Abstract
Danto's opinions on the ontology of art held since publishing his seminal book The Transfiguration of Commonplace are known and still discussed in the realm of the analytical philosophy of art and aesthetics. However, these opinions are rarely analysed in the wider context of Danto's philosophy.
Although Danto paid systematic attention to art, he published extensively also on other topics such as philosophy of action, knowledge and history. Although these topics seemed isolated and independent on each other, Mark Rollins pointed out that there is an internal connection between them; Danto in all these philosophical branches concerned with a question of representation.
Moreover, later on, Danto himself characterised human beings as "representational" in his book The Body/Body Problem in that representations mediate the world as such. I consider this claim important concerning the topic of the conference because it raises a question about the specificity of artistic representation.
I shall ask the question of what makes a representation in Danto' philosophy artistic? I will argue that artistic representation goes beyond mere content and that Danto's theory explains, albeit not fully, how. In the first part of my presentation, I will outline the general character of Danto's philosophy with an emphasis on his notion of the representation.
In the following section, I will consider Danto's position regarding the definition of art. As I have already mentioned, Danto concerned with the ontology of art since publishing The Transfiguration of Commonplace; however, he did not provide us with a real definition in the form of necessary and sufficient conditions in this book.
He introduced the real definition in After the End of Art and characterised an artwork as "embodied meaning." According to Danto, art has to be about something, i.e. to have content, but the author said us very little about the content or about the way it is embodied in After the End of Art. Quite surprisingly, Danto returned to the topic of art definition in his very last book What Art Is and added a new necessary condition of wakeful dreams.
This condition describes a particular skill of an artist, and it is responsible for the emotional response on the part of the audience. In the final part of my paper, I aim to respond to the question stated above, i.e. what makes a representation in Danto's system artistic.
Art provides us with a kind of representation that is not reducible on a linguistic representation in that it requires more than meaning. The meaning is embodied in a material basis in a specific way that Danto sought to describe as wakeful dreams.
I shall argue further that this reply has already been prefigured in Danto's Transfiguration, especially in the chapter on metaphor, expression and style.