to be actively maintained and apt to its object.^35 As Benjamin Rutter puts it,
for Hegel distinctively modern art presents limited and occasional freedom
and reconciliation in relation to“the peripheral”and“the incidental,”^36 that
is, in relation to important enough objects, persons, and incidents that are
initially experienced as perplexing rather than meaningful. In modern art,
freedominfeeling about the subject matter is achieved crucially via the
virtuoso handling of materials in a medium (paint, sound, or words), not
simply in“documentary”presentation. The artist’s subjective liveliness [sub-
jektive Lebendigkeit] in handling these materials, a liveliness in which the
audience then imaginatively participates in following the work, is indispens-
able to any coming to feel at home in, absorbed by, and animated within the
experience of the object as presented in the work.^37 “The soul and living love
of [the artist’s particular] execution,”^38 and not simply the presentation of a
shared sense of what is highest, is essentially bound up with the satisfactions
of modern art.
InThe Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Arthur C. Danto develops a yet
more pluralized and individualized theory of expression. He begins his
account by arguing that works of art, like bits of language, haveaboutness;
they present a subject matter. Only in virtue of this is a given artwork
distinct from a mere thing that is perceptually indiscernible from it. Duch-
amp’s readymade sculptureBottle Dryer(1914) is visually indistinguishable
from any of a number of pieces of manufactured ironwork used in restaur-
ants and wineries, since it began life as one of these pieces. Unlike the others,
however, Duchamp’s sculpture isaboutsomething: say, the presence of
striking forminordinary objects, the overcoming of boundaries between
art and life, the paramount importance of conception and wit in art making,
and so forth. As Danto puts the general point:
Artworks as a class contrast with real things in just the way in which words
do, even if they are“in every other sense”real...Art differs from reality
in much the same way that language does when language is employed(^35) This idea derives from Spinoza’s distinction betweenpassio(a passive idea of an affection)
andactio(an active idea of an affection). See Eldridge,Literature, Life, and Modernity,
pp. 18–23, 109.
(^36) Benjamin Rutter,Hegel on the Modern Arts(Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 11.
(^37) Seeibid., pp. 85–85.
(^38) Hegel,Aesthetics, vol. II, p. 836.
Expression 87