Lecture Notes

Resurgence in the ontology of art. Artists pushed art in certain ways that demanded new
theories and ways of understanding. Questioning theoretical understandings. After weitz.

Imitation theory: Plato. Sense of an image from the physical world.

Then Post-impressionists, first to challenge this IT.

Aiming to create something that equaled the physical world. Do not seek to imitate form but
create it. Vincent van Gogh, the Potato eaters no sense that the artist is trying to deceive us
that this is real world. If not imitation then reality.

Forms: sitting on same plane as the bed. Creating a real object. Unless you look at them as
failed attempts to imitate. Ontological shift.

Readymades: Duchamp says how chosen with complete indifference, absence of good or bad
taste. Werent made to be looked at. These are reality. Under imitation theory it was easier,
easy to identify as work of art. Even with impressionists they were paintings.
Are the artists and philistines saying same thing when they say all I can see is paint.

Zen garden is just rocks. Is zen adept and philistines answer the same. Zen: everything in the
world is unified and an illusion so therefore the same. Seeing reality. Imbued with zen
understandings? Reflection of reality. World view has coloured the way we see these objects:
imbue a different comprehension. Van goghs paintings and the readymades are art and
according to RT they are art. Suddenly art is part of the real world.

Physically same object.

Only through the interpretations that the paintings are different. See as different after
interpretation. Cant see both at same time: two interpretations are incompatible. Physical
thing is not all there is to the worl of art. Consists of a thing (physical object) and a theory.
Works of art are not just things, but interpreted things.

Arthur Danto writes that: What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a
work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art. How does Danto arrive at
this conclusion?

The Artworld notes

Hamlet and Socrates spoke of art as a mirror held up to nature. Danto:
factual basis. Hamlet thought they showed us what we could otherwise
not perceive. However mirroring objects is not art. P 154. Which was once
celebrated as the essence of art because of its mimetic features, now
almost demoted to mere illustration. We know how to separate what is
and isnt art. Theories are like mirror images: show us what we already
know. P 155. Do not know we are on an artistic terrain without artistic
theory to tell us. Theories help make art possible.

P155. Imitation theory: IT. A powerful theory, brings unity into complex
domain.conceptual revolution: new theories replace old ones. Post
impressionists challenged this. Could only be accepted as art, if bad art.
Rewuired a theoretical revision. Emphasis on newly significant features.
Other anthropological objects now accepted as art. Speaks as though
there were only one replacing theory. Artists understood as not
unsuccessfully imititating real forms but successfully creating new forms
(p156). As real as the forms which old art was imitating (157). Posts were
creating. Roger Fry aiming not at illusion but reality this is RT. Artworks
specifically created not to deceive. Non-imitations. Occupies space
between real objects and real imitations of real objects. 157. New
contribution to the world. No more or less real than IT artworks. Byt the
theory of RT.this is how we understand todays artworks. A painting of a
numeral is that numeral. A 3 made out of paint. Rauschenberg. If you
went to sleep in bed (mistook art for reality) would be an odd mistake. But
it was meant to be reality according to RT (p.158) can you mistake reality
for reality? Why is it not a misshapen bed? What makes it art?

When you mistake artwork for an object when it is the object you mistake
it for. Like mistaking a person for a material body: is a material body but
no way to discover that they are not a material body. Not bed with paint,
or bed illusion. Is a paint-bed.we are a conscious-body. Irreducible to
parts.

P159. The is. Something children master. That triangle is me. The is of
artistic identification. A is b, can still say that a is not b. the truth of the
first requires the truth of the second? A stands for a physical property of
an object that is a necessary condition for something to be an artwork,
uses the special is.

Newtons laws/artworks. Identifications are incompatible. Make a different

artwork even though each artwork contains identical real object.
Testadura says all I see is paint! Has to master the is of artistic
identification before seeing it as a work of art. P.162. difference between
testadura and abstract artist is the atmosphere of artistic theories in
which it was born.

162. Warhol: facsimiles, made of wood. Outside gallery, cartons. Has not
made a real object. Has made an artwork. Brillo box being an artists
materials. Theory of art takes it up into the world of art. Not merely just
the real object which it is. Without the theory would not be seen as art.
Fifty years prior could not have been art. (Weitz??) world has to be ready
for it. Art theories make the artworld and art possible.

Still remains a fundamental contrast between artworks and real objects.

Early IT: nonreality of art, so only other option is to be a sham: too narrow.
the brillo box of the artworld may just be the Brillo box of the real one,
separated and united by the is of artistic identification. P.164.

British journal of aesthetics, vol 40. No 3, july 2000. Joseph Margolis.

A closer look at Dantos account of Art and Perception.
Knows of no important circumstances in which the question what is it to
be a thing of this or that kind? depends on first answering in what
circumstances might these things be indiscernible from each other?

Gombrich and Danto on Defining Art Author(s): David Carrier Source: The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Summer, 1996), pp. 279-281

No essence of art?

Review: Lessons of the Brillo Box

Reviewed Work: After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History by Artkur C. Danto
Review by: Roger Copeland
The Wilson Quarterly (1976-)
Vol. 21, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), pp. 90-92

Danto meaning the end of art is actually the end of the master narratives
p. 90 One of Dantos salient themes is that the visual arts have been freed from traditional demands
of visual connoisseurship and formal analysis.

p.91. few works have meant as much to me as Warhols Brillo Box, and I have spent a fair portion of
my waking time working out the implications of my experience of it

Greenbergs account of modernism cannot explain Warhols works which blur distinctions between
real objects and art objects. art can look exactly like real things which have no claim to the status of
art at all. Danto

Danto cheered by an artworld where everything is permitted. But no an accurate description of the
present? Says Copeland. dantos utterly unqualified celebration of creative freedom

The Aesthetic Essence of Art Author(s): Richard Lind Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 117- 129 Published by: Wiley on behalf of
The American Society for Aesthetics

p.117 art forms regularly dislodge each new art theory. Arthur Danto, has plausi- bly argued
that all art makes some sort of "state- ment" interpretable only by artworld partici- pants
familiar with an appropriate art theory. Nothing can be an artwork until an artworld theory
emerges by which it can be understood.

Our counter thesis, then, will be that the con- cepts of "art" and "artwork" must be defined in
terms of the creation of significant aesthetic objects.

Danto doesnt offer a readily accessible formulation of his definition of art

At the heart of his work is concern for the difference between everyday objects and artworks
like Warhols Brillo Boxes. Only one is subject to interpretation. Not everything can be an
artwork at any time.

On the basis of such observations Danto seems to offer a set of necessary, if not sufficient,
conditions for "art": a) the use of some object b) to make an original statement c)
interpretable within an artworld context
The moment something is considered an artwork, it becomes subject to an interpretation. It
owes its existence as an artwork to this, and when its claim to art is defeated, it loses its
interpretation and becomes a mere thing. To see something as art demands nothing less than
this, an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art. Danto p.118

Accused of failing to specify what makes a community an artworld community. P.118

Danto can thus claim that the artworld is a community of individuals prepared to see the
world as the artist does through his statement

To danto the function of art is to convey meanings decipherable by an appropriate artworld

audience. Exclusionary????

Potential for interpretation therefore has to be an integral part of anythings being an

artwork.

d. So Danto's "aboutness" thesis leaves out a significant segment of what the artworld
embraces as art. (referring to the artist trying to make us see their ways of seeing the world
ie has to be about something in the world)

Danto regards artworld meanings as limited to whatever is specified by particular art theo-
ries. In doing so, he seems to have overlooked one basic meaning that appears to be
universal, present even where the work is nonobjective. That meaning is authorship, by which
we recog- nize that what has been presented to us is the product of a certain special activity
on the part of its creator

Art is always at least about itself; it conveys by certain mutually understood clues the idea
that it is the sort of thing created for a specific kind of appreciation by a certain kind of
audience

if "art" does have a set of sufficient conditions, we need to find at least one more ingredient.
I shall contend that the key condition that Danto's theory lacks-and even eschews-is the
requirement that the main function of art is to produce aesthetic objects

What Makes Art Art? Author(s): Mary H. Kaprelian Source: Dance Research Journal, Vol. 7,
No. 1 (Autumn, 1974 - Winter, 1975), pp. 10-12 Published by: Congress on Research in
Dance

danto does not refer to any certain theory. Dickie calls dantos argument stimulating
The Journal of Aesthetics and Danto's Philosophical Criticism Author(s): Daniel Herwitz
Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 2, Aesthetics: Past and
Present. A Commemorative Issue Celebrating 50 Years of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism and the American Society for Aesthetics (Spring, 1993), pp. 261-270

P262. Danto believes that an historically evolving theory, held by the artworld, defines art;
more- over, that the history of avant-garde art has a Hegelian shape, a destiny.3 Avant-garde
art has been impelled by the urge to become self-con- scious of its own theoretical nature,
with the most unlikely artwork in the world serving as the culmination of this project, namely
Andy War- hol's Brillo Box
P263. On what basis does Danto feel entitled to read Warhol's intentions and game in the
way that he does? Surely not on the basis of the visual evidence of Warhol's Brillo Box, for
those boxes look as unlike their ordinary counterparts as they look like them

P264. They are closed, empty, painted, and silkscreened.5 They look useless, ironic, and
playful, even absurd. Are these visual facts sig- nificant or not? We need Danto to tell us why
Warhol would have bothered to make his boxes look so different from ordinary ones if he in-
vested no significance in their visually unique features. If Warhol's primary reason in making
these boxes was to stimulate the thought that they are (really) identical to ordinary ones, dif-
fering only by their presence in the gallery and a theory to back them up, why did he make
them oversized, why are they half-painted and half- mass-produced, why their comedy?

P265. How should Warhol's Brillo Box be read? Danto assumes that it is precisely Warhol's
intention, in the Duchampian voice of the philosopher, to create an object about which there
is little to see, feel, and engage in the way of an ordinary art- work. Warhol himself seems to
half-believe that artworks are no different from mass-produced things, that only a context
makes one different from the other. But is the complexity of that context given its due by the
notion of a theory

So far we have examined only the likenesses between Warhol's boxes and their ordinary
coun- terparts; let us turn now to their differences. Danto acknowledges that Warhol's boxes
look different from ordinary ones, but he immediately and without argument elides the point,
saying that for all intents and purposes the two are the same. Well, for whose intents and
purposes? Warhol's? If Warhol meant his boxes to be the same as ordinary ones, why did he
make them look so strikingly parodic? His point was to make his boxes look both like and
unlike the ordinary boxes, for their play is established through their flirtation with sameness
and their parody of it.

The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol Author(s): Paul Mattick
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Summer, 1998), pp. 965-987 Published by: The
University of Chicago Press

P968. Not only does the way the Brillo boxes look not actually support Danto's reading of
them but there is no reason I know of to think that Warhol was particularly interested in the
question, What is art? to which Danto believes his work provides an answer.

Art, Artworlds, and Ideology Author(s): Marx W. Wartofsky Source: The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Spring, 1980), pp. 239- 247 Published by: Wiley
on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
The artworld is self-constituting

Theories of Art and the Artworld: Comments Author(s): W. E. Kennick Source: The Journal
of Philosophy, Vol. 61, No. 19, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Sixty-
First Annual Meeting (Oct. 15, 1964), pp. 585-587 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

p. 585 What Danto calls "the 'is' of artistic identification" strikes me as being a hybrid. There
is an idiomatic use of 'is' that fits Danto's examples, but I question his account of it.

p.586 Danto admits that there are such things as "pure abstrac- tions," but he does not take
their existence as showing that his claim is false. For he holds that to say such things as 'This
is black paint and nothing more', which one would suppose is to employ only the 'is' of
ordinary identification, is still to use the 'is' of artistic (i.e., representational) identification.
This strikes me as false

Nor do I see what the 'is' of artistic identification has to do with art theory.

Aesthetic Dualism and the Transfiguration of the Commonplace Author(s): Crispin Sartwell
Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Summer, 1988), pp. 461-
467

p.463 the argument is puzzling, because it seems to ignore the rather obvious fact that one
and the same object can gain and lose properties over time without becoming something else.
Notice that it is not the case that Fountain is simultaneously beneath notice and revolutionary.
Being revolutionary is a property that comes to be displayed at a certain time

r. For, of course, everything enters into an indefinite number of new relations all the time, and
the view that entering into new relations gives a thing a new identity would oblige us to
maintain that nothing remains what it is for more than an infinitesimal instant.

p.465 The two senses of "is" are not necessar- ily in conflict. The claim that the painting is in
the ordinary sense paint in no way contradicts the claim that the painting is also in the artistic
sense paint (or, for that matter, Icarus)

p.466 I do want to suggest that Danto's arguments fail to refute the claim that some works of
art are identical to physical objects.

Roger Fry, vision and design, London:chatto and Windus. 1920

p.157. They do not seek to imitate form, but to create form ; not to imitate life, but to find an
equivalent for lifeIn fact, they aim not at illusion but at reality

Philosophers and their Critics : Danto and His Critics (2)

CONTRIBUTOR
Rollins, Mark
PUBLISHER
Wiley-Blackwell
DATE PUBLISHED
February 2012

Chaper 7: A Tale of Two Artworlds. By George Dickie.

p.112 references danto talking about dickies theory as: implies a kind of empowering elite

the art world is clearly not a body which acts as one.

p.113 dickie calls dantos account of the artworld inconsistent.

The artworld depends on prior existence .Plays no role in creating art (but makes it
possible??)

Danto is not concerned with what makes something a work of art, but rather what is required
for someone to realise that a certain kind of thing can be a work of art.

p.114 on dantos view, can a work of art be made by a single artist such as Warhol or does it
require the actions of members of a larger group a quorum of artworld persons?

neil carrol: chapter 8: Essence and expression: dantos philosophy of art.

p.121. danto hypothesizes that artworks are about something, that real things are not about
anything. Real object is what it is. (this is the is of artistic identification)

p.122 danto isolates aboutness as a necessary condition for arthood by means of the
indiscernibility method.
p.123. that artworks have subjects and engage interpreations, though necessary features of
artworks on dantos view, hardly serve to differentiate them from many other things.

Danto and His Critics: After the End of Art and Art History Author(s): David Carrier 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. 1-16 Published by: Wiley for
Wesleyan University

P4. Merely by looking at an object like Brillo Box, Danto allows, we cannot determine its
iden- tity as artwork; but with proper knowledge of its history-and that includes for him
reference to the artist's intentions-interpretation is entirely unambiguous.

P12. What defines an artwork, Warhol thus demonstrated, is not a thing's mere visual
properties. In the proper setting, given suitable theorizing, perhaps any kind of object
whatsoever could be an artwork. This means that the modernist project is over, for there is
nothing left that artists can do to advance this project. Hence the history of art has ended
because no longer is it possible to make new sorts of artworks, and so we live in what Danto,
here borrowing from Hegel's aesthetics, thought of as a posthistor- ical era.

NOW ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE IS WHAT HE MEANS BY THE END OF ART

The is doesnt describe. It is an evaluation or interpretation.

Danto, Arthur Coleman. 1998. Beyond the brillo box: The visual arts in post-historical
perspective. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Introduction.

P4. Art did not have to be beautiful; it need make no effort to furnish the eye with an
array of sensations equivalent to what the real world would furnish it with.

The Artworld Revisited: comedies of similarity. P36. The artworld decreed that Brillo Box
but not the brillo box was a candidate for appreciation.

Who or what constitutes the artworld or what is sufficient knowledge of art theories?