A Companion to Arthur C. Danto. Группа авторов

artwork’s meaning? Often what comes after gives a different value to works that were produced before: impressionism changes the way in which Velázquez’s paintings are seen, Picasso makes us see African masks from a new outlook. Danto suggests that artworks are like events in how they “derive their importance from what they led to.” Nevertheless, his interpretation of artworks remains tethered to the artist’s intentions, restricting, in my view, the scope and potential meaning of artworks (Danto 1986, 44, 1997, 75; 2013a, 15 and ff; 2013c, 386–387).

      Hegel wrote that an artwork is “essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind” (Hegel 1835, 71). One could say that style similarly is a sort of address, an invitation to another person. Good writing summons the reader to experience the text in a certain way. Danto’s own style was an invitation, almost intimate, to engage his enticing and entertaining way of thinking. There is something contagious about it. In reading Danto, his voice continues to resonate. His writing creates the impression that he is speaking and simply registering his thoughts and imaginings as they come. “He allows his prose to wander and invites the reader to wander with it,” observed Christopher Sartwell (Sartwell 2013, 711). Often, in the midst of rigorous conceptual analysis, he introduces amusing and telling fictional characters. “Testadura,” is a favored example, “a plain speaker and noted philistine,” who could only see Rauschenberg’s “Bed” as a real and dirty bed, or the drips of paint given to plain sight.

      When Danto addressed abstract expressionism, he talked about the paintings themselves, but he also captured a certain Tenth Avenue atmosphere of the times. He wrote of a canvas itself describing

      a rotation through ninety degrees from its vertical position on the easel to its horizontal position on the floor, which the painter crouches over like a frog-god. But the drip is also evidence for the urgency of the painting act, of pure speed and passion, as the artist swings loops and eccentric arabesques across the surface, sending up showers and explosions of spatters. And since he merely executed the will of the paint to be itself, the artist had nothing of his own to say. This went with that studied brutishness of the Dumb Artist exemplified over and over again in the artworld of the time by really quite intelligent men and women who pretended to a kind of autism, and went around in clothes so splashed with paint that the very costume was an advertisement for the closeness between the artist and his work (Danto 1981, 109).

I have quoted this passage at length to show Danto’s gift as a writer. The painter is a “frog-god,” who with the “studied brutishness of the Dumb Artist” fills the canvas with splashes and drips of paint. This ironic passage is very much in the spirit of Lichtenstein’s “Brushstrokes” or Rauschenberg’s “Bed” and their allusions to Pollock’s drip painting. The reader enjoys the wit and spontaneity in Danto’s style, a style where often the risk and adventure reveal the daring on his part to take unfamiliar philosophical paths.

      Style is part of our everyday life. A living room may be decorated in a modernist style, but also with a personal flair or touch that stands out against the background of a prevalent style. People dress and adorn their bodies, says Hegel, because of the need to alter the external world. The human being recognizes himself as such, as free, as a person, by altering the world. The world modified by human activity may be like a fingerprint of the self and, therefore, may allow self-recognition. The human being is always striving through different activities ultimately “to make this foreign world for himself,” because otherwise “he is not being at home in it” (Hegel 1835, 31, 98). Art is an attempt to mold and mark and humanize the external world, and so is style. Language is public, and when we recognize someone’s style, it is because the writer has impressed his first-person perspective into the material of language, thus making a home in it, a home the reader may also inhabit.

      Style, as I have stressed, is not a mere container of something totally alien, namely, meaning. But here, too, as Danto well knew, translation of words and language, is a deep problem. Proust, as translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff, is the same and not the same Proust who wrote in French. Following Quine, a skeptic of synonymy, one might say that “what matters is likeness in relevant aspects” (Quine 1953, 60). Danto has a pithier thought: “Try writing about Proustian jealousy with Hemingway sentences” (Danto 1981, 197). But if meaning is fused with the style of the writer, what is captured better by writing about Danto’s style than reading Danto without any companion at all?

      Notes

      1 1 My translation of “Il faut lire, méditer beaucoup, toujours penser au style…on arrive à faire des belles choses à force de patience et de longue énergie”.

      2 2 Danto does not comment on this painting by Chardin.

      References

      1 Adorno, Theodor W. 1970. Aesthetic Theory, newly translated and edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor, 1997. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, Eight Printing, 2005.

      2 Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. 1753. Discours sur L’Style. http://www.athena.unige.ch.5.

      3 Danto, Arthur C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

      4 ———. 1986. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, forward by Jonathan Gilmore. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

      5 ———. 1997. After the End of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

      6 ———. 2000a. “R.B. Kitaj.” In The Madonna of the Future, 123–131, edited by Arthur C. Danto. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

      7 ———. 2000b. “Rothko and Beauty.” In The Madonna of the Future, 335–342, edited by Arthur C. Danto. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

      8 ———. 2005. “Chardin.” In Unnatural Wonders, 36–43, edited by Arthur C. Danto. New York: Columbia University Press.

      9 ———. 2013a. “My Life as a Philosopher.” In The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, The Library of Living Philosophers, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 2013, Vol. XXXIII, 3–70. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.

      10 ______. 2013b. “Reply to Gerard Vidal.”In The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto,The Library of Living Philosopher, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin, 2013, Vol. XXXIII 162–167. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.

      11 ———. 2013c. “Reply to Lydia Goehr.” In The Philosophy of Arthur C. Danto, The Library of Living Philosophers, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, 2013, Vol. XXXIII, 382–388. Chicago and LaSalle, IL: Open Court.

      12 Dummett, Michael. 1973. Frege. Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

      13 Farrand, Max, ed. 1911. The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Vol. II. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. http://oll.libertyfund.org.

      14 Flaubert, Gustave. 13 December 1846. Correspondance, à Louis Colet. http://www.flaubert.univ-rouen.fr.

      15 ———. 15 May 1859. Correspondance, à Ernest Feydeau. http://www.flaubert.univ-rouen.fr.

      16 Frege, Gottleb. 1892a. “On Sinn and Bedeutung,” 151–171.

      17 ———. 1892b. “On Concept and Object,” 181–191.

      18 ———. 1897. “Logic,” 227–250.

      19 ———. 1906a. “Introduction to Logic,” 293–298.

      20 ———. 1906b. “Letter to Husserl, 1906,” 301–307.

      21 ———. 1918. “Thought” 325–345. In The Frege Reader, edited by Michael Beaney. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. Reprinted 2000.

      22 Hegel, G.W.F. 1835. Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Arts,