The Artworld
Arthur Danto
The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61, No. 19, American Philosophical Association Eastern
Division Sixty-First Annual Meeting. (Oct. 15, 1964), pp. 571-584.
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SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK O P ART
THE ARTWORLD *
Hamlet:
Do you see nothing there9
The Queen:
Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.
Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act III, Scene I V
HAMLET and Socrates, though in praise and deprecation
respectively, spoke of art as a mirror held up to nature.
As with many disagreements in attitude, this one has a factual
basis. Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can already
see; so art, insofar as mirrorlike, yields idle accurate duplications
of the appearances of things, and is of no cognitive benefit whatever.
Hamlet, more acutely, recognized a remarkable feature of
reflecting surfaces, namely that they show us what we could not
otherwise perceive--our own face and form-and so art, insofar
as it is mirrorlike, reveals us to ourselves, and is, even by socratic
criteria, of some cognitive utility after all. As a philosopher, however,
I find Socrates7 discussion defective on other, perhaps less
profound grounds than these. If a mirror-image of o is indeed
an imitation of o, then, if art is imitation, mirror-images are art.
But in fact mirroring objects no more is art than returning
weapons to a madman is justice; and reference to mirrorings
would be just the sly sort of counterinstance we would expect
Socrates to bring forward in rebuttal of the theory he instead
uses them to illustrate. If that theory requires us to class these
as art, it thereby shows its inadequacy: "is an imitation" will not
do as a sufficient condition for "is art." Yet, perhaps because
artists were engaged in imitation, in Socrates' time and after, the
insdciency of the theory was not noticed until the invention of
photography. Once rejected as a sufficient condition, mimesis was
quickly discarded as even a necessary one; and since the achievement
of Kandinsky, mimetic features have been relegated to the
periphery of critical concern, so much so that some works survive
in spite of possessing those virtues, excellence in which was once
celebrated as the essence of art, narrowly escaping demotion to
mere illustrations.
It is, of course, indispensable in socratic discussion that all
participants be masters of the concept up for analysis, since the
aim is to match a real defining expression to a term in active
use, and the test for adequacy presumably consists in showing
* To be presented in a symposium on "The Work of Art" at the sixtyfirst
annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern
Division, December 28, 1964.
572 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOXOPHP
that the former analyzes and applies to all and only those things
of which the latter is true. The popular disclaimer notwithstanding,
then, Socrates' auditors purportedly knew what art was as well
as what they liked; and a theory of art, regarded here as a real
definition of 'Art', is accordingly not to be of great use in helping
men to recognize instances of its application. Their antecedent
ability to do this is precisely what the adequacy of the
theory is to be tested against, the problem being only to make
explicit what they already know. It is our use of the term that the
theory allegedly means to capture, but we are supposed able, in
the words of a recent writer, "to separate those objects which are
works of art from those which are not, because . . . we know
how correctly to use the word 'art' and to apply the phrase 'work
of art'." Theories, on this account, are somewhat like mirrorimages
on Socrates' account, showing forth what we already know,
wordy reflections of the actual linguistic practice we are masters in.
But telling artworks from other things is not so simple a
matter, even for native speakers, and these days one might not be
aware he was on artistic terrain without an artistic theory to tell
him so. And part of the reason for this lies in the fact that
terrain is constituted artistic in virtue of artistic theories, so that
one use of theories, in addition to helping us discriminate art
from the rest, consists in making art possible. Glaucon and the
others could hardly have known what was art and what not:
otherwise they would never have been taken in by mirror-images.
Suppose one thinks of the discovery of a whole new class of
artworks as something analogous to the discovery of a whole new
class of facts anywhere, viz., as something for theoreticians to
explain. In science, as elsewhere, we often accommodate new
facts to old theories via auxiliary hypotheses, a pardonable enough
conservatism when the theory in question is deemed too valuable
to be jettisoned all at once. Now the Imitation Theory of Art
(IT) is, if one but thinks it through, an exceedingly powerful
theory, explaining a great many phenomena connected with the
causation and evaluation of artworks, bringing a surprising unity
into a complex domain. Moreover, it is a simple matter to shore
it up against many purported counterinstances by such auxiliary
hypotheses as that the artist who deviates from mimeticity is
perverse, inept, or mad. Ineptitude, chicanery, or folly are, in
fact, testable predications. Suppose, then, tests reveal that these
hypotheses fail to hold, that the theory, now beyond repair, must
573SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK O F ART
be replaced. And a new theory is worked out, capturing what
it can of the old theory's competence, together with the heretofore
recalcitrant facts. One might, thinking along these lines, represent
certain episodes in the history of art as not dissimilar to certain
episodes in the history of science, where a conceptual revolution
is being effected and where refusal to countenance certain
facts, while in part due to prejudice, inertia, and self-interest, is
due also to the fact that a well-established, or at least widely
credited theory is being threatened in such a way that all coherence
goes.
Some such episode transpired with the advent of post-impressionist
paintings. In terms of the prevailing artistic theory (IT),
it was impossible to accept these as art unless inept art: otherwise
they could be discounted as hoaxes, self-advertisements, or the
visual counterparts of madmen's ravings. So to get them accepted
as art, on a footing with the Transfiguration (not to speak of a
Landseer stag), required not so much a revolution in taste as a
theoretical revision of rather considerable proportions, involving
not only the artistic enfranchisement of these objects, but an
emphasis upon newly signscant features of accepted artworks, so
that quite different accounts of their status as artworks would
now have to be given. As a result of the new theory's acceptance,
not only were post-impressionist paintings taken up as art,
but numbers of objects (masks, weapons, etc.) were transferred
from anthropological museums (and heterogeneous other places)
to musbes des beaux arts, though, as we would expect from the
fact that a criterion for the acceptance of a new theory is that
it account for whatever the older one did, nothing had to be transferred
out of the musQedes beaux arts-even if there were internal
rearrangements as between storage rooms and exhibition space.
Countless native speakers hung upon suburban mantelpieces innumerable
replicas of paradigm cases for teaching the expression
'work of art' that would have sent their Edwardian forebears
into linguistic apoplexy.
To be sure, I distort by speaking of a theory: historically,
there were several, all, interestingly enough, more or less defined
in terms of the IT. Art-historical complexities must yield before
the exigencies of logical exposition, and I shall speak as though
there were one replacing theory, partially compensating for historical
falsity by choosing one which was actually enunciated.
According to it, the artists in question were to be understood not
as unsuccessfully imitating real forms but as successfully creating
new ones, quite as real as the forms which the older art had been
thought, in its best examples, to be creditably imitating. Art,
574 THE JOURNAL OP PHILOSOPHY
after all, had long since been thought of as creative (Vasari says
that God was the first artist), and the post-impressionists were
to be explained as genuinely creative, aiming, in Roger Fry's
words, "not at illusion but reality.'' This theory (RT) furnished
a whole new mode of looking at painting, old and new. Indeed,
one might almost interpret the crude drawing in Van Qogh and
CBzanne, the dislocation of form from contour in Rouault and
Dufy, the arbitrary use of color planes in Qauguin and the Fauves,
as so many ways of drawing attention to the fact that these were
non-imitations, specifically intended not to deceive. Logically,
this would be roughly like printing "Not Legal Tender'' across a
brilliantly counterfeited dollar bill, the resulting object (counterfeit
cum inscription) rendered incapable of deceiving anyone.
It is not an illusory dollar bill, but then, just because it is nonillusory
it does not automatically become a real dollar bill either.
It rather occupies a freshly opened area between real objects and
real facsimiles of real objects: it is a non-facsimile, if one requires
a word, and a new contribution to the world. Thus, Van Gogh's
Potato Eaters, as a consequence of certain unmistakable distortions,
turns out to be a non-facsimile of real-life potato eaters;
and inasmuch as these are not facsimiles of potato eaters, Van
Gogh's picture, as a non-imitation, had as much right to be called
a real object as did its putative subjects. By means of this theory
(RT), artworks re-entered the thick of things from which socratic
theory (IT) had sought to evict them: if no more real than
what carpenters wrought, they were at least no less real. The
Post-Impressionist won a victory in ontology.
It is in terms of RT that we must understand the artworks
around us today. Thus Roy Lichtenstein paints comic-strip
panels, though ten or twelve feet high. These are reasonably
faithful projections onto a gigantesque scale of the homely frames
from the daily tabloid, but it is precisely the scale that counts.
A skilled engraver might incise The Virgin and the Chancellor
Rollin, on a pinhead, and it would be recognizable as such to the
keen of sight, but an engraving of a Barnett Newman on a similar
scale would be a blob, disappearing in the reduction. A photograph
of a Lichtenstein is indiscernible from a photograph of a
counterpart panel from Steve Canyon; but the photograph fails
to capture the scale, and hence is as inaccurate a reproduction as
a black-and-white engraving of Botticelli, scale being essential here
as color there. Lichtensteins, then, are not imitations but new
entities, as giant whelks would be. Jasper Johns, by contrast,
paints objects with respect to which questions of scale are irrelevant.
Yet his objects cannot be imitations, for they have the
575SYMPOSIUM: THE W O R K O P ART
remarkable property that any intended copy of a member of this
class of objects is automatically a member of the class itself, so
that these objects are logically inimitable. Thus, a copy of a
numeral just is that numeral: a painting of 3 is a 3 made of paint.
Johns, in addition, paints targets, flags, and maps. Finally, in
what I hope are not unwitting footnotes to Plato, two of our
pioneers-Robert Rauschenberg and Claes Oldenburg-have made
genuine beds.
Rauschenberg's bed hangs on a wall, and is streaked with some
desultory housepaint. Oldenburg's bed is a rhomboid, narrower at
one end than the other, with what one might speak of as a built-in
perspective: ideal for small bedrooms. As beds, these sell at
singularly inflated prices, but one could sleep in either of them:
Rauschenberg has expressed the fear that someone might just
climb into his bed and fall asleap. Imagine, now, a certain
Testadura-a plain speaker and noted philistine-who is not aware
that these are art, and who takes them to be reality simple and
pure. He attributes the paintstreaks on Rauschenberg's bed to
the slovenliness of the owner, and the bias in the Oldenburg bed
to the ineptitude of the builder or the whimsy, perhaps, of whoever
had it "custom-made." These would be mistakes, but mistakes
of rather an odd kind, and not terribly different from that
made by the stunned birds who pecked the sham grapes of Zeuxis.
They mistook art for reality, and so has Testadura. But it was
meant to be reality, according to RT. Can one have mistaken
reality for reality? How shall we describe Testadura's error?
What, after all, prevents Oldenburg's creation from being a misshapen
bed? This is equivalent to asking what makes it art, and
with this query we enter a domain of conceptual inquiry where
native speakers are poor guides: they are lost themselves.
To mistake an artwork for a real object is no great feat when
an artwork is the real object one mistakes it for. The problem is
how to a:.oid such errors, or to remove them once they are made.
The artwork is a bed, and not a bed-illusion; so there is nothing
like the traumatic encounter against a flat surface that brought it
home to the birds of Zeuxis that they had been duped. Except
for the guard cautioning Testadura not to sleep on the artworks, he
might never have discovered that this was an artwork and not a
bed; and since, after all, one cannot discover that a bed is not a
bed, how is Testadura to realize that he has made an error 4 A
certain sort of explanation is required, for the error here is a
576 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
curiously philosophical one, rather like, if we may assume as correct
some well-known views of P. F. Strawson, mistaking a person
for a material body when the truth is that a person is a material
body in the sense that a whole class of predicates, sensibly applicable
to material bodies, are sensibly, and by appeal to no
different criteria, applicable to persons. So you cannot discover
that a person is not a material body.
We begin by explaining, perhaps, that the paintstreaks are not
to be explained away, that they are part of the object, so the
object is not a mere bed with-as 'it happens-streaks of paint
spilled over it, but a complex object fabricated out of a bed and
some paintstreaks: a paint-bed. Similarly, a person is not a material
body with-as it happens-some thoughts superadded, but
is a complex entity made up of a body and some conscious states:
a conscious-body. Persons, like artworks, must then be taken
as irreducible to parts of themselves, and are in that sense primitive.
Or, more accurately, the paintstreaks are not part of the real
object-the bed-which happens to be part of the artwork, but
are, like the bed, part of the artwork as such. And this might be
generalized into a rough characterization of artworks that happen
to contain real objects as parts of themselves: not every part of
an artwork A is part of a real object R when R is part of A and
can, moreover, be detached from A and seen merely as R. The
mistake thus far will have been to mistake A for part of itself,
namely R, even though it would not be incorrect to say that A is R,
that the artwork is a bed. It is the 'is' which requires clarification
here.
There is an is that figures prominently in statements concerning
artworks which is not the is of either identity or predication;
nor is it the is of existence, of identification, or some special is
made up to serve a philosophic end. Nevertheless, it is in common
usage, and is readily mastered by children. It is the sense of is
in accordance with which a child, shown a circle and a triangle
and asked which is him and which his sister, will point to the
triangle saying "That is me" ; or, in response to my question, the
person next to me points to the man in purple and says "That
one is Lear"; or in the gallery I point, for my companion's benefit,
to a spot in the painting before us and say "That white dab is
Icarus." We do not mean, in these instances, that whatever is
pointed to stands for, or represents, what it is said to be, for the
word 'Icarus' stands for or represents Icarus: yet I would not
in the same sense of is point to the word and say "That is Icarus."
The sentence "That a is b" is perfectly compatible with "That a
is not b" when the first employs this sense of is and the second
577SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK O F A R T
employs some other, though a and b are used nonambiguously
throughout. Often, indeed, the truth of the first requires the
truth of the second. The first, in fact, is incompatible with "That
a is not b" only when the is is used nonambiguously throughout.
For want of a word I shall designate this the is of artistic identification;
in each case in which it is used, the a stands for some
specific physical property of, or physical part of, an object; and,
finally, it is a necessary condition for something to be an artwork
that some part or property of it be designable by the subject
of a sentence that employs this special is. It is an is, incidentally,
which has near-relatives in marginal and mythical pronouncements.
(Thus, one is Quetzalcoatl; those are the Pillars of
Hercules.)
Let me illustrate. Two painters are asked to decorate the east
and west walls of a science library with frescoes to be respectively
called Newton's Pirst Law and Newton's Third Law. These paintings,
when finally unveiled, look, scale apart, as follows:
As objects I shall suppose the works to be indiscernible: a black,
horizontal line on a white ground, equally large in each dimension
and element. B explains his work as follows: a mass, pressing
downward, is met by a mass pressing upward: the lower mass
reacts equally and oppositely to the upper one. A explains his
work as follows: the line through the space is the path of an
isolated particle. The path goes from edge to edge, to give the
sense of its going beyond. If it ended or began within the space,
the line would be curved: and it is parallel to the top and bottom
edges, for if it were closer to one than to another, there would
have to be a force accounting for it, and this is inconsistent with
its being the path of an isolated particle.
Much follows from these artistic identifications. To regard
THE JOURNAL OP PHILOSOPHY 

the middle line as an edge (mass meeting mass) imposes the need
to identify the top and bottom half of the picture as rectangles, and
as two distinct parts (not necessarily as two masses, for the line
could be the edge of one mass jutting up--or down-into empty
space). If it is an edge, we cannot thus take the entire area of the
painting as a single space: it is rather composed of two forms, or
one form and a non-form. We could take the entire area as a
single space only by taking the middle horizontal as a line which
is not an edge. But this almost requires a three-dimensional
identification of the whole picture: the area can be a flat surface
which the line is above (Jet-flight),or below (Submarine-path), or
on (Line), or in (Pissure), or through (Newton's Pirst Law)though
in this last case the area is not a flat surface but a transparent
cross section of absolute space. We could make all these
prepositional qualifications clear by imagining perpendicular cross
sections to the picture plane. Then, depending upon the applicable
prepositional clause, the area is (artistically) interrupted
or not by the horizontal element. If we take the line as through
space, the edges of the picture are not really the edges of the
space: the space goes beyond the picture if the line itself does;
and we are in the same space as the line is. As B, the edges of
the picture can be part of the picture in case the masses go right
to the edges, so that the edges of the picture are their edges. In
that case, the vertices of the picture would be the vertices of the
masses, except that the masses have four vertices more than the
picture itself does: here four vertices would be part of the art
work which were not part of the real object. Again, the faces
of the masses could be the face of the picture, and in looking at
the picture, we are looking at these faces: but space has no face,
and on the reading of A the work has to be read as faceless, and
the face of the physical object would not be part of the artwork.
Notice here how one artistic identification engenders another artistic
identification, and how, consistently with a given identification,
we are required to give others and precluded from still others:
indeed, a given identification determines how many elements the
work is to contain. These different identifications are incompatible
with one another, or generally so, and each might be said to make
a different artwork, even though each artwork contains the identical
real object as part of itself--or at least parts of the identical real
object as parts of itself. There are, of course, senseless identifications:
no one could, I think, sensibly read the middle horizontal as
Love's Labour's Lost or The Ascendency of St. Erasmus. Finally,
notice how acceptance of one identification rather than another
is in effect to exchange one world for another. We could, indeed,
579SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK OF ART
enter a quiet poetic world by identifying the upper area with a
clear and cloudless sky, reflected in the still surface of the water
below, whiteness kept from whiteness only by the unreal boundary
of the horizon.
And now Testadura, having hovered in the wings throughout
this discussion, protests that all he sees is paint: a white painted
oblong with a black line painted across it. And how right he
really is: that is all he sees or that anybody can, we aesthetes included.
So, if he asks us to show him what there is further to see,
to demonstrate through pointing that this is an artwork (Sea and
Sky), we cannot comply, for he has overlooked nothing (and it
would be absurd to suppose he had, that there was something tiny
we could point to and he, peering closely, say "So it is! A work
of art after all!"). We cannot help him until he has mastered
the is of artistic identification and so constitutes it a work of art.
If he cannot achieve this, he will never look upon artworks: he will
be like a child who sees sticks as sticks.
But what about pure abstractions, say something that looks just
like A but is entitled No. 71 The 10th Street abstractionist
blankly insists that there is nothing here but white paint and black,
and none of our literary identifications need apply. What then
distinguishes him from Testadura, whose philistine utterances are
indiscernible from his? And how can it be an artwork for him
and not for Testadura, when they agree that there is nothing that
does not meet the eye? The answer, unpopular as it is likely to
be to purists of every variety, lies in the fact that this artist has
returned to the physicality of paint through an atmosphere compounded
of artistic theories and the history of recent and remote
painting, elements of which he is trying to refine out of his own
work; and as a consequence of this his work belongs in this atmosphere
and is part of this history. He has achieved abstraction
through rejection of artistic identifications, returning to the real
world from which such identifications remove us (he thinks),
somewhat in the mode of Ch'ing Yuan, who wrote:
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains
and waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came
to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and waters are
not waters. But now that I have got the very substance I am at rest. For
it is just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and waters once
again as waters.
His identification of what he has made is logically dependent upon
the theories and history he rejects. The difference between his utterance
and Testadura's "This is black paint and white paint and
580 THE JOURNAL OP PHILOSOPHY
nothing more" lies in the fact that he is still using the is of
artistic identification, so that his use of "That black paint is black
paint" is not a tautology. Testadura is not at that stage. To see
something as art requires something the eye cannot decry-an
atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art:
an artworld.
I11
Mr. Andy Warhol, the Pop artist, displays facsimiles of Brillo
cartons, piled high, in neat stacks, as in the stockroom of the
supermarket. They happen to be of wood, painted to look like
cardboard, and why not? To paraphrase the critic of the Times,
if one may make the facsimile of a human being out of bronze,
why not the facsimile of a Brillo carton out of plywood? The
cost of these boxes happens to be 2 x lo3 that of their homely
counterparts in real life-a differential hardly ascribable to their
advantage in durability. In fact the Brillo people might, at some
slight increase in cost, make their boxes out of plywood without
these becoming artworks, and Warhol might make his out of
cardboard without their ceasing to be art. So we may forget questions
of intrinsic value, and ask why the Brillo people cannot
manufacture art and why Warhol cannot but make artworks.
Well, his are made by hand, to be sure. Which is like an insane
reversal of Picasso's strategy in pasting the label from a bottle of
Suze onto a drawing, saying as it were that the academic artist,
concerned with exact imitation, must always fall short of the real
thing: so why not just use the real thing? The Pop artist
laboriously reproduces machine-made objects by hand, e.g., painting
the labels on coffee cans (one can hear the familiar commendation
"Entirely made by hand" falling painfully out of the
guide's vocabulary when confronted by these objects). But the
difference cannot consist in craft: a man who carved pebbles out
of stones and carefully constructed a work called Gravel Pile
might invoke the labor theory of value to account for the price he
demands; but the question is, What makes it art? And why need
Warhol make these things a n y w a y m y not just scrawl his
signature across one? Or crush one up and display it as Crushed
Brillo Box ("A protest against mechanization . . .") or simply
display a Brillo carton as Ultcrushed Brillo Box ("A bold affirmation
of the plastic authenticity of industrial . . .") ? Is this
man a kind of Midas, turning whatever he touches into the gold of
pure art? And the whole world consisting of latent artworks
waiting, like the bread and wine of reality, to be transfigured,
through some dark mystery, into the indiscernible flesh and blood
SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK OP ART 581
of the sacrament? Never mind that the Brillo box may not be
good, much less great art. The impressive thing is that it is art
at all. But if it is, why are not the indiscernible Brillo boxes
that are in the stockroom7 Or has the whole distinction between
art and reality broken down?
Suppose a man collects objects (ready-mades), including a
Brillo carton; we praise the exhibit for variety, ingenuity, what
you will. Next he exhibits nothing but Brillo cartons, and we
criticize it as dull, repetitive, self-plagiarizing-or (more profoundly)
claim that he is obsessed by regularity and repetition,
as in Marienbad. Or he piles them high, leaving a narrow path;
we tread our way through the smooth opaque stacks and find it an
unsettling experience, and write it up as the closing in of consumer
products, confining us as prisoners: or we say he is a
modern pyramid builder. True, we don't say these things about
the stockboy. But then a stockroom is not an art gallery, and
we cannot readily separate the Brillo cartons from the gallery
they are in, any more than we can separate the Rauschenberg bed
from the paint upon it. Outside the gallery, they are pasteboard
cartons. But then, scoured clean of paint, Rauschenberg's bed is
a bed, just what it was before it was transformed into art. But
then if we think this matter through, we discover that the artist
has failed, really and of necessity, to produce a mere real object.
He has produced an artwork, his use of real Brillo cartons being
but an expansion of the resources available to arists, a contribution
to artists' materials, as oil paint was, or tuche.
What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and
a work of art consisting of a Brillo Box is a certain theory of art.
It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps
it from collapsing into the real object which it is (in a sense of
is other than that of artistic identification). Of course, without
the theory, one is unlikely to see it as art, and in order to see it
as part of the artworld, one must have mastered a good deal of
artistic theory as well as a considerable amount of the history of
recent New York painting. It could not have been art fifty years
ago. But then there could not have been, everything being equal,
flight insurance in the Middle Ages, or Etruscan typewriter erasers.
The world has to be ready for certain things, the artworld no less
than the real one. It is the role of artistic theories, these days as
always, to make the artworld, and art, possible. It would, I should
think, never have occurred to the painters of Lascaux that they
were producing art on those walls. Not unless there were neolithic
aestheticians.
582 T H E JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
The artworld stands to the real world in something like the
relationship in which the City of God stands to the Earthly City.
Certain objects, like certain individuals, enjoy a double citizenship,
but there remains, the RT notwithstanding, a fundamental
contrast between artworks and real objects. Perhaps this was
already dimly sensed by the early framers of the IT who, inchoately
realizing the nonreality of art, were perhaps limited only
in supposing that the sole way objects had of being other than
real is to be sham, so that artworks necessarily had to be imitations
of real objects. This was too narrow. So Yeats saw in writing
"Once out of nature I shall never take/My bodily form from
any natural thing." It is but a matter of choice: and the Brillo
box of the artworld may be just the Brillo box of the real one,
separated and united by the is of artistic identification. But I
should like to say some final words about the theories that make
artworks possible, and their relationship to one another. In so
doing, I shall beg some of the hardest philosophical questions I
know.
I shall now think of pairs of predicates related to each other
as "opposites," conceding straight off the vagueness of this demodk
term. Contradictory predicates are not opposites, since one of
each of them must apply to every object in the universe, and
neither of a pair of opposites need apply to some objects in the
universe. An object must first be of a certain kind before either
of a pair of opposites applies to it, and then at most and at least
one of the opposites must apply to it. So opposites are not contraries,
for contraries may both be false of some objects in the
universe, but opposites cannot both be false; for of some objects,
neither of a pair of opposites sensibly applies, unless the object is
of the right sort. Then, if the object is of the required kind, the
opposites behave as contradictories. If P and non-P are opposites,
an object o must be of a certain kind K before either of
these sensibly applies; but if o is a member of K, then o either is
P or non-P, to the exclusion of the other. The class of pairs of
opposites that sensibly apply to the (6)Ko I shall designate as the
class of K-relevant predicates. And a necessary condition for an
object to be of a kind K is that at least one pair of K-relevant opposites
be sensibly applicable to it. But, in fact, if an object is
of kind K, at least and at most one of each K-relevant pair of
opposites applies to it.
I am now interested in the K-relevant predicates for the class
583SYMPOSIUM: THE WORK OP ART
K of artworks. And let P and non-P be an opposite pair of such
predicates. Now it might happen that, throughout an entire period
of time, every artwork is non-P. But since nothing thus far
is both an artwork and P, it might never occur to anyone that nonP
is an artistically relevant predicate. The non-P-ness of artworks
goes unmarked. By contrast, all works up to a given time might be
G, it never occurring to anyone until that time that something
might both be an artwork and non-G; indeed, it might have been
thought that G was a defining trait of artworks when in fact
something might first have to be an artwork before G is sensibly
predicable of i t i n which case non-G might also be predicable of
artworks, and G itself then could not have been a defining trait
of this class.
Let G be 'is representational' and let P be 'is expressionist'. At
a given time, these and their opposites are perhaps the only artrelevant
predicates in critical use. Now letting '+' stand for a
given predicate P and '-' for its opposite non-P, we may construct
a style matrix more or less as follows:
The rows determine available styles, given the active critical
vocabulary : representational expressionistic (e.g., Fauvism) ;representational
nonexpressionistic (Ingres) ; nonrepresentational expressionistic
(Abstract Expressionism) ; nonrepresentational nonexpressionist
(hard-edge abstraction). Plainly, as we add artrelevant
predicates, we increase the number of available styles at
the rate of 2". It is, of course, not easy to see in advance which
predicates are going to be added or replaced by their opposites, but
suppose an artist determines that H shall henceforth be artistically
relevant for his paintings. Then, in fact, both H and non-H become
artistically relevant for all painting, and if his is the first
and only painting that is H, every other painting in existence becomes
non-H, and the entire community of paintings is enriched,
together with a doubling of the available style opportunities. It
is this retroactive enrichment of the entities in the artworld that
makes it possible to discuss Raphael and De Kooning together, or
Lichtenstein and Michelangelo. The greater the variety of artistically
relevant predicates, the more complex the individual members
of the artworld become; and the more one knows of the entire
584 I'HE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY
population of the artworld, the richer one's experience with any
of its members.
In this regard, notice that, if there are m artistically relevant
predicates, there is always a bottom row with m minuses. This
row is apt to be occupied by purists. Having scoured their canvasses
clear of what they regard as inessential, they credit themselves
with having distilled out the essence of art. But this is just
their fallacy: exactly as many artistically relevant predicates stand
true of their square monochromes as stand true of any member of
the Artworld, and they can exist as artworks only insofar as "impure"
paintings exist. Strictly speaking, a black square by Reinhardt
is artistically as rich as Titian's Sacred and Profane Love.
This explains how less is more.
Fashion, as it happens, favors certain rows of the style matrix:
museums, connoisseurs, and others are makeweights in the Artworld.
To insist, or seek to, that all artists become representational,
perhaps to gain entry into a specially prestigious exhibition,
cuts the available style matrix in half: there are then 2n/2 ways of
satisfying the requirement, and museums then can exhibit all these
"approaches" to the topic they have set. But this is a matter of
almost purely sociological interest: one row in the matrix is as
legitimate as another. An artistic breakthrough consists, I suppose,
in adding the possibility of a column to the matrix. Artists
then, with greater or less alacrity, occupy the positions thus opened
up : this is a remarkable feature of contemporary art, and for those
unfamiliar with the matrix, it is hard, and perhaps impossible, to
recognize certain positions as occupied by artworks. Nor would
these things be artworks without the theories and the histories
of the Artworld.
Brillo boxes enter the artworld with that same tonic incongruity
the commedia dell'arte characters bring into Ariadne
auf Naxos. Whatever is the artistically relevant predicate in virtue
of which they gain their entry, the rest of the Artworld becomes
that much the richer in having the opposite predicate available
and applicable to its members. And, to return to the views of
Hamlet with which we began this discussion, Brillo boxes may reveal
us to ourselves as well as anything might: as a mirror held
up to nature, they might serve to catch the conscience of our kings.