believed they were partaking in a large scale cultural project while in
fact there was no such project. One might suspect that aesthetic post-
modernism retains some initial plausibility by employing precisely
those concepts it tries to undermine—‘art’ and ‘history’ (both in the sin-
gular). We might call this a version of postmodernist irony.
1.3 ART ASPHILOSOPHYHowever, Danto does not adopt aesthetic anti-essentialism himself but
finally comes up with his own version of what might be called an essen-
tialist historical theory of art. The core idea of his approach to artistic
progress is to take art as a self-reflective enterprise, just like philosophy
or Hegelian spirit.^15 Art essentially aims at understanding its own nature.
This thesis is rather vague, though. Understanding the nature of a cer-
tain practice or activity, in one way or another, is often a precondition of
participating in the very practice or activity in question. For example, it
would be more than odd to meet a judge who had no idea of justice or
law whatsoever. Having to understand its own nature thus does not seem
to be a goal unique to art.
In order to give his thesis a more precise meaning Danto draws upon
certain material presented in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace
(TC), his 1981 book about art. There he defended a broadly representa-
tionalist conception of art. Art is representational, he claimed, because
artworks are essentially aboutsomething. Representation has to be taken
in a broad sense because artworks need not be about objects or processes
‘out there’. They might as well be about rather abstract matters, such as
‘blueness’ or ‘blessing’. They might even be about themselves.
This, however, remained just a logical, or rather, conceptual possi-
bility within the framework of TC. Self-referential artworks do not enjoy
any kind of theoretically privileged status here. Things change when
Danto starts to think about the end of art. Now he wants to argue that
‘being about itself’ is not just any possibility but an ultimate possibility,
the historical telosof artistic activity. Therefore, when artworks become
self-reflective, they reach the ultimate purpose of art. In a sense, there is
nothing left to do for artists afterwards. Of course, they may go on mak-
ing art forever. But they will be unable to create something substantially
new that is still an artwork, because this is by definition impossible.
Instances of this ultimate kind of artwork are the prototypical works
of later classical modernism, ready-mades like Duchamp’s Fountainor
In Advance of the Broken Arm, or Warhol’s Brillo Boxesand Campbell’s
Soup Can, or J.L. Borges’s Pierre Menard, Symbolist Poet. These works
are, each in their own way, about art or even about ‘arthood as such’. As
A Prophecy Come True? Dante and Hegel on the End of Art 57