DOCSLIB.ORG

Danto, Arthur C. What Art Is. Yale University Press, 2013, Xii 192 Pp., 24.00 Cloth, 15.00 Paper

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Danto, Arthur C. What Art Is. Yale University Press, 2013, Xii 192 Pp., 24.00 Cloth, 15.00 Paper Book Reviews Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/72/2/201/5980498 by guest on 27 September 2021 danto, arthur c. What Art Is. Yale University Press, by, say, gender, class, ethnicity, or race). This univer- 2013, xii + 192 pp., $24.00 cloth, $15.00 paper. sal is “meaning,” the first criterion of Danto’s well- known definition of art as embodied meaning. Em- The significance of Arthur C. Danto’s What Art Is for bodiment, the second criterion, is an artifact of the the philosophy of art is visible in the title. After ad- artistic means that make the meaning internal to (and dressing the “what is art?” question for roughly fifty constitutive of) the work of art (that is, the work and years, starting with “The Artworld” essay (Journal of its meaning share certain properties). The addition of Philosophy 61 [1964]: 571–584), he has now removed the third criterion, wakeful dreams (first introduced the question mark. As he was eighty-nine years old in this book), seems problematic when we are try- when this book was published, the tone is appropri- ing to make sense of the “beyond.” Although it may ately confident and conclusive, though also as poetic be universal that all humans dream, their individual and elusive as earlier works. We should be grateful dreams, typically inscrutable even to them, are hardly he has written such a book, even if in being grateful the model of something universally communicable. we also recognize it is his last. Yet this is precisely what Danto has in mind by wake- Early in Chapter 1, “Wakeful Dreams,” Danto ful dreams: a wakeful dream is universally communi- quotes from the opening stanza of Wallace Stevens’s cable through art, while its sleepy counterpart is not. poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” Several lis- Dreams can be illusory, of course, which Plato argued teners say that an artist playing a blue guitar when the was art’s ontological flaw, making it twice removed “day was green” cannot show “things as they are,” to from truth and confined to the world of mere ap- which the guitarist replies that “things as they are” pearance. So how can a comparison of art to dreams are “changed upon the blue guitar” (p. 10). Surpris- help Danto defend art, against Plato, as more than ingly, the listeners do not question whether the blue mere appearance? If being dreamlike is now a cri- guitar could or should change anything. They instead terion of art, then being dreamlike is part of what ask the guitarist to play a tune that, being “beyond us, enables art to play “of things as they are” by giving yet ourselves,” is “of things exactly as they are.” Their form and embodiment to universally communicable shift in understanding about the blue guitar reflects, meanings that may first appear as wakeful dreams. in a nutshell, the counterintuitive transformation of On this reading of Danto’s new criterion of art, the philosophy of art that has taken place over the dreams are the “creative principle” giving the blue course of its long and varied history. It is counter- guitar its power to create meanings “beyond us, yet intuitive because we typically expect the absence of ourselves” (p. 15). subjectivity, not its symbolic presence in the form of The metaphor of the blue guitar appears in vari- a blue guitar, to give us access to “things as they are.” ous guises in each chapter of What Art Is. Chapter For Danto, one of the tasks of the philosophy of art 2, “Restoration and Meaning,” concerns the restora- is to explain this transformation and, in his case at tion of Michelangelo’s paintings on the ceiling of the least, to embrace it. Sistine Chapel (in the 1990s), specifically the prob- Stevens’s poem suggests agency and intention on lem that we need assurances that the cleaning would thepartoftheguitarist.Yetitalsoincludesatrans- never entail a loss of meaning. This problem is not a subjective dimension, because the tune played on the matter of taste, Danto insists, as it is not a matter of blue guitar is “beyond us, yet ourselves.” What is be- whether the cleaning would render Michelangelo’s yond us, yet still human and “of things as they are”? paintings more or less beautiful. For meaning is as The answer, for Danto, has to be something univer- distinct from taste and beauty as it is from dirt. To ap- sal, something human but not tied to the identity of prehend meaning, we have to turn away from what we only particular individuals or groups (distinguished see, whether before or after the cleaning, and focus The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 72:2 Spring 2014 C 2014 The American Society for Aesthetics 202 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism on what the paintings mean. Yet, by definition, this to be understood as a blue guitar that changes things meaning is embodied in the paintings. So in looking as they are seen (for example, by creating stills, us- for embodied meaning, where are we to look, hoping ing telescopic lenses) in order to show them as they to find something other than what we see? Danto pro- really are. Hence, while photography seemed to real- poses that we shift our focus to the narrative structure ize art’s essence as imitation, it actually changed our of the paintings, rendered all the more intelligible understanding of art, cunningly revealing its essence once they have been cleaned. We also have to shift as embodied meaning plus wakeful dreams (which our attention from seeing to creating, which brings change Danto clarifies by revisiting his favorite ex- us back to the blue guitar, as it is the artist’s tool for ample, Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes). creating a narrative structure that, mediated by sen- In Chapter 5, “Kant and the Work of Art,” Danto, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/72/2/201/5980498 by guest on 27 September 2021 suous appearance, is able to play “of things as they in many ways a Hegelian, develops an alliance with are.” “The artist and the man [Michelangelo] told a Immanuel Kant. Danto even makes Kant seem like a story through painting the ceiling, and we have to natural ally because his (second) conception of art read the story to know how he painted the ceiling (not the one connected to aesthetic judgments of the way he did” (p. 73). While Danto provides a po- taste) is that “it consists of making meanings, which etic interpretation of Michelangelo’s paintings, one presupposes an overall human disposition not just of the pleasures of this text, his philosophical point to see things but to find meanings in what we see, is that “interpretation [“inferential art criticism” that even if we sometimes get it wrong” (p. 129). Like identifies meaning (p. 63)] should impose conditions Descartes, Kant would find the blue guitar accessi- on the cleaning process” (p. 59). ble; in fact, he might well have recognized the blue The blue guitar appears again in Chapter 3, “The guitar as a metaphor for how an artist (genius) makes Body in Philosophy and Art,” where the topic is the meaning. distinction between “the body as philosophically con- Kant’s second conception of art concerns spirit strued” and “the body as artists have come to think rather than taste, the creative power of the artist about it” (p. 79). While Rene´ Descartes was famously rather than our judgment of what she creates. Also, skeptical about the body because the senses deceive art does not promise merely to be “in good taste” but us and while the models of the body (as clock, steam to “transform viewers, opening them up to whole new engine, or computer) have changed immensely from systems of ideas” (p. 119). Danto makes his case for his time to the present, “the body as represented in these claims through an interpretation of Kant’s con- art would have been—would indeed be—entirely ac- cept of “aesthetic ideas,” that is, ideas “not abstractly cessible to him” (p. 90). In fact, Descartes “would grasped, but experienced through, and by means of, have no difficulty grasping what goes on in Picasso’s the senses” (p. 123). They are ideas because, like Blue Period paintings” (p. 90). For while our knowl- wakeful dreams, they “strive after something which edge of the body has changed greatly from Aristotle lies beyond the bounds of experience,” yet aesthetic, to the present, Danto claims that human nature as de- and thus wakeful and embodied, because “we have picted in painting has not changed “from Homer and to use what does lie within experience in order to Euripides, or from Poussin or early Picasso” (p. 91). present them” (p. 124). It is not a stretch, for Danto, to Moreover, the artistic body conveyed through the link this account of Kant’s aesthetic ideas to his own blue guitar reliably (though not infallibly) orients us definition of art as embodied meaning (plus wakeful in the world—a truth even Descartes would acknowl- dreams): works of art embody aesthetic ideas, that edge, Danto provocatively believes. is, wakeful dreams and meanings (pp. 128–129). In In Chapter 4, “The End of the Contest: The turn, this link enables Danto to offer a new inter- Paragone Between Painting and Photography,” pretation of Kant’s contemporary relevance. He is Danto analyzes how photography altered our under- typically connected to modern and contemporary art standing of the essence of art. When photography through formalism (by, for example, Clement Green- was invented in the nineteenth century, it was first berg) because he seemed to privilege form in his un- thought to be the pencil of nature, a neutral tool derstanding of art, just as modern art has privileged capturing visual truth, showing “how things really form (over, say, function).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Adorno, Art, Natural History
    Index of the Contemporary: Adorno, Art, Natural History Ryan Crawford 32 | Evental Aesthetics Index of the Contemporary: Adorno, Art, Natural History Abstract That contemporary art is fundamentally irreducible to modernist art and aesthetics has become a commonplace of contemporary art theory and criticism. In marking this distinction, reference is often made to the obsolescence of once-dominant aesthetic categories and the need for breaking with aesthetic theories traditionally allied with artistic modernism. For many in the field of philosophical aesthetics, this means going beyond the work of Theodor W. Adorno and creating a conceptual discourse more appropriate to the current state of contemporary art. The present paper reconstructs the stakes of this legitimation crisis and sets Adorno’s writings on art and aesthetics in relation to some of the most significant debates in recent art criticism. In the process, it demonstrates that many of the most pressing problems in contemporary art are integral to Adorno’s aesthetic theory and that it is precisely at those points where his thought is today regarded as most problematic that it is often most instructive. Through a sustained examination of art’s essential relation to what Adorno calls “natural-history,” the problems of contemporary art and aesthetics are then situated within the wider context of art’s relationship to a history of domination. Keywords Adorno Modernism Aesthetics Contemporary Art Natural History Volume 7 Number 2 (2018) | 33 Ryan Crawford “You create a new shudder” [Vous créez un frisson nouveau], Victor Hugo wrote Baudelaire upon receiving the poems the latter had recently dedicated to him.1 Though grateful for the gift, and appreciative of what he called Baudelaire’s “noble mind and generous heart,” Hugo could hardly countenance the “horrifying morality” Les Fleurs du mal grafted onto the older man’s art.2 For in those poems, the crowd, the very subject Hugo had first “opened ..
    [Show full text]
  • The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play, and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W
    DePaul University Via Sapientiae College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences 8-2012 The idea of mimesis: Semblance, play, and critique in the works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno Joseph Weiss DePaul University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd Recommended Citation Weiss, Joseph, "The idea of mimesis: Semblance, play, and critique in the works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno" (2012). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 125. https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/125 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at Via Sapientiae. It has been accepted for inclusion in College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Via Sapientiae. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play, and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy October, 2011 By Joseph Weiss Department of Philosophy College of Liberal Arts and Sciences DePaul University Chicago, Illinois 2 ABSTRACT Joseph Weiss Title: The Idea of Mimesis: Semblance, Play and Critique in the Works of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno Critical Theory demands that its forms of critique express resistance to the socially necessary illusions of a given historical period. Yet theorists have seldom discussed just how much it is the case that, for Walter Benjamin and Theodor W.
    [Show full text]
  • Doing Justice to Traditional Aesthetic Theories: Weitz Reconsidered
    TRAMES, 2002, 6(56/51), 3, 266–279 DOING JUSTICE TO TRADITIONAL AESTHETIC THEORIES: WEITZ RECONSIDERED Marek Volt University of Tartu Abstract. In the very first lines of his famous article – ‘The Role of Theory is Aesthetics’ – Morris Weitz tells us that each of the great art theories (Emotionalism, Voluntarism, Formalism, Intuitionism, Organicism) converges in a logically vain attempt to provide the defining properties of art. He tries to examine some of the aesthetic theories in order to see if they include adequate statements about the nature of art. But instead of giving us exact descriptions of these theories, he provided us with only a very scant summary. Thus, even if Weitz were correct in thinking that all theories converged in an essential definition of art, he does not provide any further arguments for his conviction. Some aestheticians (Diffey, Tilghman, Matthews, Snoeyenbos) have tried to do justice to the traditional theories by suggesting that aesthetic theories were not attempting to offer essentialist definitions of art. Unfortunately, those critics left untouched the aesthetic theories offered by Weitz. Therefore, in order to evaluate (1) Weitz’s account of aesthetic theories and (2) to see if the criticisms concerning his account strike home, it is necessary to consider just theories mentioned by Weitz. My paper confirms a view that within aesthetic theories a variety of purposes can be recognised. For instance, the explanation and re-evaluation of art, and the completion of metaphysical system. I. Weitz and his critics The famous article of Morris Weitz (1968) – ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’ – has raised many objections since it was published.1 Perhaps the chief objection is that Weitz did not take into account the possibility that art can be defined in terms of non-manifest properties.
    [Show full text]
  • The New Role of Theory in Aesthetics
    RECOGNITION AND RECONCILIATION: THE NEW ROLE OF THEORY IN AESTHETICS by Kristin Amber Hrehor A thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (September, 2007) Copyright © Kristin Amber Hrehor, 2007 Abstract George Dickie’s institutional theory of art has been subject to extensive debate over the past 30 years. It has been both revered and deplored, garnering such attention for the seemingly controversial way in which Dickie answers the question, “What is art?” In Dickie’s view, an object derives its existence as a work of art in the context of the informal institution of the “artworld,” a concept which was borrowed from Arthur Danto’s earlier work on the theoretical context surrounding works of art. Whether one finds the idea appealing or appalling, it is one that quite simply cannot be ignored, since the empirical validity of the institutional structure of art and the sorts of problems it can cause, especially in our particular time, are so remarkably clear. Another significant feature of Dickie’s institutional theory is that it provides a definition of art, a problem that philosophers of art have attempted to solve for the past few centuries. Dickie’s theory inclines one to dismiss other candidates for definitions as implausible, such as those put forth by R.G. Collingwood and Leo Tolstoy, since, as Dickie insists, an acceptable definition of art must be able to account for the many different kinds of practices that are all referred to as “art.” Both Collingwood and Tolstoy advance restricted conceptions of art that are meant to confine the use of the term “art” to a specific kind of creative activity.
    [Show full text]
  • Hearing Danto Out: a Critique of the “End of Art” Thesis Through Music
    HEARING DANTO OUT: A CRITIQUE OF THE “END OF ART” THESIS THROUGH MUSIC by Kenneth David Allan Hall A thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (September, 2014) Copyright ©Kenneth David Allan Hall, 2014 Abstract Arthur Danto’s “end of art” thesis contends that art followed a progressive historical narrative from about 1300 until 1964 AD, when Danto realized that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes demonstrates that an artwork can look like anything without thereby losing its status as art. I critique Danto’s revelation that an artwork can look like anything by showing how what Danto really and quite rightly means is that an art object can now look like anything. Making the art object/artwork distinction clear shows how Danto axiomatically excludes important perceptible qualities of artworks from his scope of perception which might provide outlets to the future changes to the definition of art, and thus the continuation of art history. I work up to this criticism by first addressing an apparent blind spot in Danto’s oeuvre: while Danto depicts the history of art as progressing and culminating within the realm of the visual arts, he is explicit that its implications apply to all artforms. It is a prima facie interesting question whether music can rightly be subsumed under Danto’s grand claims, since Danto’s history of art centers upon painting’s representational properties, which I argue that music lacks. Despite these differences however, music was, like painting, drawn into a Modernist search for its own essence that resulted in John Cage’s 4’33”, a piece which showed that music could sound like anything just as much as visual artworks could look like anything.
    [Show full text]
  • Aesthetics (HSA020N207A) | University of Roehampton
    09/23/21 Aesthetics (HSA020N207A) | University of Roehampton Aesthetics (HSA020N207A) View Online (Module Validation) 156 items Further Reading - additional to the weekly readings (53 items) The birth of tragedy and other writings - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Raymond Geuss, Ronald Speirs, 1999 Book | Further Reading The Disjunctive Theory of Art: The Cluster Account Reformulated - F. Longworth, A. Scarantino, 2010-03-10 Article | Further Reading The Lyotard reader - Jean-Franc ̧ ois Lyotard, Andrew E. Benjamin, 1989 Book | Further Reading On photography - Sontag, Susan, 1979 Book | Essential Reading The principles of art - Collingwood, R. G., 1938 Book | Further Reading The century of taste: the philosophical odyssey of taste in the eighteenth century - Dickie, George, 1996 Book | Further Reading Aesthetics: a critical anthology - Dickie, George, Sclafani, R. J., Roblin, Ronald, c1989 Book | Further Reading An introduction to the philosophy of art - Richard Thomas Eldridge, 2014 Book | Further Reading Schopenhauer - Patrick Lancaster Gardiner, 1963 Book | Further Reading The Routledge companion to aesthetics - Gaut, Berys Nigel, Lopes, Dominic, 2005 Book | Further Reading Languages of art: an approach to a theory of symbols - Goodman, Nelson, 1968 Book | Further Reading Philosophy of the arts: an introduction to aesthetics - Graham, Gordon, 1997 1/11 09/23/21 Aesthetics (HSA020N207A) | University of Roehampton Book | Further Reading The sociology of art - Arnold Hauser, 2013 Book | Further Reading Emotion and the Arts - Mette Hjort,
    [Show full text]
  • Lydia Goehr Is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University
    Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. In 2009/2010 she received a Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award, in 2007/8 The Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC)'s Faculty Mentoring Award (FMA), and in 2005, a Columbia University Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (1992; second edition with a new essay, 2007, with translations in Greek, Chinese, part Japanese, Italian, French, Spanish), The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy [essays on Richard Wagner] (1998; translation in French), Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory [essays on Adorno and Danto] (2008), and co-editor with Daniel Herwitz of The Don Giovanni Moment: Essays on the legacy of an Opera (2006). She has written many articles on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Arthur Danto (see ACADEMIA.EDU for publications). Her current book is titled Red Sea - Red Square: Picturing Freedom - Liberating Wit. She is co-editor with Jonathan Gilmore of Handbook on Arthur C. Danto, contracted with Wiley-Blackwell. She is a recipient of Mellon, Getty, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and in 1997 was the Visiting Ernest Bloch Professor in the Music Department at U. California, Berkeley, where she gave a series of lectures on Richard Wagner. She has been a Trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics and is a member of the New York Institute of the Humanities. In 2012, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society for an article on Wagner's Die Meistersinger.
    [Show full text]
  • 31762100154713.Pdf (2.570Mb)
    Working papers : the artist as critical consciousness by Larry Eugene Shelby A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF APPLIED ARTS Approved: airman ,''Exaiftining Committee Montana State University © Copyright by Larry Eugene Shelby (1975) Abstract: I. An Inquiry into the Definition of Art and Artist. This paper inquires into the nature and relevance of ex-isting definition of "Art" and "Artist." There is an analogy between the manner which art as an institution and a dictionary definition function. If language (or art) is to remain viable, it must be open to the continual revision necessary as part of the constantly changing social environment. In the sense that a dictionary is a reference book, an "inbuilt" dictionary is part of each of our mental equipment. The inbuilt dictionary is best altered through the educational system. Lexical items which have become irrelevant to the situations which they are to describe should be restructured. II. On the De-Definition/Re-Definition of Art. This essay is a rebuttal to Harold Rosenberg's article "On The De-Definition of Art" chosen because it is typical of arguments for defining art by morphological characteristics (i.e., formalist criticism). Approaches of this type have failed to deal with questions raised by "conceptual" artists regarding the existence, function and future of art, and, by implication, the education of the artist. III. Art: An Open Textured Concept. A condensed version of Morris Weitz' essay "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" was provided. As a theory of aesthetics it is quite sufficient but Weitz presupposes that art is always of an aesthetic nature.
    [Show full text]
  • Final Thesis
    A DEFENSE OF AESTHETIC ANTIESSENTIALISM: MORRIS WEITZ AND THE POSSIBLITY OF DEFINING ‘ART’ _____________________________ A Thesis Presented to The Honors Tutorial College Ohio University _____________________________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Art History _____________________________ By Jordan Mills Pleasant June, 2010 ii This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Philosophy ___________________________ Dr. Arthur Zucker Chair, Department of Philosophy Thesis Advisor ___________________________ Dr. Scott Carson Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies Philosophy ___________________________ Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College iii This thesis has been approved by The Honors Tutorial College and the Department of Art History ___________________________ Dr. Jennie Klein Chair, Department of Art History Thesis Advisor ___________________________ Dr. Jennie Klein Honors Tutorial College, Director of Studies Art History ___________________________ Jeremy Webster Dean, Honors Tutorial College iv Dedicated to Professor Arthur Zucker, without whom this work would have been impossible. v Table Of Contents Thesis Approval Pages Page ii Introduction: A Brief History of the Role of Definitions in Art Page 1 Chapter I: Morris Weitz’s “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics” Page 8 Chapter II: Lewis K. Zerby’s “A Reconsideration of the Role of the Theory in Aesthetics. A Reply to Morris Weitz”
    [Show full text]
  • Morris Weitz Aili W
    University of Dayton eCommons Philosophy Faculty Publications Department of Philosophy 2014 Morris Weitz Aili W. Bresnahan University of Dayton, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/phl_fac_pub Part of the History of Philosophy Commons eCommons Citation Bresnahan, Aili W., "Morris Weitz" (2014). Philosophy Faculty Publications. 4. https://ecommons.udayton.edu/phl_fac_pub/4 This Encyclopedia Entry is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Philosophy at eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Philosophy Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Word Count: 2,494 [Main body text: 1,189; Bibliography: 1,305] Weitz, Morris (1916-1981), American philosopher of aesthetics who focused primarily on ontology, interpretation, and literary criticism. Weitz’ Initial Theory of Art. Morris Weitz’ initial theory of art was provided in his book, Philosophy of the Arts (Weitz 1950). Here Weitz calls his theory of art “empirical” and “organic,” and he defined “art” as “an organic complex or integration of expressive elements embodied in a sensuous medium” (51). By “empirical” he means that his theory answers to the evidence provided by actual works of art. “Organic,” for Weitz, means that each element is to be considered in relation to the others in a living and not merely mechanical way. Weitz also has a broad understanding of “expressive,” which refers to an artistic property that functions as a semiotic sign, either of a specific emotional feeling, an emotional quality, or another sign of an emotional feature.
    [Show full text]
  • Arthur Danto's Andy Warhol
    ARTHUR DANTO’S ANDY WARHOL THE EMBODIMENT OF THEORY IN ART AND THE PRAGMATIC TURN Stephen Snyder ABSTRACT. – Arthur Danto’s most recent book, Andy Warhol, leads the reader through the story of the iconic American’s artistic life accompanied by a phi- losophical commentary that merges Danto’s aesthetic theory with the artist’s own narrative. Inspired by Warhol’s Brillo Box installation, art that in Danto’s eyes was indiscernible from the everyday boxes it represented, Danto developed a theory that is able to differentiate art from non-art by employing the body of conceptual art theory manifest in what he terms the ‘artworld’. The strength of Danto’s theory is found in its ability to explain the art of the post-modern era. His body of work weaves philosophy, art history and art criticism together, merging his aesthetic philosophy with his extensive knowledge of the world of art. If Warhol inspired Danto to create a philosophy of art, it is appropriate that Danto writes a tribute to Warhol that traces how Warhol brought philosophy into art. Danto’s account of ‘Warhol as philosopher’ positions him as a pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century art, effecting a sea change in how art was made and viewed. Warhol achieved this by conceiving of works that em- bodied the answers to a series of philosophical puzzles surrounding the nature of art. Danto’s essentialist theory of embodied meaning answers the questions that are manifest in Warhol’s art, thereby providing a critical tool that succeeds in explaining the currents of contemporary art, a task that many great thinkers of art history were unable to do.
    [Show full text]
  • The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory Sam Rose
    The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory Sam Rose New Literary History, Volume 48, Number 2, Spring 2017, pp. 223-244 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2017.0011 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663805 Access provided at 2 May 2019 15:33 GMT from University of St Andrews The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory Sam Rose eading the preface to the new edition of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, one might think that the battle over the status of aes- Rthetics is over. According to the narrative of its editor Michael Kelly, aesthetics, held in generally low esteem at the time of the 1998 first edition, has now happily overcome its association with “an alleg- edly retrograde return to beauty,” or its representation as “an ideology defending the tastes of a dominant class, country, race, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, or empire.”1 The previously “rather pervasive anti- aesthetic stance” of the 1990s passed away with that decade.2 Defined as “critical reflection on art, culture, and nature,” aesthetics is now a respectable practice once again.3 The publication of the Encyclopedia’s latest iteration is a timely moment to review the current state of its much-maligned subject. The original edi- tion of 1998 faced major difficulties, with Kelly writing that his requests for contributions were greeted not only with silence from some, but also with responses from angry callers keen to tell him how misguided the entire project was.4 And while Kelly emphasizes the change toward a more positive view, in some critics, it seems, the fear of aesthetics in art and literary theory has only increased.
    [Show full text]