- Ibid., 139.
- As Danto tells us, “This happens once art raises the question of ‘why one pair
of look-alikes was art and the other was not’ and it ‘lacked the power to rise to an
answer,’ thus necessitating philosophy (Ibid., 134). - “The End of Art: A Philosophical Defense,” History and Theory37:4 (1998),
127–143, at 133. - Danto points out that for Hegel, the end of art comes because, “Art [is] no longer
capable by its own means alone, to present the highest realities in sensuous form. Art
had become an object rather than a medium through which higher reality made itself
present” (“The End of Art,” 130). - See Theodor Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Volume 7 of the Gesamtausgabe
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 474. He writes: “Die These vom bevorstehenden oder
schon erreichten Ende der Kunst wiederholt sich die Geschichte hindurch, vollends seit
der Moderne; Hegel reflektiert jene These philosophisch, ist nicht ihr Erfinder.” - “The End of Art,” 134.
- Danto is one of the few philosophers to mention Mill in his discussion of art. In
his discussion of the end of art as the end of the possibility of progression or develop-
ment in art, Danto directs attention to Mill’s comments on the exhaustibility of music.
Mill, we are told, “declared that all possible combination of sounds would sooner rather
than later have been made and with that thought the possibilities of indefinite creativity
were closed” (Danto, Ibid., 138). - Mill does directly address the arts in some of his other writings, for example, in
Chapter 4 of his Autobiography, “Poetical Culture,” he tells us that “religion and poetry
address themselves to the desire for ideal conceptions grander and more beautiful than
life provides” (448). This insight will play a role in the case I want to make for the
humanizing function of art. - He was able to recall the following lines (118–19): “Think of your breed; for
brutish ignorance/Your mettle was not made; you were made men, / To follow after
knowledge and excellence.” - For Adorno, Auschwitz was a place “where the liquidation of the individual
loomed large as part of a historical process—a final stage in the dialectic of cultural and
barbarism” (Michael Rothberg, “After Adorno: Culture in the Wake of Catastrophe,” The
New German Critique, 58). - Richard Rorty, “Thugs and Theorists: A Reply to Bernstein,” Political Theory
15:4 (1987), 564–590, at 587. - Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of a Journey to the Equinoctial
Regions of the New Continent (London: Penguin, 1995), 42. Humboldt quotes the pas-
sage in Italian, “Right-hand I turned, and setting me to spy / That alien pole, beheld four
stars, the same / The first men saw, and since, no living eye; / Meseemed the heavens
exulted in their flame— / O widowed world beneath the northern Plough, / For ever fam-
ished of the sight of them!” (Dante’s Purgatory, Canto I, 22–27). - Chapter 4 of his Autobiography, “Poetical Culture,” 448.
- Clifford Geertz, “Art as a Cultural System,” Modern Language Notes91:6,
Comparative Literature (December 1971), 1473–499, at 1478. - Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 145. - Ibid., 145.
- Ibid., 145.
210 Notes to Pages 75–82