artwork, so there is nothing that exhibits this essence more than anything
else, nor is it important that it should do so. In a way, what makes artworks
interesting is theaccidents, what changes from artist to artist and period to
period...I can like it all.^50“Learning to live with pluralism”^51 is, in criticism, the path of virtue. Danto’s
own critical reviews of exhibitions of painting and sculpture are distin-
guished for their cosmopolitanism and generosity.
Despite the virtues of his criticism, it is possible nonetheless to wonder
whether or not Danto has quite captured the conditions for success in art. As
CynthiaFreelandobserves,“Danto’s open-doortheoryofart says‘Comein’toall
works and messages, but it does not seem to explain very wellhowan artwork
communicates its message.”^52 Artists do seem to seek to hold the attentions of
their audiences by arranging their materials so as wholly to absorb those
attentions in presentation of a subject matter as a focus for thought, fused to
both emotional attitude and material vehicle. Danto’s cosmopolitan expressi-
vism underrates the efforts of artists to achievesingularityin their work as a
focus for expression, over and above either representation or the expression of
feeling. It also underrates the effort to embody in a singular work centrally
human emotions of pride and humility in relation to work, themselves aspects
of an aspiration to live freely in Hegelian terms. Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn
capture this point by remarking that“art is also, regardless of whatever mean-
ings it occasions, a symbol of our inadequacy.”^53 That is, the work of art is not
just a representational and expressive something; it is also the always-failed
material precipitate of an effort to achieve full and absolute meaningfulness in
action and its products: of an effort, as Horowitz and Huhn put it,“to become
self-determining.”^54 Beethoven laboring in his sketchbooks, Pollock improvis-
ing in his studio, and Mallarmé crafting his lyrics were not simply and only
trying to express an emotion or attitude. They were trying to achieve–as an
(^50) Danto,Embodied Meanings, pp. 11, 13, and Arthur Danto,“Learning to Live with Plural-
ism,”in A. Danto,The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste, ed. Gregg
Horowitz and Tom Huhn (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1998), pp. 81– 95
at p. 95.
(^51) Ibid., the title of the essay.
(^52) Cynthia Freeland,But is it Art?(Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 58.
(^53) Gregg Horowitz and Tom Huhn,“The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends
of Taste,”in Danto,Wake of Art, p. 51.
(^54) Ibid., p. 49.
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