Some aspects of the conjunction of historical mimetic representa-
tionalism and historical expressivism are quite discomforting, however,
at least for a philosopher of art. One might press a historical expressivist
to admit that the game of being expressive is already over in the picto-
rial arts. Expressive art remains an episode in the history of art. And this
means that historical expressivism is unable to tell us anything about the
nature of pictorial art. But our historical expressivist may happily con-
cede this and reply that no other theory of art will be able to do so either,
because there is no such thing as the nature of art. That is, there is no
essence, no overarching project or aim of pictorial art, or of art in gen-
eral. What we call art is just a series of contingent practices and projects
linked only by contingent relations or by some slight family resem-
blances. This would be a postmodernist version of a no-theory theory of
art. Let me call it—paradoxically enough—an anti-essentialist historical
theory of art.
Adherents of postmodernism will regard the fact that a given theory
of art stresses the contingency of any theory as one of its major virtues.
But the trouble with this position comes out rather clearly when we look
more closely at the consequences of limiting our view of art to an anti-
essentialist theory of art. Art, the anti-essentialists tell us, is nothing
more than an umbrella title for a number of very different, only loosely
connected practices and projects. So, strictly speaking, we do not have
art at all but arts. The practices and projects that belong to the arts have
a history. But, strictly speaking, there is not just one history of the arts
but many different, mutually independent but overlapping histories of
arts. The search for a principle of unity in this variety is senseless, so
they say. Postmodernist thinkers believe that quests for unity are nothing
more than the result of some kind of metaphysical uneasiness that has to
be overcome.
A more traditional philosopher of art may shift the burden of proof
by asking if the story that postmodernism tells about art is intelligible in
the first place. If there is no art but rather arts, and if there is no art his-
tory but rather histories of arts, then what gives each particular artistic
practice and each particular history its unity—or at least its coherence?
What can an anti-essentialist theory of art do to justify the use of more
specific terms like ‘ancient tragedy’ or ‘the art of mimetic painting’?
The worry of the traditional philosopher of art is that if we abandon the
idea of a history of art, then the histories of arts we are after dissolve and
vanish, too. Furthermore, postmodernist thinkers are in need of an error
theory of art that can account for the fact that people who called them-
selves artists in the past (before the illusion of unity had been revealed)56 Henning Tegtmeyer