbound to beauty-as-man-
dated-by-men – the product of the women’s liberation movement since the 1970s – as
unattainable for Hesse in the late 1960s, in spite of her sophisticated aesthetic principles
and artistic accomplishments. Danto was able to discern these aesthetic inconsistencies
between Hesse’s work and her sense of self and female identity because he was a man
with a feminist consciousness and sensitivity. Even today, his insights continue to pro-
vide us with an understanding of beauty on many levels.
4 Feminist Conclusions
Arthur Danto’s vast array of feminist writings in art criticism and aesthetics remain
virtually untapped in contemporary philosophy of art. Scholars are encouraged to
focus on his analyses of gender, race, sex, and sexuality within the social context of
artistic creativity since he was one of the first among us – in addition to female aesthe-
ticians doing feminist analyses – to rise to the challenge. Notions such as disturbatory
art and Third Realm beauty (not to mention the sublime) promise untold, indeed, unlim-
ited possibilities for exploring controversial art in the twenty-first century: art in which
the ethical seems to routinely trespass upon the aesthetical. To know what Danto wrote
about the conk hairstyle of Malcolm X or a self-portrait of sixteenth-century Italian
Renaissance painter Sofonisba Anguissola or the exquisitely phallic photographs of
Robert Mapplethorpe can only enlighten and enrich our probing into “art” as we seek
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PEG BRAND WEISER
greater exposure to and knowledge of under-represented artists who led the way in an
artistic revolution in the previous century that has carried over to the present day. With
the erosion of the art-historical canon, his inclusivity was a refreshing model of
aesthetic writing; his verve and wit served to entice and entertain as well as educate. For
those who will forever think and write and create artworks about beauty – and for all of
us who enjoy our daily rituals of beautification – let us ponder and enjoy the last words
of Danto’s text, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art: “Beauty is an
option for art and not a necessary condition. But it is not an option for life. It is a
necessary condition for life as we would want to live it. That is why beauty, unlike the
other aesthetic qualities, the sublime included, is a value” (Danto 2003, 160).
References
Argüello Manresa, Gemma. 2017. “A Philosophy of Disturbatory Feminist Art.” Aesthetic

Investigations 2(1): 94–103.
Boxer, Sarah. 2000. “Non-Art for Non-Art’s Sake.” The New York Times Book Review, 6 August: 9.
Danto, Arthur C. 1968. What Philosophy Is: A Guide to the Elements. New York, NY: Harper & Row,
Publishers.
———. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1987. “Lee Krasner: A Retrospective & Jenifer Bartlett.” In: The State of the Art, 33–7 and
165–70. New York, NY: Prentice Hall Press.
———. 1990. “Cindy Sherman & Robert Colescott and Russell Connor & Bad Aesthetic Times &
Frank Stella.” In: Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present, 120–6, 272–8, 297–
312 and 144–50. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1994. “Preface & Helen Frankenthaler & Women and Mainstream Art & Rosemarie Trockel
& Whatever Happened to Beauty?” In: Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations,
ix–xvi, 24–31, 53–9, 212–9 and 251–7. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
———. 1996. “Why Does Art Need to Be Explained? “Hegel, Biedermeier, and the Intractably Avant-
Garde.” In: Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society
1970s-1990s, edited by L. Weintraub, 12–16. Litchfield, CT: Art Insights.
———. 1997. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
———. 2000a. “Beauty and Beautification.” In: Beauty Matters, edited by P.Z. Brand, 65–83. Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

———. 2000b. The Madonna of the Future: Essays in a Pluralistic Art World. New York, NY: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux.
———. 2002. “The Feminine Mystique.” The Nation 275(18): 32–36.
———. 2003. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open
Court Publishing Company.
———. 2006. “All About Eva.” The Nation 283(3): 30–34.
Frank, E. 1989. “Art’s Off-The-Wall Critic.” The New York Times Magazine, 19 November: 47.
Hennessey, Jonathan. 2016. Illustrator Love: “Nothing Is Purer Bostonese.” http://www.jonathan
hennessey.com/illustrator-love-nothing-is-purer-bostonese (accessed on 1 December 2020).
Nochlin, Linda. 1988. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” In: Women, Art, and
Power and Other Essays, 145–78. New York, NY: Harper & Row, Publishers.
354
40
Beauty and Politics
MATILDE CARRASCO BARRANCO
Old Palestinian man: You paint the wall, you make it look beautiful.
Banksy: Thanks.
Old Palestinian man: We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall, go home.
1 The Return of Beauty
Arthur Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty was a significant contribution to the acclaimed
return of beauty that had been taking place since Dave Hickey’s 1993 manifesto
announced that beauty would be the defining problem of the next decade. However, for
Danto to encourage the return was not then to allow beauty into the definition of art.
Art, so he had long argued, need not be beautiful to be good art. Retaining the gap bet-
ween art and beauty played into what he termed the “intractable avant-garde,” repre-
sented, say, by Dada and Duchamp. On the other hand, he regarded aesthetics or the
philosophy of art as having become too narrowly identified with beauty. By proving
that something could be art without being beautiful, he made room for the pluralism
that he saw all around him of different modalities or ways for art to appear, and ways
often associated with qualities, like the grungy, or disgusting, that had formerly been
downgraded in favor of beauty. Danto pursued the issue of beauty to argue that it was
only one value option among others, an option that he saw not to be much in favor in
contemporary practices. He explained its current exile given a socio-political discourse
that declared it inappropriate. But Danto remained skeptical of the discourse, finding
the exclusion of beauty as a value as unacceptable as the former exclusion of contrary
values or qualities. How then could beauty be rescued without being part of art’s
definition?
355
2 Internal Beauty
One of the most original and important aspects of Danto’s look at beauty is that he
thought about it as a contribution to art criticism. As he put it, the critic tries to explain
why things are as they are in a work, and his suggestion was that one pick an aesthetic
property, particularly beauty, “and ask what it means that the work has that property”
(2006, 52–3). Danto considered aesthetic qualities “inflectors,” since pragmatically, or
rhetorically, they “inflect” or “color” the meaning of a work of art by disposing the
audience to have certain attitude or feelings toward what the work is about. Thus, in his
view, like other aesthetic qualities, beauty would be governed by reasons, reasons
guided by the artists’ intentions to cause some sort of effect or experience on viewers, so
linking aesthetics to the critical interpretation of artworks. Interpretation states a hy-
pothesis about the meaning of the work and also looks for why a work, for example, is
beautiful. Moreover, interpretation determines whether its beauty is part of the work,
as internal to its meaning or whether its beauty is unrelated or external to the meaning
of the work.
By identifying the ligature through which a work is embodied in a material object,
interpretation will say which of the indeterminate number of physical features of the
object belong to the work. For any property, if interpretation requires that it is constitu-
tive of the work’s meaning the property will be internal, but if the property is irrelevant
to the meaning, it will be “external.” Therefore, Danto thought that, in general, any
predicate that has an aesthetic use may designate a property that could be internal or
external in an artwork. For many, Danto included, the distinction between an internal
and an external beauty was the main philosophical contribution of The Abuse of Beauty.
Danto had previously construed artworks as embodied meanings and stated that inter-
pretations constitute the works and differentiate them from the material objects. But the
new distinction tries to elucidate the relationship of the discernible qualities or properties
both to the work and the material object, as they are not identical. Furthermore, it is rea-
sonable to think that the distinction between internal and external beauty would aim not
only to refine the difference between artwork and material object but also to reinforce the
optional character for art of this aesthetic quality. The notion of internal beauty is clearly
artistic and helps Danto to make the contrast with natural beauty too. Following Hegel,
artistic beauty is “born of the Spirit and born again” and, by being meaningful, “superior.”
So, despite Danto’s residual tendency to conceive of the aesthetic in non-cognitive terms,
the role of internal beauty as constitutive of the meaning of an artwork shows an interest
in constructing aesthetics not formally (what strikes the eye) but pragmatically (focusing
on the ways in which artworks address their viewers) (Costello 2004, 427–30). As Danto
put it, his “effort was to break away from the Kant-Greenberg aesthetics of form, and
instead develop an aesthetics of meaning” (2007, 126).
External aesthetic qualities would be as meaningless as natural beauty, but those
internal ones, intended (meant) to play a role in conveying a work’s meaning, consti-
tute the aesthetic dimension of the work. Bound up with the meanings of artworks,
aesthetic qualities engage the mind and not just the senses, leading the viewers to grasp
the thoughts of the works. Nevertheless, as there is an immense range of aesthetic pos-
sibilities available to artists to build their works’ content and the point of view from
which they should be addressed, this intentional activity is subjected to art criticism.
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Beauty and Politics
The option of beauty is then open in the current scenario of artistic and aesthetic
pluralism. Nonetheless, Danto believed that nowadays beauty would play a lesser role
than that envisaged by Hickey due to the intense politicization of much of contempo-
rary art that sets beauty at odds with ethical criticism and political commitment. This
“kalliphobia” was for Danto (2004) also part of the legacy of the intractable avant-garde.
Danto offered a historical explanation of why beauty was abused. Certainly, the
avant-garde removed beauty from the definition of art, but this was the result not so
much of “a conceptual” as of “a political determination” (2003, 29). Beauty was
dethroned due to its traditional moral weight, its connections with goodness, its
promise of happiness. In a society that adored beauty and venerated artists who cre-
ated it, its suppression was a genuine and effective gesture of protest. Paradigmatically,
at the time of First World War, Dada reacted against a society they considered morally
ugly and whose ugliness they wanted to denounce and combat. Everything that was
socially represented as true, just, and beautiful became ridiculous, shameful, and bitter.
The abuse of beauty became then a device for dissociating the artists from the society
they held in contempt, turning “beautifiers” into “collaborationists” (2003, 118).
Neither was art meant to delectate nor to console, but instead to disconcert, shock, dis-
turb, and enrage people; thus, artists substituted beauty with other aesthetic qualities
such as ugliness, obscenity, outrageousness, or repulsiveness. Danto described how
since then this anti-beauty (often wrongly identified as anti-aesthetic) attitude impreg-
nates further artistic movements reaching contemporary art, which has taken on the
role of social criticism earlier represented by the intractable avant-garde and has
assumed the moral and political responsibility of producing a similar impact on society.
If the world is full of evil and injustice, it is not for art to hide it or mitigate it with
compensatory beauty.
In fact, following Danto, we can say that contemporary art has significantly
changed our way of thinking about art and consequently museums, where art is
exhibited as a cultural insight for the viewers in order to change their moral attitudes.
At the same time that Hickey proclaimed the topicality of beauty, Danto (2003, chap.
6) stressed that contemporary art museums had become dedicated to providing a
knowledge that transforms viewers into critics of society and calls them to action. This
is not to say that Danto did not question the actual effectiveness of art as a political
arm. And we could go further to question whether changing the world is art’s duty at
all. Within its limits, though, it would be still a legitimate aim for contemporary
political art to try. Danto in any case saw the antagonism between art and society as
“the current attitude” in which “artistic beauty is bedding down with the enemy”
(2003, 115).
His point was that beauty continues to be as politicized and stigmatized in contem-
porary art as it ever was at the time of the intractable avant-garde. There is the wide-
spread sense that beauty inevitably leads to falsification or escapism, thus colliding
with the purpose of art to achieve moral and political transformation. Therefore, the
kalliphobia will remain in art as long the world stays as troubled as it is and artists care
that we change it. Beauty, Danto said, “can only become what it was once in art, how-
ever, if there is a revolution not just in taste, but also in life itself. That will have to begin
with politics” (2003, 123).
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3 Elegiac Beauty
It is in life, nonetheless, where beauty does not look optional at all. Danto emphasized
that beauty is central to a fully human life, and its annihilation would leave us with an
unbearable world. It is also worth stressing that Danto saw beauty as distinct from other
aesthetic qualities, since beauty is the only one that has a claim to being a value, like
truth and goodness. Beauty is a value that connects people with fortune, happiness, and
a world worth living in; this is why humans have a natural appetite for beauty or “kalli-
philia” (2004, 25). This moral dimension of beauty, as we have seen, explains for Danto
why the intractable avant-garde and its long progeny abjured her, expelling her also
from art’s definition. But when art does not have to provide beauty, it is expected that
people will seek it somewhere else whenever they feel its need. Danto often reported how
captivating were the spontaneous creations of beautiful shrines, – candles, cards, pho-
tographs, flowers, and so forth – throughout lower Manhattan in the wake of the terror-
ist attacks of September 11, 2001: “People responded not with anger but with beauty.
No artist could have done better” (2006, 71). In fact, due to its human significance,
Danto vindicated beauty as the right option for a certain politically committed art.
Danto emphasized the power of elegy to express grief at death and loss and to create
beauty to help to mourn. As when we play music at and bring flowers to funerals or set up
vigils in the aftermath of a tragedy, in elegies “it is as though beauty works as a catalyst,
transforming raw grief into a tranquil sadness,” helping the tears to flow and, at the same
time, one might say, “putting the loss into a certain philosophical perspective” (2003, 111).
Danto’s example was Robert Motherwell’s Elegies for the Spanish Republic, an artistic response
in the form of visual meditations on the death of a valuable political form of life. In this case,
beauty “does know pain” (cf. Alberro 2004) and Danto had no doubt that their beauty is
artistically right because it connects internally to their meaning.
Danto reports that when he first saw one of the Elegies, its beauty stopped him in his
tracks, despite knowing nothing about the work and only later realizing how appropriate
its beauty was to its meaning. Not all, however, have found the beauty of these paintings
quite so evident, arguably leading us to deeper criticisms of Danto’s view of the internal
relation between the aesthetic experience of beauty and artistic interpretation. The
problem is certainly that Danto affirms that beauty is “as obvious as blue” and “one does
not have to work at seeing it when it is there” (2003, 89). But it would seem that much
work is necessary. Formal properties of paintings, such as shapes and colors, do not cause
the same (particularly first) experience in many people, and it may be necessary to learn
about the artworks to perceive their beauty. On the other hand, if proper appreciation of
their artistic beauty depends on grasping their meanings, a beautiful first look will be
irrelevant to that appreciation until it is recognized as internal. Yet this surely takes time,
effort, and perhaps a good deal of expertise and knowledge, whether in the history of art
or of politics. Danto, then, seems not to take sufficient account of the many different
factors, such as taste, circumstance, or cultural differences, that shape experiences of
beauty and their dynamics over time (Nehamas 2007, 98; Gilmore 2005, 150). Despite
conceding that some “extra-aesthetic information comes with the first glimpse” (2003,
109), he should have admitted that beauty, as with other aesthetic qualities, is not so
purely perceptual, since most accounts of aesthetic properties, including aesthetic
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Beauty and Politics
realism, characterize them as response-dependent and then outline how informed the
viewer really is. The fact that aesthetic responses are immediate, and beauty, once one
sees it, is immediately felt, is compatible with another fact, that perception, particularly in
art, is to a great extent inflected by historical and contingent conventions. As Danto liked
to say, the eye is not historical, but we are.
In any case, this should not be an obstacle for the critical role that Danto assigned to
aesthetic properties. In order to see them working internally as inflectors, all that Danto
needed was to keep rejecting a purely emotivist account of the aesthetic against “the
honest descriptive work that aesthetic properties do” (2004, 29). As he said, beyond the
principles of application, we should look at aesthetic properties to try to discern “how
the objects that fall under them affect us when we perceive them,” or at least which feel-
ings we are intended to have, even when “we don’t quite have those feelings since we are
not part of the reality” of the work’s moment (2004, 32, 35). In this way, Danto (2006,
54) could certainly argue for art criticism as something that mediates between aes-
thetics and art history. Besides this, he would also be presuming a degree of coordination
between artist and audience who share certain background beliefs and context,
necessary for any inflector to work, and whose recognition, as Jonathan Gilmore
reminds us, “may only be learned” (2005, 151).
We have returned by another path to Danto’s tendency to consider aesthetic properties
as superficially perceptual, which is in tension not only with the internal role that he now
sees them playing in artworks, but also especially with the exceptionality of beauty,
defined by Danto as a human value. Alexander Nehamas recriminates Danto for treating
beauty as a matter of mere appearance that only pleases the eye, locating beauty “wholly
on the surface of things” and making it count just as “good looks” (2007, 21). But this
characterization clearly fails to capture the human weight of beauty which, on the other
hand, Danto emphasized in its connections with goodness and happiness as much as in
the case of painful elegiac beauty. So, in order to cope with his own view, we need a char-
acterization of beauty as always involving deeper, and sometimes difficult, emotions.
Carolyn Korsmeyer (2010) has described the genuine experience of the beautiful along
these lines, distinct from the pretty, precisely because she points out that beauty carries a
moral or existential weight absent in the mere charming, agreeable, or just “easy beauty.”
And, as she explains, “the transformation of an appearance from pretty to beautiful
requires making an appreciation somewhat more strenuous, less seductive to the eye” (p.
167). This makes room for Danto’s elegiac beauty as a case of what Korsmeyer calls “ter-
rible beauties,” those beauties “bound up with the arousal of discomforting emotions,”
such as grief or sorrow (p. 163). In fact, for her, despite the traditional association of
beauty with pleasure or a positive and enjoyable aesthetic experience, these beauties
should not be seen as an exceptional or marginal phenomenon. Quite the opposite, since
beauty at the core is always difficult, terrible beauties would represent it in its most pro-
found dimensions. Korsmeyer understands, however, that we somehow take satisfaction
from the experience in art of terrible beauties. And, as with other negatively emotional
artworks, she claims that it comes from the acquiescing of terrible truths, which in this
case beauty provides, acting like a lens that produces a clarity of vision. Her argument is
that disturbing and harmful insights are aesthetically grasped in profound yet satisfac-
tory forms of difficult appreciation, and thus are shaped so as to afford us a space for
meditation and philosophy. The match between Korsmeyer’s and Danto’s terms is
359
remarkable. Danto also thought that beauty puts suffering into a certain philosophical
perspective. Thus, beauty in elegies has the effect of consolation in giving a kind of
meaning to the loss. Moreover, elegies become for Danto a paradigm of the place of beauty
in the philosophy of art. Convinced of the huge significance of beauty for human life,
Danto vindicated the option of artistic beauty also for politics. But given that we live in a
troubled world, it must be a partial and very limited vindication.
To repeat, Danto thought that the current attitude in art was very much about facing
the harshness of the world. And while art can comfort with elegies, when art’s business
is not consolation or meditation but action, beauty will get in its way. Danto argued that
beauty puts the world in a philosophical perspective and ends up somehow making sense
of it. It thus seems to distance us too much from whatever it represents, creating a conflict
with certain contents such as injustices and political catastrophes. Beauty is right for
elegies because their mood is that of mourners; it becomes morally acceptable because
damage is unavoidable. But beauty seems wrong when we feel that there is something to
be done and our response should be, according to Danto (2003, 112), indignation or
anger, in the spirit of the intractable avant-garde. In conclusion, for Danto, elegiac
beauty can provide some political role for this aesthetic quality, but the impossibility of
what could be termed an “angry beauty,” capable of outraging people, seriously limits the
option of beauty in “angrily political” contemporary art (2003, 103).
4 Angry Beauty
Danto thought that activist art will try to inflect works with an angry mood in order to
turn people against what they are about. Beauty, though, will conflict with any impulse
to counteraction because its tendency would be to heal instead of prolonging the
struggle. The human significance of beauty can accommodate the tranquil sadness of
elegy but it cannot yet afford anger, which excludes any reconciliation with the world.
However, the thing is that Danto himself offered an example of angry beauty. J.L.
David’s Death of Marat was for him a case of internal beauty whose aim “was to arouse
anger and indignation, and to increase revolutionary fervor and hatred against the
enemies of revolution” (2003, 120). He mentioned the example again later in order to
suggest that “beauty in art need not be antithetical to political action, as so many advo-
cates of anti-aesthetics, meaning more or less specifically anti-beauty, appear to think
(2004, 35). However, this hint with which he concluded “Kalliphobia in Contemporary
Art” was not further explained and nowhere else did Danto seem to revoke the thesis
defended in The Abuse of Beauty, where he dismissed that possibility due to what he
thought was the politicization of our culture and the special moral sensibility of con-
temporary political artists who should not make beauty for a bad world. Given that
what was possible in the past would not be possible in the present, Danto would not
have believed in the success of angry beauty in contemporary art, as fully overcoming the
stigma of beauty that opposes its emotional effects on political action.
By putting the world’s harshness at a distance – Danto argued – beauty seems to
mitigate the painful content of certain representations and therefore “if beauty is
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Beauty and Politics
internally connected to the content of a work, it can be a criticism of a work that it is

beautiful when it is inappropriate for it to be so.” He criticized Sebastião Salgado’s pho-
tographs because they wrongly embellish suffering humanity by implying that “their
content is somehow inevitable” (2003, 113). However, the danger might rely not so
much on the contemplative distance that beauty seems to impose on any represented
content, as Danto maintained, but more on the attraction that beauty inspires for that
particular content, because we neither want to nor should feel attracted to what we
morally resist or hate. This is why the old Palestinian man reproached Banksy in their
brief conversation quoted at the start.1 When Danto did grant that beauty is erotic and
that its rhetorical function is to inspire love towards what an artwork represents, he was
forced to admit that his view of beauty as limited to inspiring contemplation and
philosophical meditation might make it seem altogether “too quietistic” (1996, 287).
He further granted that beauty can work not only as consolation but also as relish
(2003, 113–5). His point however was to warn about the dangers of embellishing pain-
ful contents; as relish, beauty becomes a device for taking pleasure in the spectacle that,
in the case of suffering, makes it morally objectionable. However, while right to issue
this warning, Danto was wrong to think that beauty’s eroticism always turns beauty
perversely into a lure, since it is also present in elegies, his paradigm for the right sort of
artistic beauty. Danto was struck by the beauty of Motherwell’s Elegies Motherwell (and
this feeling supposedly remained when he discovered more about the works) and then
by Maya Lin’s also elegiac Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial whose internal beauty not only
heals the soul but also “lift the spirits” (2003, 101).
Certainly, as inflector, beauty arouses love, desire, and interest in the viewer. Beauty
is a promise that, as Nehamas puts it, “mobilizes the emotions and it always looks to the
future” in a search not only to possess but also to understand those objects that strike us
as beautiful (2007, 68). This sometimes hurts however, because, as mentioned earlier,
beauty might be bound up with some terrible reality. In these cases, beauty can afford
lucidity but it will also point to the future, offering hope as well as claiming for repara-
tion. Kathleen Mary Higgins (1996) pointed out to Danto that times of loss urge
renewed love of life and hope. She also noted that political activism requires not only
commitment and courage, but also faith (p. 282). Korsmeyer agrees that beauty is
sometimes compatible with anger when “anger has a noble side that allies with honor
and justice” (2010, 173). It might be the case that, since beauty is erotic or promissory,
beautifying certain contents may not always have the effect of letting us stoically accept
the way things are, but instead call us to action. Beauty, therefore, should be capable of
mobilizing us, even acting sometimes like a trigger for us to revolt and vindicate
something worth fighting for. The photograph of the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who
in September 2015 appeared drowned when he was trying to reach the Greek coast has
become a symbol for the suffering of Syrian refugees. It is hard to imagine someone
being unmoved by the beauty of a child who, in this photo, seems to be shown as lying
asleep on a beach. It is a serene, calm image, whose beauty is bound up with a terrible,
unbearable, content. For this, it shocks and repels, yet it is aesthetically very powerful
and haunting. This made it appealing to the international press, yet also controversial
(some media decided not to publish it).2 However, from the very first moment artists
worldwide used the photo, or illustrations of it, presumably because they found the
361
image’s beauty internal to its meaning: as an expression of protest and rage. Although
mostly absent in contemporary political art, as Danto signaled, angry beauty is possible
and might play the function that once inspired political art such as Death of Marat. It is
true that David’s work belongs to the past and today beauty is only an artistic option in
a society aware of the risks of the aestheticization of pain. But contrary to what hap-
pened at the times of the intractable avant-garde, we don’t expect art to be beautiful,
nor do we value it for that. Against this new background, and provided that beauty can
serve the goals from which it seems to distract, beauty might turn into an effective and
even subversive option for artists. By taking another look, Danto showed beauty’s sig-
nificance in life, and although he might have thought otherwise, he may also have
helped to enhance its centrality in the artworld.
Notes
1 See the incident during Banksy’s intervention at The West Bank Barrier, August 2005 in
Jones (2005).
2 See the photograph and the reactions in Laurent (2015).
References
Alberro, Alexander. 2004. “Beauty Knows No Pain.” Art Journal 63(2): 37–43.
Costello, Diarmuid. 2004. “On Late Style: Arthur Danto’s The Abuse of Beauty,” British Journal of
Aesthetics 44(4): 424–39.
Danto Arthur, C. 1996. “Art, Essence, History, and Beauty: A Reply to Carrier, A Response to
Higgins.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54(3): 284–7.
–––––. 2003. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago and LaSalle: Open
Court.
–––––. 2004. “Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art.” Art Journal 63(2): 24–35.
–––––. 2006. “Intervention in the Art Seminar.” In: Art History Versus Aesthetics, edited by James
Elkins, 51–89. New York and London: Routledge.
–––––. 2007. “Embodied Meanings, Isotypes, and Aesthetical Ideas.” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 65(1): 121–9.
Gilmore, Jonathan. 2005. “Internal Beauty.” Inquiry 48(2): 145–54.

Hickey, Dave. 1993. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. Los Angeles: Art Issues Press.
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August). https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/05/israel.artsnews.
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Laurent, Olivier. 2015. “What the Image of Aylan Kurdi Says about the Power of Photography.”
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Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
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41
Public Art: Monuments, Memorials, and
Earthworks
GARY SHAPIRO
Arthur Danto’s extensive body of art criticism is informed by his theory of art. From his
seminal essay “The Artworld,” to his The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and the
essays comprising After the End of Art, Danto’s criticism may be regarded holistically or
cartographically. Danto’s most intensive engagement with the arts was with the visual
arts, as contrasted with, say, music, dance, or literature. He made no claim to have a
system of the arts in the grand style of Hegel and many nineteenth-century philoso-
phers of art. He was an avowed epistemologist rather than a “great knower,” to use an
expression from his colleague John Herman Randall to describe the likes of Aristotle,
Hegel, and Dewey. Danto was under no self-imposed philosophical or pedagogical obli-
gation to provide a comprehensive system of the arts. Although he sometimes com-
pared himself to Hegel regarding their common recognition of art’s internal striving
toward self-consciousness, and co-taught a class on Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, he
saw no reason to emulate that encyclopedic panorama. (Yet, were we to superimpose
Danto’s aesthetics on Hegel’s, we would find Warhol’s Brillo Box in the place of
Shakespeare’s soliloquies).
Nevertheless, attending to some of the arts that Danto treated less frequently than
others may show that he had an oblique and revealing relation to the system of the arts.
In assuming this line of inquiry, I follow thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou
who analyze what philosophers exclude or marginalize so as to gain insight into the
deep structure of their thought. Danto’s priority was the visual, though he occasionally
wrote about literature. Regarding the visual, he devoted much more attention to
painting than to sculpture, architecture, or to what we term site-specific art. In exam-
ining site or place-intensive public art, I will show Danto’s engagement with monu-
ments, memorials, and earthworks. I will ask whether he has a consistent, general, or
systematic theory of art in place and, if so, to what extent it fits the artistic canon and
mainstream tradition of aesthetics as inherited by his generation of Anglo-American
philosophers.
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1 Monuments, Memorials, Context
Danto developed a sensitive analysis of Washington’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial

(VVM), designed by Maya Lin, a once controversial work that has gained increasing
acceptance and respect in the thirty-plus years it’s been up (or down, to be more pre-
cise). The VVM is situated within an extensive and growing complex of monuments
and memorials in which the United States attempts to express and embody the meaning
of its history. Danto’s account gives full weight to the collective sorrows and regrets
connected with that war and to the way that each dead soldier is honored with his or
her name inscribed on the black granite walls. He movingly describes how the descent
toward the structure’s hinge evokes elegiac meditation in anyone who lived through
that era; naturally those who lost family and friends will have more intense feelings.
Danto offers acute observations concerning the positioning of the memorial within the
wider Washington complex of monuments and memorials. He asks why we name some
of these monuments (like the Washington Monument) and other memorials (like
VVM). Danto’s answer is a model of clarity: “We erect monuments so that we shall
always remember, and build memorials so that we shall never forget. Monuments com-
memorate the memorable and embody the myths of beginnings. Memorials ritualize
remembrance and mark the reality of ends” (Danto 1987, 112). Monuments, then,
are material celebrations of origins that demonstrate a community’s idea of those
events and people it honors for qualities it finds indispensable to its identity. George
Washington, whatever his limits or failings, is honored as the father of his country. He
led the Revolutionary War; as its first president, he is the primary exemplar of US con-
stitutional government. Memorials, like VVM, are meant to ensure that certain events
and people will never be forgotten, although in many cases, as with the Vietnam War,
we are collectively ambivalent about major aspects of the event they mark. While we
honor the sacrifice of the soldiers named, we are much less clear about whether that
war (contrasted to the American Revolution) should have been fought at all. Many
believe it was escalated under false pretenses, and was conducted in bungled, deceptive
fashion. By its very form, descending into the ground, the VVM is memorial and not
monumental.
Danto’s distinction between monuments and memorials helps to clarify contro-
versies like those generated by the statues honoring Confederate soldiers across the
United States. Defenders of such statues and shrines resist their removal or supplemen-
tation by on-site information or additional structures explaining the Civil War and post-
Reconstruction context. They are horrified by suggestions that Robert E. Lee might have
to face off against an anti-slavery fighter like Nat Turner or John Brown. Yet their
defense is couched in the language of not monumental achievement but preservation
of “heritage.”
In other words, the contested works, originally built in a monumental spirit, are now
defended as memorials. The figures honored cannot be publicly acknowledged as prede-
cessors who inspired the white supremacist policies of the 1910 era when they were
erected, but as reminders of an old conflict, a fallen capital, and some deceptive ideas
about “states’ rights.” Using Danto’s distinction between monuments and memorials, it
seems that the “traditionalists” want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the
monumental’s heroic aura but can justify it only with the memorial’s principles.
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Public Art: Monuments, Memorials, and Earthworks
With respect to Confederate icons, or statues of Stalin, Franco, and the like, perhaps
the most fruitful approach would be to undercut the current confusion between tradi-
tionalists and iconoclasts by contextualizing them in a critical spirit, offering opportu-
nities for artistic conversation, debate, and innovation. Danto approaches this possibility
in discussing Frederick Hart’s realistic bronze sculptural group of three soldiers later
placed near the VVM. Some Americans, dissatisfied with the stark minimalism, abstrac-
tion, and downward trajectory of the VVM, claimed that heroic soldiers needed robust
figural recognition. They assimilated patriotism and realism, demanding the conserva-
tive contextualization of a liberal memorial. Danto praises the site planners for accom-
modating this later addition by placing it in a somewhat distant and oblique relation to
the VVM. It might have detracted from the VVM’s solemn statement by being placed
directly in front of it. Now, Danto says, “Hart’s shallow work has acquired a dignity and
even a certain power” (Danto 1987, 115).
Like other New Yorkers, Danto was powerfully moved by the 9/11 attacks of 2001.
That November he wrote in The Nation about two types of artistic response. On the one
hand, spontaneous, public, anonymous shrines of flags, flowers, photographs, poetry
and such had sprung up quickly around the city; on the other, city artists made various
kinds of work embodying their feelings about the event. In 2005, Danto curated a small
exhibition of these works at Apex Art gallery. The first type had this significant
consequence for him: “What the instantaneity of the impromptu shrines has taught us
is that art, at some level, is an abiding integral component of the human spirit” (Danto
2005a, 131). In the wake of the attacks, Danto realized that he and virtually everyone
else in New York was experiencing feelings of loss, grief, shock, and solidarity with
others. Moreover, they recognized that they were experiencing the same feelings. We
might read Danto’s reaction as a rare approach to Tolstoy’s view in What is Art? The
older Tolstoy thought that the best and most powerful art was that which expressed
common human emotions in works that were not only accessible to all, but whose emo-
tional sense was understood by all to be common. Such art, Tolstoy claimed, was free
from the class-based elitism of the sophisticated artworld he’d come to despise (yet
unlike Tolstoy, Danto allowed that professional artists had their own legitimate and
individual ways of expressing feelings about the event).
Danto’s statement that art “is an abiding integral component of the human spirit” is
appealing, although it is not so clear how it jibes with his general theory of the art-
world, which suggests that nothing attains the status of art without entering into a
context of theory. He could point out that virtually everyone in a contemporary urban
community is familiar with the idea of a shrine, somewhat qualifying the ideas of
“instantaneity” and the “impromptu” in his formulation. Another question arises
concerning the serial and uncoordinated construction of the shrines. Danto’s artworld
theory seems to presuppose that an artwork embodies an intention ascribable to its
creator(s). Not only is there no single presiding artist; there is nothing that would corre-
spond to the dominant plan or intention we detect in such works as cathedrals built by
many often nameless hands over multiple generations. Danto leaves unresolved this
apparent conflict between what I will call the Hegelian and Tolstoyan views of art.
While he distinguishes between the instantaneous shrines and possible later memo-
rials, he apparently did not comment publicly on the latter (the New York 9/11 Memorial
was completed just two years before his death).
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Danto noted the common feelings of grief and loss, understood by each as shared by
all. These were tied directly to the loss of about 3000 lives and the sense of vulnerability
induced by the attack (he notes that for the attackers the symbolic value of destroying
the buildings was more important than the death toll). Perhaps these feelings and the
act of mutual recognition embodied in spontaneous shrines are to be understood as a
heightened awakening to human mortality. Taking a leaf from Heidegger, we could say
that, at least in the aftermath of the attacks, it was no longer possible to evade the
reality of mortality by maneuvers that registered the death of others while avoiding an
authentic grasp of our own Sein-zum-Tode. Danto verges on articulating the possibility
that the revelation of art as “an abiding, integral component of the human spirit” is
somehow deeply involved with the apparently unique ability of humans to realize the
meaning of their own mortality (compare his remarks on Joseph Bartscherer’s Obituary
[Danto 2005a, 127–8]).
2 Public Art and Its Problems
Danto analyzes several works of public art, firmly recommending that the views, pref-
erences, and habits of the relevant public be the overriding factors in the matter of
approval, so that their removal or destruction would be justified if they did not meet the
satisfaction of the public. Monuments and memorials are, of course, a species of public
art. When installed on ground or in spaces specifically reserved for them, like those in
the District of Columbia, they potentially form a collective network of monumental and
memorial significances/references. Danto points out that the VVM maintains such rela-
tions not only with Hart’s sculpture, but also with the Washington Monument and the
Lincoln Memorial, to which its two wings point. Such art thus aspires to do more than
represent the public or ratify its taste. As successful art it must be creative expression:
“public art is the public transfigured” (Danto 1987, 93).
Typically a public space has already designated or customary functions. Such was
the case with Federal Plaza in lower New York, before Richard Serra’s ill-fated Tilted
Arc was installed there in 1981. The Plaza, not an appealing site to begin with, was the
beneficiary of a public art program that called for adding artworks to public spaces.
Critics, public officials, artists, and employees in the Courthouse and Javits building
disputed whether Serra’s 120-feet long, 10-feet high Arc of Cor-Ten steel, meant to
rust quickly, was a benefit. A number of those regularly working in or visiting the
buildings were disturbed, finding the structure offensive or threatening. Some reasons
offered were more plausible than others. Many objected to the work as an eyesore, an
obstacle to the flow of pedestrian traffic, and a catchall for garbage. Others suspected
it could be used as a shield by radical political groups who might attack the building.
Several distinct questions of value and of artistic ontology arose in connection with
the dispute. The value questions were both artistic and ethico-political. The first set of
questions included: Was Tilted Arc a work of art worthy of being preserved? Was it
worthy of being preserved in this place? To what extent should the public’s tastes and
desires be taken into account in answering that last question? To complicate things
further, just who is the public? In other words, how should the conflicting tastes of dif-
ferent “communities” – artists, critics, occasional viewers, and local employees – be
366
weighed? Inflecting all these questions was the ontological one: Was the work truly site-
specific, as the artist and some of the artworld claimed? If so, then wouldn’t removal
(even relocation to a place of honor in a sculpture park) destroy it? How could an
interest in preserving works of art (and the rights of artists) be balanced against the
interests of a broader public? Given the kinds of objections to Tilted Arc, there was no
third option to leaving in place or removing, as there was in the VVM case of adding the
realistic figurative sculpture nearby, or (hypothetically) supplementing contested
Confederate “monuments” with contextualizing information and anti-slavery
counter-sculptures.
Danto engaged with the problem of public art where the “problem” was a set of inter-
related questions having no obvious order of priority. He oversimplified the problem,
asserting that Tilted Arc would retain its identity and integrity even if removed to
another site, allowing him to assert that: “It is the great if unsought achievement of
Tilted Arc to make vivid the truth that something may succeed as a work of art but fail
as a work of public art” (Danto 1987, 90). Danto’s main objection to claims by Serra
and others that the work was truly site-specific was that it did not fulfill its goal of being
public art. What then is public art? One of his answers distinguished decorative or
appropriated art displayed in a publicly accessible space, say a corporate entrance, from
a genuine public art that was “the public transfigured: it is us in the medium of artistic
transformation” (Danto 1987, 93).
Tilted Arc was not “the public transfigured” because its most relevant public, local
employees, did not recognize themselves in it and perceived it as insulting or threat-
ening. Of course, those who defended keeping the work in its original location noted the
interests of an artworld public. But Danto anticipated them, arguing that “the public
has an interest in not having all of its open spaces treated as though they were museums”
(Danto 1987, 93). The public, he continued, has a legitimate interest in the use of their
tax money, contrasting publicly financed work with the kind of projects pursued by
Christo and Jeanne-Claude where the artists painstakingly marshal public support for
their self-financing projects (Danto 1987, 92).
Danto recognized that consulting the public’s tastes and desires with respect to
public art is rarely so straightforward as in the Tilted Arc case, where there was a daily
opposition by the workers in the Plaza. He acknowledged this in “Public Art and the
General Will,” a brief essay sparked by controversy concerning Twain, another Serra
work in St. Louis. Twain occupies a city block gently sloping toward the Mississippi River,
with a view of the city’s iconic arch, designed by Eero Saarinen. Danto was relieved to
show that his favoring removal of the New York piece is consistent with endorsing
retention of the one in St. Louis by the same artist.
The St. Louis aldermen considered a referendum, whether to remove Twain in order
to facilitate “development.” Without taking a position on the advisability of this pro-
posed vote, Danto had no general objection to referenda on placing or removing public
art, observing that such could serve as vehicles for aesthetic education. Yet, consistent
with his anti-institutionalist account of the artworld, he thought it was not possible to
determine whether something is actually a work of art, even less whether it is good art,
by means of a universal/public vote (Danto 1987, 120). The public should have a very
large say about what goes into their public spaces but the artworld determines what is
art and what is good art. The “general will,” Danto argued (with a nod to Rousseau) can
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exercise itself in aesthetic judgment only when the experts have approved the candi-
dates. Would Danto have thought it a good – or even permissible – option to have a ref-
erendum on, say, the VVM? Is it possible to evaluate the comparative advantages and
disadvantages of different ways of making public decisions concerning public art?
Should we prefer, for example, referenda, elected representatives, or commissions
appointed by representatives?
Note that the site in St. Louis was publicly owned open land. It was neither a site for
national monuments and memorials nor a plaza acknowledged as an extension of
nearby office buildings. Danto realized that different sorts of places have quite different
relations to their publics; at least implicitly he was moving toward articulating a
typology of public places for art.
3 Genius Loci: Public Art at the Edge of Visibility
For Danto, public art is art intended for the public and installed in a public place, as
opposed to art meant for the artworld that is inserted into a public space. It is not impos-
sible that a work will meet the criteria of both the public and the artworld. Danto’s
remarks on Robert Irwin’s unrealized design for Tilted Planes, meant for Ohio State
University, imply that it would have been doubly successful. Irwin’s plan was to make
several subtle changes in an existing mall. An oval space crossed diagonally by walk-
ways allowed for each section cut off by those paths and the perimeter to be treated as a
separate plane. These would have been slightly elevated, gradually rising from eighteen
to thirty inches above ground level and so offering seating space on the grassy eleva-
tions, involving no introduction of benches or any other apparatus.
Danto believed that this small change, with associated minor alterations, would have
subtly altered the area’s ambience. It would have been an atmospheric change whose
cause was almost indiscernible, tweaking the space in response to already latent possi-
bilities. Irwin is known for producing evanescent effects by means of minimal interven-
tions. As Danto wrote, contrasting Irwin’s plan with Serra’s Tilted Arc, “Tilted Planes
would have been all but invisible; indeed, had it been executed as Irwin intended, there
would have been nothing separate and identifiable as Tilted Planes that could be seen as
such. … There would have been no difference between figure and ground in Irwin’s
work. … The Oval Mall would have been the best picture there could have been of Tilted
Planes” (Danto 2001, 40–1).
Reflecting on this extraordinary, almost spectral presence of the hypothetical work,
Danto formulated a distinction between site-specific and site-generated art. A site-specific
work “refers to and defines the space into which it is set.” Sometimes, but not always,
such works may be transferred to a place other than the original site without significant
loss of aesthetic value (here Danto allowed that the case of Tilted Arc is debatable [Danto
2001, 43]). By contrast, the being of Tilted Planes “is so indissolubly mixed with the
being of its site that it can have no detached and separate existence” (Danto 2001, 44).
This is site-generated art, a form wholly responsive to the genius of the place. In the case
of Tilted Planes there would have been at least two levels of generated meaning. In the
first, the paths habitually traced by students and others traversing the Oval created an
inscription of visible walkways; in the second, the artwork would have given these just
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a bit more definition by the contrasting elevations of the distinct planes outlined by the
paths. These would have encouraged differential use of the planes for sports, lounging,
or other activities.
Here there is an extraordinary convergence between Danto’s core thesis about the
artworld and an older tradition having to do with a specific form of site-generated art,
landscape gardening. Danto’s Warholian moment of revelation came when he realized
that one of Andy’s Brillo boxes was virtually indiscernible from the real thing on the
supermarket shelf. It was something invisible – the historically reflective discourse of
the artworld – that made one an artwork and the other a utilitarian package. In this
respect, Danto’s description of Tilted Planes as having no separate existence as an object
made it a ghostly counterpart of its site, analogous to Andy’s Brillo Box and its model.
Without explicit acknowledgment, Danto borrowed the expression genius loci from the
tradition of British picturesque landscape gardening. There too, as for Irwin, the idea
was that the site’s contours and possibilities should generate the garden’s shape and
atmosphere. As Alexander Pope wrote:
In all, let Nature never be forgot…

Consult the Genius of the Place in all;
That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall…
Now breaks, or now directs th’ intending Lines,
Paints as you plant, and as you work, Designs.
Of course the typical landscape designer introduced more significant changes in the
given surroundings than Irwin did in his project. The gardener moved or installed trees
and shrubs, perhaps altered the contours of a stream or pond. Yet the garden could no
more be extracted from its site than Irwin’s work from the Oval Mall. (Irwin has in fact
designed gardens, such as the garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.) In contrast to
site-generated art, Danto briefly described Christo’s wrappings and installations as site-
dominant art, imposing the artist’s idea on the “canvas” of a built or natural site.
Danto’s strong endorsement of Irwin’s unrealized design showed a penchant for art
that plays at the edge of visibility, as already evident in his early signature essay “The
Artworld.” He was enthusiastic about another Irwin plan that did not come to fruition,
an ambitious design for a total renovation of the Miami airport and its surrounding
environment. He deemed it Irwin’s masterpiece. Danto explained convincingly how

even such a large, industrialized, commercial operation as an airport could be site-gen-
erated, and not merely an imposition on its territory. The airport would have seamlessly
integrated art and function, in contrast to the more frequent practice of simply throw-
ing them together by installing artworks as “baubles.” It would have emblematized the
city by incorporating as much as possible of Miami’s semi-tropical vegetation into the
areas in which travelers approach or depart the terminal by ground.
What if Irwin’s designs, taken as the zenith of site-generated art, had actually been
realized? Might there have been unforeseen problems in their installation and function,
arising from either the natural environment or human patterns of use, that would have
rendered the works less than ideal? Danto permitted himself a question of this sort with
regard to Tilted Planes. He asked whether Irwin’s expectation that their edges could
serve as natural grassy benches (in Ohio) reflects a Californian optimism about climate
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that could have led to an uncomfortably damp seating arrangement. Danto effectively
constructed a hierarchy of works of public art in which the supreme exemplars, Irwin’s
designs, not only aspire to be radically site-generated, making the least possible alter-
ations in the sites, but remain ideal, in the most obvious sense, by never being embodied.
I suggest that this resulting hierarchy is not simply coincidental.
Danto acknowledged an affinity between his philosophy of art and Hegel’s. Each saw
art as progressively becoming self-reflective or reflexive. For Hegel, this meant that art
abandoned the necessity of material embodiment (so that in the supreme art of poetry
the conceptual overrode the accidents of sound and the particularity of languages).
Hegel took architecture to be the most rudimentary art given its ties to the earth and its
struggles with gravity. For him, it became more romantic and ideal in the Gothic, as
stone was transfigured into something light and airy. Irwin, we might say, plays the
same role in Danto’s implicit hierarchy of public art as the Gothic does in Hegel’s philos-
ophy of architecture.
Danto discussed another artist of ideal public space, Max Neuhaus, who created
subtle soundscapes – ambient tones or noise in public places that effected a fragile,
ethereal bubble of sound even within a raucous area like New York’s Times Square
(Danto 1991). Danto aptly evoked the enigmatic, intangible character of these sound
bubbles by comparing them with Ariel’s atmospheric music in Shakespeare’s Tempest.
In one work, Neuhaus’s soundscape was composed of slightly enhanced and time-
delayed local street sounds. By alternating periods of this minimally altered sound with
periods of “silence,” or with a return to the “raw sound” background, the inadvertent
listeners became aware of the alteration of their environment. In Irwin and Neuhaus,
Danto celebrated art that seems to magically create or modify a local milieu, ambience,
or Stimmung, through minimal intervention. Here his thought has affinities with
gardening traditions, as both involve intense phenomenological attention to atmo-
spheric aesthetics.
4 Robert Smithson: Entropy and the Monumental Sublime
The artworld of the 1960s and 1970s was fascinated by the work of several artists who
produced large scale earthworks, environmental art, or temporary installations like
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence (James Turrell’s ongoing project in Arizona
is another variation along these lines). Danto was generally (and surprisingly) reticent
about these genres. He typically mentioned them briefly by way of contrast with other
works or as examples of how the limits of art had been expanded in the post-Pollock and
Greenberg era. He never commented publicly on distinctive works and events in New
York, such as The Gates or the urban landscape architecture of the High Line.
One exception to this near silence was his 2005 Nation essay on Robert Smithson,
“The American Sublime” (publication was almost simultaneous with his curating an
exhibition of The Art of 9/11). Although occasioned by a Whitney Museum exhibition,
the essay allowed him to emphasize that “Smithson’s mature work was never intended
to be shown in a museum,” and to concentrate on what became the artist’s signature
achievement, Spiral Jetty, constructed in Utah’s Great Salt Lake (Danto 2005b). Danto
observed that the work “has the timeless air of some ancient monument left behind by
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a vanished civilization,” and that the “Whitney show succeeds … in projecting a por-
trait of the artist as a restless demiurge, whose basic genre was the monument.” Danto
noted further that one of Smithson’s fundamental ideas was the inevitability of entropy,
of the tendency toward disorganization in the form of dispersal of energy, disruption of
form, sprawl, and the tendency for human works – notably monuments – to fall into
ruin (the artist spoke with characteristic irony of artworks “rising into ruin”). He
understood that the artist saw the modern world as shot through with entropy and that
his “new monuments” are “always already” in ruins (as Jacques Derrida might have
put it). Danto could have added that the Jetty has the form of a squashed ziggurat, rem-
iniscent of the Tower of Babel in ruins.
Spiral Jetty offers a paradigm case of a site-specific work, built into the lake itself,
incapable of being moved. As Danto recognized, Smithson developed an artistic prac-
tice involving a fundamental form of dislocation; his works not only occupied sites but
were displaced in non-sites. Even location was subject to the principle of entropy.
However, Danto did not address the dialectic of site/non-site operative in the Jetty. The
rock spiral in the lake is accompanied by the artist’s imaginative essay and a somewhat
surreal film – a postmodern triptych perhaps. The Utah site is less of a wilderness and
more historically dense than the usual photographs suggest. Smithson built it in the
vicinity of some abandoned industrial works and not far from the Golden Spike
Monument marking the 1869 conclusion of the United States’ transcontinental rail-
way’s construction. Given the decay of both local industry and the national rail system,
the site is rife with cultural entropy.
5 Danto and the Grounds of Aesthetics
Relatively few recent thinkers have undertaken general analyses of what we might call
site-related art such as the monumental, memorial, site-specific, and site-generated
genres. Danto gave only glancing recognition to a number of contemporary artists and
projects involving variations on the theme of place. One wonders what he would have
made of the significant developments in site-related art, such as in Christo’s Gates or
Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project.
Danto’s engagements with site-related art are entangled in the genealogy of aes-
thetics. As his Columbia colleague Paul O. Kristeller told the story, the rise of
philosophical aesthetics in the eighteenth century was the culmination of a series of
developments coinciding with the construction of the modern system of the arts; this
allowed the blanket use of “art” or “fine art” to embrace a variety of pursuits not for-
merly seen as forming a well-defined class. In eighteenth-century Britain, with its
empirically oriented theories of art and beauty, landscape gardening (involving the
genius loci theme) was regarded as a fine art, sometimes allied with its “sisters,”
painting and poetry. This era was also the acme of the culture of the picturesque
landscape. But increasingly landscape arts became difficult to reconcile with either a
strong formalism or a limitation of aesthetic experience to the “theoretical senses” of
sight and sound. Kant reduced the landscape garden to a form of painting – elimi-
nating everything related to senses other than sight – as if experiencing it were iden-
tical to seeing a series of discrete pictures in a gallery without the experience of
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walking from one to another. Hegel carried the reduction further: he said gardens were
nothing more than possible frames for architecture and that there was no aesthetic
reason for revisiting one already seen.
Danto was clearly receptive to arts of place, as in the work of Lin, Serra, Irwin, and
Smithson. Lin led him to analyze the topographical hermeneutics of a national center’s
monuments and memorials. Serra provoked him to discuss the claims of the public in
public art. Irwin allowed him to adumbrate a theory of site-generated art, a post-War-
holian version of genius loci aesthetics. Smithson offered an American sublime, testing
the limen as such in his deconstruction of boundaries. In response to the spontaneous
shrines of September 11, Danto saw the emergence of infectious, communal, place-
based art as evidence of art’s being an “integral” aspect of the human spirit. He deliber-
ately left open the questions whether and how art’s emergence has something to do
with a deep recognition of human mortality. Yet, despite his exceptionally rich and gen-
erous sensibility, he was both empowered and limited by the aesthetic rupture whose
traces can be read in both the implicit canon of the fine arts and the mainstream agenda
of Euro-American philosophical aesthetics.
References
Danto, Arthur C. 1987. The State of the Art. New York: Prentice Hall.
———. 1991. “Max Neuhaus: Sound Works.” The Nation 252: 281–4.
———. 2001. Philosophizing Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
———. 2005a. Unnatural Wonders. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2005b. “The American Sublime.” The Nation 281: 34–6.
372
42
On Architecture
REMEI CAPDEVILA-WERNING
Arthur Danto’s discussions of architecture are sparse. He nevertheless had a profound

interest in architecture that spanned his career: from his first drawings and etchings
portraying architecture to an early art-critical piece on the architecture of the Columbia
University campus (Fleming 2007, 200–1), to his interest in the works of Louis Kahn
and Steven Holl. As Danto stated more than once, it was through architecture that he
found a way to engage with art in a philosophical manner: “[…] architecture, […] had
long been a passion of mine; indeed, it was in connection with architecture that I got
the first intimations of how to think philosophically about art” (Danto 1999a, xiv).
Danto’s thinking of what architecture is and does is grounded on one basic and
underlying tenet, which serves as both guide and criterion of evaluation: how does
architecture relate to human beings? If his criticism of Wright’s Guggenheim is about
what the building does to the paintings it houses, it is because of what the paintings do
for the visitors. If, similarly, he celebrates Holl’s Department of Philosophy at New York
University, it is because it fosters discussion and the human values that concern philos-
ophy. If he praises Louis Kahn as an “Archai-Tekt,” it is because Kahn is interested in
what makes humans human, and this is what shapes and determines his architecture.
In addition to architecture being a key influence on his thought, Danto’s writings on art
and philosophy have permeated architectural theory and allowed for novel (albeit infre-
quent) approaches to architecture by contemporary scholars. This essay discusses the

place, role, and meaning of architecture in Danto’s writings and the extent to which
Danto has influenced architectural theory and criticism.
It was the work on architecture of his colleague and friend Rudolph Wittkower
(1901–1971) that helped Danto to “define the way [he] was to think philosophically
about art” (Danto 2013, 22; see also, 1999a, xiii–xiv). What he learned from Wittkower,
especially from his Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, was how to under-
stand what he was seeing as creating a whole held together not necessarily by what he
could see but by what he could not see. “Invisible upper corners” (Danto 2013, 22) or
373
“virtual corners,” as Danto calls them elsewhere (Fleming 2007, 200), determine the
formal organization and composition of the façade, say, of Santa Maria Novella in
Florence. No matter whether these elements are invisible to us or invisible because they
are non-existent, the most important aspect that Danto took from Wittkower and that
completely changed his way of looking at art was “[t]he idea that it was something
invisible that gave structure to the visual” (Danto 2013, 22–23). According to Danto’s
own narrative, it was in architecture where he found the seed for his groundbreaking
theory of art, whose central thesis is that what distinguishes an artwork from a mere
object that looks exactly the same is something that the “eye cannot de[s]cry – an
atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld” (Danto
1964, 580, where he writes “decry;” 1992, 38, where he writes “descry”).
Whether or not reading about and engaging with architecture “had the greatest
philosophical influence” (Danto 2013, 22), Danto’s explicit references to architecture
are scarce. In addition to his remarks on Wittkower, his discussions on architecture are
found in some of his art criticism for The Nation and other magazines, as well as scat-
tered throughout his numerous collections of essays on art criticism, in an essay and a
movie review on American architect Louis Kahn (1901–1974), and in an interview
conducted by architectural historian Steven Fleming in 2006, in which Danto addresses
some ideas that may be productive in contemporary architectural history.
Danto addresses architecture in only about a dozen of the two-hundred some
reviews he published for The Nation from 1984 to 2009; even then, he focuses on archi-
tectural features of the museums, galleries, or characteristically spatial artworks that
were his primary concern. In general, however, one can discern Danto’s deep sensi-
bility toward architecture: he describes materials and structures, how architecture
frames the space and how it determines one’s perception not only of the surroundings
but also of the art it contains in the case of galleries and museums. Underlying these
criticisms is his interest in how architecture relates to us as users, inhabitants, and
appreciators of buildings and the urban environment. Take, for instance, his 2005
essay “The Rebirth of the Modern,” where Danto comments on the renovation of the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) by Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi (b. 1937).
After being closed for two years, MoMA reopened its doors on November 20, 2004.
Danto remarks on details such as the staircases, which are “functional and evocative”
and which reflect “the aesthetic and historical intentions of MoMA at their best, when
architecture and art act as one in imparting Modernism’s lessons.” Danto further
addresses how the “people by their very presence contribute to its aesthetic impact” so
that “the consciousness of others moving from stage to stage and space to space is so
much a part of the experience that one feels is always part of a constantly changing
work of art” (Danto 2005a, 34). MoMA, in sum, “give[s] its authoritative vision of
modernism’s narrative and architectural embodiment,” while at the same time leaving
this narrative open to what is to come: “The sixth-floor gallery perhaps communicates
the feeling that what will be shown is really not part of what Hegel would call the idea
of the modern embodied in the grand architecture below” (Danto 2005a, 35). This
might recall another of Danto’s thesis, that of the end of art. While the lower galleries
are part of the narrative of art until, say, 1964, when Danto encountered Andy
Warhol’s Brillo Box, the upper gallery formally opens up possibilities for art “after the
end of art” (Danto 1995). Danto’s interpretation of MoMA’s building points also
374
On Architecture
toward the fact that his philosophical stance regarding art may apply to architecture as
well and provides a theoretical framework to think about architecture in Danto’s terms.
Despite his rave assessment of MoMA’s expansion, he was critical of other institu-
tions. If there is one space that he was not fond of, it was Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1959
Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In his criticism of Mario Merz’s work from
1989 and in his 1986 review of a collective exhibition titled “Transformations in
Sculpture,” both quoted extensively here to convey his style and wit, Danto writes:
The Guggenheim is a paradigm of the autocratic architectural will – chilly, self-celebratory,

indifferent to the wants and needs of its users. ‘While I have no doubt that your building
will be a great monument to yourself ’, the Countess Hilla Rebay wrote to Frank Lloyd
Wright at one stage of the building, ‘I cannot visualize how much (or how little) it will do
for the paintings’. But ‘for’ was the wrong preposition: The question ought to have been
what the building would do to the paintings. The answer is that it digests them in its
intestinal coils, reducing them to patches and swatches (Danto 1989, 614).
What the building does to the artworks is precisely to sequester them, holding them
hostage to the sever parameters of the Guggenheim’s architecture. Perceptual inertness is

one of the indignities to which sculpture is subjected in this ruthless space. […] The
architecture interposes obstacles to appreciation at every step, even where, as it were antic-
ipating that he might someday be exhibited in the Guggenheim, Carl Andre has sought to
achieve maximal flatness (Danto 1986a, 90, 91).
And by doing this, the Guggenheim also holds the audience hostage and exerts a nega-
tive impact on them. Overall, then:
The Guggenheim is beginning to look shabby. The highest ramp is filled with pieces of
stowed paraphernalia, as though it had been turned into a kind of attic. It is a very ill-
considered perversion of architectural intentions. The light is so bad one feels the
management is trying to save money on electricity. The wonderful reflecting pool with
which the great slow spiral used to end has been cemented over, inducing a terrible opacity
where light was once captured by water. The walls are dirty. In an exhibition, as in a meal,
presentation counts for something. […] Both times I visited the show I left depressed (Danto
1986a, 93).
Granted, these demolishing reviews were written before the two-year-long restoration
of the interior of the Guggenheim (1990–2) and the three-year renovation of the
exterior façade (2005–8). Clear emphasis is nevertheless given to how the space impacts
and determines one’s experience of artworks, both in a perceptual and a conceptual
sense, thus putting people and their experiences again at the center when determining
what architecture should do. In another review from 1999, “Degas in Vegas,” Danto
explains that the entire city is an “architectural theme park, in which every edifice
known to popular visual culture […] will have its simulacrum” (Danto 1999b, 25). This
brings him to question the very conception of reality and to ask whether the art on
display at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art was original or not: “In a lifetime of visiting
museums and galleries, I have never once wondered if what I was about to see was real”
375
(Danto 1999b, 26). This excerpt shows how the context matters when looking at a
work and emphasizes another of Danto’s theses, according to which looking is never
neutral but is always already interpreting (Danto 1981, 1–32). It also brings us to
question how is it that we do not doubt the reality of what we are looking at anywhere
else, but only in a full-scale architectural facsimile, which shows how architecture’s
spatial features (such as tridimensionality and size) have the potential to challenge our
pre-established conceptions of what constitutes reality.
Perhaps Danto’s most philosophical review of an architectural work is his 2008
essay “House in Use,” where he discusses Steven Holl’s project for the new building for
the Philosophy Department at New York University. This is not simply due to the fact
that Holl designed a building to host philosophers, but because Holl’s approach to
architecture is philosophical, drawn from the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and
the philosophy of Wittgenstein. In addition, Holl took into account the specific needs of
the people, from faculty to staff and students, in a philosophy department. This trans-
lates, among other things, into the construction of a giant staircase that brings together
the five upper floors of the former 1890s manufacturing building and creates a public
space for debate and conversation, the core of the philosophical endeavor. As Danto
writes:
The quiet, the generosity of the spaces – the ratio between the height and width of the cor-
ridors, the dark cork floors, and the cadence of the wide office doors, made of ash that is
whitewashed on one side and ebonized on the other, with the pivots enabling both sides to
be seen at once creates an environment considerate of thought and discourse that really
manages, I feel, to express philosophy in architectural terms. […] It is an extremely beautiful
complex, and certainly unlike any philosophy department familiar to me. In fact, I know of
no other philosophy department anywhere that was designed to express the spirit of
philosophy. […] [T]he somewhat stark white-and-black aesthetic […] contributes to what
gives the space its philosophical aura (Danto 2008, 126).
Elsewhere Danto shows his sensibility toward and understanding of what architecture
is. He comments on disconnections between the exterior appearance of a building and
its internal distribution in a photograph by Cartier-Bresson, guiding the reader’s eye
and pointing toward subtle details and relationships (Danto 1987); emphasizes
Caravaggio’s talent of “internalis[ing] into painting what belongs to architecture” in
the Madonna of the Rosary (Danto 1990, 340); juxtaposes Richard Serra and Mies van
der Rohe’s work by playing with the contrasts in their respective uses of materials
(Danto 1986b); speculates about a building that produces unwanted sound as both a
musical and architectural piece (Danto 1991). While rarely central to his criticism, for
Danto, buildings and the built environment are nonetheless continual points of
philosophical fascination.
The only essay that Danto devotes exclusively to architecture, or more specifically, to
one architect and his work, is his 1995 essay “Louis Kahn as Archai-Tekt,” written on
the occasion of an exhibition on Kahn at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary
Art (Danto 1999a, 185–204). Danto was drawn to Kahn because the architect had
also been influenced by Wittkower and because he heard in Kahn a genuine philosophical
thinking that translated into his architecture (Danto 1999a, xiii–xiv). In this essay,
Danto coins the term “Archai-Tekt” to describe Kahn as the “builder of beginnings”
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On Architecture
(Danto 1999a, 203) by which he means that Kahn was not simply an architect, a
“master of the building,” but rather that his architecture was built upon eternal and
ever-existing foundations, archai, that substantiate everything: “Kahn wanted to
ground his architectures in the timeless traits of being human, deeper than history–in
‘beginnings’” (Danto 1999a, 191). Or: “Kahn’s architecture is historical in the large
sense that it refers to and derives from what he speculated must be the basic forms of
human conduct and interaction, and these, as archai, are the beginnings on which true
architecture rests” (Danto 1999a, 193). These “primordial dimension[s] of human
activity” are “learning, meeting, well-being” (Danto 1999a, 189, 191). Precisely these
dimensions are the ones that lie beneath Danto’s understanding of what architecture
should be and do: it should create spaces that foster humanity’s development and
fulfillment.
Danto explains that these archai underlie what Kahn calls the “form” or the “what”
of a building, as opposed to the “design” or the “how” (Danto 1999a, 187). He inter-
prets Kahn’s form as a Platonic Form, because “[i]t is, exactly like its Platonic or Pauline
counterparts, invisible and eternal” (Danto 1999a, 187). Not by coincidence, Danto
begins his essay with a quote from Corinthians 4.18: “While we look not at the things
which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.” This opening resonates with the
lesson that Danto learned from Wittkower and helps to further explain his sympathy for
Kahn. Danto discusses how Kahn’s Platonic architecture unfolds in his writings and
buildings, specifically commenting on Kahn’s essay “Structure and Form” (Kahn
1961a; see also, 1961b, Fleming 2002a, 7) and on some of Kahn’s most representative
buildings, the Yale Art Gallery, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Richards Medical Research
Facility at the University of Pennsylvania and, finally, the Salk Institute. For Danto,
Kahn’s forms are not to be understood as geometric forms that are then materialized or
embodied in specific constructions, which could be taken as a sort of literal formalism.
Rather, Kahn means the more abstract conception of form as Ur-idea, as House (with a
capital H) that is “composed of essential features – walls, perhaps, and roof – that have
as function protection and shelter” (Danto 1999a, 187). Forms, at least in this context,
are defined by function and not geometry. These forms are then realized in specific
“designs”: the form of House is realized in the several designs of houses, and to create
these designs Kahn resorts to history. That is, it is not that Kahn disregards the history
of architecture in favor of an atemporal design; it is that he interprets the idea of a
building as having a history, as a succession of transfigurations, in Danto’s idiom. In

this sense, for Danto, Kahn’s architecture is not historical, pre- or post-modern but
really Platonic. Consider, for example, the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas,
featuring a series of rounded vaults recalling the Romanesque tradition but with the
essential difference of a continuous skylight in place of the keystone, thus expressing
the materiality of concrete by undermining the structural integrity of a form typically
built in stone. For Danto, Kahn achieves abstraction through the combination heavi-
ness of the Romanesque form with the weightlessness rendered possible by the contem-
porary materials. Danto’s fascination for Kahn and his architecture stems from his
admiration of Kahn as a person with intellectual affinities to Danto’s own interests, an
aspect that is also clear in Danto’s review of the 2003 documentary My Architect: A
Son’s Journey, directed by Kahn’s son Nathaniel (Danto 2005b). Danto likens the
journey of Kahn’s son to that of Telemachus in search of his father Odysseus, with the
377
difference that in the case of the movie, the son travels through his father’s main works
to gain a better understanding of him.
In “The End of Architecture?” (Fleming 2007) Steven Fleming interviews Danto with
the aim of discussing specific thoughts and ideas that may be helpful to architectural his-
tory and architectural historians. Here, Danto reiterates Wittkower’s influence on his
thought as helping him to see buildings “in terms of meaning,” that is, as architecture
necessarily having a rhetorical aspect that creates a meaning for the user, while not being
just rhetoric because there is always materiality (Fleming 2007, 201). Danto acknowl-
edges that his thinking about painting and sculpture extends to architecture and that he
thinks of architectural history in art historical terms, as evolutions of styles that develop
parallel to the ones in visual arts. However, the most relevant contribution to contempo-
rary architectural history may be Danto’s conception of history as a process which, on
the one hand, involves the use of what he termed “narrative sentences” and which culmi-
nates, on the other hand, with the end of self-conscious historical meta-narratives.
Narrative sentences describe past events in terms of a later event so that the sentence
could not have been uttered at the time of the first event. To use Danto’s example: “The
Thirty Years War began in 1618” is a retroactive description of an event that could have
been utterable only after the end of the Thirty Years War (Fleming 2007, 199). “An his-
torical explanation is a form of narrative” (Fleming 2007, 199), Danto states in the inter-
view, and following his theory of the end of art, the big unifying narratives in the history
of art (and architecture) are over. Only “the little stories” are left to be told and the only
ones that make sense to be written nowadays. This does not mean, however, that these
“little stories” are worthless. Rather, the criterion should be that “the kind of history one
wants is a human history, something that relates [architecture] to human beings”
(Fleming 2007, 204). This thought underlies all of Danto’s writings on architecture.
The considerations of Danto’s thought within the fields of architectural theory and
the philosophy of architecture seem only to be brief. This is likely because his stress on
the humanistic values and purpose of contemporary architecture is at odds with the
focus given to the postmodern condition. Danto did not consider architecture to be post-
modern in the same way as art was. And his emphasis on the human in architecture
brought him to take the work by architects such as Kahn and Holl at face value, rather
than as a symptom of postmodernity. Steven Fleming (2006) is perhaps the architec-
tural historian that has discussed Danto’s work in most depth. Drawing from Danto’s
writings on art, he proposes to write architectural history in such a way that it no

longer relies on meta-narratives nor simply takes architects’ statements at face value.
Instead, he defends a historical writing that is “a sophisticated kind of indexing that
seeks to penetrate the deepest philosophical questions embodied in the works and in
what their creators have to say about them” (Fleming 2006, 148). Fleming thus pro-
poses to adopt Danto’s “analytical philosophy of history” as a guide to writing architec-
tural history. In another essay, Fleming (2002b) discusses Danto’s interpretation of
Kahn as a Platonic architect by examining Plato’s writings and Kahn’s drawings to
reject interpretations that limited Kahn’s Platonism to the adoption of Platonic
geometric shapes. In “The Dislocation of the Architectural Self,” David Goldblatt (1991)
reads Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace to interpret Peter Eisenman’s
architecture. He examines the notion of “ecstasis” as a form of a self ’s transfiguration
through art, a “being taken out of oneself by art” (Goldblatt 1991, 343 referring to
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On Architecture
Danto 1981, 172). According to Goldblatt, here the self is momentarily transfigured or
dislocated between the actual commonplace self and the extraordinary self of art. Such
transfiguration can occur as well while experiencing great works of architecture. Other
writings address Danto’s distinction between art and ordinary artifacts, as Schumacher
(2011) or Carrier (2006) who addresses museum spaces and galleries as well (see also
Huxtable 2008); Taylor and Levine (2011) and McLeod (1989) pick up on Danto’s dis-
tinction between monuments and memorials, when Danto writes:
We erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so that we
shall never forget. [...] Monuments commemorate the memorable and embody the myths of
beginnings. Memorials ritualize remembrance and mark the reality of ends. [...] Very few
nations erect monuments to their defeats, but many set up memorials to the defeated dead.
Monuments make heroes and triumphs, victories and conquests, perpetually present and
part of life. The memorial is a special precinct, extruded from life, a segregated enclave where
we honor the dead. With the monuments we honor ourselves (Danto et al. 1998, 153).
Danto’s remarks on architecture take into account its specificities and show his sensi-
tivity and understanding. He situates architecture within the context of the history of
art, but focuses on its human values. His preferences toward Kahn and Holl reflect his
interest in what could be called a philosophical architecture: one that embodies
philosophical meanings and whose creators think philosophically while designing. His
lack of attention to architectural postmodernist theory and thought and the fact that
architects’ engagements with theoretical debates do not take place within the tradi-
tional philosophical discourse may explain Danto’s scarce influence on the broader field
of architecture and architectural history and theory. Nevertheless, the evident influence
of architecture on Danto’s philosophy of art, that is, the distinction between aspects
seen and unseen and the latter’s influence the former, suggests a philosophical direction
to examine architecture: how Danto makes architecture and its unique features theoret-
ically relevant for his reflections on art – the way he makes architecture stand out and
illuminate aspects otherwise implicit or obscured in other artworks – points to a fruitful
new avenue of investigation in the theory, history, and philosophy of architecture.
References
Carrier, David. 2006. Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61(19) (1964): 571–84.
———. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
———. 1986a. “Transformations in Sculpture.” The Nation 242(3) (January 25, 1986): 90–93.
Also available in Arthur C. Danto, The State of the Art (New York: Prentice Hall Press, 1987),
153–8).
———. 1986b. “Richard Serra.” The Nation 242(15) (April 19, 1986): 561–565.
———. 1987. “Henri Cartier-Bresson.” The Nation 245(10): 346–8. Also in Arthur C. Danto,
Encounters & Reflections (New York: The Noonday Press, 1990), 133–7.
———. 1989. “Mario Merz.” The Nation 249(17): 613–6.
379
———. 1990. “Narratives of the End of Art.” In: Arthur C. Danto, Encounters & Reflections, 331–
45. New York: The Noonday Press.
———. 1991. “Times Square.” The Nation 252(8) (March 4, 1991): 281–4.
———. 1992. “The Artworld Revisited: Comedies of Similarity.” In Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the
Brillo Box. The Visual Arts in Post-historical Perspective, 33–53. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
———. 1995. After the End of Art. Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. Princeton, NJ:
———. 1999a. Philosophizing Art. Selected Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1999b. “Degas in Vegas.” The Nation 268(8) (March 1): 25–8.
———. 2005a. “The Rebirth of the Modern.” The Nation 280(4) (January 5, 2005): 32–5.
———. 2005b. “Reviewed Work: My Architect: A Son’s Journey by Nathaniel Kahn.” Journal of
the Society of Architectural Historians 64(4) (Dec): 560–2.
———. 2008. “House in Use.” Artforum International 46(8) (2008): 123–124, 126.
———. 2013. “My Life as a Philosopher.” In: R. Auxier and L.E. Kahn (eds.) The Philosophy of
Arthur C. Danto, 3–70. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court Press.
Danto, Arthur C. Horowitz, Gregg and Huhn, Tom. 1998. The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy,
and the Ends of Taste. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association.
Fleming, Stephen. 2002a. “Louis Kahn’s Situated Platonism.” In: Society Of Architectural
Historians, Australia & N. Zealand (Eds.), ADDITIONS to Architectural History. XIXth Conference
of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand. Brisbane: SAHANZ. 2002.
––––––. 2002b. “Louis Kahn’s Platonic Approach to Number and Geometry.” In: K. Williams and
J.F. Rodrigues (eds.) Nexus IV: Architecture and Mathematics, 95–107. Florence: Kim Williams
Books. 2002.
———. 2006. “Resuscitating the Author: Implications of Danto’s Philosophy for Historians of
Trend-defying Architecture.” In: Contested Terrains: Proceedings, Society of Architectural
Historians, Australia and New Zealand XXIII Annual Conference 2006 (SAHANZ 2006):
147–52.
———. 2007. “The End of Architecture? Steven Fleming Interviews Arthur C. Danto (New York,
April 2006).” Architectural Theory Review 12(2) (2007): 200–1.
Goldblatt, David. 1991. “The Dislocation of the Architectural Self.” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 49-4(1991): 337–48.
Huxtable, Ada Louise. 2008. On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change. New
York: Walker & Company.
Kahn, Louis. 1961a. “Structure and Form.” Arts and Architecture 78(2) (February): 14–15,
28–30.
———. 1961b. “Form and Design.” Architectural Design 31(4) (April): 145–54.
McLeod, Mary. 1989. “The Battle for the Monument: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” In: The
Experimental Tradition, ed. Hélène Lipstadt, 115–37. New York: The Architectural League and
Princeton Architectural Press.
Schumacher, Patrik. 2011. The Autopoiesis of Architecture, Volume I: A New Framework for
Architecture. West Sussex: Wiley & Sons. 2011.
Taylor, William M. and Levine, Michael. 2011. Prospects for an Ethics of Architecture. London:
Routledge.
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43
Aliveness and Aboutness: Yvonne Rainer’s
Dance Indiscernibles
KYLE BUKHARI
1 Warm-Up
The year was 1963. The venue was the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village,
New York. Dancers and choreographers of the recently formed Judson Dance Theatre
forged an entirely new corporeal identity drawn from everyday gestures, actions, and
movements. Ideas sparked within the Northern California dance workshops of Anna
Halprin and refined in Robert Dunn’s composition course at the Merce Cunningham
Studios in New York had come to fruition. The elevation of ordinary, functional, and
task-based movements were now cast as a central aesthetic strategy in the dance con-
certs at the Judson Memorial Church. Founding member Yvonne Rainer’s We Shall Run
(1963) (here on WSR) was composed of two basic physical actions: first standing, then
running. The everyday body became the protagonist, a challenge to the elite ballet and
heroic modern dance personas that inhabited the stages of uptown theatres. The novel
movement idiom emerging from the Judson did not escape Arthur Danto’s attention. He
mentioned it in a 2004 lecture at Art Basel Miami, describing what he called “experi-
ments in the boundaries of dance.” As Rainer and her cohort questioned through prac-
tice, Danto posed the question for theory: “by what criterion if any can we tell when
something is a dance movement? Can a dance not consist in someone just walking
across the stage, or sitting in a chair for a certain length of time?” (Danto 2004, 11).1
Dance did not figure prominently within Danto’s philosophy, although his discussion
of Wittgenstein’s theory of action in Transfiguration of the Commonplace suggests the
difference between a “basic action” and “mere bodily movement” as an analogue to his
own theory of art vis à vis commonplace objects. A dance ontology focused on an art
product could emerge from dance’s choreographic structure (Danto 1981, 4).2 Danto’s
philosophical investigation of the art of the 1950s and 1960s is worth considering for
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KYLE BUKHARI
the light it throws on dance’s transmedium capability, its movement between

performance and plasticity (Bukhari 2017, 48). Danto’s notion of a “criterion,” a prin-
ciple or heuristic device by which a dance, like an artwork, might be identified as an
instance of the dance medium prompts me to ask here how dance’s identity establishes
itself when it does not possess obvious characteristics traditionally used to identify it:
the lyrical phrasing of a sequence of steps to music; rhythmic pulsating group movement
accompanied by percussive footwork; dramatic contractions of the torso that convey
interior emotional and psychological states. Does Danto’s “criterion” allow us to find a
difference in contemporary dance and traditional works or objects of art? Does he
accommodate the historical breach in practice? And what do we learn about perceiving
everyday functional or physical movements as dance. Does Danto’s schema allow us to
see the medium-specificity of dance’s aliveness (contra or compatible with his aboutness
criterion): dance’s kinesthetic and somatic nature; its temporal impermanence? Does
the focus on aliveness fit or contradict something in Duchampian ready-mades? What
can Danto say about dance, arguably, the most embodied of the arts?
Rainer’s choreographic work of the period is exemplary for Danto’s philosophical
purview. Rainer collaborated closely with visual artists like Robert Morris and Robert
Rauschenberg: as in WSR, Parts of Some Sextets (1965), Morris’ Check (1964) and
Waterman Switch (1965). That Danto’s “Artworld” essay exposes striking parallels bet-
ween dance and the object arts of the period is no surprise given the collaborations bet-
ween the plastic and performance artists in the downtown art scene. In a 1972
interview in Avalanche Magazine, Rainer described her work in the 1960s as the result
of her “preoccupation with objects.” If there was a connection with 1960s sculpture, it
was the “sensibility that preceded Minimalism in its concern with the human body”
referring to Robert Morris’ now destroyed Untitled (1964) a library ladder that contained
within it the indexical imprints of the human foot cast in lead (Rainer 1972, 14–5).
This preoccupation led Rainer to think like a sculptor where it was not plywood or steel
but the body that was art’s primary material.3 The dance “sculpture” remains alive but
to what point?
With Hegel, Danto wrote in After the End of Art of “a mode of presentation that is
intended to be appropriate to its meaning” (Danto 1995, 31). How did Rainer’s WSR
constitute such a “mode of presentation?” The work and its title represent an idea of
freedom gestured to but not achieved. The group dynamic imposes physical and
spatial limitations on the run so that the run feels less like a liberation than a spi-
raling in on itself until it grinds to a halt. In retrospect, this halt is suggestively read
through the lens of racial justice, to launch a critique that questions Rainer and the
Judson Dance Theatre’s glaring lack of diversity within its membership during a time
that coincided with the Civil Rights movement of the early1960s. Rainer’s choreo-
graphic standstill at the end of WSR can be reframed within Fred Moten’s notion of a
“musical caesura,” which, following Ralph Ellison, is a prerequisite or prelude to
action (Moten 2003, 85).
Danto asked how indiscernible objects can belong to completely different categories.
Take an ordinary bed found in a furniture store and Robert Rauschenberg’s paint splat-
tered, wall-hung Bed (1955) or Claes Oldenburg’s Bedroom Set (1963). Consider
observing a group of runners in Central Park and a run with an identical choreog-
raphy, drawn from Yvonne Rainer’s performance at the Judson Church in 1963, or
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Aliveness and Aboutness: Yvonne Rainer’s Dance Indiscernibles
more recently from the Marron Atrium at the MoMA exhibition Judson Dance Theatre:
The Work is Never Done (2018). Obviously, the context (park/theatre), conventions (fit-
ness/dance), and intentions (training/aesthetic proposal) are different. Yet, to the
naked eye, they look the same. Danto’s “non-identity of indiscernibles” is key to
answering his essentialist question of what art is (Danto 1964, 575). Rainer asks us
how a performing body, engaging everyday movements, becomes a medium of repre-
sentation. Danto claimed to witness the peculiar historical moment of everyday objects
mistaken for their artworld counterparts, or vice versa. Do mistakes ever occur watch-
ing Rainer’s WSR? Not if the corporeal, temporal and kinesthetic dimensions of dance
in the moment, the embodied performance of the choreography, render the witnessing
not a mere seeing but a participation itself. A twist to Danto’s indiscernibility demands
that the performative aspect of the dance medium requires more to capture the alive-
ness that stilled objects of art do not have.
2 The Invention of Running: We Shall Run (1963)
We Shall Run was created for a cast of twelve performers and, in Rainer’s own words,
was based “solely on running” (Rainer 2006, 243).4 Her choreographic proposal pro-
voked New York Times dance critic Allen Hughes to describe it as “non-dance.” And “if it
isn’t dance, what is it?” (Hughes 1963, 5). “Non-dance” became an element of dance,
allowing non-conventional choreographers to experiment anew with their art.5
Sadly, there are no video recordings of the original performances. Photographs,
however, attest to the experimental work of the Judson Dance Theater, suggesting a
priority of process even when video technology was available. 6 Rainer describes her
works of this period as “lost,” so that they needed to be painstakingly reconstructed.
This she did with her longtime collaborator Pat Catterson (Rainer 2012).
Set to a recording of Hector Berlioz’s sacred choral work Grande Messes Des Mortes
(1837) the cast is barefoot and clad in streetwear. As if responding to a roll call, the per-
formers enter the side of the stage one by one, forming a single file line from upstage to
downstage. They stand motionless, staring straight ahead, for six very long minutes.
Berlioz’s dramatic choral polyphony builds and reverberates throughout the cavernous
Marron Atrium of MoMA. Dancer Patrick Gallagher claims this the hardest part of the
piece, requiring serious restraint (Gallagher 2020). The tension creates a comic effect;
the bombastic music blasting, the dancers just standing there. When they finally burst
forth and begin to run in a loosely spaced cluster, it offers another subversion of
expectation. This is not a run of athleticism, a sprint, or an Olympic finish line run. It is
a leisurely, restrained everyday jog, as if the performers could exert much more energy
than they do. The Judson dancers worked not only with task-based movements but also
with a low level of effort required for task actions: (perhaps a subtle commentary on
alienation and labor.) Rainer has called the run a “steady trot” that she feared might be
construed as a “formal device” aligned with minimalism. But her intention, rather, was
to create an ironic contrast with two of her least favorite things: “virtuosity and flam-
boyance of the music” (Banes 1994, 87). The group divides and coalesces in various
configurations of spirals, diagonals and lines, maintaining a clump-like formation
where no one really ever leads the pack. The sacred music of a previous epoch appears
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to have no effect on the dancers, their relationship ambivalent, although not as

independent as the Cage/Cunningham music/dance divide. When the piece comes to
anticlimax, the dancers start to circle in on each other, until on cue, both the music and
movement come to a full stop.
In 1972, Rainer saw her work of the early 1960s as grappling with dance as an art
form. She rallied against the inherent “narcissism, virtuosity and display” of dancers
and their quest for the adulation of the audience. Rainer explains that it was not about
choreographic organization, but rather an interest in showing the “work” and “involve-
ment” required. This was an effort that did not project outwardly, and was a practical
solution to deal with the modern dance tendencies of concealed exertion she was
responding to (Rainer 1972, 52–3). More recently, Rainer has written jokingly that
with WSR, she “invented running,” along with Steve Paxton, who with Satisfyin Lover
(1967) had “invented walking” (Rainer 2006, 243). Rainer’s joke gets at the explicit
intention behind her choreography and the operation required to reconstitute a
functional, physical movement within a theatrical context. Her innovation gives
credence to the aliveness in an art capable of always reinventing the ordinary. Aliveness
becomes the aboutness of dance.
3 Rainer’s Negations
In 1965, Rainer penned a postscript to an essay about her own “artbed” choreography
Parts of Some Sextets, now known as her “No Manifesto.” This was a disavowal of the
theatrical conventions of dance of her day—“a very large NO.” By strictly defining the
terms of her own artistic engagement with what she saw as the proscriptive “rules and
boundaries” of dancemaking of the period, Rainer clarified what negation might mean
for dance. The repetitive series of “No’s” (echoing other such lists of the period) began
with: “No to spectacle. No to virtuosity,” and continued: “No to the involvement of spec-
tator or performer. No to style,” before delivering the final, blow of “No to moving and
being moved.” Here, Rainer enacted a wiping clean of the dance historical slate. She has
since said that the statement has “dogged (her) heels ever since it was published”—that
it was only a temporary solution to “clear the air” of what preceded dance historically
(Rainer 2006, 264). Her wish was to stage an “aesthetic rebellion” against the dramatic,
narrative forms and psychological expressionism practiced by modern dance heavy-

weights such as Martha Graham or José Limon, techniques of her own traditional
training (Burt 2006, 9). Although Rainer was inspired by Graham as a successful
female dance maker, she outgrew the influence, to align herself with the aleatory
approaches of Merce Cunningham and John Cage. Her revolt came from within her
own choreographic body.
Rainer’s dances became a purposeful disavowal of what she described as “the god-
like, the ecstatic, and the regal” of modern dance, as these qualities canceled out what
it was to be an everyday “mortal.” It was “the pedestrian, the quotidian, and the
athletic” that held her interest (Rainer 2006, 243). Her terms “the pedestrian, the quo-
tidian, and the athletic” in relation to the dance conventions of the period could be
regarded as anti-aesthetic and anti-dance. But what Danto shows is that these terms
become admissible for art in accord with his transfiguration of the commonplace or the
384
everyday. They become gestures of living actions carrying new embodied meanings,
turning movement into kinetic sculpture. The temporality in the aliveness draws from
the staticity of the aboutness to turn the stasis back into movement: the actions of a
body walking or running, standing, sitting.
4 Danto’s Difference
What, now, is dance? Danto proposed that art as we knew it had come to the end of a
developmental trajectory that culminated in a form of representation where works of
art were indiscernible from the real things they once represented. A parallel development
occurred in the danceworld. From Jean-George Noverre’s ballet d’action that aspired to
the asymmetry, verisimilitude and the “ravishing disorder” of Renaissance painting to
Isadora Duncan’s barefoot dances that appeared to be spontaneous and improvised, but
were entirely choreographed, to Oskar Schlemmer’s sculpture-like performances at the
Bauhaus that utilized untrained members of the collective (including himself in the
Triadic Ballet (1922)), up to Rainer’s WSR – dance history may be read as culminating
along a trajectory where representation seems to disappear from the stage. What one
gets at the end of dance are all possible movements of dance.
For Rainer, Berlioz’s score acts as a dramatic sonic environment to make the pedestrian
in the choreography stand out in stark contrast against the traditional music. The antag-
onism is exhausted by a criterion neither of imitation nor of representation. The running
is not a copying of what runners do when they run nor a copy of how they run when they
run. Danto described a novel relationship between his “real objects and real facsimiles of
real objects,” where the perceivable distinction is erased (1964, 574). But Rainer’s dance,
while erasing the line, reinstates a line as constantly newly made, against the tradition,
rather than ready-made, here meaning conventional or according to the tradition.
5 Embodiment and the Everyday
Danto’s embodiment amounts to “symbolic expression.” But does this adequately

capture dance’s capability to externalize an artist’s subjectivity? (cf. Carroll 2012, 124).
Does art really embody in the way the soul inhabits the body?7 Danto often thinks so.
But how then does one account for the dance body, which is both like an art-object and
not such an object at the same time. Rainer’s work complicates the relationship of the
body to the object of art. Her dances ask after the roundabout effort of turning one to
the other. But what is left: an object for interpretation, as Danto needs for his ontology,
or a body enacting an ever-new way of interpreting the everyday? Could we introduce
an “is” of aliveness to move beyond Danto’s aboutness and embodiment criteria?
One way Rainer achieved an embodied everydayness was by including artists with no
dance training such as Rauschenberg or Morris, or the composer Philip Corner. Rainer
recalls she would poke fun at Rauschenberg for being a “Sunday dancer” despite his
status as an artworld star. The incorporation of non-dancers as both performers and
choreographers must have had a cross-pollinating effect between the trained and
untrained bodies, creating a kinetic common denominator for the performers (Rainer
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2020, 9). Everyday movement at the Judson was well documented by dance writers of
the period. Dance author Deborah Jowitt suggested that found material in the object arts
translated into found movement in dance. Movements were drawn from people on the
streets, their quotidian gestures, and actions such as running or walking, standing, or
even crawling, and forged a direct relation with day-to-day living (Jowitt 1988, 323).
Village Voice dance critic Jill Johnston wrote of the “natural movement of the Judson
group” and traced its origin to Merce Cunningham’s Collage (1953), which presented a
collection of common actions such as hand washing, nail filing, hair combing, skipping,
running, rolling and handstands. Johnston described the Judson movement as “raw, rug-
ged action.” She asked the same question as Danto and Hughes: “if a performer walks
across a stage and calls it a dance, who is to say it is not a dance?” (Johnston 1965,
183–5). Dance historian Sally Banes has shown the way Rainer’s development of the
everyday could be seen as part of a larger investigation. By incorporating task-oriented
movements regulated by game-structures, as well as interactions with objects, such as
mattresses and furniture, movement and the human body actually became objectified
(Banes 1987, 43). For Rainer, movement generated through such processes appeared to
her as “self-contained” needing “no artistic tampering or justification”(Rainer 2006,
243). What does dance lose and gain by this turning toward, and turning away, from
objecthood?
Using the Duchampian concept of ready-mades, as well as “mere real things,” Danto
wrote that bringing such an object into the art gallery was not an aesthetic transgression
but rather an expansion of materials available to the artist. Rainer recalls artist Jasper Johns
saying after a performance of WSR, that the dance had: “gone to the outer limits on a scale
of possibilities.” 8 His comment resonates with Danto’s but leaves out the ready-made
(Rainer 2006, 243). Rainer was explicit about her use of “found movement,” including it an
essay in 1966 for Minimal Art, A Critical Anthology that featured a chart comparing “objects”
and “dances,” and what qualities were to be eliminated or replaced in each. The side-by-side
chart is remarkable even if Rainer writes that the benefit of such comparisons was “ques-
tionable” (Rainer 2020, 63). Yet it does show how engaged she was with both artistic media,
and how she perceived ideas from the visual arts translated into dance. Considering this, it is
possible to say that Rainer’s incorporation of running in WSR, a physical, functional
movement that already exists in the world, falls into the category of a dance ready-made,
unmade in the making. Situated between the inherent kineticism of Duchamp’s Bicycle
Wheel (1913) and the prediction of a physical mishap in Prelude to a Broken Arm (1915)
WSR finds a fragile place. Where WSR differs from its artworld relations is in its performative
nature, the doing of the choreography within a theatrical viewing context that produces the
effect of everyday movement. Like Bicycle Wheel, it has been taken out of its original
functional and utilitarian context. Where the running is performed by the cast, and
referenced by the title, Duchamp’s wheel no longer needs to spin to achieve its effect. And
not unlike Prelude, the Shall in WSR’s title predicts a future running (as opposed to an
accident), if the snow shovel was to be called into action and made once again useful.
In After the End of Art, Danto suggested for a work of art to embody its meaning, a
new “mode of presentation” might be necessary for the form to be meaning appro-
priate. This is right. How does WSR’s mode of presentation respond? Does the doubling,
or even tripling of running within the work: a dance composed of running, that in its
title references a kind of historical running, using the raw material of everyday running,
386
give currency to Danto’s appropriateness of the form? More interestingly, how does a
specific historical moment inform a work’s embodied performance, its aliveness?
Consider our current societal reckoning with racial injustice. If the phrase “running
while black” has become a symbol for the dangers faced by people of color when they
pursue everyday activities like jogging, how does this reflect on WSR’s meaning and the
Judson Dance Theatre’s lack of diversity during the historic civil rights movement in the
United States? It was after all the year 1963 that Martin Luther King gave his I Have a
Dream speech in Washington, with the folk song We Shall Overcome its rallying anthem
of promise, the same year that WSR premiered with an all-white cast in Greenwich
Village. The work was presented with a more diverse cast in 2018 at the MoMA than it
had in earlier presentations at Dancespace Project New York (2013) and at the DIA
Center for the Arts in Beacon, New York (2102). The dancers appeared to be propelled
through the white museum space, whereas in earlier versions they seemed to be
operating at a lower level of energy, in less pristine theatrical environments. It may be
that in the performances at MoMA, WSR finally finds its ultimate mode of presentation
appropriate to its meaning for audiences today, a half-century later.
Danto proposed that the title of a work guides interpretation, that the artist structures
the viewer to see the work as she wants it to be seen. But between intention and seeing,
lies the work that remakes itself in performances that alter over time. No title change, but
a way of engaging the aliveness to counter the static nature that threatens embodied
meaning. Dance is object like and not like an object. It challenges Danto’s preoccupation
with objects of art. Rainer’s dance gestures for us today toward a yet unrealized promise
of freedom and racial equality. It transcends both everyday function and aesthetic isola-
tion in demanding of the dancers and viewers to participate with bodies that are alive.
Acknowledgments
A very special thanks to Lydia Goehr, Yvonne Rainer, Pat Catterson, Patrick Gallagher,
Patricia Hoffbauer and Anna Pakes without whom this chapter would not have been
possible.
Notes
1 Steve Paxton’s 1967 work Satisfyin Lover was composed of just such actions, as was Rainer’s
later Walk She Said (1972).
2 Danto briefly distinguishes between music and noise, dance and movement, literature and
mere writing in Three Decades After the End of Art, 1995, 35.
3 Cf. Minimal Art (1968) ed. Gregory Battock and E.P. Dutton. Rainer drafted a side by side
chart that compared the way art objects and dances had been similarly affected by
“’Minimalist’ tendencies.” Rainer 2020, 63.
4 The original cast included among others Lucinda Childs, Trisha Brown, Deborah Hay, Philip
Corner, June Eckman, Ruth Emerson, Sally Gross, Carol Scothorn, John Worden, and Rainer.
5 One need only to look at the athletic walking and running in William Forsythe’s In the Middle
Somewhat Elevated (1986) to see the way these innovations were eventually absorbed into the
dance mainstream.
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6 Twyla Tharp on the other hand has extensive video documentation of her experimental work
from the 1960s.
7 Rainer remarked in reading a draft of this essay that “in keeping with my anarchist
background and sensibility, the word ‘soul’… is anathema to me!”.
8 Rainer writes of the comment: “I was quite flattered, since going out on a limb was a prized
aspiration for those of us circling around the ideas of Duchamp and Cage” (Rainer 2006, 243).
References
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Postmodern Dance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
———. 1994. Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
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Berger, Maurice. 1988. The Politics of Experience: Robert Morris, Minimalism, and the 1960s. Diss.
City University of New York.
Bukhari, Kyle. 2017. “Movements of Media in Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie (1966) and Richard
Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968).” International Journal of Screendance 8: 47–69.
Burt, Ramsay. 2006. Judson Dance Theatre: Performative Traces. New York: Routledge.
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———. 1964. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61(19): 571–84.
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———. 1972. “The Performer as Persona.” Interview by Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp.
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44
Arthur and Andy
DANIEL HERWITZ
Arthur Danto once stood next to Andy Warhol at a gallery opening while Warhol auto-
graphed his wife’s brochure. They did not speak. Warhol was unaware of Danto’s work
and, had he read it, he would probably have lacked the background to understand it. Yet
for Danto, Warhol was the catalyst and crux of his philosophical writing on art, the
enfant terrible who implicitly raised the problem of what art is and delivered the solution
in the form of an exhibition, which when viewed by Danto gave Danto for the first time
something new to say on the subject of the philosophy of art. And this, despite the fact
that Danto was a recognized artist, a maker of excellent woodcuts in the style of German
Expressionism. When he saw Warhol’s work, the scales dropped from his eyes allowing
him to become a Hegel for the Upper West Side of New York, scripting what he believed
Warhol had accomplished into an explicit theory of art, perhaps the most important of
the second half of the twentieth century. For Danto, Warhol embodied the age and its
aspirations: a philosophical artist in gel. Warhol, meanwhile, was on the job applying
gel to his wigs, creating a body of art that inaugurated the cultural understanding of
the world of Mad-Men-America, a world of advertising, celebrity, money, and intimacy
with brands, not to mention pathos and disaster.
Danto’s masterful Andy Warhol (2009) speaks of Warhol’s work “before” and “after”
1961, the date of Warhol’s wonderfully comic painting (Before and After I) of a nose
before and after the “job”, bulbous and ungainly until elegantly bridged (like Warhol’s
own before, before, that is, he consulted New York’s finest plastic surgeons). For Danto,
this painting was Warhol’s autobiography, his way of relinquishing his place as a top
commercial artist at exactly that moment, his passing beyond the abstract expressionist
pictorial technique which he had first relied upon to paint his Coke bottles; his arrival at
the after: those flat, Dayglow, glorious images of brands and icons he produced between
1961 and 1964 for which he is rightfully immortalized.
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DANIEL HERWITZ
Danto was also writing autobiographically in describing Warhol’s before and after.
The before and after made them alike: each became a modernist figure (Herwitz 1993)
of unparalleled boldness, audacity, and brilliance. The Eureka moment that led to
Danto’s “after” took place in the Stable Gallery run by Eleanor Ward in 1964, where he
witnessed an exhibition of Warhol’s Brillo Box. Reflecting on the comic, surprising,
highly provocative installation, Danto began by noting the obvious: Warhol’s art objects
were to all intents and purposes visually indiscernible from the Brillo boxes one finds in
the supermarket (even if in fact the boxes of Brillo Box in the Stable Gallery show were
made by Warhol, and comically oversized). Many at the time said Warhol’s exhibition
was a case of the emperor’s new clothes, and Warhol a sickly charlatan. But others,
including Danto, reasoned that there was no sham here; Warhol’s Brillo Box was a work
of art when exhibited in the gallery, his argument being that Warhol’s gesture of exhib-
iting these boxes invested them with the kind of embodied meaning a work of art
requires, since suddenly they become comic/ironic meditations on – and celebrations of
– the relationship between product, art, and design in American consumer culture, but
also reflections on the very nature of art. Whereas the Brillo box on the supermarket
shelf was meant to brand the product and invite sales rather than “speak” at all.
A number of critics understood that Warhol was pushing against the limits of art in
a way that forced abstract reflection on what art was, is, and could be. It was Danto who
worked out a detailed account of what Warhol had not merely solicited (questioning
about art) but implicitly demonstrated. Since these objects were visually the same when
on the supermarket shelves and in the gallery, none of the visual properties could play
the role of defining them as art when in the gallery. Rather, a background set of framing
concepts (which Danto glossed as a “theory”) shared by an artworld needed to be in
place, which would, however controversially, allow these objects, under Warhol’s pres-
tidigitating gesture, to “speak” as art. Art was like language, a way of addressing the
world, and like language, it was an abstract set of signs given meaning by a set of beliefs
comprising a “theory” by the speakers of that language, here, in the artworld.
Danto reasoned that a cultural background puts in place a set of concepts allowing
one thing to be schematized differently from a visually indiscernible counterpart. As
Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel exhibited on a pedestal allows also an abstraction so that the
artwork alone becomes a play, say, on the very idea of sculpture. When Duchamp exhib-
ited the Bicycle Wheel in 1913, it became a brilliant simulation of sculpture, exciting the
tactile values of sculpture. One wants to spin it, which is not unlike wanting to touch
the soft feminine curves of a Canova marble. It invites the viewer to see it as a head, a
torso, a body sitting on a pedestal. And like art made for the gallery or museum, it
appears to have no function apart from the mechanical one of spinning. It travels
nowhere. All of these features of Duchamp’s artwork make it exactly that: an artwork
that so brilliantly simulates classical sculpture that it places the classics under review or
scrutiny. However, Danto insisted that only in an art world with a certain history and
background concepts could viewers see, indeed imagine, the Duchamp piece this way.
Of course, not all agreed that this piece was art: Duchamp’s work, like Warhol’s, received
its share of insult. But riffing on Danto, we may add that only within the context of a
modern art world (with its conceptual schemes) could this debate even take place.
Warhol exhibited to Danto that the concept of art and the practice of art are histori-
cally evolving, since at any given time the terms for how meaning is to be embodied
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Arthur and Andy
(and in what medium) will differ from other historical moments: in the Renaissance the
terms would have been iconographic, narrative, representational of the Christian story,
and of portraiture and landscape. The Renaissance art world, on Danto’s view, could
not have conceived of, much less processed, Duchamp’s or Warhol’s gestures as art.
Danto also made clear that while both art and language are “theory driven,” they
are hardly the same. One crucial difference is this: art acquires and communicates
meaning differently from language. A language relies on its signs (a, b, c, d) purely
abstractly, as rule-governed conduits for meaning. (This is not quite true of pictographic
language but let’s leave that aside.) A work of visual art embodies its meaning in its
visual twists, which are not mere conduits but reverberate overall with content. Change
any visual feature of a work of art, and it might well – and likely will – change its
content. It is through the unpacking of the work’s specific visual twists that its unique
meaning is unfolded.
Central to the meaning embodied in Warhol’s installation is a meditation on how
close advertising art is to fine art, something Warhol knew in his bones because he had
been both. The Brillo box on the supermarket shelf is a high design object, created by
abstract expressionist painter James Harvey. Like Danto, Harvey hailed from Detroit. He
earned his living as a commercial artist, just as Warhol had, and came close to suing
Warhol for unauthorized use of his design. They settled the matter by exchanging art-
works, Harvey of course getting the better deal (sadly he died soon after). That Harvey’s
commercial box is a high design object mattered to Warhol because it allowed him to
raise the question of whether and how to distinguish fine art from commercial art. Both
are entangled in the world of markets, branding, advertising, and art products. Today
fine art is “flipped,” quickly bought and sold for profit like real estate and increasingly
identified with its logo – this to the point where real innovation in art demands an over-
coming of the market brand. The challenge for fine art, one might say (although Danto
did not) is to overcome the market aspect pertaining to all art, fine or commercial.
The entanglement of fine and commercial art is not simply a negative thing; it is a
window into the conditions of the age. Warhol was the first, and greatest artist to limn
this age, an age of money, celebrity, stardom, image culture, where everything floats in
and out of the status of being a supermarket product, shape changes between person
and persona, thing and brand. Warhol was the poet of consumer culture, as sophisti-
cated and trenchant as the poet Charles Baudelaire had been for the Paris of the
Nineteenth century. There is no better place to see it happening than in Warhol’s

painting: One Dollar Bills. There the ubiquitous one-dollar bill is painted in repetition,
with George Washington, its reigning icon, appearing in various states of fading. These
various states, like the various dollar bills in circulation at any given time – some freshly
minted, others old and tattered – give the work visual value through rhythmical varia-
tion, rather like music or the shading of light in an impressionist painting. Their varying
states of fadedness juxtaposed with their uniformity of repetition, makes for a visually
compelling work. But there is more. What they show, I think, is the doubleness of the
icon, in this case, George Washington. His presence brands the one-dollar bill with maj-
esty, trust, and desire, but over time constant repetition fades the image of Washington
– and not simply literally, but as an object of attention. The icon is an object of allure,
but paradoxically the allure fades through the very circulation through which the icon
lives. Marilyn, Jackie, and Elvis are utterly compelling aesthetic types, types which, like
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stars, could only have been invented with the rise of the media through which they
command public attention and transfix the public. Yet the very circulation of their
images causes these to flatten and fade. Susan Sontag understood this paradox as
central to the photography of trauma, which on the one hand brings the horror of the
world to the public eye with a shock, and yet, through the over-circulation of images of
war, Holocaust and personal disaster, flattens the horror into the daily stuff one sees on
TV: today the burning flames of Afghanistan, tomorrow of Peru, your usual image-
fare, hardly noticed.
Indeed – and this is central to the meaning of One Dollar Bills – in our branded society
the star becomes a form of currency, like the artwork itself. How the price of an artwork
is set and how it fluctuates are not unlike the way a currency gains or loses value: the
artwork through the critic, the gallery, the museum, and the collector, along with a
general sense in the art world of where the market is trending, the currency through
trust, belief in where the national markets are going, through what international inves-
tors do, and a web of relations to other currencies. Again, Warhol glimpses this in One
Dollar Bills: that the work of art is a commodity but also a form of currency, or very
much like one. One Dollar Bills (Warhol’s work) really is a kind of one-dollar bill.
The painting is a currency, or like one, but also transcendent, like the star icon her-
self. You can’t put a price on Sugar (Marilyn Monroe) effervescently singing to the
Florida millionaires in Some Like it Hot, however many times you watch it she is still
glorious, thrilling, an icon from a faraway and magnificent place. And yet as everyone
knows, Monroe was worth “millions” (high currency) until being fired from the studio
and ending her life. It was when she died struggling to get to the telephone and the
suicide broke news, after her string of failed marriages and the drugs and alcohol, that
the full force of Marilyn’s iconic status emerged. Just as it was when Jackie, the Camelot
queen of an America besotted by the star quality of the Kennedy presidency, became a
widow that her full iconic stature emerged. The star icon, as I have explored elsewhere
(Herwitz 2008), differs from other stars not because of her glorious attraction on screen
(which all stars have) but because of her melodrama. It is the peculiar synergy of her
life on screen and her life off-screen that creates a particular public fascination. The star
icon is (and it is mostly a “she”) at once a persona of abundant grace, worshipped with
an almost religious fervor. But she is also a real-life person tormented by melodrama
and sometimes destroyed by it. The public is in awe of her persona but is also obsessed
by the course of her tabloid life, which it follows with a voracious craving. This double
life of the star icon generates public fixation. The public wishes to attain the grace she
offers them. But they are also obsessed with her daily melodrama and can’t wait for
more. This double attitude convulses the public around the star, as if she were both the
site of a miracle and of a public execution. At once a person in the firmament and a
fragmenting figure in need of the very grace her persona offers, the public cannot get
straight where to place her.
Danto harps on the religious zeal that Warhol and his public brings to the icon. He
says of the Marilyn paintings: “Warhol painted her beautiful head as if it were the head
of a saint on a field of gold leaf in a religious icon. She was Saint Marilyn of the Sorrows.
Her beauty was a mask” (Danto (2009, 40). And he speaks of, “The level of plane
crashes, suicides, accident, executions. ... A dark world with radiant beings, whose
presence among us is redemptive, and into whose company Warhol sought to insinuate
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his own ungainly presence, and to make stars of us all” (Danto 2009, 144). Danto
astutely places Andy in the same category of an icon of public attention, distant, pasty,
other-worldly while utterly of this world (of the factory, Bloomingdales, celebrities and
sex), a life of celebrity but also dark melodrama. Warhol died twice, first shot by Valerie
Solanas and pronounced clinically dead before the doctors manage to revive him, then
the actual death following a gall bladder operation at the age of 57. Warhol aspired to
enter the invisible portals of the world of the icon, aspired to be Jackie or Marilyn. And
through his art and his life, he did exactly that.
This world of the celebrity and the star icon of which Warhol was poet laureate was
an incipient world new to history when Warhol painted it. Since his death, it has taken
over every aspect of American culture from consumer culture to aesthetics to politics
(which increasingly resembles something between a celebrity talk show featuring bil-
lionaires with bad hair days – Trump and Warhol share this love of bad hair – and Big
Time Wrestling with a bit of American Idol thrown in). Warhol was what Nietzsche
would have called “untimely” early to the understanding of a new world. Among
Danto’s first books was a book on Nietzsche, written at a moment when analytical phi-
losophy in America thought Nietzsche either a crackpot or a proto-Nazi. Danto’s book
was really a Nietzschean gesture early to the Anglo-American philosophical world. This
condition of being early/untimely Danto shared with Warhol and especially in his bold
philosophy of art. In this, Danto is totally different from Hegel, for whom philosophy
can only take place when the Owl of Minerva appears on the horizon at the end of the
day, that is, of history. Yes, Danto was also Hegelian in that he believed the Owl of
Minerva had likewise appeared at the end of modernism, which Warhol had brought to
completion with his Brillo Box in 1964, landing its history happily in Danto’s lap. But in
fact, both he and Warhol were prophets of the future. They shared a fascination with,
and sense of the importance of, the new.
Danto describes Warhol as a very American painter, unlike how the critical/
Brechtian artists and critics considered him when first encountering his images of
Marilyn and Coke bottles in Europe. Warhol shared with Danto an immigrant’s love of
American culture, Danto the Detroit Jew, Warhol the child of working-class Slovakian
immigrants (Catholic), both children of industrial cities run on steam and coal whose
roughness contrasted with the rarified atmosphere of the museum (where Danto often
visited as a child) and of Shirley Temple Hollywood (Warhol’s childhood escape valve
and adoration). This is central to the way Warhol imagines the American brand, be it
Coke, Campbell’s soup, or Del Monte peaches. In Warhol’s paintings of the Campbell
Soup can, the soup can is repeated – but again like the dollar bill, with variation. This
variation is (like the dollar bill’s) not merely visually pleasing. It is central to the meaning
of the work. We see the Chicken noodle, the Clam Chowder, the Vegetable, the Beef and
Barley, the Tomato, the Cream of Mushroom.
Warhol saw that Americans have this pleasurable intimacy with what they con-
sume. In the days of my New England childhood, my brothers and I would come inside
after a morning’s sledding to a steaming pot of Campbell’s soup prepared by my mother.
Each day it was the comfort of the same taste, but with enough variety to keep us inter-
ested. To this day, I cannot separate the comfort of the soup from my mother’s benefi-
cent gaze. I am not alone in this but one of a generation of Americans who have felt the
same.
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American intimacy goes beyond soup to network TV, which offers similar comfort
within circumscribed variation. Each episode of I Love Lucy (to take another example
from my own childhood) was similarly the same and different, always a new form of
domestic chaos produced by the zany Lucy to the consternation of Ricky, who usually
strummed a song or two at the end of the show. Yet each show had the same predict-
ability to the characters and contours of this TV world, as if it was a world contained in
a soup can. Warhol’s was a television aesthetic in his love of variation-within-con-
tained-repetition. It was also a family aesthetic (although his family was the factory).
Only in America can your investment counselor be branded as your intimate friend who
always has your welfare at heart (as is done in a thousand commercials about investment
firms and wealth management), only in America can your airlines be your “family.”
This is of course ideology, but there is aesthetic pleasure in it, which Warhol amazingly
understood in his paintings of the brand. It is crucial to why the public loved him and
continues to do so.
After 1964, Warhol pretty much turned from visual art (painting, silkscreen, seri-
graph) to film. He painted portraits to raise money for his experimental projects, pro-
jects like his Empire State Building, a single twenty-four-hour camera shot of the icon, at
once totally boring and utterly transfixing, turning the building, already iconic, into a
silent film star. He explored gay eroticism, the drag queen and her comic allure, the
macho male icon (transposed from his America’s Most Wanted series with its twist on the
word “wanted”). Warhol played against the grain of film by bringing out its home
movie-like graininess, refusing complex editing, and making the whole thing seem
haphazard.
Of particular interest were his series of Screen Tests, in which he invited various
members of the Factory, drag queens, hangers on, strung out sepulchral women like
Edie Sedgwick, and stars like Bob Dylan to pose for homemade screen tests. Warhol
simply put the camera on these people and watched them react, sometimes squirming
in obvious discomfort. He left the camera there without telling these people what to do,
leaving them befuddled, annoyed, and sometimes humiliated. There was sadism in his
control over his subjects, and certainly voyeurism, but also the desire to let the camera
do what it would to each and every person without his intervention. What transpired
was nothing short of revelatory. Some became glorious under the camera’s gaze, others
wilted. The series is about each and every one of these individuals, but also about the
way the screen test is a portal between the person and the persona, the real individual
and the artifact of the camera. Warhol demonstrated that the screen test is where this
world meets the other, that netherworld of the medium, a portal whose ability to trans-
figure individuals is utterly unpredictable and strange. At issue are the aesthetics of film
and of media, an aesthetics that occupied Warhol throughout his career, from the
Jackie and Marilyn studies to these. What makes Norma Jean become Sugar singing to
the shareholders with other-worldly effervescence? To say there is no way of predicting
how a person will appear, endure, be, on screen is a good start. Like Kant said, genius
occurs in the absence of rules. But more needs to be said. The word “transfiguration” is
called for, which is exactly Danto’s word.
Danto hazards the thought, at the end of Andy Warhol, that “at some moment bet-
ween 1959 and 1961 Andy Warhol underwent an artistic change deep enough to bear
comparison with a religious conversion – too deep, one might say, not to be a religious
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conversion” (Danto 2009, 145–146). This conversion left Warhol the illustrator
behind, and turned him into an artist, indeed a revolutionary one. Danto suggests this
conversion is the true meaning of his famous painting Before and After of 1961, men-
tioned earlier in this essay, a painting ostensibly about a nose job (his). Danto suggests
the transformation is not merely physical but spiritual, in concordance with Warhol’s
deep and abiding Catholicism (Danto 2009, 146–147).
Here is a deeper link between the thinking of Danto and Warhol’s own project, which
I think Danto himself did not fully articulate, because its full force only came out in the
last book he wrote: What Art Is (2013).
It was central to his philosophy until that time that the aesthetic was sidelined from
the definition of art. The very point of Brillo Box, he thought, was that it proved that
nothing visual could account for the ontological difference between a ‘mere thing’ and
a work of art. Warhol’s work was to him more like declarative language than anything
else: it spoke in virtue of a shared background of concepts, which he called a theory
(although its meaning was nevertheless embodied visually in a way language isn’t!).
But in What Art Is he seems to retract this sidelining of the aesthetic. There he says the
work of art is a kind of “wakeful dream.” He writes this in the context of a long
discussion of Wallace Stevens’ masterpiece, The Blue Guitar, a poetic riff on Picasso’s
equally magnificent The Old Guitarist from the blue period. The painting (like the poem
that follows) is dreamlike, filled with a haunted and ethereal melancholy that owes
more than a little to the Spanish, philosophical melancholy of Miguel de Unamuno. Life
is but a dream, the Spanish say, and Stevens followed suit with a poem that riffs on the
color blue, blue moods and the blues. Danto believes this wakeful dreaming – which is a
beautiful characterization of both the old guitarist and of Stevens’ poem – belongs to
the works, not the viewer’s imagination. It is a genuine property of these works, like
color or shape or word formation. And not only these very dreamlike works: many or all
works of art have this property, Danto surmises. Art is a kind of wakeful dream, trans-
figured from the ordinary into the strange and alluring.
Perhaps all Danto had in mind in writing this was a semantic point. That the dream-
work, as Freud put it, is a good analogy for the way a work of art veils its meaning
within the medium, demanding imaginative unpacking. Perhaps he believed nothing
aesthetic followed from this.
My own intuition is otherwise. I think the whole way in which the strange allure of
the Stevens poem is brought in has a clear aesthetic ring to it, and “wakeful dreaming”
is in fact a classic aesthetic property. Like most aesthetic properties or aspects (a better
word), “wakeful dreaming” is the result of a correspondence or synergy between things
in the work of art (the insubstantiality of the Picasso figure whose elongation, El Greco
eyes and pale, emaciated skin are washed in the thinnest blue), and the active engage-
ment of the viewer’s imagination, which projects a sense of dreamlike strangeness onto
these features. Calling the work a wakeful dream is the result of this synergy between
what is in the work, and the active engagement of the viewer’s imagination, indeed
feeling. One should not underestimate the viewer’s share in establishing the “wakeful
dreaming” attributed to the painting. The viewer – strange as this might sound – enters
into a kind of trancelike state, a state of absorption not unlike a “wakeful dream” in
contemplating the work, while remaining wide awake and highly focused (which is why
it is “wakeful”). Together, work and viewer create pictorial content. It is the same with
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the Warhol screen test: how a person appears when displayed on screen is a matter of
their place in the cinematic frame but also how we see it and react to it. And so, Danto
has placed, perhaps without realizing it, the aesthetic front and center in the making of
art. That is, in its definition. He would probably have resisted this conclusion, but I
believe it is true, and I also believe it brings Danto far closer to Warhol and his fascina-
tion with the transfiguring portal than he knew.
References
Danto, Arthur C. 2009. Andy Warhol. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Herwitz, Daniel. 1993. Making Theory/Constructing Art. Chicago and London: Chicago.
–––––. 2008. The Star as Icon. New York: Columbia University Press.
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45
Letter to Posterity
ARTHUR C. DANTO
Philosophers acquired their designation in ancient times, in consequence of a becoming

modesty. Socrates is said to have turned aside a characterization of himself as a wise
man, preferring to be known instead as someone who loved wisdom – hence the term
philo-sophia. I don’t know whether, aside from etymology, wisdom especially figures in
the concept of philosophy, at least among philosophers themselves, few of whom, in my
fairly wide acquaintanceship, especially covet the epithet “wise,” or even count wisdom
as something they especially love. Philosophers love cleverness, acuity, fertility in
inventing novel arguments, and ingenuity in finding surprising counter-examples. At
least since the professionalization of the discipline in the 20th century, these have been
what philosophers particularly admire in other philosophers. What is great about phi-
losophers is that they will entertain any position, however outrageous, as long as one
can defend it. My theory of the end of art drove people in the art world up the wall, but
the philosophers were entirely open: “Okay, so art is over. What are the arguments?”
They make up in openness what they lack in wisdom. For the most part philosophy is an
intellectual sport.
Never, in my entire experience, have I encountered a philosopher I thought of as
wise. Years ago, though, I met the great art historian Rudolf Wittkower, whom I
regarded as a genuinely wise man. By comparison with Rudy, whom I adopted as a
model human being, most philosophers I knew seemed shallow, vain, silly, and what
Nietzsche spoke of as human, all too human. My principle of conduct has since been
imitatio Rudy, but I am only too aware how far short I fall in putting this into practice. I
knew that I would be doing right if I could treat others the way Rudy would have treated
them, and I think I knew in a general way what Rudy would have done in most given
circumstances. But as Socrates knew as well as anyone, since he introduced the concept
into philosophical discourse, the will is weak, and knowing the good does not mean
doing the good, as he at one time believed. We are, in many conditions of existence,
akratic, to use the technical term for the morally weak will. Like Socrates, I suppose
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I could say that I loved wisdom, since I after all knew who was wise and who was not,
and that I wanted to behave like the former and not the latter. But actual wisdom is
something that escapes me.
I am exceedingly grateful that, without being wise, I possessed enough of the traits
philosophers cherish to have had a successful philosophical career. Having a
philosophical mind would qualify one as a perfect misfit if there were no such thing as
the discipline of philosophy, and I think that explains why I was considered a terrible
student in my early years. No one knows that one is a philosopher at, say, 16 years of
age, and certainly one’s teachers in high school have no way of knowing it either. The
artist Vitaly Komar explained to me once what he admired in philosophers: they will
claim that two things that appear exactly the same are entirely different, and that two
things apparently entirely different are entirely the same. My success as a philosopher
of art, to take an example, consisted in arguing that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box was a
work of art while its lookalike in the stockroom of the supermarket was a mere real
thing, though the two are to all intents and purposes indistinguishable. I later claimed
that all philosophical problems have this form, as for example two actions, one done
because it is a matter of duty and the other done just because one feels like doing it, can
be outwardly identical, though only the former and never the latter, according to Kant,
has any moral value whatever.
The other thing for which I am grateful to philosophy is that, at least in the world in
which I first sought to make a name for myself, one was required to write clearly, con-
cisely, and logically. Wittgenstein said that whatever can be said can be said clearly, and
that became something of a mantra for my generation. At one time, the British journal
Analysis sponsored regular competitions: some senior philosopher propounded a
problem, which one was required to solve in 600 words or less, the winner receiving as
a prize a year’s subscription to the magazine. Here is an example of the kind of problem,
propounded by J. L. Austin, that engaged Analysis’s subscribers: “What kind of ‘if ’ is the
‘if ’ in ‘I can if I choose?’” (Hint: it cannot be the truth-conditional “if ” of material impli-
cation, as in, “If p, then q.”)
I tried answering all the problems and never won a prize. But the exercise taught me
how to write. The great virtues of clarity, concision, and coherence, insisted upon
throughout the Anglo-American philosophical community, have immunized the pro-
fession against the stylistic barbarity of Continental philosophy, which, taken up as it
has been since the early 1970s by the humanistic disciplines – by literary theory,
anthropology, art history, and many others – has had a disastrous effect, especially on
academic culture, severely limiting the ability of those with advanced education to con-
tribute to the intellectual needs of our society. It is true that analytical philosophers,
reinforced by the demands of their profession to work within their constricting hori-
zons, have not directly served society by applying their tools to the densely knotted prob-
lems of men, to use Dewey’s term for where the energies of philosophy should be
directed. At one point, it became recognized that “clarity is not enough.” It is not
enough. But the fact that it remains a stylistic imperative in most Anglo-American phi-
losophy departments means that these virtues are being kept alive against the time
when the humanities need to recover them.
I have to say that writing art criticism the way I would write a philosophical essay
has brought me a certain following in my second career, that of an art critic, at a time
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Letter to Posterity
when the bulk of contemporary art writing is jargon-ridden and pretentious. I have, in
any case, had the immense privilege of living in two worlds. I love the art world for its
spirit of celebration. But it is delicious to slip back into philosophy, where one is accepted
however outrageous one’s views, and where one’s colleagues can argue interminably
even the smallest of points with no sense of wasting their time.
I early came to the view that the least unit of philosophical discourse is the total
philosophical system. I once read a text in which Wittgenstein was portrayed as making
merry at the expense of those – I suppose he had Bertrand Russell in mind – who believe
that all philosophical questions have to be solved at once. Wittgenstein felt that no
philosophical problem could be solved but only dissolved, since no such problem is real,
philosophy in his view being nonsense through and through. My own view was and is
that all truly philosophical problems are genuine and that they must indeed all be solved
at the same time, since they form an interconnected whole. And since the nature of phi-
losophy is itself a philosophical problem, calling for a philosophical solution, if
Wittgenstein was wrong about philosophy itself, he must be wrong about everything in
philosophy, not counting the poetic obiter dicta that ornament his books. To do philos-
ophy at all means doing all of philosophy at the same time. That means that philoso-
phers cannot be specialists.
Somewhere along the line it dawned on me that the entirety of philosophy is
somehow connected with the concept of representation – that human beings are ens
representans – beings that represent the world; that our individual histories are the his-
tories of our representations, and how they change in the course of our lives; that rep-
resentations form systems that constitute our picture of the world; that human history
is the story of how this system of representations changes over time; that the world and
our system of representations are interdependent in that sometimes we change the
world to fit our representations, and sometimes we change our representations to fit the
world. At some point, I had decided that my task as a philosopher must be to compose a
theory of representations, which would be a philosophy of what it is to be human. It
would be a philosophy of history, of knowledge, of action, of art, and of the mind. It was
an extremely ambitious project, conceived of at a time when such large undertakings
were quite out of fashion in the field of philosophy, in which philosophical reputations
were based on short analytical papers published in professional journals. But I thought
it would be a great intellectual adventure to embark on a total philosophical system and
to carry it out over several volumes.

My inspiration, in a way, was a five-volume work by the great Spanish and American
philosopher, George Santayana, titled The Life of Reason. Santayana belonged to a gen-
eration earlier than mine, one in which to be a philosopher really did mean creating a
system that would house the whole of things. Housing the whole of things is, in a way,
an architectural vision, and while there is something arrogant in believing oneself
capable of constructing such an encompassing edifice of thought, I felt that we all more
or less live in one or another such edifice, made by others and handed down to us. Why
not try to make one more suitable to how one understands the way of things? So I
embarked, rather recklessly, on a five-volume philosophy of representation. I had no
wish to be a disciple of Santayana or of anyone, but a fellow architect of comparable
scope, with admittedly something of the same taste as he for aesthetically self-conscious
prose. If one decides on the life of a writer, one had better take pleasure in words. I saw
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no inconsistency between philosophical truth and literary flair. So though I continue to

identify myself as an analytical philosopher, I am grateful that, despite its virtues as a
discipline, I was able to strike off on an independent path as a system builder, whatever
future generations might think of what I have built.
I have always had an intense interest in the visual arts, my mother having taken me
at an early age to the Detroit Institute of Arts, and in the years of my moony adoles-
cence I knew no greater pleasure than wandering through its then largely empty gal-
leries, hung with images that resembled scenes from my own life not at all. I recall a
Saint Francis by El Greco and a painting of a woman in a satin skirt by Terborch. I
studied painting and thought of becoming an artist. The museum had an unusually
rich collection of German Expressionist painting – Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff,
Pechstein. I was greatly moved by the German Expressionist woodcut, and when I
embarked on a career in New York, where I had gone after the war – I had been a vet-
eran of the North African and Italian campaigns, and made the landing in Italy, though
not in the first wave – I had a certain success as a printmaker. I was also studying for a
doctorate in philosophy at the same time – I had tremendous energy in those years, and
slept very little – and saw no reason why I could not have two careers. At a certain
moment in the early 1960s, it occurred to me that I was finally more interested in
writing philosophy than I was in making art, which had begun to bore me. So I stopped
immediately, which was just as well. The movement I was part of was the New York
School, though I was never an abstractionist, but that movement was coming to an end,
and had I chosen to abandon philosophy instead of art, I would have been in a bad way.
The pop movement greatly interested me, but as a romantic, I would have had no
interest in being a pop artist.
What engaged me in pop was that it showed me how to write philosophically about
art. I had never seen much if any connection between philosophy and the art that had
moved me, but I did begin to see, with pop, the basis for a serious philosophy of art. At
the same time, I found the art of the mid-1960s – pop art and minimalism – fascinating
philosophically. But the figures that engaged me – Andy Warhol preeminently, but also
Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg in the pop movement, and the sculptors whose
work was shown in the important 1966 exhibition “Primary Structures,” at the Jewish
Museum – would have been almost totally unfamiliar to most aestheticians, even the
rare figures among them who knew much about modern art. I wrote my first piece on
the philosophy of art in 1964, at a time when my powers of philosophical invention

were at their peak. I had become very excited about pop art after seeing a painting by
Lichtenstein reproduced in ARTnews, at the time the leading art magazine in America.
I was living in the south of France, writing the Analytical Philosophy of History, and had
driven up to Paris for the Christmas holidays. I was eager to read up on what was hap-
pening in the New York art scene, so I went to the American Library to look at the art
magazines. Lichtenstein’s painting was called The Kiss, and it showed, as if it came from
some comic strip like Steve Canyon, a pilot kissing a girl. I was astonished. I could not
imagine a copy of a comic-strip panel being shown at an actual art gallery like Leo
Castelli. At first I was revolted, as I believed in the highest ideals of painting. But then I
wanted to see the work. My life was essentially changed by that painting, and when I
returned to New York, I sought out the galleries where pop art was on view. In 1964 I
was blown away by Andy Warhol’s shipping cartons, exhibited in great stacks, as if in
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Letter to Posterity
the stockroom of a supermarket. I instantly accepted them as art but then wondered
why, if they were art, the ordinary shipping cartons of the supermarket were not. That,
I realized, had the form of a philosophical problem.
I had the great good luck to be invited to present a symposium paper on aesthetics at
the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association that year, and I decided
to present the new kinds of problems I had encountered in recent art. I called it “The
Art World,” meaning by that the world of art works. My question, as suiting the times,
was political: How does something get enfranchised as an art work? Nineteen sixty-four
was a very political year for American civil rights activists, many of whom went into the
South to register black voters who had been disenfranchised by racial prejudice. To be
an art work meant that an object had all sorts of rights and privileges that ordinary
objects lacked – people respected it, it was valuable, it was protected, it was studied and
contemplated with awe. Brillo Box was enfranchised; the Brillo boxes were not. How did
that happen? It could not be based on anything perceptual, since the two kinds of
objects were perceptually indiscernible. That meant that the differences between them –
and hence between art works and ordinary objects – had to be invisible. So what was it
to see Brillo Box as worthy of its status?
I did not get very far with an answer in “The Art World.” I used a strategy of
differentiation that the state of philosophy at that time favored: I thought the two
objects had disjoint sets of causes. The causes of the ordinary Brillo boxes were prac-
tical: Brillo had to be shipped from factories to warehouses, from warehouses to super-
markets, where it would be unpacked, put on shelves, and sold. That made the logo
important, since cardboard cartons look much alike. It had to be attractive and easily
recognized. Warhol’s Brillo Box did not belong to that causal chain at all. It was the
result of development in the theory of the art work, and of the recent history of art. To
see something as an art work, one had to know this history, have participated in the
kinds of discussions that had been taking place. The status of being an art work was a
product of history and of theory. At most moments in the history of art, something like
Brillo Box, while possible as an object, would not have been possible as art. It became
possible as art only when the art world – the world of art works – was ready to receive it
as one of its own.
In a way, the Brillo Box–Brillo carton problem is like a problem in religion, the
problem, namely, of distinguishing between a god in human form and an ordinary
human being. The evident humanity of Jesus lay in the fact that he bled when circum-
cised, but wherein lay his divinity? That had to be invisible, which is what makes
Christianity so philosophical a religion. I have always been convinced by Hegel’s claim
that philosophy, art, and religion are but different moments of what he termed Absolute
Spirit. The Dantos are Sephardic Jews, who in the case of my family found their way to
the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. But I am in no sense a religious person, though I have
always found philosophical inspiration in the way Christian thinkers wrestled with the
kind of problem I found in the philosophy of art. Most religious people are not philoso-
phers, so differences between religions take on an importance that philosophy would
never permit.
When I came to write the fourth volume of my system – my philosophy of art – I
found a wonderful title for it in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a novel by Muriel Spark. Her
heroine, a sexy teenager who becomes a nun, writes a famous book, The Transfiguration
401
Arthur C. Danto
of the Commonplace. She now wants a life of quiet meditation, but the world is interested
in her book, and she is beset by interviewers and the like. I decided to appropriate that
title. My previous books were Analytical Philosophy of History, Analytical Philosophy of
Knowledge, Analytical Philosophy of Action. I did not want this one to be called Analytical
Philosophy of Art. I love the world of commonplace life. And I thought pop had transfig-
ured the everyday world into works of art. I sought a definition of art that would expli-
cate the concept of transfiguration. In candor, I really aspired to write a famous book,
like that of Spark’s nun – Sister Helena of the Transfiguration. Lately, I have come to
sympathize with her predicament. The book has been widely translated and commented
on. I have no wish for a life of quiet devotion, but I would not mind the peace. You can’t
have everything!
What I do know in retrospect is that without recognizing it at the time, I was part of
a movement – the movement that was the 1960s – that consisted in overcoming bound-
aries of every sort, in my case the boundary between art and everyday life. Though I
was every bit an academic philosopher, I must somehow have sensed that we were
living in an age of immense conceptual upheaval. I am very grateful that I was not a
conservative by temperament, and that I did not resist the revolution that was happen-
ing in art, though it had little to do with the art that made me want to be an artist in the
first place. Nineteen sixty-four, as I mentioned, was the “Freedom Summer,” in which
the boundary between blacks and whites began to be erased. In 1968, the antiwar
movement exploded in the universities. It was also then that the modern feminist
movement was launched, inspired by Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, but
even more by the recognition that discrimination against women was arbitrary. In
1969 came the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, and the beginning of gay
liberation. What began as an overcoming of boundaries in the art world culminated in
the overcoming of boundaries in political life everywhere. I take great pride that these
movements were detonated in America, and especially in New York, and I am ashamed
by the conservative reaction in America that has taken place in the past decades. I am
an advocate of openness, in art, in politics, in sex, in life.
I was born on January 1, 1924, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My birthday perhaps
explains my indefensible optimism. Each year opens on a new page, for me as well as for
the world. I have always enjoyed the age I was, excepting my adolescence, when the fact
that I was a born philosopher muddled my life without my knowing why. I enjoy being
88, despite not having achieved wisdom. Proust writes of les chagrins qu’ont les vierges et
les paresseux (“the vexations to which virgins and the indolent are subject”). I have nei-
ther kind of regret. My philosophical system is unfinished, but not because I was lazy. I
was, rather, distracted by philosophical opportunities. I did lay the whole system out in
a 1989 book, Connections to the World, where the last chapter points beyond philosophy,
where I have spent a lot of time writing about the art that interests me, having had the
luck to have been appointed art critic for the left-liberal magazine The Nation. That has
helped me play a role in the life of my times.
I have always greatly preferred the company of women to that of men, and I have no
interest in the kinds of things men are supposed to cherish – sports, speed, combat, and
the like. I have been, by preference, serially monogamous. Marriage, or marriage-like
relationships – sharing a life – is my ideal state of being. I can understand how gays
would covet such a life, and I can see no basis for denying them the opportunity of living
402
Letter to Posterity
the kind of life in which I have found such intense satisfaction. That is one of the bene-
fits of not being religious. The other is not believing in an afterlife. Though I grieved
deeply when my first wife died, I had no fears for her, feeling that the end really is the
end. I hate the idea of dying, since I relish life, as long as I can actually live it. But death
is a gift of the gods, a way of escaping life when it is really intolerable. Though I have
built a philosophical system, it does not contain a philosophy of life. If I have a philos-
ophy of life, it is to keep living until I drop.
For what it is worth, I bear a strong likeness to Socrates, that legendarily ugly man.
Friends are always sending postcards of busts of Socrates, struck by our resemblance.
An artist, whose project is painting portraits of art-world figures as famous works of
art, has painted a portrait of me as a bust of Socrates. Here is the inscription: ΑΡΘΟΥΡΟΣ
ΔΑΝΤΟ ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΟΣ ΔΗΜΟΤΗΣ ΝΕΑΣ ΥΟΡΚΗΣ. “Arthur Danto, Philosopher,
Citizen of New York.”
403
Index
Abbey, Ruth, 46 Bambrough, Renford, 200, 205n1

Adams, Ansel, 229 Banai, Nuit, 99
Adorno, Theodor W., 2, 3, 28, 124, 166, 167, Banaji, Mahzarin R., 99
187, 213, 266, 315n2, 337, 339, 340, Banes, Sally, 383, 386
342, 343 Banksy, 355, 361, 362n1
Alberro, Alexander, 358 Barenboim, Daniel, 186
Albers, Josef, 68 Barr, Alfred, 323
Allais, Alphonse, 113 Barthes, Roland, 185, 323
Alloway, Lawrence, 317–324 (passim) Bartlett, Jennifer, 348
Alsop, Joseph, 118 Bartscherer, Joseph, 366
Alteveer, Ian, 331, 335n7, 335n10 Battock, Gregory, 387n3
Andersen, Hans Christian, 192 Baudelaire, Charles, 11, 224, 391
Andina, Tiziana, 246n3 Baumgarten, Alexander
Anguissola, Sofonisba, 353 Gottlieb, 164
Ankersmit, Frank, 116, 242 Bazin, André, 217, 219
Anscombe, G.E.M., 154, 160n10, 160n14, Beardsley, Monroe C., 49n4, 280n2
205n1, 238, 319 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 165, 342
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 221 Bell, Clive, 290n6
Aquinas, Thomas, 235, 236, 237, 239n2 Bellelli, Count Gennaro, 201
Arakawa, Shusaku, 115 Belting, Hans, 118
Argüello Manresa, Gemma, 350 Ben Hacem Mohammed Lahbib, 304
Aristarchus, 45 Benjamin, Walter, 94, 124, 130, 166
Aristophanes, 207 Berengar of Tours, 235
Aristotle, 55, 197, 199, 212, 336, 363 Berlin, Isaiah, 224
Ashbery, John, 207 Berlioz, Hector, 383, 385
Auden, W.H., 207 Bernstein, Richard J., 66n2
Augustine, Saint, 159, 160n15, 196, 212, Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 288
234, 239n2 Bidlo, Mike, 233, 245, 246
Austin, J.L., 398 Bilgrami, Akeel, 76, 78–81 (passim)
Avedon, Richard, 224–228 (passim), 231 Blanchett, Cate, 217
Bloom, Harold, 8
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 129 Boardman, Frank, 252–255 (passim)
Badiou, Alain, 363 Boehm, Gottfried, 94
404
Index
Bois, Yve-Alain, 185, 188n15 Churchland, Paul M., 87

Borges, Jorge Luis, 191–192, 197n9, Clark, T.J., 177
197n10, 207 Claudius, King, 195
Borradori, Giovanna, 59, 66n3 Cohen, Ted, 211
Borromini, Francesco, 17 Coleman, James, 218
Botstein, Daniel, 86–87 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 207
Bourdieu, Pierre, 51–52 Collier, Gordon, 197n13
Boxer, Sarah, 347 Conway, Dan, 49n1
Boyer, Pascal, 108 Cooper, Sterling, 319
Brandom, Robert, 65 Copernicus, 45
Brecht, George, 312 Corner, Philip, 385, 387n4
Brent, John, 56 Cosgrove, Ken, 318, 319
Breughel, Pieter, 134 Costello, Diarmuid, 356
Brooks, David, 301 Crary, Alice, 344n2
Brown, Trisha, 387n4 Cunningham, Merce, 12, 384, 386
Bruner, Jerome S., 94 Curci, Amelita Galli, 3
Brutus, 133 [pseudonym]
Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 185, 188n15 Daguerre, Louis, 216
Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, 26, 38 Danto, Elizabeth, 16
Bui, Phong, 332 Darger, Henry, 104, 118
Bukhari, Kyle, 382 Darling, Candy, 224–228 (passim)
Bullough, Edward, 257, 260 Darwin, Charles, 89, 149
Burke, Edmund, 241 David, J.L., 360, 362
Burt, Ramsay, 384 Davidson, Donald, 63, 152, 153, 159
Davies, Stephen, 108, 276, 279
Cage, John, 12, 164, 309–315 (passim) Davis, Whitney, 98, 100n2, 100n3, 114, 117
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 134, De Duve, Thierry, 57n1
202, 203, 376 De Kooning, Willem, 23, 120n7, 134
Cardinal, Roger, 118 Defoe, Daniel, 207
Carrier, David, 379 Degas, Edgar, 134, 201, 224
Carroll, Noël, 94, 208, 251, 253, 255n6, Democritus, 114
255n8, 280n1, 282, 287, 318, 385 Derrida, Jacques, 26, 185, 323, 363, 371
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 223, 230, 376 Descartes, René, 34, 60, 63, 64, 77, 79, 212,
Casey, Ed, 49n1 233, 240
Cassirer, Ernst, 138, 139, 141n3 Dewey, John, 51, 53, 54, 56, 59–67, 66n1,
Castiglione, Giuseppe, 96 66n4, 164, 363, 398

Catterson, Pat, 387 Dickens, Charles, 207
Cavell, Stanley, 1, 165, 166, 214, 214n5, Dickie, George, 118, 163, 168n1, 236, 238,
217, 301, 337, 338, 340–341 239n3, 273–280, 318, 321
Celmins, Vija, 327–334, 334n1, 335n7 Diderot, Denis, 28
Cervantes, Miguel de, 191, 207, 244, 245 Dillmann, E., 136, 141n3
Cézanne, Paul, 6, 26, 27, 91, 92, 202, 203, Dine, Jim, 206n3, 323
278, 320, 333 Dionysius, 116, 135
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste Siméon, 28, 29, 31n2 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 133
Chiang Yee, 96 Drury, Maurice, 233
Chicago, Judy, 345, 351–352 Duarte, Jose Luis Verdejo, 304
Childs, Lucinda, 387n4 Dubuffet, Jean, 104, 118
Ch’ing Yuan, 311 Duchamp, Marcel, 6, 112, 164, 237, 249,
Christo, 334, 367, 369, 370, 371 268, 270, 279, 309, 312, 323, 331–334
Chuang-Tze, 61 (passim), 335n14, 337, 339, 340, 350,
Church, F.E., 329 355, 386, 390–391
405
Index
Duhem, Pierre, 94 Fowler, Harold North, 198n15

Dummett, Michael, 27, 188n10 Frank, Elizabeth, 347, 348
Duncan, Isadora, 385 Frankenthaler, Helen, 350
Dunn, Robert, 381 Franklin, Benjamin, 28
Dunne, Dominick, 227 Frege, Gottleb, 8, 27, 37, 136
Dutton, Denis, 107–108, 109, 110, 114 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 395
Dylan, Bob, 394 Fried, Michael, 165
Friedan, Betty, 351, 402
Eakins, Thomas, 224 Friedrich, Caspar David, 329
Eastman, George, 229 Frisch, Karl von, 114
Eckman, June, 387n4 Fry, Roger, 6, 109, 317
Eco, Umberto, 244, 245, 246n2 Fukuyama, Francis, 144, 150, 163
Edwards, Paul, 42
Eggleston, William, 36, 226 Gallagher, Patrick, 383, 387
Eisenman, Peter, 378 Gauguin, Paul, 350
El Greco, 400 Gell, Alfred, 108, 109, 110
Eliot, George, 207, 211 Geulen, Eva, 124
Eliot, T.S., 207 Giacometti, Alberto, 104, 250, 253
Ellison, Ralph, 382 Gibbs, Raymond W., 246n1
Embree, Ainslee, 304 Gilmore, Jonathan, 116, 159n1, 186,
Emerson, Ruth, 387n4 358, 359
Ernst, Max, 105 Gins, Madeline S., 115
Erro, Enrique, 304 Giorgione (Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco),
Escher, M.C., 87 68
Esolen, Anthony M., 198n14 Giotto di Bondone, 182
Evans, Gareth, 36 Glennerster, Andrew, 100n1
Goehr, Lydia, 3, 42, 49n1, 97, 115, 144,
Fagot, Joel, 100n2 159n1, 186, 188n17, 271, 276, 314,
Farrand, Max, 28 315n2, 387
Faulkner, William Cuthbert, 207 Goldblatt, David, 378–379
Ferguson, Russell, 334n2 Gombrich, Ernst Hans, 96, 103, 104, 113,
Fesmire, Steven C., 66n1 116, 134, 135, 147, 184, 188n10,
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 220, 271 188n11, 242
Fine, Jonathan, 49n1 Goodman, Cecile C., 94
Fink, Gereon R., 100n1 Goodman, Nelson, 1, 10, 95, 113, 118, 135,
Finley, Karen, 292, 294
217, 241
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 207 Goossen, E.C., 324
Flaherty, Robert J., 221 Grabes, Herbert, 197n13
Flaubert, Gustave, 27, 207 Graham, Martha, 384
Fleming, Steven, 373, 374, 377, 378 Greenberg, Clement, 19, 164, 165, 166,
Fletcher, John, 196 169n5, 171, 173, 180–184 (passim),
Fliess, Wilhelm, 9 188n3, 273, 277, 317, 323, 347
Fontana, Lucio, 99 Greene, Sharon L., 120n1
Fodor, Jerry, 89, 93, 96 Greimas, A.-J., 181
Ford, Anton, 159n1, 160n5 Gross, Sally, 387n4
Forest, Geneveva, 304 Groys, Boris, 268
Forster, Michael, 290n2 Grundberg, Andy, 225
Forsythe, William, 387n5 Grünewald, Matthias, 36
Foster, Hal, 185, 188n15 Gsell, Paul, 224
Foucault, Michel, 185 Guggenheim, Wright, 373
406
Index
Guillaume, Eugène, 37 Hutson, Lorna, 198n16

Guilleminot, Marie-Ange, 352 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 379
Guston, Philip, 23
Irwin, Robert, 368, 369, 370, 372
Habermas, Jürgen, 185
Hacker, P.M.S., 205n1 Jacobus-Parker, Frances, 335n4
Halprin, Anna, 381 Jaeger, Werner, 116, 122
Hansell, Michael H., 114 Jakobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 142n6
Hanslick, Eduard, 314, 315 James, Henry, 169n6, 199–206, 207
Hanson, N.R., 95 James, William, 51, 56, 59, 200, 201
Harrison, Charles, 95 Jameson, Fredric, 168, 169n7, 185
Hart, Frederick, 365 Janis, Sidney, 325
Harvey, James, 233, 245, 391 Janson, Horst Waldemar, 17
Hay, Deborah, 387n4 Jeanne-Claude, Denat de Guillebon, 334,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1, 9, 11, 23, 367, 370
29, 30, 31, 66, 107, 115, 116, 124–130 Johns, Jasper, 311, 320, 323, 386
(passim), 143, 164, 170, 174, 176–177, Johnson, Mark, 246n1
182, 186, 196, 198n20, 211, 212, 233, Johnston, Colin, 159n1
258–262 (passim), 346, 356, 363, 370, Johnston, Jill, 386
372, 374, 382, 401 Jones, Sam, 362n1
Heidegger, Martin, 39, 57, 220, 234, Jowitt, Deborah, 386
307, 366 Joyce, James, 207
Heimsoeth, Heinz, 141n3
Heizer, Michael, 334 Kafka, Franz, 200, 207
Hemingway, Ernest, 26, 27, 31, 202, 207 Kagan, Robert, 150
Hennessey, Jonathan, 347 Kahn, Louis, 373, 374, 376–377, 378, 379
Hesse, Eva, 106, 345, 350, 353 Kahn, Nathaniel, 377
Hickey, Dave, 355, 357 Kahn, Victoria, 197n5
Higgins, Kathleen Mary, 361 Kalina, Richard, 318
Hijuelgo, Oscar, 207 Kandinsky, Wassily, 104
Hilmer, Brigitte, 118, 119, 120n6, 261 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 115, 120n2, 130, 132,
Hinshelwood, Alec, 159n1 133, 137, 150, 164, 166, 167, 169n3,
Hirst, Damien, 339, 347 212, 219, 226, 232n2, 234, 245, 260,
Hitchcock, Alfred, 220 306, 331, 371
Hitler, Adolf, 73 Kantor, Jordan, 335n17
Katz, Alex, 322
Hoffbauer, Patricia, 387

Hoffmann, Hans, 348 Kautzsch, Simon, 192
Holl, Steven, 373, 376, 378, 379 Keats, John, 207
Homer, 207 Kelly, Michael, 113, 261
Honigmann, Ernst Anselm Joachim, 198n17 Kennedy, Jackie, 392
Hornsby, Jennifer, 159n1, 160n4 Kennick, William, 263, 276, 281, 284–285,
Horowitz, Jonathan, 319 290n6
Horowitz, Gregg, 344n2 Kierkegaard, Søren, 38, 41, 218
Hughes, Allen, 383, 386 King, Martin Luther, 387
Hugo of St. Victor, 235 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig, 400
Huhn, Tom, 344n2 Kissinger, Henry, 304
Hujar, Peter, 225, 226, 231 Kitaj, R.B., 29
Hume, David, 206n2 Klee, Paul, 104
Hurley, Andrew, 197n9 Klein, Yves, 99
Hurley, S.L., 160n8 Köhler, Paul, 136, 141n3
407
Index
Komar, Vitaly, 21, 398 Malcolm X, 353

Korsmeyer, Carolyn, 359, 361 Malevich, Kazimir, 318
Kortum, Richard D., 27 Malick, Terrence, 221
Kracauer, Siegfried, 217 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 207
Krasner, Lee, 206n3, 348 Mandel, David, 103
Krauss, Rosalind, 180–186 (passim), 188n4, Mandelbaum, Maurice, 276, 277, 282
188n8, 188n9, 188n15 Manet, Edouard, 148, 337
Kreimer, Seth, 294 Manin, Bernard, 133
Kripke, Saul, 2 Mann, Thomas, 207
Kristeller, Paul Oscar, 371 Mantegna, Andrea, 244, 245
Kubrick, Stanley, 221 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 223, 227, 228, 231,
Kuhn, Thomas, 95 292–299 (passim)
Kuhns, Richard, 4 Margolis, Joseph, 99
Kurdi, Aylan, 361 Marx, Karl, 143, 144, 150
Maslen, Richard W., 197n6
Lakoff, George, 246n1 Matisse, Henri, 200, 353
Lamarque, Peter, 99 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 164
Laurent, Olivier, 362n2 Matthew, Saint, 234, 238
Lavin, Douglas, 160n13 Maugham, William Somerset, 207
Lawrence, D.H., 207 Mead, George Herbert, 201
Lee, Robert E., 364 Melamid, Alex, 21
Leibniz, Gottfried, 5, 23, 132, 136–141 Menard, Pierre, 191, 244
(passim) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 34, 39, 40,
Leonardo da Vinci, 134 41, 376
Levi, Isaac, 76, 79–81 (passim) Merz, Mario, 375
Levin, Daniel T., 99 Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni,
Levine, Michael, 379 120n7
Levinson, Jerrold, 119, 120n8, 251–252, Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 376
253, 255n11, 255n12 Milton, John, 194
Lewis, C.I., 95 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 221
LeWitt, Sol, 290n8 Modigliani, Amedeo, 109
Lichtenstein, Roy, 26, 27, 31, 120n7, 190, Moncrieff, C.K. Scott, 31
197n2, 278, 320, 323, 400 Monet, Claude, 86, 249
Limon, José, 384 Monk, Ray, 233
Lin, Maya, 298, 361, 364, 372 Monroe, Marilyn, 392–393
Lindon, Jerome, 52 Moore, George Edward, 28, 36, 206n2

Locke, John, 212 Morgenbesser, Sidney, 8, 301
Lopes, Dominic, 106 Morris, Ivan, 304, 305
Loran, Erle, 26, 278 Morris, Robert, 181, 382, 385
Louis, Morris, 148, 341, 342 Moss, Ann, 197n4
Lowie, Robert, 105 Moten, Fred, 382
Luther, Martin, 235, 237 Motherwell, Robert, 341, 358, 361
Lyotard, Jean-François, 163 Moyn, Samuel, 302–303
Muybridge, Eadweard, 224
McDowell, John, 160n7
McEvilley, Thomas, 105, 106 Nagel, Thomas, 74, 75n8
Maciunas, George, 312, 315 Nathan, Jeremy, 86, 87
McLeod, Mary, 379 Nehamas, Alexander, 358, 359, 361
Madison, James, 28 Neuhaus, Max, 18–19, 370
Mahnke, Dietrich, 136 Newman, Barnett, 118, 134, 177, 341
408
Index
Niépce, Nicéphore, 216 Quine, W. V., 28, 31, 206n2, 212

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 6, 42–49 (passim), 63,
95, 116, 124, 130, 135, 139, 164, 178, Rachels, James, 71, 75n3
241, 302, 336, 342, 393, 397 Racine, Jean, 207
Nochlin, Linda, 349 Rainer, Yvonne, 381–388
Noland, Kenneth, 324 Randall, John Herman, 363
Noverre, Jean-George, 385 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), 120n7,
Nussbaum, Martha C., 27 134
Rauschenberg, Robert, 30, 134, 309, 313,
Obrist, Hans Ulrich, 23 320, 321, 323, 382, 385
O’Connor, D.J., 42 Read, Herbert, 317
Ofili, Chris, 294 Rebay, Hilla, 375
Oldenburg, Claes, 292, 382, 400 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 134,
Orozco, Gabriel, 319 202, 203
Orton, Fred, 95 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 207
Ozick, Cynthia, 207 Rimbaud, Jean-Nicolas-Arthur, 207
Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 55
Pakes, Anna, 387 Rodin, Auguste, 180, 224, 225
Pakiry, Reggie, 304 Rogers, Brian J., 100n1
Panofsky, Erwin, 104, 268 Rollins, Mark, 98
Pater, Walter, 314, 315 Romano, Sal, 318
Paxton, Steve, 384, 387n1 Rorty, Richard, 51, 52, 59, 65, 163
Pechstein, Hermann Max, 400 Rosenberg, Harold, 173, 347
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 56, 57 Rosenberger, Christina Bryan, 334n1
Perón, Maria Estela Martínez de, 304 Rosenquist, James, 321, 322, 323
Picasso, Pablo, 30, 90, 104, 106, 109, 182, Rothko, Mark, 29–30, 134, 318
249, 320, 353, 395 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 367
Piper, Adrian, 352 Royce, Josiah, 201
Pippin, Robert B., 124 Rubens, Peter Paul, 321
Pitcher, John, 197n11 Rubin, William, 104–105, 106, 119
Plato, 53, 54, 128, 191, 198n15, Ruskin, John, 203, 204
212, 241, 257, 278, 287, 314, 321, Russell, Bertrand, 206n2, 399
336, 340
Plimpton, George, 26 Saarinen, Eero, 367
Plotinus, 220 Salgado, Sebastião, 361
Pochoda, Elizabeth, 170 Salle, David, 10, 11
Poe, Edgar Allan, 207 Santayana, George, 257, 399

Pollock, Jackson, 31, 134, 148, 181, 182, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1, 33–41 (passim)
341, 348 Sartwell, Christopher, 30
Pope, Alexander, 369 Sawin, David, 200–201
Popper, Karl, 188n11 Schapiro, Meyer, 120n7
Porter, James L., 116 Schapiro, Miriam, 350
Post, Robert, 294 Schjeldahl, Peter, 193
Poussin, Nicolas, 182, 183, 185, 283 Schlemmer, Oskar, 385
Povinelli, Daniel J., 120n1 Schmalenbach, Eugen, 141n3
Premack, David, 120n3 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl, 400
Price, Ken, 330, 335n9 Schneeman, Carolee, 350
Proust, Marcel, 27, 28, 31, 207, 402 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 35, 95, 164
Puccini, Giacomo, 4 Schulte, Joachim, 205n1
Pylyshyn, Zenon, 93 Schumacher, Patrik, 379
409
Index
Schwabsky, Barry, 188n18 Tarr, George Herrmann, 221

Schwarz, Arturo, 268 Tasso, Torquato, 194, 198n14
Scothorn, Carol, 387n4 Taylor, Neil, 197n1
Scott, A.O., 171 Taylor, William M., 379
Scotus, John Duns, 212 Terrace, Herbert L., 120n1
Scully, Sean, 186 Teshigaharu, Hiroshi, 221
Sedgwick, Edie, 394 Teufel, Christoph, 93
Seel, Martin, 262 Tharp, Twyla, 388n6
Sellars, Wilfrid, 156, 160n9 Thompson, Ann, 197n1
Selz, Peter, 323 Thompson, Michael, 154, 160n13
Semper, Gottfried, 114 Tolstoy, Leo, 338, 365
Serra, Richard, 292–298 (passim), 366, 367, Tompkins, Calvin, 339
372, 376 Trockel, Rosemarie, 350
Serrano, Andres, 22, 292, 294, 299 Trump, Donald, 230, 231, 393
Serres, Michel, 314 Tulving, Endel, 91
Shakespeare, William, 130, 190–198 Turner, Joseph Mallord William, 329
(passim), 207, 208, 370 Turrell, James, 370
Shepherd, Geoffrey, 197n6
Sherman, Cindy, 223, 229–230, 231, 308, Udell, Monique A. R., 120n1
345, 348
Shiner, Larry, 108 Van Gogh, Vincent, 350
Shusterman, Richard, 257 Van Nieuwenhove, Rik, 235
Sidney, Sir Philip, 191, 197n6 Vasari, Giorgio, 103, 134
Sielmann, Heinz, 114, 115 Vaughan, William J., 120n1
Sifaneck, Stephen, 24n1 Velásquez, Diego, 30, 129
Smith, David, 180, 181, 183, 185, 339 Vendler, Zeno, 157
Smithson, Robert, 181, 184, 185, 334, Vercellone, Federico, 124
370–371, 372 Vilar, Gerard, 124
Snell, Bruno, 116 Vogel, Susan, 106, 107, 108, 109
Socrates, 23, 194, 198n15, 397, 403 Vonnegut, Kurt, 207
Solanas, Valerie, 393
Sonnenberg, Ben, 306, 307 Wagner, Richard, 6
Sontag, Susan, 392 Walton, Kendall, 99
Soucek, Brian, 176 Ward, Eleanor, 390
Spark, Muriel, 12, 207, 234, 401 Warhol, Andy, 5, 6, 11, 20, 34, 52, 55, 85,
86, 88, 107, 108, 112, 126, 147, 148,
Sproul, Barbara, 305

Steen, Jan, 202, 203 149, 162–168 (passim), 175, 180, 183,
Stella, Frank, 337, 349 185, 186, 188n10, 190, 218, 224, 225,
Sterling, Roger, 323 228, 233–239 (passim), 245, 249, 258,
Stevens, Wallace, 395 261, 268, 272, 284, 285, 309, 310,
Stich, Stephen, 87 312, 320, 322, 323, 329, 333, 334,
Stolnitz, Jerome, 257 337, 347, 369, 374, 389–396, 398,
Suarez, Francesco, 137 400, 401
Suzuki, Shinichi, 310, 314, 315 Wartofsky, Marx, 94
Swift, Jonathan, 207 Washington, George, 28, 364, 391
Szarkowski, John, 224 Watteau, Antoine, 269
Weidner, Ralph, 100n1
Talbot, Henry Fox, 216, 225 Weitz, Morris, 263, 266, 276, 281,
Taniguchi, Yoshio, 374 283, 284
Tarkovsky, Andrei, 221 Welty, Eudora, 226
410
Index
Westman Danto, Barbara, 14, 24, 263, 267, Wölfflin, Heinrich, 94, 174
345–348 (passim) Wollheim, Richard, 1, 6, 10, 12, 68,
Weston, Edward, 229 69, 71, 72–75, 75n4, 99, 113,
White, Hayden V., 145 134, 279
Wilde, Oscar, 145 Woolf, Virginia, 207
Wilke, Hannah, 350 Worden, John, 387n4
Wimsatt, William K., 49n4 Wordsworth, William, 207
Windsor, Jackie, 106 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 375
Winogrand, Garry, 227, 230, 231 Wynne, Sharon L., 120n1
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 28, 35, 94, 95,
160n10, 160n11, 160n16, 184, 201, Yeats (William Butler), 207
204, 205, 205n1, 206n2, 212, 233,
241, 263, 265, 276, 281–291, 376, Ziff, Paul, 276, 281, 283, 285, 290n10
381, 398, 399 Zwingli, Ulrich, 235, 237
Wittkower, Rudolf, 17, 373, 374, 376, 377,
378, 397
411

Lydia Goehr (Editor), Jonathan Gilmore (Editor) - A Companion To Arthur C. Danto-Wiley-Blackwell (2022)

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29. A Companion to Heidegger 57. A Companion to David Lewis

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gilmore, Jonathan, editor. | Goehr, Lydia, editor.

Cover image: © Photograph by D. James Dee

Introduction: Five Pieces for Arthur Danto (1924–2013) In memoriam 1

3 Writing with Style 26

4 Sartre, Transparency, and Style 33

5 Nietzsche and Historical Understanding 42

6 Pragmatism between Art and Life 51

7 Danto on Dewey (and Dewey on Danto) 59

8 Thought Experiments: Art and Ethics 68

9 A Normative Perspective on Basic Actions 76

10 Cognitive Science and Art Criticism 85

12 The Anthropology of Art 103

13 The Birth of Art 112

14 The End of Art 124

15 Representation, Truth, and Historical Reality 132

16 History and Retrospection 143

17 Action in the Shadow of Time 152

18 The Sixties 162

19 Criticism and the Pale of History 170

20 Postmodernism and Its Discontents 180

21 Shakespeare and the Repetition of the Commonplace 190

22 Engaging Henry James: The Metaphorical Perspective 199

23 Literature, Philosophy, Persona, Politics 207

24 Moving Pictures 216

25 Photography and Danto’s Craft of the Mind 223

27 Embodiment and Medium 240

28 The Style Matrix 248

31 Danto and Dickie: Artworld and Institution 273

32 Danto and Wittgenstein: History and Essence 281

33 Censorship and Subsidy 292

34 Amnesty International and Human Rights 301

35 Random Noise, Radical Silence 309

36 Mad Men and Pop Art 317

37 Vija Celmins: Nature at Art’s End 326

38 The Meaning of Ugliness, The Authority of Beauty 336

39 Feminist Criticism: On Disturbatory Art and Beauty 345

40 Beauty and Politics 355

41 Public Art: Monuments, Memorials, and Earthworks 363

43 Aliveness and Aboutness: Yvonne Rainer’s Dance Indiscernibles 381

44 Arthur and Andy 389

45 Letter to Posterity 397

Tiziana Andina is Professor of Philosophy at University of Turin, and author of Arthur

volumes of essays, On Taste and On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges.

Berlin until he retired in 2017.

Life with Art

some of the restrictions of a philosophy to which, however, he remained lifelong

In Memoriam, Arthur Danto

to twist the words of Warhol, is not having anything to think about.

Figure 2 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

Remembering Arthur Danto

faintly Kantian taxonomy appealed to him as a matter of philosophical historiography,

Figure 3 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

Working with Arthur C. Danto

recently published book, What Art Is.

Figure 4 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

Figure 5 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

among the books and manuscripts was invariably a sketchbook, or a portfolio of

commonplace actually happened – as a product of the daily functioning of real-world

3 Today’s Art World

Introduction: Five Pieces for Arthur Danto (1924–2013) In memoriam 1

3 Writing with Style 26

4 Sartre, Transparency, and Style 33

5 Nietzsche and Historical Understanding 42

6 Pragmatism between Art and Life 51

7 Danto on Dewey (and Dewey on Danto) 59

8 Thought Experiments: Art and Ethics 68

9 A Normative Perspective on Basic Actions 76

10 Cognitive Science and Art Criticism 85

12 The Anthropology of Art 103

13 The Birth of Art 112

14 The End of Art 124

15 Representation, Truth, and Historical Reality 132

16 History and Retrospection 143

17 Action in the Shadow of Time 152

18 The Sixties 162

19 Criticism and the Pale of History 170

20 Postmodernism and Its Discontents 180

21 Shakespeare and the Repetition of the Commonplace 190

22 Engaging Henry James: The Metaphorical Perspective 199

23 Literature, Philosophy, Persona, Politics 207

24 Moving Pictures 216

25 Photography and Danto’s Craft of the Mind 223

27 Embodiment and Medium 240

28 The Style Matrix 248

31 Danto and Dickie: Artworld and Institution 273

32 Danto and Wittgenstein: History and Essence 281

33 Censorship and Subsidy 292

34 Amnesty International and Human Rights 301

35 Random Noise, Radical Silence 309

36 Mad Men and Pop Art 317

37 Vija Celmins: Nature at Art’s End 326

38 The Meaning of Ugliness, The Authority of Beauty 336

39 Feminist Criticism: On Disturbatory Art and Beauty 345

40 Beauty and Politics 355

41 Public Art: Monuments, Memorials, and Earthworks 363

43 Aliveness and Aboutness: Yvonne Rainer’s Dance Indiscernibles 381

44 Arthur and Andy 389

45 Letter to Posterity 397