Danto after Warhol: toward an Aesthetics of Meaning.

It is a well known fact that 1964 is a pivotal year in Danto’s life: in the Spring of that year he saw Andy Warhol’s exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York and the readers of Danto’s work are familiar with how much Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box – exhibited in that show – has meant to him since that very moment. Brillo Box brought the established trajectory of Western art to an end and gave rise to an era of absolute pluralism in which everything is permitted since nothing any longer was historically mandated. After the end of the linear progress of western art, in a sense, anything goes – pluralism reigns. Brillo Box has changed the way art is made, perceived, and exhibited claiming that the distinction between works of art and ordinary things could no longer be taken for granted. This is the starting point of Danto’s philosophical investigation on art. His inquiry on the art’s nature begins from the question Brillo Box rises: when the art does look so like to the reality, how is possible to distinguish it? According to Danto the new thing about art in this era – which he called post historical period of art – is that we can no longer tell whether something is art by looking at it. For him, the possibility to find objects that are perceptually indiscernible from artworks but that lack artistic status involves that art cannot be simply identified by perceptual inspection. In this sense Danto invites us to speculate on what works of art have in common and on how they differ from other things, starting from the case of indiscernibles. As a result of his reflection work of art are embodied meanings, which implies that what works of art have in common is to have a meaning and how they differ from other things is to embody their meaning. Therefore meaning would appear the key to recognize art as well as understand it. My ambition in this essay is i) to demonstrate that Danto’s theory of art of embodied meanings leads to an “Aesthetic of Meaning” and consequently ii) to try to explain what “Aesthetics of meaning” means. I will attempt to argue this in three steps. First I will underline the way in which Danto’s definition of art is oriented to the meaning and doing this I will follow the well known Noël Carroll’s critics in order to show that Danto’s apparent balance between matter and meaning – which the notion of embodied meaning seems to provide – usually leans towards meaning. Hence I will attempt to show that for Danto art’s value is mainly cognitive because, altough artworks strike us emboding something, Danto’s attention to our affective response to the flesh of an artwork seems relative to the artwork’s capacity of providing meaning. It will follow that interpretation hold a fundamental role within his Theory of Art, that criticism advanced by Danto implies that aesthetics considerations are commingled with cognition, and hence that aesthetics experience after Warhol is mostly cognitive: it’s an Aestheticss of Meanings.