The Importance of Being Earnest about the Definition and Metaphysics of Art

Abstract

the first place. But many are troubled by the nagging sense of failure that no mere dismissal seems able to dispel. We are still caught in the puzzles of Morris Weitz's extraordinarily disturbing early essay, The Role of Theory in Aesthetics, published in 1956, only a few years after the appearance of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953), on which, however inaccurately, it claims to depend.1 If Weitz's account is regarded as the original gauntlet analytic aesthetics took up so eagerly almost at onceagain, very close to its own beginnings: Beardsley's Aesthetics appeared in 1958it is equally plausible to credit Arthur Danto's immensely influential essay, The Artworld, published in 1964, with having confirmed (by the absence of explicit mention, so to say) the single most-discussed version of the great complication that baffled all efforts at defining art in accord with the new spirit of rigor that had just taken hold in analytic aesthetics. I mean, of course, the trauma produced by Duchamp's devilish jokes (especially the notorious Fountain) transfigured, in Danto's hands, into the sober metaphysics of Warhol's Brillo Box? A great swath of well-intentioned responses to the double challenge of Weitz's verdict and Danto's new turn fell over the philosophical cliff in an effort to get things right in accord with the seeming fashions of the day. They have engaged a large part of the energies of contemporary aesthetics for the last fifty or so yearsand they still do. Yet a small caution suggests that the puzzles thus confronted have yielded rather meager gains (at least of the mettle sought). Have we perhaps entrapped ourselves in unguarded readings of the errors we supposed we had uncovered in the various now-canonical summaries of the work of the