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My subject is the popular view in philosophy that a work of art is essentially a bundle of meanings and that one of the main charges of the art critic, therefore, is to interpret art. The version of the view that I will address is the one that we find in the philosophy of Arthur Danto, along with supporting arguments from Monroe Beardsley and Richard Wollheim. My critique develops lines of argument hinted at, but never fully developed by Susan Sontag, in her seminal essay “Against Interpretation.”
Notes
1. Sontag 5.
2. Ibid. 7.
3. Ibid. 10.
4. Danto, Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art 39–43.
5. Beardsley 39.
6. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace 1–4.
7. Ibid. 120–21. The example – and the point about applying the “is” of artistic identification – first appears in Danto, “The Artworld” 571–84.
8. Danto, Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art 44–45.
9. Ibid. 67.
10. Ibid. 51–55.
11. Ibid. 56–60.
12. Sontag 9.
13. Wittgenstein, sections 7–22.
14. Quine 48.
15. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace 124–25.
16. Sontag 5.
17. Danto, Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art 50–51.
18. Although even this strikes me as unclear, since it is not obvious that for the description “the land of Carmen” to refer to Spain there must have been a Carmen.
19. Danto, Transfiguration of the Commonplace 46; emphasis in the original, my brackets.
20. Gombrich 373.
21. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fayum-01.jpg>.
22. Danto, Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art 43–44.
23. Ibid. 44; emphasis in the original.
24. Beardsley 9–10.
25. Ibid. 10.
26. Ibid. 14.
27. Sontag 4.
28. Wollheim 201.
29. Ibid. 202–04.
30. Ibid. 204.
31. Danto, Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art 55.
32. Beardsley 11.
33. Margolis 67.
34. Mencken 3.
35. Brandon 364.
36. Mencken 5.
37. Ibid. 9.
38. Margolis 72–76.