1.2 TWOTHEORIES OFARTISTICPROGRESSDanto discusses—and partially rejects—two substantial theories of
artistic progress before he offers his own as a more promising alterna-
tive. According to the first theory, art aims at mimetic representation, at
depicting certain parts of the external world as faithfully and accurately
as possible. If this were true, then artistic progress could be said to con-
sist in mimetic achievements of the innocent eye test kind. That is, it
would be a case of artistic progress if an artist managed to make specta-
tors mistake his picture for the very object depicted, whereas former pic-
tures of the same object only slightly resembled it. He who managed to
make painted grapes look just like grapes, would be the greatest artist.^8
Anyway, this theory fails because it lacks generality in two different
respects. First, it is not general in scope. It grasps only pictorial art,
painting and sculpture. Second, it is not historicallygeneral. It does not
grasp post-impressionist painting and sculpture. It is not true, Danto
argues, that Matisse or Picasso failed to make mimetically accurate por-
traits of the persons they depicted. They did not even try. The mimetic
game was already over for pictorial art when Matisse and Picasso
entered the stage. Photography and film had taken over the mimetic job.
Or so goes the story that Danto tells us. Nevertheless he accepts a lim-
ited version of the mimetic theory of art. He believes that mimesis was
the ideal guiding painting and sculpture until about 1900.
One may wonder whether Danto takes too much for granted in the
story he tells. What he does take for granted without further analysis is
the very concept of mimesis. This is a mistake, but for reasons that are
not obvious. The problem with mimesis does not have to do with the dis-
tinction between pictorial and linguistic representation. Nelson
Goodman claimed that there is no difference in principle between pic-
tures and texts, between depiction and description, but only gradual dif-
ferences. He even took the linear perspective in paintings and drawings
to be merely conventional.^9 Danto rejects both Goodman’s general the-
sis and the claim concerning linear perspective, and he is right.^10
Goodman’s claims must be false if there is any substantial difference
between depiction and description at all. And there certainly is a funda-
mental difference. The discovery of perspective is one of the great
mimetic achievements of artistic technique. The problem is rather that
Danto never asks how it was possible that pictorial art ever aimedat
mimesis of the make-believe kind. It is not open to him to simply
assumethat there is a conceptual link between mimesis and pictorial
A Prophecy Come True? Dante and Hegel on the End of Art 53