In an age during which the prognosis for art is dire, as art seems to move
from one crisis to another with such regularity that some even speak of
a “permanent crisis”^1 facing art today, it is perhaps time to step back and
consider more carefully the use and abuse of art in our age.
Why do we need art? That is, what are some of the human needs that
are met in our experience with art and how does art fill these needs?
What sort of tendencies in art might undermine art itself, leading to the
permanent crisis bemoaned from so many quarters? As these prelimi-
nary questions already indicate, my interest lies more centrally in our
experience of art rather than in the work of art itself. There is a rich tra-
dition of scholarship that addresses the philosophical dimensions of aes-
thetic experience, to which I shall turn in due course. Yet, to refine my
focus even more, my primary interest is not in aesthetic experience per
se: I am interested in examining one particular function of art and its
particular aesthetic effects, namely, what I call “the humanizing function
of art” and certain tendencies in art that might undermine this function.
So, the end of art that concerns me is rather different from the end of
art so eloquently articulated by Arthur Danto, that is, the end of art that
comes as art dissolves into its own philosophy, with art “vaporized in a
dazzle of pure thought about itself”^2 —the end of art that comes with the
“ascent to philosophical consciousness of the art movements.”^3 Danto’s
thesis regarding the end of art, is not, as he is careful to point out, that
“the history of painting [stops] dead in its tracks after the ascent to con-
sciousness [which] took place in the 1960s.”^4 Danto is concerned with
art (and as some critics point out, perhaps too narrowly with painting)
and its relationship to philosophy. He is not concerned with aesthetic
experience: he is after a definition of art, one that, in fact, endeavors to
75[ 4 ]
The Humanizing Function
of Art: Thoughts on an
Aesthetic Harm Principle
ELIZABETH MILLÁN