Arthur Danto -  20^th Century

Danto rejects the earlier aesthetics of attitudes and perception; he challenges both the timelessness of art and the perceptual nature of aesthetics.

 

Much of the visual art of the twentieth century challenges earlier expectations about what art is and what art does. The earliest changes reflected a simple move away from pictorial transparency�the view that in looking at a picture one saw through it to what it was a picture of. Impressionism focused on the �surface� of the picture�the play light and color rather than the objects and their arrangement that had made up the focus of traditional art. But postimpressionism went farther, abandoning perspective and formal verisimilitude. From there, art has exploded into so many forms of abstraction and eccentricity that one cannot mention them all.

 

Danto sees a deeper significance in what we should now be able to recognize in the history of art. As new art forms appear we gain a new perspective. (not just in the visual arts but across the fields of art in general) What we had taken to be the only available forma and styles of art now become only one part of the historical picture. Art has a history, and its history dictates our theoretical understanding. Morris Weitz argued that theory has only a limited role. It misleads us into looking for only one thing and not seeing what is present. The positive role/side of theory is to help us see. But Danto argues that theory is essential to the very existence of art in the first place. One must be careful, therefore, to understand what the term   �theory� refers to.

For Danto, theory is the ability to apply predicates correctly. It is thus a linguistic operation, but it assumes a standard independent of language.  Danto recognizes two broad categories of theories�imitation theory (IT) and reality theory (RT)�That largely account for the art theories that we have known so far. Reality theories come latter, so they subsumes imitation theories as a special case or replace them with different explanations of the same phenomena.