Wesleyan University

Art as Appearance: Two Comments on Arthur C. Danto's after the End of Art
Author(s): Martin Seel
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 37, No. 4, Theme Issue 37: Danto and His Critics: Art
History, Historiography and After the End of Art (Dec., 1998), pp. 102-114
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
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ART AS APPEARANCE:
TWO COMMENTS ON ARTHUR C. DANTO'S AFTER THE END OF ART

MARTIN SEEL

ABSTRACT

In his latest book about art Arthur Danto claims that aesthetic appearance-visuality in
the visual arts-has become more and more irrelevant for most of contemporary art. This
essay first immanently critiques the distinction between the aesthetic and artistic properties underlying this claim. Danto's claim about the irrelevance of the aesthetic is not com-

patible with the spirit of his own writings: what Danto denies in After the End of Art has
been a cornerstone of his theoretical work since The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,
namely, that the aesthetic is indeed both an elementary and a defining property of art.
Examples ranging from Duchamp's Fountain to a recent installation by the Art &
Language group are discussed to support this critique. Second, the essay defends Danto's
contention that developing a "definition of art" is a sensible enterprise. But it turns out that
Danto's (self-ascribed) "essentialism" concerning art has no essentialist implications in

any specific sense.

Arthur Danto's most important achievement in the field of aesthetics is not theo-

retical but practical. Since the publication of The Transfiguration of the

Commonplace he has demonstrated that it is possible to be a professional
philosopher of art and a successful critic and a true admirer of the art of one's
own time. This is not just a personal but an eminently political point-since what

is at stake here is the foreign relations between the art world and the world of academic research. These relations are much less foreign now. In modern thinking,

art and art theory seemed to be natural enemies, at least as long as theorists could
not convince the public that they themselves had the temperament and virtuosity
of genuine artists (as in the case of Walter Benjamin or Theodor W. Adorno).
Although it is said that Danto himself is one of the leading conceptual artists
(thanks to his famous series of merely imagined artworks and their merely material Doppelgdnger), his reputation as a mediator between the academy and the art

world does not depend upon an addiction to a romantic conception of the artist
as theorist and the theorist as artist. What he has shown is simply that a theory of

art of Hegelian strength and ambition does not have to ignore what is going on
in contemporary art.

This, therefore, might be called Danto's rule: Hard-core philosophy of art is in

a position to acknowledge the plurality of the artistic movements of its time. Or

even stronger: Someone who believes he or she has a valid definition of art can

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nevertheless display emphatic appreciation of art. What seemed to be excluded

by an implicit law of artistic sovereignty appears to be included in the life and

work of at least one single theorist and critic. Danto's most recent book is just
one more piece of evidence for this. It develops strong philosophical claims
about the history of art and the position of artworks among all other kinds of

things and signs, and at the same time it is a highly intense reflection on the state
of the art in art. Its discourse proceeds in a continuous encounter with a variety
of contemporary styles and works, thereby fulfilling the ultimate function of the
philosophy of art as well as of art criticism in an exemplary way: to enrich and

enlighten the perception of older, newer, and the newest works of art.
This practical or even existential demonstration is an outcome of Danto's out-

standing theoretical contributions. Two basic assumptions are responsible for the
intensity of both his philosophical and his critical praxis. (1) Artworks are objects
in the world only insofar as they are about the world; they are about the world

only insofar as they embody their meaning. (2) History of art can be writtenphilosophically-as a quasi-Hegelian history of the growing self-consciousness

of art, culminating in Duchamp and Warhol; following that, in the 1960s, art
reached a new age in which there is no longer a place for a teleological story of
artistic progress. The first assumption allows Danto to say what an artwork is or,

to be more precise and less hybrid, how it differs from other objects and signs.
The second allows him to react open-mindedly to any artistic object that strikes

him-not exactly the way in which critics, let alone philosophers, usually react
to current affairs in art.
Nevertheless, there is an irritating bias in Danto's more recent treatment of art:

the claim that aesthetic appearance-visuality in the visual arts-has become

more and more irrelevant for most of contemporary art. Aesthetics, it follows, is
no longer responsible for the theory of art. This, I believe, is an unacceptable

consequence, since it ignores the point-or at least a point-of all artistic production: the creation of unique appearances in the world which in turn display
unique interpretations of the world. In a Heideggerian idiom, one could say that

Danto's latest writings tend to be not seinsvergessen (forgetful of being), but

erscheinungsvergessen (forgetful of appearing). However, since I believe that the
separation between aesthetics and the philosophy of art at which Danto arrives in
After the End ofArt is not a natural consequence of his entire theoretical work on

this subject, the first of my comments will be an immanent critique of his distinction between aesthetic and artistic properties. I shall argue that Danto's claim
about the irrelevance of the aesthetic is not compatible with the spirit of his own
writings. Having put things together again and having consulted some examples,

my second comment-in the third part of this essay-will be an attempt to

defend a claim that is probably the most adventurous of all of Danto's contribu-

tions: that it is a sensible, non-perverse, non-suicidal enterprise to develop a "definition of art." Again my remarks might be read as an immanent critique, since I
would like to show that Danto's (self-ascribed) "essentialism" concerning art has
no essentialist implications.

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I. AESTHETIC AND ARTISTIC APPEARANCE

Throughout Danto's writings about art lurks an argument against the importance
of the aesthetic. He holds that aesthetic predicates are not able to discriminate

sufficiently between artworks and other kinds of objects. In The Transfiguration

of the Commonplace he convincingly argued for this position. If of two phenomenally identical objects one can be an artwork while the other is a mere real thing,

then the status of being an artwork cannot depend on aesthetic-that is, sensually discriminable-properties alone. In Danto's own words:
No sensory examination of an object will tell me that it is an artwork, since quality for
quality it may be matched by an object that is not one, so far at least as the qualities to
which the normal senses are responsive are concerned. That much I should hope has been

established by my argument. If aesthetic response were constant as to the difference

between art and nonart, the same would be true of these. But it is false. Our aesthetic

responses will differ because the qualities to which we respond are different.'
This position is assumed again in After the End of Art, where Danto says that

the appearance of readymades and Brillo boxes in the art world "meant that as
far as appearances were concerned, anything could be an artwork, and it meant
that if you were going to find out what art was, you had to turn from sense expe-

rience to thought."2 But Danto then goes on to draw a conclusion that is much
stronger than the contention that aesthetic qualities are not sufficient to determine
whether an object is artistic. Visuality, he concludes, is no longer the point of
contemporary visual arts: "Visuality drops away, as little relevant to the essence
of art as beauty proved to have been. For art to exist there does not even have to

be an object to look at, and if there are objects in a gallery, they can look like any-

thing at all."3 It is important to notice here that the case of invisible objects within the visible arts (to which I shall return below) is not the paradigm case for
Danto's diagnosis about the decline of aesthetics. "I shall argue," he writes some

pages later, "that aesthetical considerations, which climaxed in the eighteenth

century, have no essential application to what I shall speak of as 'art after the end
of art'-i.e. art produced from the late 1960s on. That there was-and is-art
before and after the 'era of art' shows that the connection between art and aes-

thetics is a matter of historical contingency, and not part of the essence of art."4
In Danto's view the artistic movements of the late 1960s have to be seen as a

fulfillment of the Duchampian program "to extrude the aesthetic from the artistic."5 Therefore "aesthetics seems to be increasingly inadequate to deal with art

after the 1960s."6 This is so because "there is one feature of contemporary art that

1. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), 99.
2. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton,
1997), 13.

3. Ibid., 16. In the same paragraph: "Whatever art is, it is no longer something primarily to be
looked at. Stared at, perhaps, but not primarily looked at."
4. Ibid., 25.

5. Ibid., 84.
6. Ibid., 85.

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ART

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distinguishes it from perhaps all art since 1400, which is that its primary ambi-

tions are not aesthetic. Its primary mode of relationship is not to viewers as viewers, but to other aspects of the persons to whom the art is addressed."7 All in all,
the history of art from Giotto to Duchamp and Warhol "demonstrates that the aesthetic is in fact not an essential or defining property of art."8

On the contrary, I would like to respond, the aesthetic is indeed both an essential and a defining property of art. All that Danto has shown (that modern art has

shown)-and all that can be shown-is that aesthetic quality is not sufficient to
distinguish artworks from other kinds of things. Moreover, that the aesthetic is
not sufficient to discriminate between art and non-art does not at all mean that

the aesthetic is not (or is no longer) the point of artistic objects. Aesthetic appearance is in fact the very point of traditional, modern, and contemporary art.
Before taking a look at some examples, I would like to make clear the sys-

tematic reason why I think Danto cannot really mean what he is saying in the
passages quoted.9 First notice an ambiguity in Danto's use of the term "aesthetic." Sometimes the term "aesthetic" stands for "matters of taste" in the sense of
matters of "the sense of beauty." But this is not the predominant use of the term
in Danto's writings. In most cases the term "aesthetic" stands for "matters of

vision" or, more generally, for "features of an object that can be distinguished by
sensory experience." After the End of Art employs the second sense of "aesthetic": its crucial claim is that the sensory presence of artworks has become more
and more irrelevant for their status as works of art.

This cannot be true because it is only half of the truth. In The Transfiguration
of the Commonplace Danto made a double comparison, aiming to draw a double
distinction. On the one hand, he compared artworks with (phenomenally indis-

cernible) mere real things; on the other hand, he compared artworks with (again
phenomenally indiscernible) "mere representations"-recall the telephone book
read as an avant-garde novel, or Loran's diagram transformed into a Roy

Lichtenstein painting. The result of this twofold conceptual experiment was a

double distinction between artworks and other things on the one hand, and artworks and other signs (or constellations of signs) on the other. Artworks, Danto

argued, differ from mere real things in having a dimension of aboutness (and in
existing in a context of interpretation)-they are not just things, they are signs,
even if they may look like simple things. But-as the second half of Danto's
investigation was designed to demonstrate-they are very special kinds of signs,

differing from all other kinds of (widely understood) symbolic representations.

They do not have meaning in the way arbitrary linguistic signs (which are in principle replaceable) and sentences have; they embody their meaning in an irre-

7. Ibid., 183.
8. Ibid., 112.

9. For reasons of simplicity I shall restrict myself in the following to a discussion of the role of
appearance in the visual arts; for a discussion of the literature (which might seem to be a counterexample to the assumption of a strict interdependence of the aesthetic and the artistic), see my forth-

coming Asthetik des Erscheinens (Munich, 1999).

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placeable manner. They are individual signs, displaying an untranslatable and

irreplaceable way of seeing whatever they are about. 10

This short-and extremely condensed-recollection was necessary to bring
into focus again what came out of focus in the boldly anti-aesthetic passages

quoted above: the constitutive role of embodiment in artistic presentation. If it is

plausible to say that artworks differ from "mere representations" in that they
embody their meanings, then it cannot be plausible to say that appearance in art

has become irrelevant. For where would the embodying features of a work of art
be identifiable if not in the very appearance of each and every object of art? And
how should these appearances, which are constitutive of the artistic embodiment

of meaning, be recognized if not through the media of sensory perception, how-

ever much thought and interpretation will be needed to capture what is to be perceived here and only here? How could "artistic predicates" be applied in an

enlightened way without successfully applying the relevant "aesthetic predicates"? How could the "ways of seeing" embodied in a work of the visual arts be
perceived without intensely looking at this very object (or, if it is an installation,
experiencing it together with all kinds of bodily reactions)? How could visual

perception not be the point of taking a work of the visual arts seriously-again,
if it is true that being an artwork means to transcend the means of mere representation (roughly speaking, representation in the use of arbitrary or replaceable
signs)? Therefore, if we underwrite the premises offered by the twofold analysis

of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, the consequence can only be this: if

embodiment is a constitutive feature of art, appearance is constitutive as well,
since meaningfully articulated appearance is a very condition of artistic embodiment.

This is why I believe that the radical anti-aestheticism in After the End of Art
is incompatible with Danto's own philosophy of art. One reason for the radical

formulations in After the End of Art seems to be that there Danto is one-sidedly
concerned with the difference between artworks and other things and not so
much with artworks and other signs. Only in the last chapter, where he discuss-

es the possibility of a definition of art, does the topic of embodiment (marking

the difference between artistic presentation and normal linguistic or pictorial representation) regain its complementary role with the element of aboutness (marking the difference between things in the world and things about the world). If
these two conditions are interdependent, as I believe (that Danto believes) they

are, then there is no way of "extruding the aesthetic from the artistic."
One must distinguish between (at least) two kinds of "aesthetic reaction"just as Danto himself did in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. One kind
of reaction is directed simply at what can be seen by everyone not out of their

senses (to put it literally); the other kind of reaction, relying upon normal sensory awareness, is directed to objects of articulation and interpretation, which display their specific meaning by presenting themselves as bodies of significance.
10. Cf. TRansfiguration, 164 and chapter 7. The connection between embodiment and irreplaceability would need further discussion which I cannot go into here.

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ART AS APPEARANCE 107

This second reaction does not, however, go beyond sensory appearance; it is just
a different reaction to it, a different treatment of it-including interpretation and
the ascription of artistic predicates as well as aesthetic ones. Thus, artistic
appearance is to be understood as a mode of aesthetic appearance, not as an alter-

native to it."1 Whoever succeeded in "extruding the aesthetic from the artistic"
or-which is the same-artistic meaning from the sensory process of appearing,
would succeed in extruding art from the art world.

II. DUCHAMP AND OTHERS

Duchamp and Warhol succeeded in many-although quite different-ways, but

fortunately not in that. Among other things, they succeeded in exhibiting the

paradoxes of artistic appearance, but they did not go beyond appearance. They
needed appearance, and needed to insist on appearance, to exhibit the puzzles of

aesthetic and artistic appearing. The core of these paradoxes is precisely that
which not only seems but (visually) appears to be without difference can nevertheless have a dramatically different appearance. Works of art do have an appearance different from their visually indistinguishable material counterparts: this, I

believe, is the philosophical point that is made by the art of the ready-mades and
after.

Duchamp's Fountain, shown in a gallery, looks like an ordinary urinal but also

occupies the position of a sculptural object-a figurative thing with a metaphorical meaning-a position that it at the same time heavily denies. It at once insists

that it is there not to be used for its usual purpose but to be seen only, without
allowing itself to be seen as this or that, except maybe as a reflection on the desire

to see sculpture-like objects as this or that. In so doing, it suddenly reminds the

viewer that something essential-essential to urinals in everyday life-is missing, namely, the smell, thereby initiating an experience of subtraction, letting
subtraction be sensed, a subtraction of functions and meanings and sensings. This

subtraction, if the viewers are in touch with philosophy, will be conceived as a

decomposing process of meaning that this parody of a sculptural work of art
keeps increasing in each and every one of its switching appearings. Only because

of this play of incompatible appearances is it possible to ascribe the artistic predicates Danto chooses to characterize the difference between ordinary urinals and

11. In fact needed here is a threefold distinction among visual, aesthetic, and artistic objects, the
artistic ones being visually and aesthetically relevant objects of a special kind. What separates aesthetic from merely visual objects-if such a distinction is drawn in addition to Danto's ambiguous dis-

tinction between the aesthetic and the artistic-is not so much a (perhaps old-fashioned) "sense of
beauty" but a sense of the momentary appearing of an arbitrary object. Everything that is viewed (or
stronger, that is said to deserve to be viewed) in such a way can be understood as an aesthetic object.
As Danto rightly points out, this kind of aesthetic awareness it not sufficient for the perception of artworks, but it is nevertheless a necessary condition for treating an object as an object of art. For an
account of the prominence of the concept of appearance in the history of aesthetics, see my essay "The
Career of Aesthetics in German Thinking," in German Philosophy since Kant, ed. A. O'Hear
(Cambridge, Eng., 1998).

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Duchamp's Fountain: "The work itself has properties that urinals themselves

lack: it is daring, impudent, irreverent, witty and clever."' 2

A different story with the same systematic consequence could be told about
the Brillo Boxes. Were it not for the massive irritations generated by the appearing of these seemingly banal objects, they could not possess the highly artistic

virtues Danto attributes to them in the last sentences of The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace (using visual metaphors all the way down): "As a work of art, the
Brillo Box does more than insist that it is a Brillo box under surprising metaphor-

ic attributes. It does what works of art have always done-externalizing a way of

viewing the world, expressing the interior of a cultural period, offering itself as

a mirror to catch the conscience of our kings."'I3 Without lingering in the presence
of an object of art-without an at once sensitive and interpretive awareness of its
appearing-there is no possibility to take it as an object of art.
An objector to this might argue that this synopsis fails to do justice to those

artworks or practices in art which do not offer any object to be viewed or otherwise sensed. "For art to exist there does not even have to be an object to look at,"

was one of the arguments Danto gave to support his radical position. If one aims
at a philosophical definition of art as Danto does, it would be sufficient to give
just one example of an artwork which has been fully emancipated from visuality. Here, indeed, where we would have a work of visual art without anything relevant to be looked at, visuality would have dropped away. But there is no such
work of art, at least not as far as I know.
There are, of course, instances of conceptual art which consist merely in texts
providing advice for the construing or imagining of objects of art. But this advice

is presented in the form of texts, more or less typed like term papers, hanging on
the wall like a series of paintings, so that they have at once the appearance of pic-

tures and non-pictures, being about the impossibility of a pictorial and picturesque art, nevertheless (from a certain distance) looking like a sequence of
minimalist graphics, and so on. There are statistical experiments like that of
Komar and Melamid about the average preferences of American consumers of

paintings, which gave rise to the painting America's Most Wanted (1994), of
which Danto writes: "As a painting it has no place in the art world at all. What

does have a place in the art world is the performance piece by Komar and
Melamid which consists in the opinion poll, the painting, the publicity, etc. That

work is probably a masterpiece. That work is about the people's art without itself
being people's art at all. That work is 'postmodern, humorous, and ironic,' as one
observer said, as is derivatively, the Most Wanted painting itself."' 4

12. Transfigutraction, 93-94. The status of art objects that seem to state "we are what we are not and
we are not what we are"-to use a quote from Sartre's Being and Nothingness that Danto uses in a
piece on Ad Reinhardt (A. C. Danto, Embodied Meanings [New York, 1995], 204)-concerns the
paradoxical appearance of these works, because otherwise we would have difficulties in distinguishing between artworks and persons, as I think we should.

13. Transfiguration, 208.

14. After the End of At, 216.

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But of course that means that this painting, which "looks unmistakably
Hudson River Biedermeier,"'l is an essential part of this artistic operation, especially in its being a flat, decisively nonauratic (and maybe even anti-auratic)
painting of what the average everyday user of paintings believes to be the paradigm case of an auratic painting. A paradox again which manifests itself solely
in the appearance of that sardonic painting.

Consider, too, the pertinent pieces of land art like Walter de Maria's Vertical
Earth Kilometer installed for the Documenta VI in Kassel in 1977. All that can
be seen is a sandstone plate, measuring two square meters, with a brass manhole
cover in the middle under which a solid brass rod one kilometer in length extends
into the earth. Nothing is to be seen of this rod; the viewer has to know about it
from information provided in the catalogue (or from an additional exhibition,
which was arranged in the museum in 1977, documenting the realization of the
installation). Here, indeed, most of the artwork cannot be seen. But still, visuality, let alone sensuality, does not drop away fully. The beholder experiences a
visuality that withdraws from his or her beholding, an inverted monument, at a
place-a huge lawn in front of the exhibition hall-that would be most suitable
for a conventional sculpture looming into the sky. In other words, the work of art

here is not only the invisible hole but also the place at which one of the longest
artworks in the world is located, maybe the largest sculpture ever made, without

any sign of human power and splendor, without any bit of a Heideggerian Gestell being erected. We are not standing in front of or beneath, but above a gigantic sculpture, which excludes the viewer from any vision of its magnitude and

sublimity. We only have a glance of the top of the thing, which is the center of a
site created by its largely invisible dimension. To be sure, one has to know of this
in order to be sensually aware of the earthly space beyond all spaces in which

sculpture, architecture, and landscape are given. De Maria's work of art is, like
every installation, the creation of an experiential place at which a bodily-sensual
encounter cannot be replaced by anything, even though bodily-sensual experience alone could not identify any artwork here. In art, even nonappearing is a
matter of appearing.'6

At Documenta X in Kassel in 1997, the group Art & Language (consisting of

the English artists Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden) equipped two rooms.
The installation was entitled Sighs Trapped by Liars. In one of them were various furniture-like forms: a sofa, a low table, and a number of armchairs. These

forms were constructed from panels measuring approximately 30cm x 40cm,

which were covered with colored canvas; here texts had been copied (some easily legible, some barely decipherable)- two pages of an open book in each case.
The texts consisted of extracts, partly from the group's publications, from litera-

ture, and from art criticism. Four of the panels were positioned on the wall as

paintings, one of which was without printed text, like an abstract painting.
15. Ibid.

16. For a more extended treatment of the dialectics of appearing, see my forthcoming Asthetik des
Erscheinens.

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Looking at this arrangement with an attitude indifferent to art, one saw strange
pieces of furniture made of colored panels, some of which were hung up like
paintings. Everything was very colorful and cheerful; it was like being in a
kindergarten for adults.

Whoever could perceive this installation as art saw and experienced something
completely different. One participated in a game of differences that dissolved
only to re-form again and again. The squares that made up the objects appeared,
with varying intensity, as pictures, texts, or decorative elements. However one

looked at the small canvases-as the still background for a text, or as the shifting surface for a painting-they always seemed to be denying their status. The
text appeared now as a linguistic meaning, now as a graphic figure. It consisted
of colors and lines or of sentences and paragraphs. By the same token, these
objects consisting of picture/text panels presented themselves as utensils and as
sculptures, without fulfilling one of the two roles completely. They were objects
for bodily use or for contemplative viewing. There was a constant switching
between base and superstructure, between background and foreground. The colorful furniture, which had just reminded us loudly of the needs of the body, metamorphosed into a presentation of the linguisticality of things. The colorful can-

vas, which had just been the background of a theoretical text, moved into the
foreground of an abstract painting.

In oscillating between these ways of appearing, the installation played both

with the literality of the visible and with the materiality of the mental. At the
same time, it ironically commented on recent art's need for commentary. It is just
as impossible to transfer the complex spatial and visual metaphor developed by
this work into another medium as it is to replace a powerful linguistic metaphor.
The metaphor is presented only through the appearing of the work of art. Of

course, this appearing cannot come about without the interpretive sensibility of
beholders. But that does not mean that Art & Language's playing with the
switching to and fro is not visible, is not present in perception. Rather, it is there
solely in that way-for a perception that can see the ensemble as art.

This perception does not first have to be supplied with interpretations in order
then to discover a different process of appearing (after all, the interpretations

offered could be wrong, misleading, or nonsensical). Rather, in the course of the

encounter with the object, this perception discovers the meaningful appearing of
the artwork. In respect of art, the saying "We only see what we already know" is
wrong. All relevant knowledge about the objects of fine art can be confirmed
solely in seeing, in the act of perceiving the particular works of art. Fine art does
indeed require an interpretive seeing, but it is nothing without an interpretive see-

ing (or sensing, if we recall the Vertical Earth Kilometer). This also applies to
very small and, up to now, fictional works. "Familiar as I am with thumbtacks, I

yet have to see a work whose material counterpart is one.""7

17. Transfiguration, 105 (emphasis added).

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Thus, when in one of his most cautious moments Danto says "that artworks

and real things cannot be told apart by visual inspection alone,""8 he is indeed
right. However, one cannot conclude from this that the visual is in any way irrelevant. What can be concluded is just that the perception sufficient for seeing any

"real" object is not sufficient for the perception of an art object. Once we behold
something as a work of fine art, we ascribe to it perceivable properties different
from those any child could ascribe to it. In Art & Language's Documenta room
we say: "The components of this piece of furniture oscillate between text and
image." To make this possible is one of the exemplary tasks of the artist: to give

the look of things an improbable appearance. And isn't this what happens in any

"transfiguration of the commonplace"?

III. CLOSING GAPS, DEFINING ART

My considerations so far have two further critical consequences concerning the

framework of After the End of Art. Danto tends to overstate the systematic gap
between aesthetics and the philosophy of art, as well as the historical gap
between art before and after Warhol.

If it is unjustified to put the aesthetic and the artistic in opposition, then it is

equally implausible to separate philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of

art. Different as mere real things and mere aesthetic objects (of beautiful design,
or beautiful or sublime nature) are from artworks, this difference can be sufficiently explained only if their corresponding modes of appearance are not torn
apart-if we see the philosophy of art as a special (though the most interesting)

part of philosophical aesthetics."9 "It is not that aesthetics is irrelevant to art,"

Danto remarks in passing in his magnum opus on art.20 It is not only not the case
that aesthetics is irrelevant to art, I would prefer to say, but since aesthetic
appearance is essential to all kinds of art, aesthetics is highly relevant to any theory of art.

If it is unjustified to say that visuality has been dropping away in the (visual)
arts since the 1960s, then it seems equally implausible to say that a development
in art-or even the development of art- has at this point come to an end. The

gap between art "since 1400" and what happens today appears much less dramatic. Since the item of an "end" of art is not my topic here, I shall not go into

a discussion of this point. Nevertheless I feel obligated to mention the costs of

my apology for Danto's general position (as I see it) against some of his more
eccentric claims. His philosophy of art history too needs to be revised. For if art

before and after the late 1960s continues to produce aesthetically intense objects

of meaning, then the changes in the art world cannot have that exceptional meaning Danto tends to assume. To be sure, grave changes in artistic production have

18. After the End of Art, 71 (emphasis added).

19. This interconnection across differences is realized in my book Eine Asthetik der Natur
(Frankfurt, 1991).
20. Transfiguration, 107.

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occurred since then: the art scene has become radically pluralistic, together with
an extremely widespread tendency to cross the lines of different artistic genres.
But instead of being the end of all comprehensive development in the arts, this
increasing interactionism might be just one more historically significant devel-

opment. Be-that as it may, I am not at all sure that art came to full Hegelian selfconsciousness in the 1960s-or that such a goal can ever be reached. Going on

in many parts of contemporary art seems to be a deepened self-exploration of art

in respect of its history as well as its genres, its public position as well as its relation to science and theory. It is hard to imagine that this process could come to
an end for internal reasons. What has been called the "end" of art since Hegel's

days has once again turned out to be nothing more-but on the other hand nothing less-than a fundamental change concerning the cultural functions of art.
However, as indicated at the beginning, I shall leave this point in favor of some

concluding remarks about the problem of defining art. Following Hegel, Danto
himself has tied the possibility of a definition of art to a diagnosis of an ending

not of artistic practice but of artistic progress. Only after art has gained full selfconsciousness, Danto claims, can philosophy make a sensible attempt to say
what an artwork is.21 Since I have doubts concerning the diagnoses of an ending

of art, I might seem to be committed to another skeptical consequence here. But

this is not the case. Following Danto I believe that the development after
Duchamp has indeed posed the philosophical question of the demarcation
between art and non-art in a radical way, so that since then there is a much bet-

ter chance to come up with a plausible definition. Thus I find myself once more
in a position to defend Danto's project, this time not so much against himself but

against those critics who condemn the very attempt to define art as a roll back
into essentialist metaphysics.

The crucial question that has to be answered first is what are we doing when

we try to give such a definition. The main answer is a negative one. To propose

a definition of art in no way means to establish a criterion of art-neither a criterion of good art nor a criterion of what deserves to count as (good or bad) art.
To acknowledge a given object as art or as good art always implies a critical judgment about this object (or is derivative of such judgments given by others). To be

sure, every philosophy of art must unavoidably rely upon the past and present
discourse of art-critical interpretation and evaluation, since its examples are usu-

ally well-established works of art. There are no artworks outside the reach of (a
variety of historical styles of) artistic appreciation. But the philosophy of art does

not directly contribute to this kind of discourse. Of course the philosophy of art
may have and is allowed to have a more or less strong (or, to be realistic, a more

or less weak) influence on artistic production and art criticism; however, it does
not itself, as long as it is philosophy of art, perform sequences of critical dis-

course. Its chief purpose is not the interpretation and evaluation of artworks and
21. "By 'after the end of art,' I mean 'after the ascent to philosophical self-reflection."' "The end
of art consists in the coming to awareness of the true philosophical nature of art." After the End ofArt,
14 and 30.

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artistic developments, but a reflection on what kind of practice we are involved

in when we are concerned with making, performing, perceiving, and interpreting

works of art. Or, to put it in Danto's own words, its foremost enterprise is a
reflection on how the "art world" relates to the rest of the world.

At this point another negative answer must be given. A definition of art should
not be understood as a synopsis of what a philosophy of art is able to achieve, but
rather as a recalling of the starting point of art-theoretical reflections-a starting
point, to be sure, they have to come back to again and again. An appropriate definition of art does not give a final answer, it gives an initial one. It cannot by any

means say what we are doing when we are dealing with art. Nevertheless, it
might say what we are talking about when we are treating art philosophically.
According to Wittgenstein, philosophical problems often have the form of "not

knowing where one is"; maybe it is a good idea to see the search for a definition
of art (as prima facie anti-Wittgensteinian as it is) in light of this remark. A definition may help to say where we are, what kind of problems we have in think-

ing about the difference between art and non-art. A useful "definition of art"
would not give a substantial answer; rather it would raise-or at least help to
raise-the right kinds of questions.

In my opinion, this is exactly what Danto does when he offers his definition of
art.22 He does not say anything about the good and the bad in art, he gives two
conditions that every object treated as an artwork has always already satisfied.
First, it has a dimension of aboutness; this makes a difference with respect to all
"mere real things." Second, being "about" the world in some way, it articulates
its meaning through procedures of embodiment; this makes a difference with
respect to all other species of aboutness, that is, all other kinds of "representa-

tion" in a wide sense of the term. As Danto himself sees it, in his major opus on

art he analyzed the first condition sufficiently, whereas some work is left to be
done on the second. This is so because once having separated the object of art
from all mere things it is placed into the sphere of signs, where a neat separation
is a much more complex matter. But here as well, the task of any further elaboration is as clear as can be: what has to be discussed is the ways in which artis-

tic embodiment differs from other kinds of designation. A discussion of this point
will contribute to the question of what we are doing when we are making and
experiencing artworks in contrast to other things in the world and other sayings
about and showings of the world.
Thus the job of a definition of art is primarily to mark the differences that are

at stake when we-practically or theoretically-are concerned with art. Its job is

not that of a doorman watching out for the right kind of things entering the dis-

cotheque named "art world."23 Its purpose is solely to delimit the dance floor on
which everything that happens to have gained entrance makes its individual
moves. It says what it means to be a member of the art world, not what is required

22. For the following, see After the End of Art, esp. 193ff.
23. I owe this example to Karlheinz Lfideking.

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to enter. In Danto's original version, it says quite laconically it has to do with

aboutness and with presenting its contents through a process of appearing.
Is this an "essentialist" position, as Danto and his critics declare it to be? I do

not think so. It is a statement about the sorts of differences that are at play wherever something is taken to be art, at least up to now. Nobody knows what will
happen tomorrow. Since "art" and "artwork" are normative concepts, there cannot be such a thing as an everlasting essence of art; all "ontology" of the art world

rests upon persistent demarcations that are continuously held to be relevant

where things such as artworks are at stake. Artworks and the art world exist as a
realm of cultural practice, and it is possible-although, if thinkers such as Hegel

and Danto are right, quite improbable-that human cultures may one day lose all
interest in objects that make possible an experiential encounter with ways of
encountering the world. Thus, the attempt to understand the function of art quite
naturally implies a defense-however tacit-of the importance not of this or that

work of art, but of the cultural possibility of making and perceiving art.
Combining this implicit theoretical apology of art with an emphatic criticism of
artworks and art movements, as Danto personally does, is a permanent encore for
which we should be additionally grateful. It demonstrates that a philosophical
enthusiasm for art must not make philosophers blind to what they believe to be

their passion.24

Justus-Liebig- Universitdt
Giessen

24. Thanks to John Farrell for rectifying my English.

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