The Blind Spots of Art History. How Wild Art Came to Be - and Be Ignored

«In Kant, the subject of world history is the human species itself... progress is perpetual; there is never an end to it. Hence, there is no end of history»
Hannah Arendt [1]


In our recent book Wild Art Joachim Pissarro and I make a distinction between art found in galleries and museums and what we call wild art - graffiti, tattoos and all the other many art forms which are outside of the art world.[2] That book is primarily devoted to the presentation of very many examples. Originally, however, our larger project had two parts: the historical/philosophical background; the examples of wild art. Both are necessary. You need the theory to understand our examples and you need the examples to be convinced that our claims are important. Publishing contingencies separated the examples from this theory. But thanks to generous hosts in Naples, Florence and Turin I was able in 2013 and 2014 to present five lectures, full accounts of wild art.[3] In this condensed, edited and revised version of that material, I don’t discuss the published examples. I focus, rather, on the historical and philosophical grounding of our claims. Our published book account of the theory will have a full bibliography. Here I offer a concise, clear summary of the basic argument.

There are two kinds of art. Art world art, which is art found in galleries and museums; and wild art, which is art outside of that art world. We model this distinction on two others: Domestic animals/Wild Animals Domestic plants/Wild Plants In making this contrast we are not praising wild art as such. There is much mediocre art in the art world - and much mediocre wild art. Our definition of wild art picks out location, not value. It is description, not evaluation. Art critics and historians normally focus attention almost exclusively on art world art. Once, however, you discover that there are really two kinds of art, then you will understand the art world art differently.

Let us start by telling the usual history of art history. Because this story is very familiar, I will tell it quickly.

The end of the old regime in late eighteenth-century Europe was marked by three events, which were of lasting central importance for the art world. The creation of the art museum, which involved moving the most important art from private collections into a public space. The opening of the Louvre as a museum, 1793, is a symbolic moment because it took place during and thanks to the French Revolution (fig. 1). But some collections were opened to the public in Rome and elsewhere a little earlier.


Fig. 1: G.-J. DE SAINT-AUBIN, Vue du Salon de 1765, 1765. Paris, Musée du Louvre


The birth of art history, which provided ways of organizing that art displayed in museums. One key figure was Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose The History of Ancient Art appeared in 1764. This history of Greco-Roman provided a model for narratives of art from other periods and, eventually from other visual cultures.

The aesthetic theory presented in Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Judgement (1790). He explains why aesthetic judgments are neither factual judgments, nor mere expressions of option, but a distinctive kind of statement.

These thus are the three components of the art world: a display system, a theory of how to present art within that system, and an explanation of why art belongs in that system.

The old regime had an authoritarian top-down art world. Aesthetic judgments were believed to be grounded in the revealed nature of reality. The ruling elite controlled patronage. Most of the major works of art accessible to the public were in churches. By contrast, the art museum is a public space, accessible to all citizens. Within that museum, art is organized, typically, in historical displays based upon the scholarship of art historians. This was a radically new situation. Artistic modernism thus is associated with a democratic culture - here we find the essential link between art and politics after the demise of the old regime.

Once top-down aesthetic judgments were abandoned, then public must judge art. This situation was anticipated twenty-five years before the Critique of Judgement was published when public exhibitions of contemporary art were held in the Louvre. Denis Diderot, the first great art critic wrote justly famous reviews. The American art historian Thomas Crow has explained why these exhibitions were important:

The Salon was the first regularly repeated, open, and free display of contemporary art in Europe to be offered in a completely secular setting and for the purpose of encouraging a primarily aesthetic response in large numbers of people.
What transforms that audience into a public, that is, a commonality with a legitimate role to play in justifying artistic practice and setting value on the products of that practice? The audience is the concrete manifestation of the public but never identical with it.[4]

The audience, we might say, is just the group of people who look at art, while the public is a community, a group self-consciously aware of its own identity. In making this distinction, we allude to the much-discussed concept of ‘the public sphere’, that community which defines modernist culture. What transforms the audience into a community is the felt-need for public debate. The art shown in Paris in the 1760s looks very different from what is presented nowadays in a Venice Biennale or a Carnegie International. But the evaluation process is similar - like Diderot, we critics provide judgments which aim to guide the public response.

The details of Kant’s aesthetics are complicated, and his presentation is often obscure. And so a great deal of academic discussion is devoted to understand its claims, and their place in his elaborate philosophical system. For our present purposes, however, the key points can be summarized briefly. We each must judge for ourselves - for no one can legitimately tell us what pleases us. And so then the practical question is how moving from these individual free judgments to some public consensus about aesthetic value, which is needed to run the museums and organize art history writing.

When Kant alludes to the importance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he underlines the political significance of his analysis. In a modern culture, aesthetic judgments are freely made by all for all. Needless to say, as we all know, this is as yet an ideal. But it is an important ideal. In a democracy, you must make political judgments for yourself. And in an enlightened art world, you must make your own aesthetic judgments. There is no reason to believe that experts can make better aesthetic judgments; indeed the very phrase, ‘better aesthetic judgment’, is essentially confused. There are only aesthetic judgments, mine and yours. Here the link between Kant’s famous short essay “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ ” (1784) and his aesthetic theory is important. Because he produced his account of aesthetics late in life, he himself didn’t make this connection between politics and art, which is obvious now to every reader. The problem of political theory is how individual free votes can yield public policy. The question for the art world is how individual aesthetic judgments can be the basis for the museum.

The history of the museum, art history and aesthetic theory from Kant’s day to the present is a story of continuing expansion. New objects enter the museum; art historians relate these objects to older art; and aestheticians explain why these objects are art. Art from everywhere in Europe; and then from China, the Islamic world and everywhere in the world; and also contemporary art: it all enters the museum. And art historians narrate this story. Winckelmann focused on Greco-Roman antiquity, including some of the art found in Naples in the Archaeological Museum. But as the museum and art history expanded, it took account of very different sorts of artifacts - Chinese landscape scrolls, Islamic carpets; and Pre-Columbia carvings to consider three challenging examples.

As I said, this story is well known. I focus, then, just on one part of it, the successive revisions of aesthetic theory. Defining visual art involves historical analysis. First art was representational, then expressive and later comes the ready-made, Pop art and other post-modern art forms. Tiziana Andina’s The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition. From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theories (2013) offers a model description of this process.[5]

It’s natural, then, to present the history of art in an historical narrative because the history of art is readily understood as a story of expansion in what counts as art. Consider the writings of five very well-known figures: Giorgio Vasari (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1550); Georg Wilhelm Fried- rich Hegel (Lectures on the Fine Arts, 1820s); E. H. Gombrich (The Story of Art, 1950); Clement Greenberg (“Modernist Painting,” 1960); and Arthur Danto (various essays and books, 1964-2013). A heterogeneous group- two philosophers and three very different art writers - they all offer historical narratives.

Vasari presents the story of art in Tuscany from Cimabue to his own day, with brief glances at Venice and the Low Countries. Hegel looks back to Egypt, Gre- co-Roman antiquity and forward to his own time. Gombrich, focused on Europe, looks briefly at Chinese and Islamic art and, near to the present, at figurative art and, even Jackson Pollock. Greenberg, providing a genealogy of American Abstract Expressionism, links that art to the tradition of old master European painting. Danto, inspired by Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) argues that now art history is in a post-historical moment - its ongoing history ended.

These successive writers expand the range of examples, creating an ever more comprehensive narrative of the story of art. The price of this expansion, however, has been the disappearance of a clear narrative structure. Gombrich could offer a straightforward unified story of art. His many successors cannot. If you want an updated version of Gombrich’s classic The Story of Art then consider Julian Bell’s Mirror of the World: A New History of Art (2007), which covers art up to the present in every visual culture.[6] Gombrich tells the story of progress in naturalism. This is clear if you look at his Art and Illusion where the basic mainline story of art runs from the naturalism of Greco-Roman antiquity to Constable’s Wivenhoe Park (1816, fig. 2).[7] Bell tells a more elusive story.


Fig. 2: J. CONSTABLE, Wivenhoe Park, 1816. Washington, National Gallery of Art


The museum adds novel forms of art; the art historian explains their relationship to familiar art; the aesthetician explains why they are art. Thus originally art was representation; then expression; and in the mid-twentieth century a bewildering variety of counter-examples to older definitions of art were developed. Abstract painting showed that visual art need not be representational; minimalism, that art need not be expressive; and, finally, Tino Seghal’s performances demonstrated that making visual art did not even require producing any physical artifact, like Warhols’s Brillo Box (fig. 3, see top-image). Consider Danto’s definition of art: «To be a work of art is to be (i) about something and (ii) to embody its meaning»[8]. Warhol’s Brillo Box fits the definition - it is art because it embodies a commentary on its own nature as art. The physically identical brillo box in the store is not art because it is not about something- it is just a container designed to hold brillo. The question, What is art?, the search for necessary and suflcient conditions defining art was pushed forward as artists presented counter-examples to the older theorizing. This, then, is why contemporary visual art is philosophically challenging. You need some theory of why these novel artifacts or performances are works of art. And your definition needs to include also old master European painting; Chinese scrolls; Islamic carpets and pre-Columbia sculpture, as well as all of these contemporary examples - everything on display in the museum. The story of the museum, art history and aesthetics thus is the story of progress. New kinds of art were identified and displayed, and aesthetic theory explained why these things were art.

As I said, this part of the story is very familiar. Now, however, we get to the original part of my account. Thus far we have only considered art world art. But a story of art that leaves out so much wild art surely cannot be the full story. An accurate account of the museum, art history and aesthetic theory must consider all art. Consider this analogy. Suppose that a political analysis made reference only to part of the population, let us suppose: only privileged white males, to use an example that has some real relationship to the development of political theory. It would be natural to object, to note that a plausible analysis must consider all members of the community. Analogously, I am saying, a convincing account of the art world cannot just deal with art world art, but must include wild art.

If we are concerned not only with art world art, but also with wild art, how does this analysis develop differently? Answering that question gives us a radically novel perspective on aesthetic theory, and also on the history and present prospects of the art museum. We propose to change these well-entrenched ways of thinking entirely - our challenging analysis thus involves revising fundamentals. Why did the development of the museum, art history and aesthetic theory go so dramatically wrong from the very start? Here it is suggestive to draw an analogy with political democracy. Nowadays most people believe in some form of popular rule. And so there are many attempts to explain why often the public choices are not realized. There are special interest groups; the public is divided by gender and race; and many people lack to the ability to identify their own real interests, what Rousseau called the General Will. Within the art world, similarly, we might argue that aesthetic judgments remain authoritarian because special interest groups promote their agendas; because of divisions like those in the broader public sphere; and, just because it’s hard to accept that making aesthetic judgments is essentially an exercise of individual freedom. Within the art world, as in the civil society at large it’s hard to leave the authoritarian ways of the old regime
behind.

What, that is, was the significance of the omission of wild art from this story of the art world? And how will that story be different now that wild art is considered? The familiar history focuses on three events in the late eighteenth-century: the creation of the public museum; the birth of art history; and the development of aesthetics. We need now, however, to consider also a fourth event, the birth of wild art. Graffiti were found in Roman Pompei. And we might look to the history of pre-modern festivals to find other anticipations of this art form. In general, however, wild art is a creation of modernism - like the museum, art history and aesthetic theory.

It may appear, then, that the introduction of wild art merely extends this narrative in a natural way. The museum, art history and aesthetic theory have been enlarged to include abstract painting, minimalism, pop art, conceptual art and performance - and now we ask that they include also graffiti, tattoos and all of the other myriad forms of wild art. And so, what is called for, it would seem, is yet another expansion of the museum. But this is not our claim. Here, then, we need to consider the truly radical implications of our analysis.

The art world has long been under the spell of historicist ways of thinking. New forms of art are brought into the art world - and so the claims of museum, art history and aesthetic theory need to be adjusted. By the 1820s, in his lectures on art Hegel historicized Kant, and prepared the way for art history and the art museum, which in Berlin was built even while he lectured at the University there. Once Winckelmann published a history of Greek and Roman art, then analysis could be extended to what Hegel calls the «historical development of painting»[9]. In Berlin in the museum, Hegel says in a lecture of 1829, we find

The essential progress of the inner history of painting... It is only such a living spectacle that can give us an idea of painting’s beginning in traditional and static types, of its becoming more living, of its search for expression and individual character, of its liberation from the inactive and resposeful existence of the figures...[10]

More recent art historians mostly do not appeal to Hegel, but they think in similar historicist terms. To understand when (and why) something becomes art, and to properly place it in the historical narrative, you need an historical analysis. Gombrich, Greenberg and Danto all think in these Hegelian terms.
We are not saying that now wild art can join the art world in yet another expansion of that world as, earlier, abstract art, minimalism and various forms of post-modern art joined the art world. What interests us, rather, is how this art world has always been organized by drawing a borderline between what is within and what is outside. The more things change, the more they stay the same: The recent addition of a myriad of forms of art to the art world has not dissolved the most basic barrier, the dividing line between art world art and what is outside. If you look at the art world in these terms, then its expansion will seem less important. That border-line between art that is inside and what is outside of the art world is conventional, which isn’t to say that it is unimportant, but only that there is no interesting difference in kind between art world art and wild art.

If you look within the art world, then it seems that there have been a long sequence of revolutionary changes. Compare the art museum a mere hundred and fifty years ago with that institution as it exists at present. Medieval art from Europe; artifacts from the Islamic world; photography: and a whole additional range of art has been brought into that museum. And look at how much museums of modern art have changed in less than a century. In the 1930s, MoMA was proud to do the then-daring exhibitions of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. But now when those figures are the old masters of modernism, the contemporary art shown is radically novel. These changes in the contents of museums are reflected also, as we noted earlier, in art history writing and aesthetic theory. Within the art world, the story since 1793 is one of radical ongoing change.

If, rather, you take our outside perspective, then a very different picture emerges. All of this radical change in museums, art history writing and aesthetic theory has not changed the basic governing idea, the belief that identifying the contents of the art world system requires appeal to some rules set up by the art world authorities. Recently there has been a great deal of discussion about the exact ways that these ever-changing rules are developed. When an artist (Duchamp, Eva Hesse, Warhol, Jeff Koons, Sturtevant and their successors) develops challenging novel art, how, exactly, do their claims get adjudicated? What would happen, for example, if it were decided that a work of art did not belong within the art world? Such cases happen - Norman Rockwell and Leiroy Neiman were controversial, as are, still, a number of other wild artists. Do the artists make this judgment, or is it up to the curators?; and what happens when there is disagreement amongst these authorities? What is assumed here is that there are some rules to determine this distinction between wild art and art world art. Those rules change- what was art world art in 1963, just before Warhol became important, is not what is art today. The rules change pretty much continuously - but what remains unchanged is the belief that there are generally accepted rules (whoever determines them) which make this distinction.

If you are looking for an aesthetic theory, which will support art history, then you will find Kant disappointing. Danto expresses this disappointment when he says that the Critique of Judgment seems «to have little to say about art today»[11]. By contrast, he read Hegel’s lectures with excitement because he found there an anticipation of his own aesthetic. These stories of the museum, art history and aesthetic theory are dramatic narratives in which the museum, art history and aesthetic theory expand radically to encompass novel forms of art. Art from all visual cultures has entered the museum and been written about by world art historians; and contemporary artists have challenged older aesthetic theory, demonstrating that any sort of artifact or performance can legitimately join the art museum. Understood in that way, Vasari, Hegel, Gombrich, Greenberg and Danto tell a story of the same form - a narrative in which novel kinds of objects are added to the art world. The distinctive original feature of Danto’s account is merely to argue that now this story has come to an end: the history of art is over.

Kant was not an historicist, and so his view of this situation- and ours, which is derived from his - is entirely different. According to Kant, each of us makes independent aesthetic judgments, which are subject to no rules. I judge for myself; you for yourself; and then we must argue with one another, knowing that what’s at stake is something other than truth to the facts.

The implications of our analysis are, as yet, difficult to understand. Much discussion will be needed, we believe, to work through the implications of these claims, which are radical and unexpected. Here, however, some tentative observations are suggestive. Part of what is at stake is the distinction between art criticism and art history. Usually this distinction is understood as the contrast between journalist reporting, focused on contemporary art, and scholarly writing, mostly about older art. We, however, make the distinction in a different way, contrasting the critic’s judgments of taste and the art historian’s presentation of factual information about the work of art.

Here a personal story is very revealing. Arthur Danto, my teacher and friend liked a great variety of art but not, it happened, the paintings of Poussin. We were wandering together in the Harvard Museums, and Danto was enjoying a number of very diverse works But when I took him to the great Nicolas Poussin, The Birth of Bacchus (1657, fig. 4), he had an almost visceral reaction of rejection - we didn’t stay long in that gallery. I can tell you a great deal about this mysterious painting.[12] It really is odd. At the top right, in the clouds, Jupiter rests from giving birth to the child Bacchus, who is held by Mercury; and at the bottom, we see Narcissus and his unhappy lover, Echo. Art historians have puzzled over the relationship between the depiction of these two different scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Nothing I tell you will necessarily convince you that this is a great painting. Of course, if initially it just seems confusing, then perhaps my historical account may be persuasive. Ultimately, however, you may find it a great interpretative challenge- but a dismal work of art.


Fig. 4: N. POUSSIN, The Birth of Bacchus, 1765. Cambridge (Mass.), Fogg Art Museum


Consider another example, this one from contemporary art. Inspired by his study of the writings of Edgar Wind, the American painter R. B. Kitaj loved highly complex iconography. If Not, Not (1975-6, fig. 5), shows a paradise corrupted by horror. The picture has many sources- Giorgione’s Tempest, and the poet T. S. Eliot in the left foreground, but also Degas and Cézanne. All of this information certainly will help you understand Kitaj’s picture, but it will not tell you whether it is a success. In my judgment, the painting is a fascinating failure, because it does not successfully synthesize its sources in a way that alludes, as Kitaj intends, to the Holocaust. You may well disagree.


Fig. 5: R.B. KITAJ, If Not, Not, 1975-1976. Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art


What I describe with reference to Poussin and Kitaj is pretty much the everyday experience of frequent disagreements of taste that we all have, I think in the galleries or museums. The lesson is simple: art history, which provides the facts and the interpretations, is one thing and art criticism, which does the evaluation, is another. Art history can (and often does) influence critical judgments, but it does not determine aesthetic judgments; for, to go back to Kant’s key insight, aesthetic judgments are not judgments of facts.

If, then, you take Kant’s aesthetic theory as your starting point, then you can- not have the art museum and art history as we know them, for these institutions require rules and norms. Museums collect the most important art - and art historians describe this art. Unless or until the critical consensus is formed, they cannot function. In practice, as we all know, the present art world functions in the top-down fashion of the old regime. Curators, professors and reviewers make critical judgments, and the public follows. Like the aristocratic patrons of the old regime, these authorities dictate what art is displayed and interpreted. Does this sound too critical? I am a former professor and so in criticizing professors I am offering a self-critique. Now, however, I am interested in how this system might be changed. What would a Kantian art world look like? Kant wrote extensively about politics, but he never wrote about the politics of the art world. And so, to answer this question we need to synthesize his Critique of Judgment and his late writings on
politics. In “What is Enlightenment” he lays down his qualified optimism.

«Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another... The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! (dare to be wise!)».[13]

If free discussion is permitted, as was not the case under the old regime (Kant’s Prussia was part of that world) then we may arrive at the truth. In the art world, if we all are permitted to freely discuss our aesthetic judgments, then it is possible that we may achieve some consensus. This is why the usual teaching of art history (in which I have participated) is all wrong. Instead of teaching students to trust their own aesthetic judgments, we offer them authoritarian accounts of what is the best art, a practice that hardly encourages independent thinking.

In our culture, there is free discussion of popular culture - films, music, YouTube. Go online and you find open debate about these contemporary art forms. (I am not contending that these media are themselves inherently democratic.) But the art world remains as authoritarian as under the old regime. Our analysis involves great faith in the process of open debate. People who believe in the primacy of expert opinion, whether they are on the political left as Marxists or on the right will reject this account. And in the American art world, where for several generations leftists have been very influential, ours is a radical proposal. The larger public, it’s true, votes on exhibitions by choosing what to attend, but their tastes play no direct role in determining what art is on display.

Any individual work of wild art could enter the art museum. Consider, for example, the sidewalk art found in Naples or, indeed, in many other cities; tattoos; or skateboards. Sidewalk art, tattoos and skateboard performances can make their way into museums of contemporary art. Anyone of these artifacts could enter the museum because, already, similar sorts of things are found there. As we have seen, Danto’s definition of art allows for this possibility. Any wild art can become art world art because nowadays anything at all can become a work of art - anything can, that is, be set in an art world context and interpreted as is other art in that setting. Whether such things will be good, or successful art world art is of course another story.
Since all the definitions of art world art apply, also to wild art, the difference between wild art and art world art is purely one of context. An object can move out of the museum and, then, back into it. Our book presents one such example, the art of Joe Milone, an Italian emigrant in America (fig. 6). Thanks to Louise Nevelson, who introduced him to Alfred H. Barr, the founding director of MoMA proposed to acquire this artifact. He wrote:

Joe Milone’s shoe-shine furniture is as festive as a Christmas tree, jubilant as a circus wag- on. It is like a lavish wedding cake, a baroque shrine, or a super-juke box with no blank areas in the ornament. Yet it is purer, more personal and simple-hearted than any of these. We must respect the enthusiasm and devotion of the man who made it as much as we enjoy the result.[14]


Fig. 6: J. MILONE, Shoe-Shine Stand, 1942


But then this, one of a series of aesthetic disagreements with Stephen Clark, the head of MoMA’s board of trustees, led to Barr’s dismissal. (He remained in the museum in a marginal position). And so Milone’s art was never shown at the museum. When we published Wild Art, we assumed that this shoe-shine stand had been destroyed. More recently, however, it was rediscovered, rescued by being put in the trash by a scholar who recognized its significance, auctioned and sold to an upstate New York Museum. One reason that it was hard to locate was that Milone, like many immigrants, Americanized his name; his original name was Giovanni Indelicato.[15]

In drawing attention to wild art, we vastly expand the field of art. And stories of expansion, so we have seen make marvelous narratives. Still, there is, still, a crucial difference between the older extensions of the museum and art history and our discussion of wild art. When earlier commentators added art to the museum and art history they thought of history as advancing. In that way, all of these accounts had something of Hegel’s vision of progress. This is true even of Gombrich, who very much disliked Hegel. Our viewpoint is totally different. Of course, we don’t deny that art has a history - Kandinsky’s abstractions couldn’t have been painted in 1520, Duchamp’s readymades couldn’t have been presented in 1818. But we believe that the failure right from the start of the curators in the art museum and the art historians to do justice to Kant’s account of aesthetic judgments has dramatically distorted their thinking. This policy of exclusion made possible the order of the museum and of art history - and the history of aesthetic theory as a story of progress. If wild art had been considered from the start, then this order would not have been possible. What needs to be emphasized, still, is that not everything outside the museum can enter. The art world depends upon a principle of exclusion, upon keeping wide art outside.

In the American academic world devoted to art history writing, there is a great deal of leftist politics. There has been much debate about how to understand Jacques-Louis David’s proto-revolutionary Oath of the Horatii (1785) and about the political implications of Andy Warhol’s Hammer & Sickles (1976), which were popular amongst grand Italian collectors. We propose to look at art and politics in a completely different way. What, we ask, are the political implications of wild art? We just do not know! Today, as when Kant published his defense of the Enlightenment, it is too early as yet to answer such questions. The future is open - and that has to be exciting.




References:

[1] H. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. by Ronald Beiner, Chicago, 1982. The contrast she makes with Hegel’s philosophy of history is highly suggestive for our purposes.
[2] London, 2013.
[3] Thanks are due to Tiziana Andina, Daniela Bruscino, Gerardo de Simone and Paul Tucker- and to their colleagues in Florence, Naples and Turin whose generous support made these five lectures possible. My co-author Joachim Pissarro has been closely engaged with every aspect of this process, including the editing of this lecture. So also has Marianne Novy.
[4] T.E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris, New Haven-London, 1985, pp. 3, 5.
[5] T. Andina, The Philosophy of Art: The Question of Definition. From Hegel to Post-Dantian Theo- ries, trans. by Natalia Lacobelli, London, 2013.
[6] J. Bell, Mirror of the World: A New History of Art, London, 2007.
[7] E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London, 1960.
[8] A.C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton, 1997, p. 195.
[9] G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, 2, trans. by T. M. Knox, Oxford, 1975, p. 869.
[10] Ibidem, p. 870.
[11] A.C. Danto, What Art is, New Haven-London, 2013, p. 116.
[12] See my Poussin’s Paintings: A Study in Art-Historical Methodology, University Park-London, 1993.
[13] Reprinted in I. Kant, Political Writings ed. by Hans Reiss, trans. by H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge, 1991, p. 54.
[14] Quoted in S. Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, Cambridge (Mass.), 2002, p. 241.
[15] A Shoeshine Box, With a Luster All Its Own, Emerges From the Shadows By Eve M. Kahn, New York Times, June 8, 2014

About the author

David Carrier, a former professor of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University and Champney Family Professor in Cleveland, has been Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Class of 1932 Fellow in Philosophy, Princeton University; a Getty Scholar; and a Clark Fellow. He has lectured in China, Europe, India, Japan, New Zealand and North America. In Spring, 2009 he was a Fulbright-Luce Lecturer in Beijing, and he lectured also in Taiwan. His recent books include A World Art History and its Objects (Penn State. 2008) and Proust/Warhol: Analytical Philosophy of Art (Peter Lang. 2008). He has published catalogue essays for many museums and art criticism for Apollo, art critical, Artforum, Artus and Burlington Magazine. And he has been a guest editor for Brooklyn Rail.