nature of music is also discussed in chapter 5, “Music and Cognition,” in Torres and
Kamhi, What Art Is.
- For further consideration of the mirror neuron system in relation to art, see Who
Says That’s Art?, 160–62. - A Prophecy Come True? Danto and Hegel on
the End of Art - “The End of Art,” in Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of
Art, New York, 1986. - Later, though, Danto told his audience in a public lecture about the reasons that
led him to believe that the end of art history had arrived. See his After the End of Art,
Princeton, 1997, especially 3–19, 31–39. The reasons he offers are partly art-historical
and partly autobiographical, due to his experiences as an art critic. His pessimism about
the future of art is expressed even more drastically in the lecture than in the original
paper, although Danto tries hard to bring in some optimistic overtones with respect to
the possibility of aesthetic pluralism after the end of art history. - Cf. R. Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, Oxford, 1994.
- In his 1964 paper “The Artworld” (reprinted in J.W. Bender and H.G. Blocker,
eds., Contemporary Philosophy of Art, Englewood Cliffs, 1993). - Broadly Hegelian because it is shared by analytic philosophers of art like Jerrold
Levinson who cannot be said to be a Hegelian in a stricter sense. - Therefore, Morris Weitz’s claim that the concept of art is indefinable in terms
of necessary and sufficient conditions is Hegelian in spirit while his Wittgensteinian
alternative is not. Cf. M. Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism15 (1956), 27–35. - The term ‘historical relativism’ is inspired by Bernard Williams. Cf. “Truth in
Relativism” in B. Williams, Moral Luck, Cambridge University Press, 1981. - This kind of theory is sometimes ascribed to Plato and Aristotle—wrongly, it
seems to me, although I cannot argue this point here. - Cf. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, Indianapolis, 1968, Part I.
- Cf. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. A Philosophy of Art,
Harvard University Press, 1981, 73. - In this respect, it resembles Walter Benjamin’s famous thesis about the artwork
in the age of its technical reproducibility. Cf. W. Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter
seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser, eds.,
Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt, 1972, Volume 1.2. - Following Hegel, one might argue that make-believe pictorial art like the Dutch
tradition of painting from the seventeenth century became possible because of develop-
ments of Geist, i.e. developments of religious and philosophical thinking. Of major
importance is the revival of Neo-Platonism in the late Middle Ages and during the
Renaissance. Neo-Platonism taught that the beauty and splendour of the visible world—
or better, the mundus sensibilis—are marks of the eternal and immutable world, the
mundus intelligibilis. The visible world itself, according to Neo-Platonism, is nothing
but a temporal, unstable image of the invisible, godly and perfect world, but it is the only
connection to the latter that is given to us mortals. Therefore, it becomes of utter impor-
tance to grasp and depict the visible world as accurately as possible. Depicting the
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