[215]
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 68, No. 3 (SUMMER 2010), pp. 215-223
JOSEPH MARGOLIS
The Importance of Being Earnest about the Definition and Metaphysics of Art
[SK's comments]
The philosophy of art may be doomed,
again and again
but always once and for all,
to define what it is to be
"a work of art,"
an "artwork,"
"art"
in the sense
best suited to "the fine arts."
Modern efforts seem to end
in exhaustion
or bafflement
or sheer scatter
or
a sort of bad faith
that assures us that it was never worth the bother in the first place.
But many are troubled by the nagging sense of failure that no mere dismissal seems able to dispel.
We are still caught in the puzzles of Morris Weitz's extraordinarily disturbing early essay, ...
published ... only a few years after the appearance of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953),
on which,
however inaccurately,
it claims to depend.
If Weitz's account is regarded
as
the original gauntlet analytic aesthetics took up so eagerly almost at once
...
it is equally plausible
to credit Arthur Danto's immensely influential essay,
"The Artworld,"
published in 1964,
with
having confirmed
(by the absence of explicit mention,
so to say)
the single most-discussed version
of
the great complication
that
baffled all efforts
at
defining art
in accord with
the new spirit of rigor
that had just taken hold
in
analytic aesthetics.
I mean,
of course,
the trauma
produced by
Duchamp's devilish jokes
(especially the notorious Fountain)
transfigured,
in Danto's hands,
into
the sober metaphysics
of Warhol's Brillo Box.
