Autonomy, pluralism, play: Danto, Greenberg, Kant, and the philosophy of art history

Abstract

Arthur Danto's celebrated declaration of “the end of art” might seem to accommodate well the apparently open-ended aesthetic diversity of contemporary art. However, in his philosophy of art history, Danto treats the pursuit of autonomy as a misdirected philosophical concern, and denigrates the aesthetic pluralism of contemporary art as a matter of empty indifference. As a result, Danto not only fails to do justice to the explosion of artistic forms in recent decades, he contributes to their misconstrual. Accordingly, this paper revisits the opposition between autonomy and pluralism on which Danto's philosophy of art history rests, arguing that artistic self-definition ought to be conceived, not as a misplaced conceptual problem, but rather as a distinctly aesthetic concern, integral to art practice and criticism. So understood, autonomy and pluralism do not stand opposed but rather mutually implicate one another, and the historical responsibility for artists to define the terms of their own work, rather than having been exhausted, persists amidst the broad field of formal possibilities presented by contemporary art's complication with everyday life

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