PREVIEW-Episode 16: Danto on Art

0:00 Speaker: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the Itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store. If you want more than one episode, you can become a PEL citizen at partiallyexaminedlife dot com membership.

0:25 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. My name is Mark Linson Meyer, coming to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:37 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas,

0:39 Wes: and this is Wes Allman in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:44 Mark: Our question for episode number 16 is what effect should the avant garde have on our understanding of what art is actually? That's one of many questions raised in the reading, which is three essays by the current American philosopher Arthur Danto, taken from the book the Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, including the essay of that name, the essay called the End of Art, and the essay called the Appreciation and Interpretation of Works of Art, first published as a whole in 1986. While the book is not unfortunately available for reading online for free, we posted a link to where you can purchase it.

If you'd like to read along at our website partiallyexaminedlife.com there is an essay that I'll link to which was a excerpted chapter from a follow up book that he wrote 10 years later or so called after the End of Art that at least explains the end of art thing. I also saw some pages on there in the Amazon preview from his book before this one, the Transfiguration of a Commonplace, which has some overlap with this. Anyway, he's a big time aesthetics guy, but wrote a lot of other stuff as well. In fact I got a bunch of them out of the library.

One called Connections to the World, the Basic Concepts of Philosophy, which goes through metaphysics and epistemology and gives somewhat of a systematic, I guess when you get to the end. I only looked at the first little bit of it, but gives a comprehensive picture of philosophy and at least judging by the intro it seemed pretty cool. He also, just as recently as last year came out with a book on Andy Warhol which is going to be very relevant to what going to talk about today.

2:20 Wes: He was a critic for the Nation for a long time, right?

2:23 Mark: Yes, yes, from 1984 to 2009. Okay, but now he's like 85 years old, so I guess he doesn't need to do that.

2:34 Seth: And let me say this to anybody who may be hearing this and going oh, okay. This is Andy Warhol and avant garde and all that. This guy is as much a philosopher as anybody that we are likely to study who writes in the 20th century. The fact that art is the milieu that he is using to discuss philosophy is simply an accident of the. Or I guess a matter of. Well, you know what I'm trying to say. Don't run away just because you hear the words Andy Warhol, which I would have myself.

3:06 Wes: He's a great writer. His writing is not in the spirit of Andy Warhol.

3:10 Seth: No, Right.

3:11 Wes: Not to say that Andy Warhol wasn't great.

3:13 Mark: Right. He is in the analytic tradition. Like, I'm looking at some of the titles of his earlier books called Analytic Philosophy of History, Analytical Philosophy of Knowledge, Analytical Philosophy of Action. These are. These are three of his earlier books. But yet has an appreciation for the continental figures and the things that I was looking for. And even in his essays, you know, he talks about Schopenhauer. He has a whole book on Nietzsche. Brings up Sartre and Foucault and all these cool guys like that.

3:38 Seth: He's a true intellectual. True intellectual and a staunch Hegelian.

3:43 Mark: Yes, we'll get into that. There's a reason that we're doing this right after last time's Hegel and the Philosophy of History. And in fact, it might behoove you to stop listening right now and go listen to that one first. But we'll fill in the gaps if you don't feel like doing that. Before we get into that, here are some ground rules for our discussion. Number one, we do not assume that our audience knows anything about any of this. Number two, no gratuitous name dropping. We're interested in ideas, not in these dead philosophers themselves or living philosophers in this case.

If we have a point to make, we're just gonna make it and not say you'd understand me if only you had read Jean Baudrillard's all these Sandwiches Are Just Social Constructs. Number three, we should be rigorous and exact in all that we say, except in cases where not doing so seems like it would be more entertaining. Let's move on to some viewer postings. Dan B. Posted on the partiallyexaminedlife.com blog. This was in response to it posted the text of the inspirational speech that I put inspirational in quotes here. I'm abridging this a little.

He says listening to you guys talk with what seems to be irreverent humor towards philosophy is kind of amusing to me. Kind of. It seems as though you guys seem to view studying philosophy as a kind of pathology engaged in by people with some sort of obsessive compulsive or narcissistic personality disorders. You have reached the epiphany that the over examined life is a cause of much distress. And any comment on that part in particular?

5:10 Seth: I'll just say that that's clearly in response to what you wrote.

5:13 Mark: Okay, well what I wrote, the inspirational speech, is not actually talking about academic philosophy and doing that. It is more just how unbearable I have been at various points in my life. And of course it's exaggerated. He says. I'm not sure what happened to you guys at the University of Texas that led you to develop such a negative view of so called academic philosophy, but I'm interested. From what it sounds like, you guys seem to focus on the arrogant personalities of the various philosophers, possible groupthink going on. I agree that many philosophers have a kind of know it all elitist attitude that from the outside seems grandiose and narcissistic.

However, this kind of silly puffed up ego is common and a lot of educated people or people that view themselves as having a higher social status. Doctors, lawyers, professors, politicians, CEOs, etc. It is puzzling to hear you guys discuss philosophy in this way, as though you were disillusioned with it and finally wised up that it was all a waste of time or perhaps just a strange kind of geeky pastime. I. I would love to have the time to study and discuss philosophy in the way that you guys were able to. I would view that as a dream come true and feel grateful and fortunate for the opportunity.

So he's. So he's guilt tripping us for our cynicism here. Although I'm not sure I would view it as something that would lead to definite answers. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you. However, I'm glad you guys have found an outlet for your love hate relationship with philosophy. I don't necessarily agree with your philosophy of philosophy, but is interesting and amusing. What do you think is philosophy? What is our criticism of philosophy? I know we don't all have the same take on this.

6:34 Wes: Yeah, Seth and I are getting lumped into your take

6:39 Mark: because it's the intro to the show.

6:40 Wes: Man, I didn't know you were so unanimous.

6:43 Mark: Yeah, but I don't actually have that much against philosophy either. I think it's easy to try to piss on the parade of people who are having a good time being cynical. And I'll just, I'll just put that in this category that actually I Don't have much. It would have its ups and downs to do this for a living. I've exchanged emails with just Jessica Berry, our former classmate who recommended. When I asked what aesthetics reading should we do, she recommended this the End of Art. So you can blame her. She's some university in Atlanta and is she enjoying it?

And she said there were a lot of trade offs, life, work, balance issues going on. So I mean, that's the same in any profession that you can either really give yourself to that you're gonna maybe be left behind in other respects. I'm sure it's an individual thing whether you can achieve that balance. So yes, there would be downsides. It is a little weird to spend as much in the same way that it would be weird to become a comic book writer and scholar who just like knows everything that Marvel and DC ever put out that would be weird to spend that much of your brain power on that.

But that actually seems like, you know, when you compare that to other jobs, hell, like that would be awesome. So yeah, or any other kind of niche field. But at the same time, does that mean that I'm dismissing philosophy as a geeky pastime? Well, it depends on what day you ask me. Sometimes it seems really important, sometimes it seems like a calling. There's a reason that I'm so excited to read some of these texts again. And why not only then do I. Okay, so I've already read the essays that we're going to read in advance. Oh, well, let me just read some more background on this and some more background.

Let me get four other books by Danto out of the library and see how much I can stuff into the last few days before the podcast. And you know, I just have kind of an addictive personality like that. And I guess it's better vented on something like this than say, smack, I suppose. Although Marcel Duchamp, the chief artist that Danto is talking about in these essays, refers himself to art as an addictive drug and in fact more or less got out of the business like pretty early in his life and then just like was a curator for himself and for other people.

So there are many people that treat philosophy the same way. Wittgenstein, right, described it as the fly trying to get out of the fly bottle. That like getting too hung up on these questions as necessary things. Like you have to answer these questions, they're forced questions. Seems like you're taking it too seriously to me.

9:08 Wes: Yeah, well, I was looking at the what is art? Entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. And just because it's the one that discusses Danto. And it's just. It just becomes this, you know, once you start getting into these necessary and sufficient conditions kind of things, that's where my eyes start glazing over. It's like, oh, my God. Because of course, it's endless. And you never come up with the definitive conditions for defining something.

9:33 Mark: Right. That's just to give some background. So many of these pieces of philosophy, like, I would say, our treatment of the ethics. It's really hard when you're doing ethics to get away with this. Start with a definitional question. What is the good? And the expectation is that you should be able to come up with some criteria that everything that fits the criteria will be the good or will be art. And whatever fails to fit those criteria is not.

9:56 Seth: Are you still talking about Dan B's response to your speech?

9:59 Mark: Not really.

10:00 Wes: Sort of segueing.

10:01 Mark: We're segueing.

10:02 Seth: Well, wait, I have something to say about it.

10:03 Mark: All right, go ahead.

10:05 Seth: So I think the mere fact that we're doing this podcast should indicate that you have a certain amount of respect. It's not simply some kind of, like, hobby. You know, we committed to it quasi professionally for a while and now we're recommitting to it. It takes a tremendous amount of work and energy on my part to fit this in with what's going on in my life. So it's not something that I'm doing lightly or as an aside. I think what Dan, if he's picking up on any of those threads from me, what he's picking up on is my sort of general disdain for academia as a profession.

Forget about what field you're in. The professional academician who writes articles about articles about other people's articles and fills them with jargon and who isn't committed to the search, whether it's philosophy for truth or significant meaningful self realization or furthering the knowledge or the beauty in the world. That's the part that gets me, is that there were several people that I quite admired and liked that were professors at ut and there were other people that just were checking off the boxes and doing work. And when I hear academics get involved in these conversations where they're just basically trading isms and arguing about minute points that really don't have any meaning to anybody outside of their area of specialty, it angers and disgusts me.

So that's what you're hearing. But in terms of philosophy, yeah, obviously, I wish I didn't have to make a living either. And I could spend all my time doing the sorts of things that I did when I was in grad school, but there's no free lunch. I mean, nobody goes to grad school forever. Right. Everybody enters the grist mill, and academia is just one form of it. As Mark mentioned, we all are going through our own versions. The fact of the matter is that I think what I'm saying is that given a preference, I'd rather do philosophy and do something else than do philosophy and be an academic.

12:01 Wes: Yeah. I have a very similar thing, and at ut, I think I took it so seriously and so personally. Philosophy was that important to me. It was always a huge conflict for me. Is this the right thing? Am I, in a way, am I degrading the whole pursuit by professionalizing it, by becoming one of these people who's publishing for the sake of publishing? And it just seemed. It seemed like I was making some huge moral compromise. Now, I think as I get older,

12:33 Mark: I think that you'd love to make that moral compromise.

12:36 Wes: Yeah. And also, I think it's like in any profession, and I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from pursuing an academic career. You can. I think you could do something good with that and you wouldn't have to just be a douchebag. Yeah. And you wouldn't even have to go research direction. You could end up teaching at a small liberal arts teaching college and you wouldn't have to be forced to write kind of scholarly papers and things like that. And then, you know, and then thinking of Danto for this reading, you know, he did something that I would love to do. You know, he's a critic for a magazine. So you, you know, there are ways to.

13:07 Mark: He also was a professor at Columbia at time.

13:09 Seth: The same.

13:10 Wes: Same. Yeah.

13:10 Mark: Just to be clear.

13:10 Wes: Yeah. But, you know, and then his writing and is more, I guess you could call technical or philosophical writing, like the stuff we read for. This is beautiful. You know, it's not just. It's artful itself. And I think you could be an artful scholar. So I think it's people who are considering academia. You know, you have to be realistic about it and not even just the job prospects, just realistic about the pros and cons of it. And you can certainly. I think you can get just as much satisfaction outside of academia. It's great to have time. But, you know, within academia, your time is taken up by certain things as well. There's teaching. I mean, I remember Mark and I with our stacks of papers. And of course, once you reach the Holy Grail of Tenure, apparently that changes.

13:55 Mark: So you know who Seth agrees with, your comments about philosophy being so internal and kind of messed up? Why? Donto.

14:04 Seth: Arthur Danto.

14:06 Mark: Yes. In this, I have a quote here from the intro to Connections to the World, that metaphysical and epistemological text. He says this is an intro that he wrote in 1997, even though the book as a whole is from 1989. He says, so philosophy is baffling to those without its walls because philosophers communicate with one another, typically in dense technical articles, often inaccessible to readers, illiterate in the notations of symbolic logic, addressing issues whose larger human relevance is as obscure as the immediate of the articles themselves.

But philosophers able, of course, to say what limited achievement is being aimed at in these communications themselves may be at some loss in explaining what ultimate human purpose is furthered through that limited achievement. In the context here is he's saying that the history of philosophy in the 20th century has been a history of self dissatisfaction, as its many internal critiques testify. So the. The Geist here that we are channeling is not even like an outsider's thing. Philosophers themselves feel this way, a lot of them. And even, you know, we already talked about Wittgenstein, who wanted to kind of seemingly throw away the whole enterprise.

We're going to do Hume next time, who has a similar motivation. Descartes, who thought a lot of what was said before was ridiculous, and we need this firm grounding. Kant. You know, so many people are going into their own systems because they think that there's something fundamentally wrong with philosophy as an institution, as an edifice, at least in their time.

15:33 Wes: It's always a crisis. It's always, why does philosophy look so bad next to science?

15:38 Mark: Let me give one more. This is just part of a posting from Dan M. On our website. This was in the discussion of the Eastern Philosophy podcast, and I think it was in the discussion of mysticism. And he was responding to my referring to people's beliefs about mysticism and their personal relationship with God. And I was probably less than reverent in the way I was characterizing them, though it wasn't too bad. And he says after, after saying some, you know, things, addressing my points, I wouldn't want to denigrate anyone's religious beliefs or belief systems.

However, in the course of our daily lives, all the mistakes and false assumptions we make about others, the world, and everything else, then to go out and call someone's belief in God foolish is, to me, a little arrogant. That implies we possess perfect knowledge. That seemed very much in the Same spirit that Dan B's post was, which is being snarky is fun. So there's nothing more to it than that. In fact, it's entirely because I am a skeptic, why I feel it's okay to be mouthy at the same time. Right. Because I know that what I'm saying is just.

This is just in the moment when I'm calling it like I see it, this is how I see it. And part of doing philosophy in this context is to, you know, get things clear to yourself and talk out loud. And so I can't help but express my impatience with some. What some people believe, you know, first, don't take me that seriously. You know, it depends. When my plane is crashing, I probably call out for God the same as most people. And you know, this is the context. When you enter the Socratic arena, then you sort of open yourself to having your beliefs attacked.

And I think people take having their beliefs attacked too personally. Right. They equate their beliefs with themselves. Like it's a judgment on their intelligence or something. When really I would say 99% of what makes up you has nothing to do with your beliefs. We are so similar in so many ways. And the concept even of judging people's worth by their intelligence or their credulity or something, I just don't put a lot of stake in it. What do you guys think in that area? I would be respectful in real life to people is what I'm saying.

17:44 Wes: Yeah, I think deprive the podcast of a lot of energy if we have to worry about people's feelings. Take this as a. In the spirit of blogs and podcasts. It's like a diary entry or a private conversation that you get to listen to.

18:03 Seth: I think that's kind of artificially giving us power. The assumption that if we were having.

18:08 Wes: We are almost up to 300 subscribers.

18:12 Seth: Exactly. No, no.

18:13 Mark: I mean, I think most of them are pity subscribers. They just let it.

18:17 Wes: Friends and family. Friends and family plan Well, I mean,

18:21 Seth: but the point is, is that if you were walking by some crazy guy in the street and he was just shouting out things about your religion, you wouldn't think twice about it. If you're having a conversation with somebody in a cafe that you just met, you would have one kind of reaction. And if you were having a conversation with somebody you've known for a long time whose opinion you respect versus going into say an auditorium and hearing a lecture by a so called authority. And so I think what you're saying is that they shouldn't give your opinion any more credence than its due and somehow put you in a position of making a judgment and acting as some kind of an authority about this, because that changes the perception of what's being said. If you're just some guy on a podcast, it's not that big of a deal.

19:07 Wes: And also it should be taken in the spirit of a joke. I mean, it would be, you know, Mark's not the. He's not the Christopher Hitchens of religion or the Dawkins. He's not here ranting about how stupid religious people are, you know, in a serious way. I mean, that would be off putting to some people. I mean, I'm sure to some people it would be a reason, a reason to listen, but I don't think that's happening.

19:28 Mark: Well, I think you're ruder about conservatives than I am, actually, Wes, so.

19:32 Wes: Yeah. Yeah.

19:34 Mark: What are you most rude about, Seth? I'm not.

19:36 Wes: I'm not worried about alien conservatives.

19:39 Seth: I'm not rude. I'm happy to do this. And why I'm enjoying it. It was a complete revelation and surprise. It came about, as you mentioned, through Jessica. So it kind of was one of these. It wasn't just kind of a stumble upon. It was a result of reinvigorating a social relationship and reconnecting with old colleagues and getting us into a modern thinker who I could respect instead of despise. And it's beautifully written. I think Wes made the point earlier. He's a very, very good writer. And it's about philosophy. It's not about aesthetics. I thought we were going to have a podcast on aesthetics. You know, what is art? What is the meaning of art? That sor thing. And instead, what we have is a legitimate philosophical discussion that I think is extremely interesting and very well put and fascinating. So I'm excited to talk about it.

20:27 Mark: Yep. And it was hard to come up even with, you know, a single question to encapsulate because this is three different essays in a book that has some common theme throughout it. But, you know, he does address some different issues. Really. His viewpoint was highly affected by the avant garde. So he was a critic in the 60s when, you know, Warhol and Jasper Johns, he talks a lot about and Robert Rauschenberg. These are all people who were influenced by Marcel Duchamp. Again, he was really influenced by what the showing of these people's works did to the art world itself. So just as an example, should we talk a little bit about, like, the readymades and stuff?

21:06 Speaker: Sure.

21:07 Mark: So some of this I got from. I have a secondary source that I'll also provide a link to. This was actually something I read, some essay by Danto, I don't even remember which one, in the aesthetics class I took in undergrad. And then we also read part of a book called the Bride and the Bachelors, which was written in the 60s. Five masters of the avant garde. So it's these like 50 to 100 page biographical, but also sort of philosophical analyses of Duchamp, John Cage, a musician, Rauschenberg again, and also like a sculptor and a dancer. And kind of says a lot about what those people thought that they were doing.

And to some degree, they were all trying to get past the distinction between art and life. And the senior of these was Marcel Duchamp, because he did most of his work, like in the 20s, you know, pretty early, he would do things like these readymades, which are. He would go buy a urinal at a plumbing supply store. And he submitted it to this museum showing specifically because I think the museum had said, we're not going to be judgmental about what you guys are doing. We're just going to post everything. So he's like kind of challenging that. So he submitted the urinal as is.

He like signed a name on it, it wasn't even his name, and submitted that and called it Fountain, which seems like it's just a joke. But then he went on to do this a bunch more times. He has like hat, rack and comb. So he calls these readymades at these things. And Danto actually takes this really seriously as. Because, you know, it ended up, though, in that particular case with the first one, first of all, they just rejected and said, this is not art at all. It's not that we think it's bad art, it's just not art at all. But eventually these things did get displayed, and they're part of, you know, the thing that Duchamp is most remembered for, in fact.

And so it was the fact that he was doing it. And so there's a lot of interpretations of how is this art? Like, it's conceptual art. It's not the thing itself. It's not like he went and built it with his own two hands. And you can admire his handiwork. I mean, you could say, oh, you know, what a beautiful urinal this is. But Danto argues against that, really. Like, Duchamp was trying to pick things that were aesthetically neutral. And in fact, he was challenging this whole notion that art is about beauty. Art is something More than that. So the question Danto gets out of this is, if you accept that this is an artwork, it looks exactly like a regular urinal.

It's just one of them is posted in a museum and is called art, and one of them is not. So what is it that makes one art and one not art? Is it really just the being in the museum? Or could you have, you know, somebody accidentally left there? You know, another one is a snow shovel. So maybe the guys who were shoveling the snow outside the museum, you know, went in and left their shovels against the wall, like, well, those wouldn't suddenly become exhibits because they were in the museum. So there must be something else. And so that's the question.

He's starting with the snow shovel.

23:53 Wes: Has the witty title in advance of a broken arm? Yes.

23:57 Mark: Do you find that a challenge to your notion of arts, or is it just kind of a stupid conceptual joke that makes some point but is nothing too profound?

24:05 Wes: Stupid conceptual joke. Let's throw that out there, Seth. Give a more nuanced view.

24:15 Seth: I have always had problems with 20th century art and understanding it. And I took a class in college that was about art that focused on the Middle Ages and Renaissance. And so I think my conception of what art was and the value of art was very much wrapped up in that. And I got very caught up in the ideas of viewing artworks in their political context and their social context and their economic context. You know, sort of like, there's lots of different ways to do art history, just like there's historiography. Lots of different ways to do history, where you look at the material conditions that produce the art, you look at the social conditions around the artist and so forth. And 20th century art, I never really understood it, and it never really appealed to me. And it wasn't actually until I just read this book that I had any sense of why that was a problem for me.

25:08 Mark: You're including in that not just this wacky postmodern stuff that we're talking about, but modern art itself. Picasso and those guys.

25:14 Seth: I'd say yes, although with increasingly difficult, increasingly more degree as you get through the 20th century. So, for example, there's Picasso and Matisse and Klimt and. And guys that I can appreciate, or at least I have my own standard and my own way of judging and appreciating. But when you talk about Kandinsky and Miro and Pollock, the more abstract it gets, the less I was able to get a hold of it. And I didn't really know. I didn't really understand why. And now I have what I would say is a much better understanding of why that were so difficult for me and why I didn't have a grip on it. By the way, that little bit in the article about Guernica that he leads off of and the disenfranchisement art is just absolutely fascinating.

25:57 Mark: Tell us a little about that.

25:59 Seth: I think he's trying to make the point about what art means in context to the artist and to people who view the artwork will change over time. So he's trying to make a point about Guernica, or Guernica was made by Picasso, and it was intended to illustrate an act of terrorism or violence about this village. And Danto's claim is that anybody who lived at that time who saw the artwork would have recognized that what it was was a kind of protest, or at least a statement about the violence of, I guess it was the Germans against this Spanish villager.

And he quotes Picasso responding to a German saying something to that effect. But he says, you know, to an audience, even 20 or 30 years later, the historical context of what happened at that village and how this was a representation of that village is completely lost. It's completely gone. And if you don't know that this was originally intended to point out this atrocity that happened here, then how does the artwork have meaning to you and what does it mean? He was trying to make a point about context and so forth.

27:08 Wes: Yep. I just want to quote the German line thing, because it's really, really funny. Picasso responded to the German officer's question, having handed him a postcard of the painting. Did you do that? And then Picasso responds, no, you did.

27:23 Seth: Right.

27:24 Wes: I thought that was great. You know, it reminds me of my own experiences with museums, where, I have to admit, I have a sort of problem. Visual arts, for me, aren't as powerful as, say, literature. I guess I'm more into diegesis than the masis.

27:39 Speaker: Right.

27:40 Mark: We're going to have to watch that, going through this, that visual art is his paradigm case. You know, there's supposed to be a story here about art in general.

27:47 Wes: Right. And he moves beyond.

27:49 Seth: I have a theory, by the way, about that.

27:51 Wes: He moves beyond the visual arts. And I think within this book, Right. He moves on to literature. Last year, being in Italy, I'm trying to say I need the historical context. Now, I have to admit, when I was in, say, Venice, my favorite parts were like the Armory and the dungeons and the. What, Doges. So I'm really a philistine in a way. And I. When it becomes the visual art, I'm like that typical American that William James writes about who just sort of glances blankly. Not entirely. I'm doing myself a little discredit. But I'm trying to say is I need the handheld audio thing or I need to be able to look at some description and then I can appreciate it, or I need to bring the story of art or some short history.

Otherwise it's difficult for me to appreciate. And it's certainly difficult for me to go in and, and look at 14th century iconic stuff of the Virgin Mary and appreciate it at all. Because I am not a Christian. And I think even Christians today, because they're not Christians in the way that they're not that, say a 14th century Italian was. Is it any longer a work of art to them? It certainly is not going to have the same power. It's certainly not going to be the communication, let's say that it was at the time it was done.

29:06 Seth: So I feel like we should start with his central philosophical thesis that he lays out in the Disenfranchisement of art, because I think that's really the central point to all of the stuff that we're going to talk about.

29:19 Wes: All right, let's hear it.

29:20 Mark: Go ahead.

29:21 Wes: What's the thesis?

29:22 Seth: Danto's claim is that philosophy has disenfranchised art in the following way, beginning with Plato, that Plato is ultimately responsible for this. And that really everything, you know, in the last 2500 years or whatever is just an echoing of Plato. But basically what the. The net is that Plato says that the purpose of art is to represent things, to mimic or represent the image of something. And that where philosophy is responsible for trying to get at things themselves, art by virtue of just focusing on the representation or the image of something, is sort of one step removed from that. So art is just by definition less central and less useful than philosophy because it's one step removed from the object. And in general, art has no utility because you can't do anything with art. It doesn't serve any purpose. A work of art doesn't shoe a horse or create a building or define a political.

30:32 Mark: That's all it could do is fool people.

30:34 Seth: All it can do is fool people.

30:35 Mark: You'd say, look at all these grapes I have here. Oh, that's just a picture of grapes. Are you bastard.

30:41 Seth: That's right.

30:41 Mark: That's all you can do.

30:43 Seth: So the term.

30:43 Wes: But it also can corrupt them.

30:45 Seth: Well, yes, it's dangerous, even though it's completely impotent, which is the central paradox that Danto brings up. But his key point is that the definition of art from a philosophical perspective, from way back when, all the way through Kant, everybody uses the same definition, is that it is mimetic, which means to say that it tries to mimic or represent reality. And it does so poorly, at least at the beginning. And so his philosophy of the history of art is that the history of art is the history of getting successively better and better and better at representing well.

31:23 Mark: And for Plato, it was especially bad because the objects of our experience are themselves pale imitations of the real things, the true forms of the world. But you don't have to be, you know, a Platonist to still feel like art is epiphenomenal, right? It sits on the surface of things. It has no causal power. It has no, again, no utility. It's just a surface level phenomenon.

31:47 Seth: Yes. And if a huge part in modern times, if a huge part of philosophy is trying to get through perception or sensory data to the things themselves, or to actual objects or to monads or whatever, then art is even doubly useless because it's just creating a barrier between you and even your sense perceptions.

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