Embodied Meanings, Isotypes, and Aesthetical Ideas

Author(s): Arthur C. Danto

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 65, No. 1, Special Issue: Global
Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics (Winter, 2007), pp. 121-129
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
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ARTHUR C. DANTO

Embodied Meanings, Isotypes, and Aesthetical Ideas

The translator into Hungarian of several of my

becomes the basis for a common cultural life and

writings on art theory recently sent me a catalog of

a common cultural relationship."2 Just consider

the work of a young artist from her country, Agnes

their international use in giving traffic directions to

Eperjesi.' The translator-Eszter Babarczy-is a

drivers who may or may not be able to read the lan-

gifted critic in her own right, and I cannot do better

guage of the country in which they are traveling,

than quote from her letter, which explains why she

or in guiding us through foreign airports. Isotypes

felt I would be especially interested in Eperjesi's

commonplace applied to her work, and she took inspi-

are among the rare practical and positive contributions made by modern philosophy to the common life of humankind. When these pictograms
are recycled-or transfigured-into works of art,
their implied universality is elevated to a portrait

ration from your essays. Hers is a remarkable and long

of the society in which the products are to be used.

journey from experimental photography to an absolutely

I would not altogether follow Babarszy in calling Eperjesi's works beautiful and, in truth, I am
somewhat at a loss to describe them aesthetically.

art.

She thought your ideas about transfiguration and the

unique venture of collecting wrappings of household

products, and taking the humble sign language of ordinary household chores, and recreating them as objects
of beauty and irony.

The products, like dishwashers and vacuum

cleaners-or underwear-were in all likelihood

intended for export to countries anywhere in the

world, which implies that they will fit into forms
of life that must be much the same the world over.

So the images must themselves belong to the sign

language of globalism, necessarily universal in that

they have to be legible to consumers who cannot be counted on to have a common language.
The signs show what the consumers need to know

about the products they have purchased-which

But I can appreciate that in transfiguring the isotype into an artwork, an interesting reversal of

Walter Benjamin's famous distinction has taken

place: the art of mechanical reproduction has acquired, through transfiguration, an aura, and in
virtue of that the images may acquire an aesthetic
interest they heretofore lacked. At least, as art, we
look at them as critics, and notice their aesthetic

qualities, such as they are. Just knowing that an

object is intended as a piece of fine art may trigger the sense that it must be beautiful. Or better,
we use this standard term of aesthetic commenda-

tion in connection with them that we would hardly

use in characterizing the pictograms on which they

side of a pair of underpants is front and which side

are based. The term 'beautiful' may simply be a

is back, for example. In many, though not, all cases,

compliment paid to art as art, without really being

they are pictograms or even isotypes-an acronym

descriptive of the art at all.

for "International System of Typographic Picture

The goal of trans-cultural communication may

mean that features that imply ethnic differences

Education"-signs of a kind initially invented in

1936 by the Logical Positivist, Otto Neurath, who
may have been influenced by Wittgenstein's socalled picture theory of language. Neurath anticipated globalism in saying: "The visual method

will be erased-the persons are depicted neither

as white nor black nor red nor yellow-leaving
figures that are abstractly human, which in a way

look quite "modern." But is "looks modern" an

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122 Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics

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FIGURE 1. Agenes Eperjesi.

aesthetic characterization or a stylistic one? Modernist design strove for a kind of simplification
through its distaste for ornament, and this led
to stylization in modernist pictography. This does
not explain why the isotypical pictograms are styl-

ized as they are, which comes, rather, from glob-

alist imperatives-so "looks modern" is fagon de

parler. But in any case, the pictogram has undergone some sort of aesthetic transformation in the
course of its artistic transfiguration, however we
finally describe it. Eperjesi's aesthetic enhancement of workaday images is as distinctive as Andy
Warhol's transformations of Polaroids into portraits.

As to Eszter Bararcszy's description of the work

as "ironic," that is true-but it is due more to Eper-

jesi's titles--or perhaps they are captions-than

to the images themselves: the covers of The New
Yorker Magazine have titles, the cartoons have
captions. Either way, the titles/captions express
thoughts that the images alone do not. Eperjesi
has often selected her images with the intention
of using them to convey how women in contemporary Hungary regard themselves, and how they
think about the housework for which the prod-

uct designated by the image is intended to be

used-usually by women as a matter of course.
One of her images shows a man, a woman, and a
child on bicycles. It is difficult to determine what

product it stands for, though I would guess that it

belongs to what we might think of as the secret life

of women. The image could show a woman living

a full active life, thanks to the product in question.

Whatever its rhetorical aim, Eperjesi captions it

this way: "My new boyfriend gets along fine with
my daughter. I hope it's not just a show for now"
(Figure 1). This is interesting because the woman
is evidently a single mother, looking for a new relationship. The irony derives from the implication

that while women in contemporary society have

been greatly liberated, they remain in a disadvantageous position in relationship to men, as much

so in Hungary as in America or western Europe.

They are the ones left to do the housework, and
to hope that men are not just out to exploit them
sexually.
The irony goes well beyond the power of isotypes. The three figures could, after all, just represent a family. Interestingly, most of the women
are in Western clothing, which has become fairly
isotypical: I imagine that the isotype on the door
of women's' toilets, shown with a short flaring
skirt, would be recognized in airports everywhere
in the world, even by women who wear burkhas.
In any case, the titles/captions have to be translated, as the artist has done, from Hungarian into
the language of the country in which they are to be

shown-English, for example, in the catalog I saw.

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Danto Embodied Meanings, Isotypes, and Aesthetical Ideas 123

English itself is not, for all it ubiquity, isotypical.

subject to formalist analysis. That is to say, he ap-

Even if it were universally used, as Latin once was,

there would be a distinction between pictures and

preciated painting in terms of what we might call

words, which means that while isotypes may validate the picture theory of language, they do so in
ways having nothing to do with natural languages
as spoken or written. The semantics of sentences

lence is determined by what pertains to properties

essential to that medium, namely, in Greenberg's

in a natural language differ from the semantic of

a sentence used pictorially, as in a quotation. But
even quotations have to be translated.

Tempting as it is to dwell on the artistic semantics of Eperjesi's pictures, my immediate purpose in using her work has to do with its extreme
contemporaneity, and to the way it illustrates the
pluralistic structure that has increasingly come to
define the production of contemporary art, especially since the 1960s when artists first began to ex-

plore the possibility of using vernacular imagery.

I have already touched on the question of their

indeterminate aesthetic qualities, but I want ultimately to discuss this with reference to the problems that artistic pluralism has raised for aesthetic
theory, and especially for Kantian aesthetic theory,
which more or less dominated discussion until the

decade when pluralism became a driving force in

art. I understand "Kantian" to mean the view that

artistic excellence is one with aesthetic excellence,

which is understood to be a matter of pleasure and
value distinct from the pleasure of sensual gratifi-

cation, and internally connected with an ideal of

disinterested contemplation. It concerns what the
classical aestheticians designated "taste," and the
main features of the theory are laid out in the section of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment titled
"The Analytic of Taste," which served as the great
empowering text for aesthetic theory in modern
times, especially, at least in America, in the critical
thought and practice of Clement Greenberg.
Immanuel Kant's initial interest was in natu-

ral beauty, which it was easy enough to relate to

the visual arts, understood-the decorative arts

the aesthetics of medium, since painterly excel-

view, relationships between flat forms, irrespective

of what the forms may signify. Aesthetic value is

what these forms convey to visual perception, in

which all concepts are put out of play. Kant him-

self spoke of the pleasure taken in an object independently of any concept. For Greenberg, the
critic's eye alone mattered, with whatever historical knowledge he or she may possess put for the
time in brackets. The task of the artist was to elim-

inate from painting whatever did not address the

critic's eye. The aim was the production of pure
beauty for contemplative delectation.
The impact of Greenberg's modernist aesthetics on so-called art professionals in the United
States was inestimable. What is astonishing is
how pluralism should have emerged at all when
the Greenberg-inspired professionals had all the
power and authority in the artworld, at least so
far as contemporary visual art was concerned. But
for reasons that demand an historical explanation
I am unable to furnish, the Kant-Greenberg aesthetic began to give way in the late 1950s, and became untenable just when Greenberg published
his most considered statement in his 1960 essay,
"Modernist Painting." The underground imperative, implied by Robert Rauschenberg in 1961,
in the catalog for the exhibition "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art, was to erase

the boundary between art and life. (Kant would

have spoken instead of erasing the boundary between art and reality so far as both were beautiful.) In Rauschenberg's artistic practice, that
meant disregarding the imperatives of medium altogether, giving himself license to make art out of

anything-socks, bedclothes, Coke bottles, automobile tires, stuffed animals-"whatever." Purity

apart, which were appraised in terms of "free

of medium had become obsolete almost the mo-

beauty"-either as accurate representations of

ment it was declared.

natural beauty, or else as beautified representa-

Aesthetics was not rendered irrelevant when

tions of natural objects that in reality fell short of

Modernism ended in the 1960s, but the kind of aes-

beauty. For what would be the point of making pic-

thetic quality presupposed by the Kant-Greenberg

conception almost certainly disappeared, making
room for what one may think of as a pluralism
of aesthetic modalities. There is, for instance, a
Rauschenbergian aesthetic that is almost the opposite of the kind of aesthetic excellence Kant and
Greenberg took for granted. It is the aesthetics

tures of aesthetically repellent or deficient motifs?

Greenberg had no such interest, as far as I can tell,

and his chief focus was on abstract painting, which

could be treated in terms of "free" beauty. This

had the advantage for him that he could treat even

representationalist art as if abstract, and hence

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124 Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics

of grunge and mess, as exemplified in Rauschenberg's Bed, where he slathered paint over the
bedclothes and quilt in which the work materially consists. He applied paint, as it was used by
Abstract Expressionist painters, to an object of
domestic use in connection with which cleanli-

ness and neatness are ordinarily mandated-as in

hospitals, army barracks, or bedrooms as maintained by what Matisse once described as "country aunts." Grunge is the aesthetic of disorder,
flaunted by rebellious adolescents, and there is lit-

"quality in art can be neither ascertained nor

proved by logic or discourse. Experience alone
rules in this area-and the experience, so to speak,

of experience."3 Greenberg's view here is essentially Hume's: that quality is what qualified critics
agree is good.

Greenberg cherished Kant for explaining how

it was possible to be right or wrong in questions of
aesthetic merit. He did not think one had to know

anything of the kind that art history concerns itself with in order to be right or wrong about art.

tle question that a taste for it can be developed,

Indeed, he believed that modernism had opened

and even exploited, by marketing torn blue-jeans,

up the possibility of appreciating "all sorts of ex-

tacky tee-shirts, and athletic jerseys to young people concerned with identifying themselves through

otic art that we didn't 100 years ago, whether ancient Egyptian, Persian, Far Eastern, barbaric or

a style of affected slovenliness.

primitive."4 What makes art good has nothing to

Kant's main ambition was to combat what one

might call a pluralism of taste, by which I mean the

common and somewhat cynical view that beauty

is in the mind of the beholder and that differences
in taste are relative to differences in beholders'

minds. Kant rightly undertook to show that beauty

is and ought to be univocal, the same for all. This

was a kind of aesthetic colonialism-the view that

so-called primitive societies were simply aesthetically retrograde in their taste-which was the theoretical underpinning for the supremacist views
of Western taste in what came to be Victorian

anthropology. Greenberg was convinced that his

critical practice was validated by Kant's Critique
of Aesthetic Judgment, which he often proclaimed

the greatest book ever written on art. In truth,

the direction of validation might equally have
gone in the opposite direction: the remarkable
success of Greenberg's critical judgments could
be taken to have conferred a measure of validity
on Kant's otherwise exceedingly abstract formulations, which derived a surprising confirmation
from a body of painting hardly thinkable in his
own century.

do with historical circumstance. He once boasted

that though he knew little about African art, he

would almost unfailingly be able to pick out the
two or three best pieces in a group. They need not
be best by the criteria by which Africans themselves judged such matters, but probably that was
because they were driven by beliefs that had little
to do with aesthetic qualities as he himself understood them. There was little to say, in front of a
piece of good art, beyond an admiring "Wow!" But
that in no sense meant that one was merely venting

feelings, as Greenberg's positivist contemporaries

in philosophy would have said, having come to the
view that aesthetic discourse is noncognitive. That
it was, on the other hand, nonconceptual is underwritten by Greenberg's way of closing his eyes and

opening them only when the work to be judged

was in front of him. What immediately flooded
the eyes, as if a blinding flash, before the mind
had time to bring anything to bear by way of external associations, was what aesthetic experience
rested upon.
Greenberg's "home-made aesthetics" was validated through his actual success in identifying

Two of Kant's claims give particular support to

Greenberg's practice, which came to typify aesthetic attitudes that prevailed in the New York

artistic merit, particularly in championing Jackson

School. First, there was Kant's argument that judg-

This would have included conservative art critics

ments of beauty are nonconceptual, and second,

on the major New York newspapers-John Canaday at the New York Times and Emily Genauer
at the New York Herald-Tribune. "They lack the
right to pronounce on abstract art, because they

that they are universally valid, that is, they are in

no sense merely personal. Greenberg rarely spoke

of beauty. His interest was in what he termed

Pollock, at a time when there was still resistance

on the part of many critics to abstract art as such.

"quality" in art, which meant that his views could

have not taken the trouble to amass sufficient ex-

not easily be extended to the aesthetics of nature, which would of course have been of central

perience of it. Without experience enough to be

able to tell the good from the bad in abstract

interest to Kant. In 1961, Greenberg wrote that

art, no one has the right to be heard on this

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Danto Embodied Meanings, Isotypes, and Aesthetical Ideas 125

subject."' However, European critics were also
resistant, including David Sylvester, who came
round to agreeing with Greenberg on Pollock's
preeminence ("What could I have been using for
eyes?"). Greenberg was the "high-brow New York
intellectual" referred to in the 1949 Life magazine
article that made Pollock famous. The massive endorsement of his assessment of Pollock had about

it the quality of a scientific proof. It gave him immense authority as well as great power in the artworld.

Where Greenberg and, more excusably, Kant

went wrong was in their failure to recognize that

there is a nearly boundless set of aesthetic qualities, something that came to be recognized when
philosophers of language touched on the vocabulary of aesthetics at about the same time that
Greenberg dominated critical discourse in America. I have in mind particularly an obiter dictum of
J. L. Austin's: "How much it is to be wished [that]
we could forget for a while about the beautiful and

get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy."6

Austin stated this in describing his philosophical practice, in his important 1956 paper, "A Plea
for Excuses," as linguistic phenomenology. Essentially this meant working out the rules that govern linguistic practice-"what we say when," to
use the slogan of ordinary language philosophyand some interesting discoveries were made by
analysts such as Frank Sibley, who attempted to
prove that aesthetic predicates were not "rulegoverned." It would have been interesting to find
out if this was the criterion for aesthetic predicates

as a class-for "beautiful," "dainty," "dumpy,"

"grungy" for starters-and if not, what criteria,

globalized art world, in the United States and

England, but also in Germany, Italy, France,

Spain, Japan, and finally everywhere that art was

made, down to the present moment. The artists

that mattered philosophically were preeminently
Duchamp and Warhol, Eva Hesse, the minimalists,
and the conceptualists, in whose work aesthetics
was of negligible significance. And since the definition of art had to deal with the ready-mades and
the Brillo Boxes, in which aesthetic qualities were
marginal at best, there was a question of whether
aesthetics had anything really to do with art at
all. This was a revolutionary shift, given that from
the outset it had seemed self-evident that aesthetic

pleasure was what art was all about.

I was fairly bearish about the importance of aesthetics for art. In my main work in the philosophy

of art, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace,

I emerged with what I thought of as two necessary conditions for a philosophical definition of
art-that art is about something and hence possesses meaning; and that an artwork embodies its
meaning, which is what art criticism addresses. I
condensed this by calling works of art embodied
meanings. In my latest book, The Abuse ofBeauty,
I more or less acknowledged Austin's discovery
that aesthetics is wider than had been traditionally
recognized, and asked if there were not a third nec-

essary condition, namely, that to be a work of art,

something has to have some aesthetic quality-if

not beauty, then, say, grunge. If not grunge, then

something else. I ended the book skeptical that

art need have any aesthetic quality at all. I did,
however, make a distinction worth emphasizing

if any, there are.

between internal and external beauty, and, by generalization, between internal and external a, when

Linguistic phenomenology did not survive

Austin's death in 1960-the year Greenberg's

ply.

"Modernist Painting" was published. But aesthetics took a backseat in the ensuing decade to the
philosophy of art, beginning, I am obliged to say,
with my 1964 paper, "The Art World," which was
inspired by Pop and to a lesser degree by minimalism. With the work of Richard Wollheim, and

especially of George Dickie, the central issue became the definition of art, and that has more

or less been the project for the analytical philosophy of art ever since. What was interesting
was how minor a role aesthetics played in that
collective investigation-almost as minor as the
role aesthetic qualities played in advanced artistic production and criticism in the increasingly

a stands for any aesthetic predicate that may ap-

Here is what I meant by internal beauty. The

beauty of an artwork is internal when it contributes to the work's meaning. I offered several
examples of this from contemporary art, including
Robert Motherwell's Elegy for the Spanish Repub-

lic and Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in

Washington, DC. In a subsequent essay I thought
a very successful example was the use that Jacques
Louis David made of beauty in painting the body
of Marat as beautiful in Marat Assassind, which
looks like a descent from the cross. The beauty of
Marat was like the beauty of Jesus, and the meaning of the painting was that Jesus/Marat died for
the viewer, who must acknowledge the meaning

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126 Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics

of this sacrifice by following their imperatives. If

shyness, and like vexations of the loveless. It is

the beauty is not internal in a work of art it is,

the aesthetics of "cheap black-and-white ads," explained by the need to make salient the blemishes
that would cause viewers to buy the product advertised. But that aesthetic gets to be internal to
the works Warhol made of them, as the aesthet-

strictly speaking, meaningless, which means that it

is, in Kant's terms, "free beauty" and mere decoration. In brief, my effort was to break away from

the Kant-Greenberg aesthetic of form, and instead

develop an aesthetics of meaning. It is at this point
that one might recognize that the internal/external

distinction applies throughout the vast domain of

aesthetic qualities to which Austin and the ordinary language aestheticians drew attention in the

ics of package images gets to be internal to the

work Agnes Eperjesi based on them. Both bodies of work show their origins and draw meaning
from them-though this is not the whole meaning
of either artist's work.

early 1950s. Let us consider grunge once more. In

The upshot of this excursion is that the answer

certain artists-Dieter Roth is a good example--

to the question of whether aesthetics survives into

grunge had just the meaning that the work was de-

the era of pluralism is yes and no. It is "no" if we

are thinking of the Kant-Greenberg aesthetic of
taste and disinterested contemplation. It is "yes"
if we are thinking of the way in which different
aesthetic qualities, many of them antithetical to
taste as construed by Kant and Greenberg, are internal to the meaning of works of art construed as
embodied meanings. In brief, the age of pluralism
has opened our eyes to the plurality of aesthetic
qualities far far wider than traditional aesthetics

liberately anti-aesthetic, meaning anti-beautiful.

When Roth first saw the 1962 exhibition of Jean

Tinguely in Basel, it was a conversion experience

for him. "Everything was so rusty and broken and

made so much noise," he said afterward. "I was

impressed half to death. It was simply a completely different world from my Constructivism,

it was something like a paradise that I'd lost."' In

a sense, Roth's quest from that moment on was
the recreation of a lost infantile paradise, made up
of detritus, noises, and noxious smells. He moved
from a Kantian to an anti-Kantian aesthetic, as

was able to countenance. I would say, moreover,

that each of these aesthetic qualities is as objective
as Kant supposed beauty was. Aesthetics is in the

did Duchamp when he applied as his criterion for

mind of the beholder, but only in the way in which

the ready-mades that they have the zero degree

of aesthetic interest-meaning that they caused
neither pleasure nor pain to the eye. They were
nonaesthetic from the narrow perspective of "the
analytic of taste"-but they were entirely aesthetic
from the widened perspective that was to open up
in the 1960s, when aesthetic blandness became an
aesthetic quality, internal to the meaning of the

sense qualities are in the mind of the beholder, just

The case is the same with beauty and deformity, virtue

ready-mades, and itself a matter of taste, the way

grunge had been for Dieter Roth.

the reality of the latter qualities than from that of the

There is, one might say, an aesthetic of ready-

former ... Though colours were allowed to lie only in

as Hume argued they are. "Beauty in things exists

in the mind," he wrote, but this in no sense distinguishes it from anything else, inasmuch as "tastes
and colours, and all other sensible qualities, lie not
in bodies but in the senses.

and vice. This doctrine, however takes off no more from

made images, of the kind out of which Agnes Eper-

the eye, would dyers or painters ever be less regarded or

jesi makes her art. It is not easy to describe this

aesthetic, but it is easy enough to recognize, and
it is probably due to the contingencies of design,

esteemed? There is a sufficient uniformity in the senses

itself due to the requirement of making the images

influence on life and manners.8

easy to read and to understand everywhere in the

world. There is, to take a kindred form, an easily
recognized aesthetic in the coarsely drawn images
of the simple advertisements that Andy Warhol

used in his first exhibition in April 1961, in the

store windows of Bonwit Teller's women's store

on 57th Street. They were the kind of advertisements that were printed on pulp paper in cheap
publications, advertising cures for acne, baldness,

and feelings of mankind to make all these qualities the

objects of art and reasoning, and to have the greatest

Having taken the matter to this point, however,

I must make some amends to Kant, whose view

on works of art takes a very different direction
in a later section of the Third Critique-the brilliant Section 49, "Of the Faculties of the Mind that
Constitute Genius," where he introduces his concept of aesthetical ideas. The Kant of Section 49 is
not the Kant of Kantian aesthetics, which is based

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Danto Embodied Meanings, Isotypes, and Aesthetical Ideas 127

almost entirely on the "Analytic of Taste." I owe
it to Kant-and to myself-to show how close my
views are to his in this section of his book, the
mere existence of which shows how Kant was registering the deep changes in Enlightenment culture that the age of Romanticism was developing
from within. He certainly realized that taste alone
was not the entire story when it comes to art: "We
say of certain products of which we expect that

they should at least in part appear as beautiful

art, they are without spirit, although we find noth-

ing to blame in them on the score of taste."9 By

spirit, he means "the animating principle of the
mind"; and this principle, he goes on to say, "is
no other than the faculty of presenting aesthetical
ideas."'o It is characteristic of Kant that he will

seek a kind of faculty in order to account for a

lightning must have extraordinary power. The im-

age tells us more than "Jupiter is all powerful"

alone tells. Presenting the idea of power aesthetically, that is, via an image, "gives occasion to the
imagination to spread itself over a number of kindred representations that arouse more thought
than can be expressed in a concept determined
by words."
It is in regard to the expression of "aesthetical ideas" that Kant speaks of "spirit" and of "the
imagination as free from the guidance of rules and
yet as purposive in reference to the presentment
of the given concept." This was much in the air in
the 1790s, when he published his Third Critique.
In 1792, for example, Francisco Goya composed a
set of proposals for reforming the Royal Academy
of San Fernando, of which he was at the time as-

difference, when the difference, one might say, is

sistant director. His fundamental principle must

really ontological. An "aesthetical idea" is really,

as it turns out, an idea that has been given sensory embodiment-he uses "aesthetic" in the way
it was used by Alexander Baumgarten, where it
generally refers to what is given to sense. What is
stunning is that he has stumbled onto something
that is both given to sense and intellectual-where

have seemed entirely contrary to the concept of an

academy, namely, that there are no rules in paint-

ing: No hay reglas en la pintura. It follows in particular from this that we cannot base the practice
of painting on the canon of Greek sculpture, or on

any set of paradigms. His text ended with a plea

to allow the "genius" of the students to "develop

we grasp a meaning through the senses, rather than

in full freedom, without suppressing it, and to use

merely a color or a taste or a sound.

means for turning them away from the tendency

that shows them the way to this or that style of
painting."12 Historically, Goya's text marks a shift
from the neoclassicism that defined his early work
to the romanticism of his mature work, but it also

Kant gives as an example one of Frederick the

Great's French poems, which we are likely to pass
over, thinking that Kant is writing here as a sort of
courtier, flattering the monarch, when in fact the

poem, whatever its actual merits, does something

that poetry often does-mean one thing by saying
another. The king speaks in the poem of "finishing
ones life and dying without regret" through the

image of a beautiful summer day ending peaceuse of poetry,

as Kant seems
is merely one
in irony or in
metaphor. We realize that the poet, in this case
Kant's sovereign, is talking about the course of a

fully." This is a quite commonplace

and has nothing to do with genius,
to feel it has. "The aesthetical idea"
meaning given through another, as

day as a way of talking about the course of a life. It

is a beautiful thought, which need have nothing to

do with the beauty of the words. The poetic example comes just after two examples from the visual

expresses a deep truth about art. Strictly speaking,

art involves a deep originality and is not something
that can be taught.
Aesthetical ideas have nothing much to do with
the aesthetics of taste, and they are what is miss-

ing entirely from Greenberg's agenda, who seldom

spoke of meaning in his discussions of quality in
art. In a sense, aesthetics, which has application
to natural and physical beauty, has little to do
with art, which in Goya's time was imitated in the
academies in copying plaster casts of what were
felt to be paradigms of classical beauty. There is
very little of that in his masterpiece, Los Caprichos. However one characterizes them, these are

arts: Jupiter is represented as an eagle grasping

hardly celebrations of ideal beauty. "Caprice" embodies the idea of spirit, but I draw attention to

lightning in its claws, and Juno as a peacock (actu-

Goya's advertisement for this work, published in

ally, as a male peacock, with glorious tail feathers).

the Diario de Madrid, where he claimed for "la

The power of Jupiter is made vivid through the fact

pintura" a right to criticize human error and vice,

that lightning is not something than can ordinar-

"although [such] criticism is usually taken to be ex-

ily be grasped-that a being capable of holding

clusively the province of literature."'3 If "no hay

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128 Global Theories of the Arts and Aesthetics

reglas en la pintura," there is no rule against using

painting for purposes of "holding a mirror up" to
"the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in

any civilized society." Greenberg would have rejected this as having nothing essential to do with
plastic art at all. "Literary" was a term of critical
dismissal in Greenberg's vocabulary, and in formalist vocabulary generally.
My own view is that the relationship of aesthetics to art was always external and contingent. The advent of pluralism has changed nothing
in this respect. But the theory of art as embodied meanings-or the "aesthetical presentation of
ideas"-makes it clear how aesthetic qualities can
contribute to the meaning of the work that possesses them. This I am certain is what Hegel intuited when he declared, at the beginning of his
lectures on aesthetics, why artistic beauty is "superior" to natural beauty. It is because natural beauty
is meaningless-not, incidentally, something Kant
could have accepted since for him natural beauty
is a symbol of morality, and gives us the sense
that the world is not indifferent to our hopes.
Beauty, for him, has a kind of theodical meaning,
as the philosopher Fred Rush has recently claimed
in his writings. Painting natural beauty, as in the
immense canvases of the Hudson River School,

was an effort to capture this kind of meaning.

-I

But its presence in those works is internal to their

beauty as art. One can accept that without for

a moment believing that nature itself is God's
message in the medium of mountains and mighty
waterfalls.

The 1961 works of Andy Warhol I spoke of con-

vey aesthetical ideas-though they have only as

aesthetic qualities what belongs to cheap advertisements through their cheapness. They convey
the small vexations of the flesh, and the promise
that for a mere few dollars our complexion will be
clear, our hair grow luxuriant, and that love and
happiness will finally come our way. What Agnes

Eperjesi discovered in the throw-away packaging in which consumer products are wrapped are
portraits of the society in which those products
are used. They are ready-made portraits or better, assisted ready-mades, as her melancholy wit

makes clear. Beneath a picture of what looks

like a bride in her veil-which may in fact be
the negative of a photograph of a woman with a
handkerchief-she writes: "Once in a while some-

thing gets into my eyes. Then I can let go of

my feelings" (Figure 2). An innocent, even bland
image of a woman with a hanky is turned into
a psychological representation of stifled feelings
and a comment on repression for the sake of
appearance.

V4W

OR-

---------

-------

FIGURE 2. Agenes Eperjesi.

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Danto Embodied Meanings, Isotypes, and Aesthetical Ideas 129

ARTHUR C. DANTO

Columbia University
New York, NY 10027, USA
INTERNET: acdl@columbia.edu

same may be true of Thierry de Duve's Kant After Duchamp,

which makes a heroic effort to transform Kant's aesthetic

into the kind of philosophy of art one can live with today.
For obvious reasons, his is not a path I can follow.
2. Otto Neurath, "Visual Education: a New Language."
Survey Graphic 26. (1937): 25; this essay can be found at:
http://newdeal.feri.org/survey/37025.htm.

Lafargue, of the Universite de Pau; and it appeared un-

3. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance (1957-1969),

der the title, "Les Significations incarn6es comme Id6es

esth6tiques," in Figures del'art 10 (2006). I am grateful to
Diarmuid Costello for having drawn my attention to Kant's
concept of aesthetical ideas as conveying a philosophy of
art quite different from the rather shallow one implied by
the "aesthetics of taste." He felt that Kant's concept has

p. 118.
4. Greenberg, The Collected essays and Criticis, p. 309.
5. Greenberg, The Collected essays and Criticis, p. 119.
6. J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson
and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 131.

1. This essay was written at the invitation of Bernard

something of the same logic as my own view of artworks as

embodied meanings. Kant was annoyed when critics claimed
that some of his ideas had been anticipated by earlier writers
when, as he said, no one had the wit to see them before they
appeared in his writings. I certainly did not have the wit to
see Kant as having anticipated ideas of my mine, but no one

can begrudge having Kant as a predecessor. My own feeling is that aesthetical ideas dropped out of aesthetic theory
until they emerged in the guise of embodied meanings in a
very different artworld than Kant could have imagined. If I
am right, aesthetics really wandered in the wilderness until
the anti-aesthetic bias of contemporary art set it on course
once again. Robert J. Yanal's "Duchamp and Kant: Together

Again," Angelaki 7 (2002): 161-166, was very much on the

right track, had I been able to follow his thought, and the

ed. John O'Brian (University of Chicago Press, 1993),

7. Dirk Dobke and BernadetteWalther, Roth Time: A

Retrospective ofDieter Roth (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 2003), p. 64.

8. David Hume, "The Skeptic," Essays Moral and Political, n. 2.

9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H.

Bernard (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1951), p. 156.
10. Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 157.
11. This and the following two quotations are from Kant,
Critique of Judgment, ? 49.

12. Francisco Goya, "Address to the Royal Academy of

San Fernando Regarding the Method of Teaching the Visual
Arts," in Janis A. Tomlinson, Goya in the Twilight of the
Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 1992).

13. Francisco Goya, Diario de Madrid.

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