Danto and the Pale of Aesthetics

Abstract

Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace is a new theory of art, seeking to catch the flavour and essence of its contemporary phenomenology. It is obliged, however, to pit itself in toto against aesthetic philosophy, leaning on the derivatives from deuteropraxis and institutional definition while committing itself to a concept of arthood extracted from exoteric ideas, which are held to comprise the artworks’ individuation and identity. This paper examines the principal notions in support of his contentions and contrasts them to the chief principles of aesthetic philosophy. In this juxtaposition, it transpires that conviction eludes Danto, as his suppression of aesthetic criteria yields unsuspected aporias from a disconjugate amalgam of inherence, ontology, epistemology and concept integration. Thus the leap from “mere real things” to the plateau of arthood is never accomplished, as it falters at the step where a perceiving subject has a stake in, and the power of authorisation, of this conception of art.

Keywords:

• Danto
• art/arthood
• aesthetic experience

Notes

1. Eduard Hanslick, the celebrated and controversial Viennese music critic, whose definition of music as “sonorous forms in motion” in On the Musically Beautiful (1854) raised hackles with its implied repudiation of an emotional “content” in music.

2. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (The Critique of Judgment) 1793/B1957; Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik.

3. As there is no possibility of engaging with this literature here, the following list may serve as an indicator of the endurance of aesthetics-based philosophising: Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, and Philosophy of New Music; Hermann Broch, Schriften zur Literatur und Kunst; R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art; Benedetto Croce, The Essence of Aesthetic; John Dewey, Art as Experience; Anton Ehrenzweig, Hidden Order of Art: A Study in the Psychology of Artistic Imagination; Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful; Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art; Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art; Susan Langer, Feeling and Form; Georg Lukacs, Ästhetik; José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanisation of Art; Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? and The Imaginary; Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects.

4. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and After the End of Art.

5. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, vii.

6. Ibid., 205.

7. In Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste” the qualifications for judging the merit of artworks are so stringent that only those of the highest education and culture and of mature age and wide experience are admitted. It has often been remarked that it ends up being a circular definition: that art is what the wisdom of such highly qualified people approves of, but this wisdom can only be exhibited by those who approve of this art. Herein, however, lies the predicament.

8. Bruner and Olsen, “Learning through Experience.”

9. Collingwood, Principles of Art, 73–75.

10. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, vi.

11. Ibid., 208.

12. Ibid., 28–29.

13. Dickie, Art and the Aesthetic, 34.

14. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 93f.

15. I think this requires a philosophical interjection. It can hardly be maintained of an inert object that intentional expressions inhere in it as “properties.” A witticism is the intentional act of an intentional agent who accepts responsibility for the perception of his acts by others as well as their façon de parler which attributes the act to the object. While this works well in ordinary language use, where it may serve for the short-circuiting of a lengthy circumlocution, its logic gets short shrift when such casual usage is carelessly transplanted into philosophical diction. It is the same sloppiness which attributes “sadness” to music or “virility” to a male statue, which one would not normally object to. But when a philosopher speaks philosophically, one expects greater circumspection, especially in the present context where a fundamental principle of philosophy is at stake.

16. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 94–95.

17. Levinson, Music, Art and Metaphysics, 23.

18. Ibid., 12–13.

19. Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 141; (my italics).

20. For example, as Luhmann writes in Art as a Social System: “Text-art does not seek automatically to repeat familiar meanings, it aims instead at disrupting automatisation and delaying understanding… connotations, not denotation, mediate meaning; it communicates not through the propositional content of its utterances, but [through] the ornamental structure of mutually limiting references that appear in words” (25).

21. It is incidentally the same reason why drawings are preferred to photographs for the depiction of mechanisms, appliances, parts of gadgetry and the like, so as to guide the eye to their salient aspects.

22. Gombrich, Story of Art, 18.

23. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 32–53.

24. Kaiser in Beethovens 32 Klaviersonaten, 532, relates that the recipient at first believed his master had gone potty, but came to an understanding of the artistic necessity once his mind became attuned to their presence and could no longer conceive of dispensing with them.

25. Borges, “Pierre Menard.”

26. Lawrenz, Leibniz, 156–57. Leibniz’s indiscernibility principle rests on his doctrine of an information flow being generated by an individual monad (fundamental substance) at the instant of its creation. As this involves a unique time and location, it is asymmetrical and monodirectional; accordingly, there is no logical avenue by which the exact duplicate of an existent could occur. As this is clearly a cosmological principle, and Leibniz not an author widely read in the art community, one cannot help wondering if Danto banked on the recherché allusion making its point by sleight of hand.

27. Another specimen, perhaps Borges’s best-known story, is “The Garden of Forking Paths.”

28. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 33.

29. Ibid., 51, 41–44.

30. I am aware that the materials used in the production (i.e., the ontological features) are always the first to be researched; but assuming ceteris paribus, the final judgement rests on perceivable (recognisable) idiosyncrasies in design and execution.

31. I have dealt with this exhibit on an earlier occasion, in Art and the Platonic Matrix (64ff.), but the ensuing account is a considerably enlarged rendering, as it aims to highlight in detail the specificity of Danto’s doctrine.

32. Fichte, Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy, 119–20.