Online Conference in Aesthetics

Keynote: David Carrier

Is Danto's Aesthetic Truly Universal? (click to download full pdf version)

David Carrier

Arthur Danto has always said that his aesthetic, like his account of action, history and knowledge, is absolutely general. His definition of art describes works of art in all cultures. In making that claim, he goes against the dominant ways of thinking of his fellow art critics, and also, I believe, of most art historians. But his analysis does grow out of a long philosophical tradition. The central concern of philosophical aesthetics is to define art. Until we know what art is, we cannot properly describe its history, interpret it, or explain why it is significant.

In looking at the history of these definitions of art, the questions posed by historicism, relativism, and multiculturalism, are especially pressing. Within the West the forms of art have changed dramatically over time. Some philosophers thought that art was representation. But then abstract art was created. Other aestheticians said that art was expression. But then works of art that were not expressive were created. No one in 1850 could have imagined cubism; and in 1910, who could have imagined conceptual art? This is why the older general definitions of art are no longer acceptable. Given that such radically new forms of art have been developed relatively recently, why should that process not continue? When we look to China, India and the Islamic world we find very different forms of art. Chinese use scroll paintings; Indians sculpt Hindu gods; Muslims make calligraphy and decoration. Many of these works of art look very different from ours. And because the Chinese, Indians and Muslims have exotic customs, political institutions and religions, we can reasonably expect that their art will be unlike ours. And so it is natural to ask if Western-style definitions will accommodate this art.

Although Danto the art critic has very wide ranging interests, the examples of Danto the aesthetician almost always come from Western art. Were a sociologist of religion to offer a general theory based solely upon Christianity and Judaism, it would be natural to wonder whether his analysis applied also to Buddhism, Daoism and Hinduism. Danto’s working procedure raises similar problems. But the philosopher, of course, is not a mere sociologist, who gathers examples and then offers a description, which may need to be revised when further examples are gathered. After describing the nature of knowledge and our relationship to the world the philosopher offers a very general account of the identity of art...

Keynote: Richard Shusterman

Art as Religion: Transfigurations of Danto’s Dao (click to download full pdf version)

Richard Shusterman

I first encountered Arthur Danto’s philosophy as an undergraduate in Jerusalem in the early 1970s, in a course on analytic aesthetics, where we also studied the texts of Monroe Beardsley, Nelson Goodman, Richard Wollheim, George Dickie, and Joseph Margolis. Each of these philosophers has a distinctive voice, and it was not Danto’s but Nelson Goodman’s that initially won my heart and inspired my philosophical ambitions. So inseparable was his red-covered Languages of Art from my person that friends jokingly described it, with reference to Chairman Mao’s current eminence, as my little red book of cultural revolution. Goodman’s austerely uncompromising nominalism, his lean, hard-fisted logical style, his confident, even arrogant tone of conviction all appealed to me as a young Israeli shaped by that culture’s military virtues. The infatuation did not survive my doctoral studies in Oxford, and my unqualified zeal for analytic philosophy did not survive my encounter with pragmatism in the early 1990s. Now, after more than thirty years of engagement with analytic aesthetics (both from the inside and from the critical perspective of the pragmatist aesthetics I advocate), I regard Danto as having its most alluringly potent oeuvre. This paper is, in part, an effort to explain why.