DANTOOVO PITANJE
DANTO’S QUESTION

Summary/Abstract: Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art deals with the relationship between art and reality with the aim of discovering how an object or figure from real life passes into the world of the imagination, the way in which art transforms the mundane to give it a new modus of existence different from that modus of existence of items of practical use. Of course, the question of the relationship between art and reality is not a new one, but is age-old; Arthur Danto gives it new youth by enquiring into the relationship between the objects we use in our day-to-day lives and their artistic transformation. A work by pop-artist Andy Warhol, the well-known, and controversial, Brillo Box, is taken by this aesthetician as a serious example in support of the argument that an essential difference is to be discovered between the object – a box of cleaning pads on the supermarket shelf – and the artistic transformation of the same object in an exhibition. Danto explains the mode of existence of this artistic phenomenon. The aesthetician thus raises the issue of traditional aesthetics in the light of contemporary artistic practice – the world of art. The ontological difference between a work of art and mere objects in the interpretation of an art work is also constituted so as to give Danto’s philosophy of art the stamp of the kind of reflection on the artistic that leads, in self-scrutiny, to an awareness of the very structure of art. The aesthetician’s point of departure, why art is, or is not, a matter of philosophical reflection, is thus elaborated within the interconnection of all the leading topics of aesthetics, from Plato’s theory of imitation to Hegel’s vision of the end of art, Heidegger and the guide to hermeneutics, so as to give new life to the fundamental questions of the philosophy of art that have not been wholly rejected by new artistic practice.

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