The Journal of Aesthetics and Danto's Philosophical Criticism

Abstract

This is a journal of both aesthetics art criticism, yet in recent years the criticism side has been dramatically underrepresented. In dedicating themselves to the sport of definition generalization, aestheticians have abjured attending to the details vicissitudes of individual art examples. Yet, ironically, the stimulus for much recent aesthetics has been nothing other than recent art itself. Works like Duchamp's Fountain Robert Rauchenberg's Bed, not to mention such sundry objects as combs pieces of driftwood, have made their appearances in the pages of this journal. While these artworks have routinely made their ways into our arguments, they have not been given the kind of scrutiny they deserve. Hasty verdicts-for against-have been given about them, they have often been accused of the worst obfuscation: of aiming to incapacitate the critic from easy interpretation by invoking polysemic games of play through their most strikingly striking natures. Whether because we are all susceptible to the seductions of the definitive, or because we are uninterested in the details of interpretation when we peer into the arena of art from our grand philosophical heights, we have failed to ask the most difficult questions about how to read these other art objects: about what counts as a complete or adequate reading of them, about how to negotiate the plethora of readings that have already been made of them, about how to avoid-or how to court-the act of reading one's own persona beliefs into them. We have not shown criticism-by doing it-to be the complex, intricate, difficult, philosophically stupefying subject that it ought to be. Broadly stated, what is the relevance of art criticism for philosophical aesthetics? We are here celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of a publication called The Journal of Aesthetics Art Criticism, it is timely to take a good look at the and in our journal's title. How do aesthetics art criticism align? Are they separate activities? No one, I suppose, doubts that art criticism is relevant to aesthetics, if aesthetics wishes to maintain contact with the reality of its subject: art. But what do we know when we know that? And how much of that knowledge have we repressed in practice? Needless to say, I will not attempt to answer such heady questions in the abstract. For to approach the question of how art criticism relates to aesthetics in abstraction from the complexities of reading actual art objects would be to suggest that the relation between criticism aesthetics could be addressed in the abstract, thus that the business of aesthetics could continue to go on without our doing any criticism or our even acknowledging the full force of the critical results of others. How easily we generalize about that particular relation depends both on how much the art examples interpreted are like other examples, on how stable the concept of philosophy remains from one context of interpretation to another. The alignment of criticism with philosophy, as well as its relevance to philosophy are as variant as art itself. In this sense, the philosophy of criticism is like art: its examples can invite generality but never prove it. In this essay I want to look at the alignment between Arthur Danto's criticism his philosophy as an example of the way one person has negotiated, or reinvented, the and in the title of our journal. Danto's philosophy of art has evolved out of deep engagement with the avant-garde, especially with the art of Andy Warhol (whom Danto believes represents the apex of the avant-garde).