Style

• Sondra Bacharach: How Transfiguration Saved the Style Matrix
• Regina Wenninger: The Transparency of Style
• Stephen Snyder: The Ontology of Style

Excerpts from each paper below the fold...

Sondra Bacharach: How Transfiguration Saved the Style Matrix (click to download full pdf version)

Although Arthur Danto introduced the idea of the style matrix over three decades ago, it has received little attention since that time. Moreover, what attention it has received has been primarily critical in spirit. Noël Carroll and Jerrold Levinson have both criticized the style matrix on the grounds that it is overly historicist: Carroll worries that it entails backward causation, while Levinson complains that it licenses changes in an artwork’s content or meaning over time. Danto himself has even accepted Carroll’s charge in print; so one would think that if Danto were to give up his style matrix, it would be because he too found it overly historicist. Surprisingly, however, Danto himself has rejected the style matrix for just the opposite reason! He objects to the style matrix because he thinks it is too ahistoricist. This is very puzzling. How can the style matrix be simultaneously too historicist and too ahistoricist?

I defend the style matrix against charges from both camps. If we take seriously the lessons from Transfiguration of the Commonplace about the nature of art and about how artworks gain their properties, neither attacks against the style matrix is legitimate. After spelling out what the style matrix is and how it functions, I explain why Danto’s original formulation of it need not be ahistoricist in the way that Danto later worries. On the contrary, it is perfectly compatible with the historical sensitivity Danto advocates in Transfiguration and in his later works. I then defend even our historically sensitive understanding of the style matrix from Carroll and Levinson’s charges of being overly historicist. I argue that many of the attacks against the style matrix rest on a confusion about the forms of historicism to which Danto is committed. But if we take seriously the morals of Transfiguration, it is clear that Danto’s position need not be problematic in the way that many have suggested...

Regina Wenninger: The Transparency of Style  (click to download full pdf version)

The conception of style that Danto sets forth in the last chapters of Transfiguration has received surprisingly little attention within the discussion about his book. My paper critically examines one of Danto’s central claims about style: namely, that an artist’s individual style, in contrast to a “mere manner,” is not at the artist’s disposal and is in this sense unavailable to him: it is something given, not externally acquired, and hence cannot by arbitrarily chosen or changed; moreover, style is not even cognitively accessible to the artist whose style it is: it is not visible or conscious to him and is in this sense “transparent,” in Danto’s terminology. The focus of my paper is on this “Transparency thesis.”

I will first reconstruct Danto’s reasoning, point out some of its ambiguities, and then make explicit certain problematic implications of the Transparency thesis. These concern in particular three points: First, the thesis generates internal problems for Danto’s conception of style: some of its implications seem to be inconsistent with certain other of assumptions Danto makes about style in Transfiguration. Second, for independent reasons the plausibility of the thesis itself is doubtful. Remarkably, this becomes particularly evident in the light of those phenomena of postmodern art in which Danto is most interested and which to integrate into a general theory of art is the declared aim of Transfiguration. Third, the thesis deprives one from accounting for the normative dimension of the contrast between style and manner.

As I will argue, some of these problems can be resolved if one modifies Danto’s conception of style in certain ways. The paper concludes with a few remarks about some elements of Danto’s conception of style that I take to be the more promising ones and that to develop further would be rewarding.

Stephen Snyder: The Ontology of Style (click to download full pdf version)

Arthur Danto defines style as the physiognomic self-representation of the artist. This representation, opaque to artists, is nonetheless visible to the audience. Thus, through their higher powers of intuition, artists in possession of style create metaphors without direct knowledge of how they are able to do this. The metaphors, once manifested within artworks, have a rhetorical nature. The metaphor is like an enthymeme, causing the audience to fill in the blank without full awareness of the ellipsis. But Danto’s account of how artists create metaphors based on their “cultural competency” and an ability to read the subtext of historical meaning does not adequately account for the critical role metaphor plays in the artwork’s ability to effect a reaction in the audience. The comparison of the artwork to the enthymeme requires more than the artist’s unself-conscious revelation of meaning. It also requires artists to craft the enthymeme such that the metaphor evokes an audience response making them aware of its meaning. Aristotle agreed with Danto insofar as he felt that the creation of great metaphors could not be learned; only the master of metaphor could bring them into being. Nonetheless, the practical usage of rhetoric, the power the artwork utilizes to affect the audience, is a technē requiring a relationship between the artist and the audience that is not addressed in Danto’s description of style, rhetoric and metaphor. Danto’s explanation of the generation of metaphor minimizes the potential art has in effecting change. Without contesting the artist’s superior intuitions, removing the stipulation of style’s opacity would allow a formulation of artistic creation that better underwrites art’s capacity to evoke critical self-reflection.

Comments

[davidcarrier]

SB is right to take the style matrix seriously. I did so in my book on Rosalind Krauss, (Praeger, 2002) and will do so again in A WORLD ART HISTORY (Penn State, 2008). In the account of Krauss, I link it to her structuralist art criticism. For Krauss, this way of thinking came from structural anthropology, which of course was athistorical. We see all the options in one diagram. Arthur dislikes this, I think, because he wants to study historical change, which obviously such a diagram cannot allow us to do. But since he holds that the history of art is closed, he of all people should find this chart congenial. We can look back at the history of art knowing that this history is over. And so it's a minor mystery, never resolved in our private conversations that he rejects this way of thinking.

I don't understand Carroll's point about backwards causation. Looking now at what happened earlier, we provide connections, but without attributing them to the artists then. No different from comparing the French and Russian Revolutions now I would think. WIth my world art history, analogously, we can compare art in cultures not in contact, compare it now without asking how it was then in the past. So SR is right to reject these claims. It would be useful to look also at Krauss' formulation of these ideas, developing from Greimas by way of Jameson. I think her formulation on p. 14, that we now find properties which were undetected earlier is the right way to go. This, I stress, is consistent with everyday art historical and historical explanation, it doesn't involve any high powered metaphysics.

[davidcarrier]

RW nicely points to the interest of a not much studied part of TRANSFIGURATION. I have always felt that the book's structure to some extent falls apart at the end, because the analysis of style isn't so clear. Here staging a debate with RW is productive, for his account of style was more highly developed.

The transparency thesis is very attractive. It is nicely presented in a book making no reference to Arthur, Joshua Landy's study of Proust, PHILOSOPHY AS FICTION. I know about it because I'm finishing my book PROUST/WARHOL which of course uses Arthur's ideas.

The key in Arthur's account is that when you have a style, what you do always comes out the same. Well look at his writings which for 40 years circle around BRILLO BOX, with many differences but yes always in his style. Considering the style of a philosopher might help here. And it would be good to look at the art world, considering the contrast between unproductive merely commercial repetitions and the development of an art, Scully for example, who has a style. Or look historically: Poussin had a style, while Sebastien Bourdon, very skilled, merely a manner. It would be worth reconstructing the reasoning behind that contrast.

[davidcarrier]

SS wants to link style and metaphor. Of course Arthur's concept of style is traditional, so the interesting question is: how does it relate to his untraditional aesthetics. I learned a lot from this clear history. Without responding frontally, let me say something which maybe is relevant. This interest in visual rhetoric is at odds with defining the aesthetic by reference to aesthetic distance. Metaphor of course is a central concern of baroque art, for there the idea of moving the spectator is central. And so perhaps looking at Arthur's relationship with Rudolf Wittkower, who did the great survey history of the baroque, is one way to go. 25 years ago we drove around Turin, with the book in hand: it really speaks to Arthur's interests. I appeal, I hope not digressively, to mere biography here because I think that SS is onto something very interesting. Precisely because Arthur has not developed this part of his system, compared say with the ontology, in so much detail, there is more room for immediately productive commentary, which as here very elegantly does the history.

[Stephen Snyder]

RW’s analysis of style and manner underscores the point I make about how style as an unselfconscious gift cannot endow the artwork with the ability to transform the audience. RW’s alternative account of commitment works well to show how style is integrated with the artist’s conscious efforts in the creative process. The example RW uses to show how Danto employs his account of style and rhetoric in Lichtenstein’s ‘Portrait of Madame Cezanne’ points out that the arbitrary account of style conflicts with the conscious usage of rhetoric and metaphor manifest in the artwork. I think RW is right that Danto defines a strong sense of transparency, but often uses a weaker one.

The normative critique seems a bit out of place, however. RW argues the case well that the artist’s consciousness of style need not negatively affect the work. But the question of the artists’ blameworthiness for having become aware of their style doesn’t really seem to be what is at issue. After all, are artists who never had style--like artists who lost their style--blameworthy, or are their works merely given a lesser evaluation?

[Derek Allan]

Regina quotes AD as saying that in his style ‘the artist expresses himself or his way of seeing the world.’ Leaving aside the problems with ‘expresses’, does Danto define anywhere what he means by the concept of ‘world’ in the context of the theory of art?

I ask because the concept is so often used in the philosophy of art and yet so seldom defined. I can’t remember Danto defining what he means by it, but I wondered if anyone else could.

[Sherri Irvin]

I appreciate the fact that David Carrier is taking the time to comment on every paper. But I wonder which transparency thesis he is referring to when he says, "The transparency thesis is very attractive." Regina Wenninger argues rather convincingly, to my mind, that the strong transparency thesis (that style is necessarily invisible to the artist whose style it is), for which there is strong textual evidence in Transfiguration, is not particularly attractive: it implies that the artist must be blind to, and thus unable to reflect on, central tendencies within her work that contribute to its content and aesthetic properties. It seems that a truly committed artist should strive for self-awareness in stylistic matters, and that a gifted artist will be able to achieve such self-awareness, at least to a considerable degree.

I like RW's proposals about explanation (that the 'transparency of style' might be cashed out in terms of the artist's ignorance as to the origins of her style) and about the fact that style is the manifestation of commitment to a particular set of artistic demands (whereas manner seems to be a manifestation of a different kind of attitude, having more to do with pleasing the crowd). At the same time, though, there does seem to be an additional kind or aspect of transparency, closer to Danto's original observation, that needs to be accounted for. It is often said that an artist's style reflects a way of seeing the world. Presumably, for Cezanne, it felt somehow *natural* to represent what he saw through a certain kind of brushstroke, a certain way of juxtaposing forms, and other things that we could identify as his style. There was something about his understanding of the visual world, as he saw it unfolding itself, that demanded this sort of treatment. It wasn't as if he was playing around with different modes in Photoshop, thinking, "Okay, 30% blurring plus red/green filtering looks cool. Let's go with it!"

Of course Cezanne could see that there were systematic differences between his mode of representation and that of, say, Courbet. And of course Cezanne didn't think that his paintings were (what we would now call) photorealistic representations; he could recognize that his color palette and line quality did not precisely reflect the visual inputs he received when looking out into the world. So, to that extent, his style was accessible to him. Still, while we can speak of Cezanne's 'choices' about color and line, perhaps he did not typically experience these as choices; they were instead a natural and pre-reflective expression of the way the world manifested itself to him.

It seems to me, especially in the context of conceptual art, that the notion of style must be extended beyond the visual, as in AD's example involving Lichtenstein. It is not just visual appearances but also ideas that can have a style about them: Lawrence Weiner's choices about which items to include in his conceptual "sculptures," the medium of which is "language + the materials referred to," clearly have a style to them. This does not at all exclude the possibility that Weiner reflected extensively on which items to include; but the choices may be "styled" in part by virtue of the fact that, from his perspective, they had a feeling of "rightness" about them that would be impossible to cash out propositionally. (Weiner's works include "A stake set" and "The residue of a flare ignited on a boundary.")

This provides further support for Sondra Bacharach's suggestion that the style matrix cannot plausibly be seen as capturing just visual affinities or similarities; conceptual affinities might obtain even between works with no particular visual similarity. But SB suggests, further, that to avoid objectionable ahistoricism, the style matrix should make reference to properties indexed historically or causally: so the mere fact that two works resemble each other visually (or, I suppose, conceptually) will not make it appropriate to apply a common stylistic predicate to them; the predicate will be applicable to both only insofar as one of the works *caused* the other to have the relevant visible features. My worry about this proposal is that it seems to drain the style matrix of an important of its punch: whereas AD wants the entire artworld to be enriched each time a new predicate becomes available, on SB's construal the new predicate remains effectively irrelevant to most works. It will be trivially true of all earlier works not causally related to a new work manifesting predicate P that they are not-P, even if they are visually (or conceptually) quite P-like. The availability of the new predicate then becomes uninteresting with respect to most works (because the application is trivial), and the ability of new works to bring out aspects that are latent in earlier works is greatly diminished. So the style matrix seems, on this proposal, to lose much of its ability to enrich our understanding of art.

At the same time, I think SB is right to observe that there is a problem, on Danto's own view, with identifying stylistic properties by visual means alone. So perhaps this loss of power in the style matrix is the price we have to pay to bring the matrix back in line with AD's view.

[Stephen Snyder]

I appreciate DC’s taking the time to write thoughtful comments for each writer. I’ll take a look at Rudolf Wittkower. DC makes a good point about the contrast of art’s rhetorical power and aesthetic distance. Rhetoric has the greatest effect when there is little distance, temporal or spatial, between the artist and the viewer. Yet, in most cases, the distance between creator and beholder is vast. This is why I agree with Danto when he claims that the metaphor created should be one that everyone can step into. Great metaphors say something general about human nature, and perhaps less about the here and now. Danto accounts for this in his description of metaphor and his historical notion of embodied meaning. But the unmediated account of style stipulates too much distance between the artist and the audience for such a metaphor to take hold.

[Regina Wenninger]

Many thanks for the comments on my paper!
Stephen Snyder doubts that the normative issue of blameworthiness plays a role in the distinction of style and manner: we do not blame artists for lack of style but merely give their works a lesser evaluation.
Let me try to make the question of blameworthiness seem less out of place in this context. What I had in mind were observations like these: to say of a work that it is “merely mannered” often goes beyond negative evaluation. In many cases such judgments have an almost moral character. “Mere manner” is typically associated with pretense and artificiality, with striving for marketable effects and pleasing the crowd. Applying the same shallow mannerisms over and over again may strike one like an expression of disrespect to the work, a betrayal of the artist’s own talents, of the audience, of the “dignity of art,” etc.; though no straightforward fraudulence is involved, there seems to be something phony and inauthentic with it. Often there is an air of arbitrariness. This can maybe best be illustrated with examples from performative arts. Robert Wilson has been accused for making use of ever the same mannerisms no matter whether he brings on stage Büchner’s Leonce und Lena, Sophocles’s Antigone or a Mozart opera. The underlying criticism seems to be that he subordinates the works and their peculiarities to his manner rather than the other way round. The work’s stylistic features are not the byproduct of serious artistic efforts; rather, the work is misused as a mere pretext for eliciting anticipated effects, ... And so on.
In short, what is wrong with mere manner in these regards is not just that it is “bad style.” It is also at odds with something like a professional ethos: with “artistic virtues” such as trying to do justice to the demands of the work. In these respects, mere manner is not only a matter of lower artistic quality; it is something for which we accuse the artist.
I am not sure whether I would like to defend those alleged artistic virtues ( – after all, do they not rely on an obsolete romanticizing, heroicizing cliché of the truly dedicated artist, unaffected by the corruptions of the art market and other worldly matters? Why not grant artists the liberty to commercialize their style?) As a matter of fact, however, such moralizing aspects seem frequently at work in judgments of style and manner.
I think they are also part of that “reasoning behind that contrast [of style and manner]” of which David Carrier, at the end of his comment, justly says it “would be worth reconstructing.”

I readily agree that often such normative aspects are NOT at issue. Notably with regard to pre-modern art the question of blameworthiness may seem out of place. My sense is, however, that with regard to contemporary art we are more sensitive and less generous when artist are flirting with the market (unless, that is, we are dealing with pop art).

Generally, a range of conditions has to be in place if we justifiably want to blame the artist for employing a mere manner. That the artist has some control over his style is only one precondition in order for such accusations to be legitimate. An artist may have good reasons – say, political or economic pressure – to repeat a certain manner over and over again. In the light of such reasons, we will excuse, rather than blame him for his mannerisms. Furthermore, it seems unfair to blame an artist for lack of style if we know that this deficiency is due to a lack of skill and competence. (On the other hand: arguably, Picasso’s oeuvre is full of mannerisms, and yet we do not charge him for this; taking his genius for granted, it seems we are ready to take them as a bagatelle, or an expression of his nonchalance and sovereignty in the handling of stylistic means.)

In any case, there is certainly no strict uniform criterion for distinguishing style and manner, or “being true to one’s style” and “merely repeating oneself”.
DC points to the “contrast between unproductive merely commercial repetitions and the development of an art, Scully for example, who has a style.”
Plausible as the contrast of “mere repetition” vs. “developmental” or “productive” repetition is, it cannot always be applied. Serial or minimal art is a case in point. Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings can hardly be characterized in developmental terms; and yet we do not regard them as mannered on that grounds. (As Danto points out, “we often accuse Chagall of self-plagiarism, at best of repeating himself – though his paintings might resemble one another less than those of Morandi or Reinhardt do”. (TC, 204) Or think of Roman Opalka’s series of numbers. Of course, we may still accuse Reinhardt or Opalka for having a mere manner – but if we do so, we cannot do so for the sole reason that their works are repetitious and monotonous and apparently without development. A different standard of repetitiousness has to be applied to Serial art than to more traditional art forms and genres.

DC says the “transparency thesis is very attractive”. Unfortunately he does not say what makes it attractive. Anyway, I am eager to have a look at Joshua Landy's book that DC recommends here. Thank you for the hint!

[Julie Kuhlken]

Regina I have usually read Danto’s exposition on style as the moment where he takes up Kant’s notion of genius and tries to deal critically with its romanticism. In this light, I wonder if you haven’t completed this process for him by proposing a move from a cognitive understanding of the relation between an artist and his style—which perpetuates the notion that the artist is blind to his natural gifts—to an attitudinal one. My one question is whether seeing the relation to style as a matter of attitude, and thus holding up commitment as the preferred mode of artistic activity doesn’t still unnecessarily denigrate the kind of conscious stylistic quotation characteristic of postmodern art?

[Regina Wenninger]

Julie, I agree at once that Danto’s account of style has close affinities to the concept of genius. I am not so sure I understand in which regards he critically deals with it or tries to overcome it, as you propose. Could you specify this?

Indeed, Postmodern art troubles me, I have to confess, concerning the question of commitment. Thanks for raising this issue. I think there is no conflict specifically with quotation. The problem is not that postmodern artists quote styles: the style of the quoting artist is his style of quoting, not the quoted style; hence one might still say the artist is committed to his style of quoting. To have a style of one’s own is perfectly possible in the realm of quotation and appropriation art. (Lichtenstein, Bidlo, Sherrie Levine, or Russell Connor have quite different styles of appropriating art.)
Rather, the problem seems to be that commitment simply is not at issue. Postmodern art may be generally characterized as being marked by irony, nonchalance, pluralism, or a noncommittal anything-goes-attitude. In this light, it seems to be out of place, or a category mistake, to ask whether this artist or that artist is more committed to his style.
I am a bit at a loss how to deal with this. I certainly do not want to denigrate stylistic quotation. Maybe we should discard the claim for generality and accept that different art forms call for different conceptions of style. If you have an idea – spread the word!

[Brian Soucek]

Sondra, I'm sorry it's taken me so long to post this, but I've had a question about your interesting paper since I first read it. I think your discussion of Danto's intentionalism is extremely relevant. What I don't understand is how your epistemic interpretation of the style matrix is immune from the challenge you say intentionalism poses to the metaphysical interpretation. Here's what I mean. The epistemic interpretation seems to say that certain artworks always had certain properties, (Raphael's Transfiguration was always non-cubist), but we just didn't know it (say, until Cubism came along). But if Danto's intentionalism suggests that works only have those properties which their creators could have intended, how can Raphael's Transfiguration have been non-cubist all that time? After all, Raphael couldn't have intended his painting to be interpreted as non-cubist. I wonder if intentionalism poses an even greater challenge to the style matrix than that which you develop here.

[Sondra Bacharach]

Brian, thanks for the interesting question. I’ve been mulling over it and related matters since Derek posted his comments. I shall try to address your question and some of Derek’s concerns.
The relationship between intentionalism and historicism (of both the epistemic and metaphysical varieties) is a tricky one. In my paper, I argue that metaphysical historicism – the view that the properties of an artwork can literally change over time – and intentionalism are inconsistent. But you’re worried that epistemic historicism – the view that certain artworks had certain properties all along, but they were not epistemically available – may be equally inconsistent with intentionalism. After all, as you rightly suggest, it seems rather unlikely that a given artist could intend an artwork to have property p, if that property is not even epistemically available. Fortunately, I don’t think Danto is committed to this. I think he can avoid this unpleasant consequence by noting that when a new artwork is created, the artworld gains a new predicate that can be artistically relevant, or not. When new art is created that genuinely changes the way we see or think about art, we discover new properties that suddenly appear to be artistically relevant in a way that they never were before. The properties are there all along; what is new is their artistic relevance. New art essentially makes relevant new properties that were irrelevant before.
Now, the tricky issue here for Danto’s style matrix emerges in the case you present. Consider the case where new art reveals a certain property p as artistically relevant. Earlier art was always not-p, and later art may be either p or not-p. But, now does Danto’s intentionalism commit him to saying that the properties of the earlier art – including not-p – were intended? If it does, then he is forced into the unpleasant position of having to admit that an artwork has property not-p, and this was intended by the artist, even though not-p was epistemically unavailable to him. But, I think there are ways to avoid this unpleasant conclusion. For example, one might think that intentions only fix properties which are, to use Walton’s terms, variable for a given category of art, but they do not fix those which are standard. In that case, not-p would have been standard for all artworks, and so it would not make sense to say that it was intended or not by an artist at that time. Another way of making this point would be to suggest that intentionalism fixes properties that the artist chooses to apply to the artwork; but in our example, earlier artists had no choice about whether their art would be not-p. So, it isn’t the kind of property that could be intended. On this reading, Danto could happily be an intentionalist about properties that are variable, about properties which artists had a choice about applying to their work, but not about others. Those other properties really were there all along (Raphael’s Transfiguration really is not-cubist), but they were artistically irrelevant – and it’s only when those properties become relevant that we come to pay attention to them. So long as Danto does not believe that every property of an artwork is intended – so long as Danto can grant that some properties can be true of a work, without thereby having been intended by the creator – then this line of reasoning should be available to him. And, this should avoid any concerns about the viability of endorsing intentionalism and epistemic historicism.
Derek laments that this picture of the style matrix drains it of its punch – true, if a new artwork makes p artistically relevant, suddenly all earlier art trivially acquire not-p. True, the new predicate remains effectively irrelevant to most, if not all, earlier works. So, there is one sense in which the enrichment of the artworld is only forward-looking – from the discovery of that new artwork forward, p becomes artistically available in a way that it never was before. However, there is another sense in which the enrichment of the artwork can be backward-looking. From the discovery of that new artwork backward, we can refine our artistic and art critical vocabulary (we can rule out p as a relevant feature) and we can better understand what artists who made p-like artworks were trying to do (we can rule out explanations appealing to p). Admittedly, the style matrix doesn’t pack the biggest punch, but it is punch nonetheless.

[Derek Allan]

Something has long puzzled me about this debate about the meanings of an artwork changing over time (which I realize involves many other writers apart from AD).

If the debate relates to the interpretation of all objects – art or not – then in what sense is it a debate in the philosophy of art? Presumably, in this case, any answer one arrived at would not reveal anything about art specifically.

If, on the other hand, the debate relates to art specifically (i.e. this property of being able to change meanings is seen as specific to art), then shouldn’t the real question be: what gives art this peculiar power to change its meanings?

My reading of Danto has not helped me out of this dilemma. Nor, I must confess, has my reading of other contemporary aestheticians. Can anyone suggest an answer?

[Stephen Snyder]

RW, I apologize for taking so long to respond. I see your point regarding the difference between having had style and no longer employing it and never having had it. Though both are associated with a negative evaluation, one is culpable in a way that the other is not. Nonetheless, I still caution against calling this moral reproach. The harsher criticism, that the artist who had style and now creates according to a manner, is still an evaluation of taste. You point out the issue of a professional ethos. Perhaps it is a censure from those who make art: if you are capable of an artistic style, to do otherwise is inauthentic. Yet to view this censure as moral runs the risk of leveling all moral judgments into judgments of taste, as Nietzsche argues in his genealogy of the terms good and bad and good and evil. If that is a direction you would take moral judgment, then I think you can make your case. But if that is not the form you see moral judgments taking, I would suggest caution. A very interesting path to follow, however, would be the notion of personification of art. If we really attribute moral reproach to artists who neglect their style, this could have to do with the human characteristics we often attribute to the artworks.

[Julie Kuhlken]

Regina,

I am sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner. I hope you are still checking up on the conference. What I am thinking of when I say that I read Danto on style as a critique of Kant on genius is that in Danto style occupies the same role with regard to that genius does in Kant. In other words, whereas Kant opposes manner to genius, Danto opposes manner to style. In both cases, manner plays the critical role of potential indiscernible to the desired productive trait. Kant opposes manner to genius saying that the former is a “kind of aping, viz namely of mere peculiarity.” As for Danto, he detects a similar problem with manner when he contrasts the early and late Chagall. The difference, of course, is that the ideal of style is very different from that of genius. Genius carries with it the romantic baggage of the “gift” of nature; whereas, style is historical, “the man himself” as “ways of seeing the world, representations incarnate.”

What I also find very interesting, but haven’t look at in enough detail, is the following: For Kant what distinguishes manner from genius is exemplarity, and even though exemplarity is not a significant notion for Danto, he spends a great deal of time analyzing it in these pages on style and manner.

[Wang Chunchen]

I know this website from Danto,he told me there is such online conference on his philosophy of art. So great an idea to hold such an online conference, for me even in Beijing of China I can 'attend' for reading all the discussions. I also downloaded all of them to print, so I will digest them one by one. I know the name of Danto in 2002,a year that I prepared to write my thesis of master degree in Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts,so I found Danto and began to collect his books that were available in Beijing. It's lucky that some of his books have been stored in the National Library of China,Beijing University and my school. Then I started to read him, as all discussions here show that Danto is not so easy in one deep breath to understand, but it is enjoyable to read it again and again with your more understanding of him. Finally in the next year 2003 I finished my master thesis,which mainly focuses on his art criticism. Since then my dream is to translate Danto's books into Chinese, so there would be more Chinese readers to read him and discuss him. I contacted Danto and got replied for his copyright information,then I contacted the agents,then I contacted the Chinese publishers for translation,and eventually in 2005 I made a translation contact with the Chinese publisher to put Danto into Chinese. I spent one year to translate his 'After the End of Art'and 'The Abuse of Beauty',and then submitted to the publisher,they worked on editing them for more than half year,and now I am working on its final proofreading before print in this March (2007). During the work I asked many questions to Danto, and he answered me and also wrote a special preface for his Chinese versions, which I think is a brief introduction to his philosophy of art. Here I show my gratitude to Danto and inform all the fans of Danto that in China he has fans too.