Abstract
For the American philosopher Arthur. C.
Danto art came to an end in the 1960s in that it entered the era of pluralism. Art freed itself from the bounds of self-defining and or any other agenda prescribing its development.
Post-historical art, i.e. art produced after the end of art, is disjunctive in its nature and it is impossible to reveal any common denominator which would describe how all post-historical artworks should look like. However, since the 1960s, Danto paid systematic attention to the question of art definition, and he truly believed that art has an essence shared by all an only artworks, and therefore that there is a unifying principle of art after all.
Although it seems that there is a tension between these two realms of Danto's thought, in reality, he reflected on them in the light of each other. It is possible to define art if and only if the definition respects the pluralistic state of the artworld.
Accordingly, since publishing The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Danto defined art as 'embodied meanings.' In 2013, however, Danto published a book titled What Art Is in which he added the third necessary condition: artworks should be like 'wakeful dreams.' This new condition aims to describe a universality of art consisting in that audience shares a certain range of emotions vis a vis a particular work of art.