‘being ashamed of one’s own country’. Objectless emotions then come
into the picture through a kind of abstraction marked by the shift from
talk about ‘envy of X’ or ‘shame because of p’ to talk about envy or
shame ‘as such’. In other words, the possibility of objectless emotions
rests on a kind of linguistic invention. They have no existence inde-
pendent of this kind of inventive language game. And if objectless emo-
tions are not given immediately, but only in abstraction from their object
or content, in abstraction from their intentionality, then it is highly plau-
sible to argue that objectless emotions cannot be objects of pictorial—
or any other kind of—representation in the first place. No wonder
therefore, an expressivist might continue, that the pictorial artists did not
even aim at pure pictorial expressiveness before 1900. They could not
possibly do so. Only after 1900 was it possible to abstract from repre-
sentational content, or rather to represent pictorially the objectless emo-
tions themselves, pure and simple, that is disconnected from their
intentional context.
But a cognitivist argument like the one sketched here does not do
enough to defend expressivism. Danto might respond that it still remains
a mystery why objectless emotions came to be the direct objects of pic-
torial representation so late in the history of art. Objectless emotions
may well be understood as a kind of linguistic invention. But neverthe-
less this invention must have taken place in ancient times. At least as
early as Plato and Aristotle, we find mention of objectless emotions.
Proponents of the view that expressivism was fated to appear only after
1900 are unable to explain the gap between talk of objectless emotions
by the ancient philosophers and the absence of such depictions in
ancient pictorial art.^14
There is another possible reading of the expressivism that Danto
discusses. Expressivism may also be taken to make a more local claim
about a certain feature of modern pictorial art rather than a point about
art in general. An expressivist in this sense may allow that the aim of
pictorial art was once mimesis, without entering into a discussion of
why this was the case. But then she is free to insist that things changed
when post-impressionist painting entered the stage. Mimesis ceased to
be important and pictorial expressiveness became the new game. Or at
least so the story goes. Let us label this position historical expres-
sivism. Historical expressivism is not vulnerable to the charge of not
being general, for it makes no claim to be a theory of art in general. It
may even coexist with a historical mimesis theory of pictorial art. We
might label this kind of revised mimetic theory historical mimetic
representationalism.
A Prophecy Come True? Dante and Hegel on the End of Art 55