two pages essay

Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

The Artworld Author(s): Arthur Danto Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61, No. 19, American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Sixty-First Annual Meeting (Oct. 15, 1964), pp. 571-584 Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2022937 Accessed: 08-04-2016 17:29 UTC

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SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK OF ART 571

THE ARTWORLD *

Hamlet:

Do you see nothing there ?

The Queen:

Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.

Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act III, Scene IV

AMLET and Socrates, though in praise and deprecation respectively, spoke of art as a mirror held up to nature.

As with many disagreements in attitude, this one has a factual

basis. Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can already see; so art, insofar as mirrorlike, yields idle accurate duplications

of the appearances of things, and is of no cognitive benefit what- ever. Hamlet, more acutely, recognized a remarkable feature of

reflecting surfaces, namely that they show us what we could not

otherwise perceive-our own face and form-and so art, insofar as it is mirrorlike, reveals us to ourselves, and is, even by socratic

criteria, of some cognitive utility after all. As a philosopher, how- ever, I find Socrates' discussion defective on other, perhaps less

profound grounds than these. If a mirror-image of o is indeed

an imitation of o, then, if art 'is imitation, mirror-images are art.

But in fact mirroring objects no more is art than returning

weapons to a madman is justice; and reference to mirrorings

would be just the sly sort of counterinstance we would expect

Socrates to bring forward in rebuttal of the theory he instead uses them to illustrate. If that theory requires us to class these

as art, it thereby shows its inadequacy: "is an imitation" will not do as a sufficient condition for "is art." Yet, perhaps because artists were engaged in imitation, in Socrates' time and after, the insufficiency of the theory was not noticed until the invention of

photography. Once rejected as a sufficient condition, mimesis was

quickly discarded as even a necessary one; and since the achieve-

ment of Kandinsky, mimetic features have been relegated to the periphery of critical concern, so much so that some works survive in spite of possessing those virtues, excellence in which was once

celebrated as the essence of art, narrowly escaping demotion to mere illustrations.

It is, of course, indispensable in socratic discussion that all

participants be masters of the concept up for analysis, since the

aim is to match a real defining expression to a term in active

use, and the test for adequacy presumably consists in showing

* To be presented in a symposium on "The Work of Art" at the sixty- first annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern

Division, December 28, 1964.

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572 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

that the former analyzes and applies to all and only those things

of which the latter is true. The popular disclaimer notwithstand- ing, then, Socrates' auditors purportedly knew what art was as well

as what they liked; and a theory of art, regarded here as a real

definition of 'Art', is accordingly not to be of great use in help-

ing men to recognize instances of its application. Their antece-

dent ability to do this is precisely what the adequacy of the

theory is to be tested against, the problem being only to make

explicit what they already know. It is our use of the term that the

theory allegedly means to capture, but we are supposed able, in the words of a recent writer, "to separate those objects which are

works of art from those which are not, because . . . we know how correctly to use the word 'art' and to apply the phrase 'work

of art'." Theories, on this account, are somewhat like mirror-

images on Socrates' account, showing forth what we already know,

wordy reflections of the actual linguistic practice we are masters in.

But telling artworks from other things is not so simple a

matter, even for native speakers, and these days one might not be aware he was on artistic terrain without an artistic theory to tell

him so. And part of the reason for this lies in the fact that

terrain is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic theories, so that

one use of theories, in addition to helping us discriminate art from the rest, consists in making art possible. Glaucon and the

others could hardly have known what was art and what not:

otherwise they would never have been taken in by mirror-images.

I

Suppose one thinks of the discovery of a whole new class of artworks as something analogous to the discovery of a whole new class of facts anywhere, viz., as something for theoreticians to explain. In science, as elsewhere, we often accommodate new facts to old theories via auxiliary hypotheses, a pardonable enough conservatism when the theory in question is deemed too valuable

to be jettisoned all at once. Now the Imitation Theory of Art (IT) is, if one but thinks it through, an exceedingly powerful theory, explaining a great many phenomena connected with the causation and evaluation of artworks, bringing a surprising unity into a complex domain. Moreover, it is a simple matter to shore it up against many purported counterinstances by such auxiliary

hypotheses as that the artist who deviates from mimeticity is

perverse, inept, or mad. Ineptitude, chicanery, or folly are, in

fact, testable predications. Suppose, then, tests reveal that these

hypotheses fail to hold, that the theory, now beyond repair, must

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SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK OF ART 573

be replaced. And a new theory is worked out, capturing what it can of the old theory's competence, together with the heretofore recalcitrant facts. One might, thinking along these lines, repre- sent certain episodes in the history of art as not dissimilar to cer-

tain episodes in the history of science, where a conceptual revolu-

tion is being effected and where refusal to countenance certain

facts, while in part due to prejudice, inertia, and self-interest, is

due also to the fact that a well-established, or at least widely

credited theory is being threatened in such a way that all coher-

ence goes.

Some such episode transpired with the advent of post-impres- sionist paintings. In terms of the prevailing artistic theory (IT), it was impossible to accept these as art unless inept art: otherwise

they could be discounted as hoaxes, self-advertisements, or the

visual counterparts of madmen's ravings. So to get them accepted

as art, on a footing with the Transfiguration (not to speak of a

Landseer stag), required not so much a revolution in taste as a

theoretical revision of rather considerable proportions, involving not only the artistic enfranchisement of these objects, but an

emphasis upon newly significant features of accepted artworks, so that quite different accounts of their status as artworks would now have to be given. As a result of the new theory's accept-

ance, not only were post-impressionist paintings taken up as art,

but numbers of objects (masks, weapons, etc.) were transferred from anthropological museums (and heterogeneous other places)

to musees des beaux arts, though, as we would expect from the fact that a criterion for the acceptance of a new theory is that it account for whatever the older one did, nothing had to be trans-

ferred out of the muse'e des beaux arts-even if there were internal rearrangements as between storage rooms and exhibition space.

Countless native speakers hung upon suburban mantelpieces in- numerable replicas of paradigm cases for teaching the expression

'work of art' that would have sent their Edwardian forebears into linguistic apoplexy.

To be sure, I distort by speaking of a theory: historically,

there were several, all, interestingly enough, more or less defined in terms of the IT. Art-historical complexities must yield before

the exigencies of logical exposition, and I shall speak as though there were one replacing theory, partially compensating for his- torical falsity by choosing one which was actually enunciated. According to it, the artists in question were to be understood not

as unsuccessfully imitating real forms but as successfully creating new ones, quite as real as the forms which the older art had been

thought, in its best examples, to be creditably imitating. Art,

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574 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

after all, had long since been thought of as creative (Vasari says

that God was the first artist), and the post-impressionists were

to be explained as genuinely creative, aiming, in Roger Fry's

words, "not at illusion but reality." This theory (RT) furnished

a whole new mode of looking at painting, old and new. Indeed,

one might almost interpret the crude drawing in Van Gogh and

Cezanne, the dislocation of form from contour in Rouault and

Dufy, the arbitrary use of color planes in Gauguin and the Fauves,

as so many ways of drawing attention to the fact that these were

non-imitations, specifically intended not to deceive. Logically,

this would be roughly like printing "Not Legal Tender" across a

brilliantly counterfeited dollar bill, the resulting object (counter-

feit cum inscription) rendered incapable of deceiving anyone.

It is not an illusory dollar bill, but then, just because it is non- illusory it does not automatically become a real dollar bill either.

It rather occupies a freshly opened area between real objects and

real facsimiles of real objects: it is a non-facsimile, if one requires

a word, and a new contribution to the world. Thus, Van Gogh's

Potato Eaters, as a consequence of certain unmistakable distor-

tions, turns out to be a non-facsimile of real-life potato eaters;

and inasmuch as these are not facsimiles of potato eaters, Van

Gogh's picture, as a non-imitation, had as much right to be called

a real object as did its putative subjects. By means of this theory (RT), artworks re-entered the thick of things from which soc- ratic theory (IT) had sought to evict them: if no more real than

what carpenters wrought, they were at least no less real. The Post-Impressionist won a victory in ontology.

It is in terms of RT that we must understand the artworks

around us today. Thus Roy Lichtenstein paints comic-strip panels, though ten or twelve feet high. These are reasonably

faithful projections onto a gigantesque scale of the homely frames

from the daily tabloid, but it is precisely the scale that counts.

A skilled engraver might incise The Virgin and the Chancellor Rollin on a pinhead, and it would be recognizable as such to the

keen of sight, but an engraving of a Barnett Newman on a similar scale would be a blob, disappearing in the reduction. A photo- graph of a Lichtenstein is indiscernible from a photograph of a

counterpart panel from Steve Canyon; but the photograph fails to capture the scale, and hence is as inaccurate a reproduction as

a black-and-white engraving of Botticelli, scale being essential here

as color there. Lichtensteins, then, are not imitations but new

entities, as giant whelks would be. Jasper Johns, by contrast, paints objects with respect to which questions of scale are ir-

relevant. Yet his objects cannot be imitations, for they have the

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SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK OF ART 575

remarkable property that any intended copy of a member of this class of objects is automatically a member of the class itself, so that these objects are logically inimitable. Thus, a copy of a numeral just is that numeral: a painting of 3 is a 3 made of paint. Johns, in addition, paints targets, flags, and maps. Finally, in what I hope are not unwitting footnotes to Plato, two of our pioneers-Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg-have made genuine beds.

Rauschenberg's bed hangs on a wall, and is streaked with some desultory housepaint. Oldenburg's bed is a rhomboid, narrower at one end than the other, with what one might speak of as a built-in perspective: ideal for small bedrooms. As beds, these sell at singularly inflated prices, but one could sleep in either of them: Rauschenberg has expressed the fear that someone might just climb into his bed and fall asleep. Imagine, now, a certain Testadura-a plain speaker and noted philistine-who is not aware that these are art, and who takes them to be reality simple and pure. He attributes the paintstreaks on Rauschenberg's bed to the slovenliness of the owner, and the bias in the Oldenburg bed to the ineptitude of the builder or the whimsy, perhaps, of who- ever had it "custom-made." These would be mistakes, but mis- takes of rather an odd kind, and not terribly different from that made by the stunned birds who pecked the sham grapes of Zeuxis. They mistook art for reality, and so has Testadura. But it was meant to be reality, according to RT. Can one have mistaken reality for reality? How shall we describe Testadura 's error? What, after all, prevents Oldenburg's creation from being a mis- shapen bed? This is equivalent to asking what makes it art, and with this query we enter a domain of conceptual inquiry where native speakers are poor guides: they are lost themselves.

II

To mistake an artwork for a real object is no great feat when an artwork is the real object one mistakes it for. The problem is how to as oid such errors, or to remove them once they are made. The artwork is a bed, and not a bed-illusion; so there is nothing like the traumatic encounter against a flat surface that brought it home to the birds of Zeuxis that they had been duped. Except for the guard cautioning Testadura not to sleep on the artworks, he might never have discovered that this was an artwork and not a bed; and since, after all, one cannot discover that a bed is not a bed, how is Testadura to realize that he has made an error 7 A certain sort of explanation is required, for the error here is a

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576 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

curiously philosophical one, rather like, if we may assume as cor-

rect some well-known views of P. F. Strawson, mistaking a person

for a material body when the truth is that a person is a material

body in the sense that a whole class of predicates, sensibly ap-

plicable to material bodies, are sensibly, and by appeal to no

different criteria, applicable to persons. So you cannot discover that a person is not a material body.

We begin by explaining, perhaps, that the paintstreaks are not

to be explained away, that they are part of the object, so the

object is not a mere bed with-as 'it happens-streaks of paint spilled over it, but a complex object fabricated out of a bed and some paintstreaks: a paint-bed. Similarly, a person is not a ma-

terial body with-as it happens-some thoughts superadded, but is a complex entity made up of a body and some conscious states:

a conscious-body. Persons, like artworks, must then be taken as irreducible to parts of themselves, and are in that sense primitive.

Or, more accurately, the paintstreaks are not part of the real object-the bed-which happens to be part of the artwork, but

are, like the bed, part of the artwork as such. And this might be

generalized into a rough characterization of artworks that happen

to contain real objects as parts of themselves: not every part of an artwork A is part of a real object R when R is part of A and can, moreover, be detached from A and seen merely as B. The mistake thus far will have been to mistake A for part of itself, namely B, even though it would not be incorrect to say that A is B,

that the artwork is a bed. It is the 'is' which requires clarifica- tion here.

There is an is that figures prominently in statements concern-

ing artworks which is not the is of either identity or predication; nor is it the is of existence, of identification, or some special is

made up to serve a philosophic end. Nevertheless, it is in common usage, and is readily mastered by children. It is the sense of is in accordance with which a child, shown a circle and a triangle

and asked which is him and which his sister, will point to the triangle saying "That is me"; or, in response to my question, the person next to me points to the man in purple and says "That one is Lear"; or in the gallery I point, for my companion's bene- fit, to a spot in the painting before us and say "That white dab is

Icarus." We do not mean, in these instances, that whatever is pointed to stands for, or represents, what it is said to be, for the word 'Icarus' stands for or represents Icarus: yet I would not in the same sense of is point to the word and say " That is Icarus. " The sentence "That a is b" is perfectly compatible with "That a is not b " when the first employs this sense of is and the second

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SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK OF ART 577

employs some other, though a and b are used nonambiguously throughout. Often, indeed, the truth of the first requires the truth of the second. The first, in fact, is incompatible with "That a is not b" only when the is is used nonambiguously throughout. For want of a word I shall designate this the is of artistic identifi- cation; in each case in which it is used, the a stands for some specific physical property of, or physical part of, an object; and, finally, it is a necessary condition for something to be an artwork that some part or property of it be designable by the subject of a sentence that employs this special is. It is an is, incidentally, which has near-relatives in marginal and mythical pronounce- ments. (Thus, one is Quetzalcoatl; those are the Pillars of Hercules.)

Let me illustrate. Two painters are asked to decorate the east and west walls of a science library with frescoes to be respectively called Newton's First Law and Newton's Third Law. These paint- ings, when finally unveiled, look, scale apart, as follows:

A B

As objects I shall suppose the works to be indiscernible: a black, horizontal line on a white ground, equally large in each dimension and element. B explains his work as follows: a mass, pressing downward, is met by a mass pressing upward: the lower mass reacts equally and oppositely to the upper one. A explains his work as follows: the line through the space is the path of an isolated particle. The path goes from edge to edge, to give the sense of its going beyond. If it ended or began within the space, the line would be curved: and it is parallel to the top and bottom edges, for if it were closer to one than to another, there would have to be a force accounting for it, and this is inconsistent with its being the path of an isolated particle.

Much follows from these artistic identifications. To regard

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578 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

the middle line as an edge (mass meeting mass) imposes the need

to identify the top and bottom half of the picture as rectangles, and as two distinct parts (not necessarily as two masses, for the line

could be the edge of one mass jutting up-or down-into empty

space). If it is an edge, we cannot thus take the entire area of the

painting as a single space: it is rather composed of two forms, or

one form and a non-form. We could take the entire area as a

single space only by taking the middle horizontal as a line which is not an edge. But this almost requires a three-dimensional

identification of the whole picture: the area can be a flat surface

which the line is above (Jet-flight), or below (Submarine-path), or on (Line), or in (Fissure), or through (Newton's First Law)-

though in this last case the area is not a flat surface but a trans-

parent cross section of absolute space. We could make all these

prepositional qualifications clear by imagining perpendicular cross

sections to the picture plane. Then, depending upon the ap- plicable prepositional clause, the area is (artistically) interrupted

or not by the horizontal element. If we take the line as through

space, the edges of the picture are not really the edges of the space: the space goes beyond the picture if the line itself does;

and we are in the same space as the line is. As B, the edges of

the picture can be part of the picture in case the masses go right to the edges, so that the edges of the picture are their edges. In

that case, the vertices of the picture would be the vertices of the

masses, except that the masses have four vertices more than the picture itself does: here four vertices would be part of the art

work which were not part of the real object. Again, the faces

of the masses could be the face of the picture, and in looking at the picture, we are looking at these faces: but space has no face,

and on the reading of A the work has to be read as faceless, and the face of the physical object would not be part of the artwork. Notice here how one artistic identification engenders another artis- tic identification, and how, consistently with a given identification, we are required to give others and precluded from still others: indeed, a given identification determines how many elements the

work is to contain. These different identifications are incompatible with one another, or generally so, and each might be said to make a different artwork, even though each artwork contains the identical real object as part of itself-or at least parts of the identical real

object as parts of itself. There are, of course, senseless identifica- tions: no one could, I think, sensibly read the middle horizontal as Love's Labour's Lost or The Asceendency of St. Erasmus. Fiinally, notice how acceptance of one identification rather than another

is in effect to exchange one world for another. We could, indeed,

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SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK OF ART 579

enter a quiet poetic world by identifying the upper area with a clear and cloudless sky, reflected in the still surface of the water

below, whiteness kept from whiteness only by the unreal boundary

of the horizon.

And now Testadura, having hovered in the wings throughout

this discussion, protests that all he sees is paint: a white painted

oblong with a black line painted across it. And how right he really is: that is all he sees or that anybody can, we aesthetes in-

cluded. So, if he asks us to show him what there is further to see,

to demonstrate through pointing that this is an artwork (Sea and

Sky), we cannot comply, for he has overlooked nothing (and it

would be absurd to suppose he had, that there was something tiny

we could point to and he, peering closely, say "So it is! A work

of art after all !"). We cannot help him until he has mastered

the is of artistic identification and so constitutes it a work of art.

If he cannot achieve this, he will never look upon artworks: he will be like a child who sees sticks as sticks.

But what about pure abstractions, say something that looks just

like A but is entitled No. 7? The 10th Street abstractionist blankly insists that there is nothing here but white paint and black, and none of our literary identifications need apply. What then

distinguishes him from Testadura, whose philistine utterances are

indiscernible from his? And how can it be an artwork for him

and not for Testadura, when they agree that there is nothing that

does not meet the eye? The answer, unpopular as it is likely to

be to purists of every variety, lies in the fact that this artist has returned to the physicality of paint through an atmosphere com-

pounded of artistic theories and the history of recent and remote painting, elements of which he is trying to refine out of his own

work; and as a consequence of this his work belongs in this atmos-

phere and is part of this history. He has achieved abstraction

through rejection of artistic identifications, returning to the real

world from which such identifications remove us (he thinks),

somewhat in the mode of Ch'ing Yuan, who wrote:

Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains

and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came

to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are not waters. But now that I have got the very substance I am at rest. For

it is just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once

again as waters.

His identification of what he has made is logically dependent upon

the theories and history he rejects. The difference between his ut-

terance and Testadura's "This is black paint and white paint and

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580 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

nothing more" lies in the fact that he is still using the is of

artistic identification, so that his use of "That black paint is black

paint" is not a tautology. Testadura is not at that stage. To see

something as art requires something the eye cannot decry-an

atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art:

an artworld.

III

Mr. Andy Warhol, the Pop artist, displays facsimiles of Brillo

cartons, piled high, in neat stacks, as in the stockroom of the

supermarket. They happen to be of wood, painted to look like

cardboard, and why not? To paraphrase the critic of the Times,

if one may make the facsimile of a human being out of bronze,

why not the facsimile of a Brillo carton out of plywood? The

cost of these boxes happens to be 2 x 103 that of their homely counterparts in real life-a differential hardly ascribable to their

advantage in durability. In fact the Brillo people might, at some

slight increase in cost, make their boxes out of plywood without

these becoming artworks, and Warhol might make his out of cardboard without their ceasing to be art. So we may forget ques-

tions of intrinsic value, and ask why the Brillo people cannot

manufacture art and why Warhol cannot but make artworks. Well, his are made by hand, to be sure. Which is like an insane

reversal of Picasso's strategy in pasting the label from a bottle of

Suze onto a drawing, saying as it were that the academic artist, concerned with exact imitation, must always fall short of the real

thing: so why not just use the real thing? The Pop artist laboriously reproduces machine-made objects by hand, e.g., paint-

ing the labels on coffee cans (one can hear the familiar com- mendation "Entirely made by hand" falling painfully out of the

guide's vocabulary when confronted by these objects). But the difference cannot consist in craft: a man who carved pebbles out

of stones and carefully constructed a work called Gravel Pile might invoke the labor theory of value to account for the price he demands; but the question is, What makes it art? And why need Warhol make these things anyway? Why not just scrawl his

signature across one? Or crush one up and display it as Crushed Britto Box ("A protest against mechanization . . .") or simply display a Brillo carton as Uncrushed Britto Box ("A bold af- firmation of the plastic authenticity of industrial . . .") ? Is this

man a kind of Midas, turning whatever he touches into the gold of

pure art? And the whole world consisting of latent artworks

waiting, like the bread and wine of reality, to be transfigured,

through some dark mystery, into the indiscernible flesh and blood

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SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK OF ART 581

of the sacrament? Never mind that the Brillo box may not be good, much less great art. The impressive thing is that it is art at all. But if it is, why are not the indiscernible Brillo boxes that are in the stockroom? Or has the whole distinction between art and reality broken down?

Suppose a man collects objects (ready-mades), including a Brillo carton; we praise the exhibit for variety, ingenuity, what

you will. Next he exhibits nothing but Brillo cartons, and we criticize it as dull, repetitive, self-plagiarizing-or (more pro-

foundly) claim that he is obsessed by regularity and repetition, as in Marienbad. Or he piles them high, leaving a narrow path; we tread our way through the smooth opaque stacks and find it an unsettling experience, and write it up as the closing in of con-

sumer products, confining us as prisoners: or we say he is a modern pyramid builder. True, we don't say these things about the stockboy. But then a stockroom is not an art gallery, and we cannot readily separate the Brillo cartons from the gallery

they are in, any more than we can separate the Rauschenberg bed from the paint upon it. Outside the gallery, they are pasteboard

cartons. But then, scoured clean of paint, Rauschenberg's bed is a bed, just what it was before it was transformed into art. But then if we think this matter through, we discover that the artist has failed, really and of necessity, to produce a mere real object. He has produced an artwork, his use of real Brillo cartons being but an expansion of the resources available to arists, a contribution to artists' materials, as oil paint was, or tuche.

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. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of is other than that of artistic identification). Of course, without the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to see it as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of recent New York painting. It could not have been art fifty years ago. But then there could not have been, everything being equal, flight insurance in the Middle Ages, or Etruscan typewriter erasers. The world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less

than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, these days as

always, to make the artworld, and art, possible. It would, I should

think, never have occurred to the painters of Lascaux that they were producing art on those walls. Not unless there were neolithic aestheticians.

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582 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

IV

The artworld stands to the real world in something like the relationship in which the City of God stands to the Earthly City. Certain objects, like certain individuals, enjoy a double citizen- ship, but there remains, the RT notwithstanding, a fundamental contrast between artworks and real objects. Perhaps this was already dimly sensed by the early framers of the IT who, in- choately realizing the nonreality of art, were perhaps limited only in supposing that the sole way objects had of being other than real is to be sham, so that artworks necessarily had to be imitations of real objects. This was too narrow. So Yeats saw in writing "Once out of nature I shall never take/My bodily form from any natural thing." It is but a matter of choice: and the Brillo box of the artworld may be just the Brillo box of the real one, separated and united by the is of artistic identification. But I should like to say some final words about the theories that make artworks possible, and their relationship to one another. In so doing, I shall beg some of the hardest philosophical questions I know.

I shall now think of pairs of predicates related to each other as "opposites," conceding straight off the vagueness of this demode term. Contradictory predicates are not opposites, since one of each of them must apply to every object in the universe, and neither of a pair of opposites need apply to some objects in the universe. An object must first be of a certain kind before either of a pair of opposites applies to it, and then at most and at least one of the opposites must apply to it. So opposites are not con- traries, for contraries may both be false of some objects in the universe, but opposites cannot both be false; for of some objects, neither of a pair of opposites sensibly applies, unless the object is of the right sort. Then, if the object is of the required kind, the opposites behave as contradictories. If P and non-P are op- posites, an object o must be of a certain kind K before either of these sensibly applies; but if o is a member of K, then o either is F or non-F, to the exclusion of the other. The class of pairs of opposites that sensibly apply to the (6)Ko I shall designate as the class of K-relevant predicates. And a necessary condition for an object to be of a kind K is that at least one pair of K-relevant op- posites be sensibly applicable to it. But, in fact, if an object is of kind K, at least and at most one of each K-relevant pair of opposites applies to it.

I am now interested in the K-relevant predicates for the class

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SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK OF ART 583

K of artworks. And let p and non-F be an opposite pair of such

predicates. Now it might happen that, throughout an entire pe- riod of time, every artwork is non-F. But since nothing thus far is both an artwork and F, it might never occur to anyone that non-

F is an artistically relevant predicate. The non-P-ness of artworks

goes unmarked. By contrast, all works up to a given time might be

G, it never occurring to anyone until that time that something might both be an artwork and non-G; indeed, it might have been

thought that G was a defining trait of artworks when in fact something might first have to be an artwork before G is sensibly predicable of it-in which case non-G might also be predicable of

artworks, and G itself then could not have been a defining trait of this class.

Let G be 'is representational' and let F be 'is expressionist'. At

a given time, these and their opposites are perhaps the only art-

relevant predicates in critical use. Now letting '+' stand for a

given predicate P and '-' for its opposite non-P, we may construct a style matrix more or less as follows:

F G

+ + +_

+

The rows determine available styles, given the active critical

vocabulary: representational expressionistic (e.g., Fauvism); repre- sentational nonexpressionistic (Ingres); nonrepresentational ex- pressionistic (Abstract Expressionism); nonrepresentational non- expressionist (hard-edge abstraction). Plainly, as we add art-

relevant predicates, we increase the number of available styles at

the rate of 21f. It is, of course, not easy to see in advance which predicates are going to be added or replaced by their opposites, but

suppose an artist determines that H shall henceforth be artistically relevant for his paintings. Then, in fact, both H and non-H be-

come artistically relevant for alt painting, and if his is the first

and only painting that is H, every other painting in existence be-

comes non-H, and the entire community of paintings is enriched,

together with a doubling of the available style opportunities. It

is this retroactive enrichment of the entities in the artworld that

makes it possible to discuss Raphael and De Kooning together, or

Lichtenstein and Michelangelo. The greater the variety of artisti- cally relevant predicates, the more complex the individual members

of the artworld become; and the more one knows of the entire

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584 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

population of the artworld, the richer one's experience with any

of its members.

In this regard, notice that, if there are m artistically relevant

predicates, there is always a bottom row with m minuses. This

row is apt to be occupied by purists. Having scoured their can-

vasses clear of what they regard as inessential, they credit them-

selves with having distilled out the essence of art. But this is just

their fallacy: exactly as many artistically relevant predicates stand

true of their square monochromes as stand true of any member of

the Artworld, and they can exist as artworks only insofar as "im-

pure" paintings exist. Strictly speaking, a black square by Rein-

hardt is artistically as rich as Titian's Sacred and Profane Love.

This explains how less is more.

Fashion, as it happens, favors certain rows of the style matrix:

museums, connoisseurs, and others are makeweights in the Art-

world. To insist, or seek to, that all artists become representa-

tional, perhaps to gain entry into a specially prestigious exhibition,

cuts the available style matrix in half: there are then 2'f/2 ways of

satisfying the requirement, and museums then can exhibit all these "approaches" to the topic they have set. But this is a matter of

almost purely sociological interest: one row in the matrix is as

legitimate as another. An artistic breakthrough consists, I sup-

pose, in adding the possibility of a column to the matrix. Artists

then, with greater or less alacrity, occupy the positions thus opened up: this is a remarkable feature of contemporary art, and for those

unfamiliar with the matrix, it is hard, and perhaps impossible, to recognize certain positions as occupied by artworks. Nor would these things be artworks without the theories and the histories

of the Artworld.

Brillo boxes enter the artworld with that same tonic in-

congruity the commedia dell'arte characters bring into Ariadne auf Naxos. Whatever is the artistically relevant predicate in vir-

tue of which they gain their entry, the rest of the Artworld becomes that much the richer in having the opposite predicate available

and applicable to its members. And, to return to the views of

Hamlet with which we began this discussion, Brillo boxes may re-

veal us to ourselves as well as anything might: as a mirror held up to nature, they might serve to catch the conscience of our kings.

ARTHUR DANTO COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

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