Ontology and Aesthetics of Digital Art

Abstract

Many would claim that the traditional idioms of visual art have lost their capacity for large-scale innovation. Arthur Danto, for example, has argued that the exhaustion of innovation is symptomatic of art having completed a historical process of self-investigation (aimed at clarifying its own essence).1 1 have indicated some of the problems with Danto's approach elsewhere.2 There is no grand narrative of art's self-discovery at issue. The exhaustion of large-scale artistic innovation is due, rather, to the fact that the structural conventions and properties that constitute pictorial representation are unable to sustain further significant development at the structural level itself. There are limits to new ways in which the representation of three-dimensional material can be achieved within the traditional idioms alone. The