I do not intend to quarrel with this picture. On the contrary, in my
view there is strong evidence that the condition of art today is poor
indeed and that Danto is right in his overall diagnosis, although, in his
search for the powerful and genuine in contemporary art, he may be
looking in the wrong direction.^3 But this is not my main concern here.
The focus of this paper is on the question of how Hegel comes into the
picture. This is important for the very understanding of Danto’s thesis
because Danto describes himself as offering a Hegelian explanation for
the existence of postmodern art.
Danto is quite aware that his claim concerning the end of art presup-
poses that art is essentially historical. That means that art is a form of
practice—an institution, Danto says^4 —that develops in time. This is a
broadly Hegelian understanding of art.^5 That art develops in time
implies two things: 1. One cannot reliably tell artworks from non-art just
by ‘looking and seeing’, or by describing the immediately perceptible
qualities of any given object. Identifying an object correctly as a work
of art rather has to do with placing it in the history of art; (2) one can-
not analyze the conceptof art synchronically, without referring to art
history. Therefore, any attempt to define art by stating necessary and
sufficient conditions for arthood at every time and place is doomed to
fail. This does not imply, however, that the concept of art dissolves into
time-relative concepts like ‘ancient art’, ‘medieval art’, or ‘modern art’.^6
Danto does not share any form of historical relativism with respect to
the concept and the history of art.^7 On the contrary, the idea of develop-
mentmakes it possible to account for the variety of art forms, genres and
styles.
Understanding art as essentially historical is tightly connected to the
idea of artistic progress. I use the rather vague term ‘tightly connected’
to indicate that no strict logical necessity is involved here. A develop-
ing practice or institution need not be progressing. It might just as well
decline and dissolve gradually. However, this would be a quite implau-
sible kind of story about the history of art. Surely it would explain why
art is in a miserable condition, but it would do so at the cost of making
unintelligible how art could have been in a better state before.
Therefore, an overall pessimistic theory about the history of art would
be much too sweeping to explain anything at all. One needs the idea of
artistic progress to make the idea of artistic decline intelligible. But in
order to explain the real history of art, and not just an abstract idea of
art history, the concept of progress invested into the theory has to be
quite substantial itself.52 Henning Tegtmeyer