representation. Even if this was true, it would be no trivial truth, because
it would make the question urgent how pictorial expressionism or
cubism were possible. Or, more generally: how is it possible to create a
non-mimetic picture that still is a picture? In order to avoid conceptual
confusion here, we must understand mimesis as pictorial make-believe
to constitute a special projectwithin the history of art, a project that is
not identical with the project of pictorial representation tout court. As
long as the nature and the aims of this special project are not made intel-
ligible, it is impossible to understand why it had to end with the inven-
tion of photography and film. Despite its initial plausibility, Danto’s
hypothesis that mimetic pictorial art ceased to exist because of the
invention of photography and film seems to be rather an ad hocexpla-
nation.^11 Perhaps one could strengthen Danto’s point with some effort.
But I cannot do this at length in the present context.^12
The other substantial theory of artistic progress that Danto discusses
is the expression theory of art in a Crocean version. According to Croce,
the aim of art is to express human emotions or, more broadly, mental
states. In an admittedly oversimplified version, aesthetic expressivism
claims that the main point about any sufficiently well-made work of art
is that it somehow expresses the emotions of its creator, which call for
an aesthetic or rather emotional response of the spectator. This helps to
explain why pictorial cubism in comparison with impressionism can be
seen as an artistic achievement. Cubist pictures are progressive because
they are more expressive than their impressionist counterparts. Croce’s
aesthetic theory allows us to evaluate the merit of modern, post-impres-
sionist painting, not as a lack of mimetic accuracy, but rather on its own
terms, as a movement that went beyond mimetic standards in favour of
expressive ones.
But even if aesthetic expressivism may count as a theory of artistic
progress at all—which may be doubted—it nevertheless remains local.
It explains the shift from nineteenth- to twentieth-century art. But it is
unable to explain the development of art as a whole. The claim, Danto
argues, that art always had been striving for emotive expressiveness, and
that it finally succeeded in reaching such expressiveness around 1900, is
simply implausible. Moreover, expressivism cannot explain how picto-
rial mimesis ever came to be important. Of course one might refine
expressivism by building it upon a more sophisticated, cognitivist theory
of the emotions. An expressivist might hold that there are no ‘objectless
emotions’^13 like anger or joy in the first place. Any adequate theory of
the emotions has to start with emotions and attitudes towardspersons or
states of affairs, for example with ‘envying Paul’, ‘admiring Mary’, or54 Henning Tegtmeyer