artists find themselves in, and are part of that historical moment.”^47 That is,
there are, one might say, historically afforded patterns of grief, love, awe,
and honor in relation to appropriate objects, and no one comes to have such
emotions and attitudes except by way of engaging with (and then perhaps
altering) such patterns. In this respect, meaning is social in nature. The
achievement of the artist is not to invent meanings out of whole cloth, but
to embody them.“The originality of the artist comes from inventing modes
of embodying meanings she or he may share with communities of very large
circumference.”^48
But it is also true that it is the individual artist’s distinctive, personal way of
seeing (itself achieved against a historical background of emotion and atti-
tude) that is embodied in the successful work.“The greatness of the work is
the greatness of the representation the work makes material. If style is the
man, greatness of style is greatness of person.”^49 Hence Danto’s theory of
expression is considerably weaker than Hegel’s. Though meanings, emotions,
and attitudes arise in any individual out of historically afforded patterns, such
patterns can be refigured within any individual. There is no logic of or plan for
appropriate emotions toward appropriate objects in which all persons, or even
all persons of a given time and place, must participate. In that sense, there is,
for Danto, no necessary Spirit of an Age. There are only embodied meanings
that the artist may share with communities of very large circumference–or
may not. The emotional-attitudinal“inside”of a person that is embodied in an
expressive work is a kind of mere factual-historical inside: something a given
person in interaction with a collectivity of some extent will happen to have in
one way or another. There is no necessarily shared common human project of
freedom, and there are in consequence no necessarily shared emotions and
attitudes toward embodiments of strategies of freedom.
This is in many ways a great virtue, and Danto is himself happy with this
result. There is no governing logic of culture and cultural expression in
which art, criticism, and the philosophy of art must all participate. Many
critics, Danto remarks, have
an agenda. I have none...For me the essence of art [viz. expressing and
embodying some meaning or other] must be shared by everything that is an(^47) Danto,Embodied Meanings, p. xiii. (^48) Ibid.
(^49) Danto,Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. 207.
90 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art