The end of art and aesthetic universalism: Danto, Dickie, and the institutional theory

Intuition Beginner

In April 1964, Andy Warhol stacked wooden boxes stamped with the Brillo soap-pad logo on the floor of the Stable Gallery in New York. The boxes were built to the same dimensions and printed with the same design as the cardboard Brillo cartons then sitting in any American supermarket. A visitor could not tell them apart by looking. Yet the gallery boxes were art, and the supermarket boxes were packing stock. What made them different?

Arthur Danto, a philosopher at Columbia University, visited the Stable Gallery and concluded that this was the defining question of contemporary art. His answer, published that same year in "The Artworld," was that the difference is not visible. It lies in the artworld — the network of galleries, critics, museums, art history, and theory that surrounds an object and gives it the status of a work of art. Two boxes can look identical and still be different kinds of thing.

Danto then declared the "end of art." He did not mean that artists would stop working. He meant that art's long history of asking itself "what counts as art?" — a history in which each movement staked its claim on a different answer — had reached its logical limit with Warhol. Once a perceptually ordinary object can be art, there is no further formal boundary for art to discover.

George Dickie, a philosopher at the University of Illinois, sharpened this into the institutional theory: art is whatever the artworld confers that status upon. If anything can be art, the hard question becomes "what grounds a judgment that art is good?" — the dispute between universalism (beauty is a shared human response) and relativism (each culture sets its own standards).

Visual Beginner

The picture shows the founding provocation of this unit: two boxes that are phenomenal twins yet differ in art-theoretical status. The lower band traces the modern sequence of definitions of art that the provocation set in motion, each philosopher offering a different answer to the question the boxes forced into the open.

Worked example Beginner

Warhol's Brillo Boxes were exhibited at the Stable Gallery on East 74th Street, New York, in April and May 1964. Warhol commissioned carpenters to build plywood boxes to the dimensions of commercial Brillo shipping cartons, then had assistants silk-screen the red-and-blue Brillo logo and product text onto the sides, and stacked the finished boxes in the gallery.

Step 1. The sculptures measured roughly 17 by 17 by 28 inches and matched the grocery cartons point for point in shape, colour, and lettering. A viewer standing in the gallery saw a pile of supermarket stock.

Step 2. The philosophical problem is precise. The plywood box and the cardboard box share every property the eye can register — colour, size, typography, design. Yet one was purchased, by 1971, into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and the other was thrown away with the week's rubbish. No inspection of the surfaces explains the difference in status.

Step 3. Danto's resolution in "The Artworld" (1964) is that the difference is supplied by theory. The gallery box is embedded in a history of artistic gestures (Duchamp's Fountain of 1917, the readymade tradition, Abstract Expressionism's redefinition of the picture plane) and in an institution (the Stable Gallery, the reviewing press, the museum) that confers the status of art. The supermarket box stands in no such history.

What this tells us: once perceptually ordinary objects can be art, the definition of art can no longer be read off the object's appearance. The definition has moved outward, into the surrounding institution and theory.

Check your understanding Beginner

Formal definition Intermediate+

A definition of art is a statement of the necessary and sufficient conditions under which an object or event counts as a work of art. The contemporary debate, opened by Morris Weitz's anti-essentialist challenge of 1956 and reshaped by Danto's indiscernibility argument of 1964, divides candidate definitions into four families.

Definition (functional definition). Art is an object that performs a characteristic aesthetic function — typically the production of a distinctive aesthetic experience in a suitably prepared viewer. The classical source is Kant (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), whose account of judgments of taste grounds aesthetic experience in disinterested pleasure that claims universal validity without being determined by a concept. A functional definition treats aesthetic experience as logically prior to art: objects are art because they afford the experience.

Definition (procedural / institutional definition, Dickie). A work of art is an artifact that has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of the social institution commonly called the artworld (Dickie 1974, Art and the Aesthetic). The artworld comprises artists, critics, curators, museums, galleries, art-history departments, and the public for these. The definition is classificatory — it settles what counts as art, not what is good — and it is procedural: status is conferred by a social act, not discovered in the object's intrinsic features.

Definition (historical-intentional definition, Levinson). An object is art at a time $t$ if its maker intends it for regard-as-a-work-of-art, where "regard-as-a-work-of-art" denotes any way in which objects were correctly regarded as art prior to $t$ (Levinson 1979, British Journal of Aesthetics 19:211). The definition is recursive: each new work is hooked into the growing historical chain of earlier art through the maker's intention. The first works of art are a separately treated boundary case.

Definition (cluster concept, Gaut). Art is not governed by necessary and sufficient conditions at all; instead, an object is art if it satisfies a sufficient number of a cluster of ten criteria — among them possessing positive aesthetic properties, being expressive of emotion, being intellectually challenging, being the product of an art tradition, and being intended by its maker for regard as art (Gaut 2000, in Carroll ed., Theories of Art Today). No single criterion is required, and no fixed threshold is imposed.

The backdrop against which all four are defined is Weitz's claim that art is an open concept governed by Wittgensteinian family resemblance: we call things art because of overlapping similarities, not a shared essence, and any proposed necessary condition can be defeated by a new work (Weitz 1956, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15:27).

Counterexamples to common slips

• Slip: "The institutional theory says anything in a gallery is art." It does not. Dickie's definition requires that status be conferred by an agent acting on behalf of the artworld. A crate of paintings left in a gallery by a careless mover has had no status conferred on it and is not thereby art. The gallery is a typical but not a constitutive venue.

• Slip: "Danto and Dickie hold the same theory." They do not. Danto offers a metaphysical diagnosis (two perceptually indistinguishable objects can differ in ontological kind) and is primarily interested in why the Brillo Box is art at all; Dickie offers a definitional procedure that converts Danto's diagnosis into a general account of art's necessary and sufficient conditions. Danto (1981) explicitly distanced himself from the procedural reading of his argument.

• Slip: "The end of art means art is over." It does not. Danto's "end" is the close of a narrative of progressive self-definition, after which art becomes pluralist and "post-historical." The thesis is taken from Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (1823-1829) and is an account of the shape of art's history, not a prediction about its volume.

• Slip: "Institutional theory relativises all aesthetic value." It does not, on its own terms. Dickie is careful to separate the classificatory question (is this art?) from the evaluative question (is this good art?). The institutional theory answers the first and is officially silent on the second. The universalism-versus-relativism dispute concerns value, not classification.

• Slip: "Universalism means everyone agrees about beauty." It does not. Kant's thesis is that a judgment of taste claims universal validity — that it demands the assent of every judge — not that the assent is in fact always forthcoming. The claim is normative, not empirical.

Key theorem with argument Intermediate+

Theorem (Danto's indiscernibility thesis, 1964/1981). There can exist two objects that share every perceptually accessible property — the same shape, size, colour, surface texture, material composition, and visible design — and yet differ in their art-theoretical status, one being a work of art and the other not. Consequently, no property accessible to perception alone is sufficient to define art; the distinction between art and non-art requires an appeal to a historical-theoretical context — the "atmosphere of theory," later named the artworld — that is not reducible to the object's appearance.

Argument. The thesis is established by exhibiting the pair of objects and arguing that the difference between them is real and non-perceptual.

(1) The pair exists. Warhol's Brillo Boxes (Stable Gallery, April 1964) and the commercial Brillo shipping cartons of the Procter & Gamble distributor were, by Danto's own report and by subsequent art-historical documentation, perceptually matched in shape, colour, typography, and surface design. The gallery boxes were wooden rather than cardboard, but Danto's thought is that the example can be sharpened: he constructs cases throughout The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) — the gallery of indiscernible red squares, one a painting by a disciple of Josef Albers, one a metaphysical meditation by a follower of Giorgio de Chirico, one a Communist flag, one a bare ground — in which the visible properties are identical and the differences are entirely in the "is" of artistic identification, the manner in which each is of something as a work.

(2) The difference is real, not a verbal trick. The gallery Brillo Box entered MoMA's collection; it is reproduced in standard art-history texts; it commands an auction price; it is the subject of sustained scholarship. The cardboard carton does none of these things. The two objects have different causal and institutional careers that no examination of their surfaces would predict. The difference is therefore not in the surfaces.

(3) The difference is non-perceptual. If every property available to the eye, the hand, and the camera leaves the question of artistic status open, then the property that settles the question is of a different kind. Danto identifies it as a theoretical property: the box is art because it is positioned within a body of art-historical and critical theory — the legacy of Duchamp's Fountain (1917), the readymade, the collapse of Greenbergian formalism — that gives it the status of an artistic gesture. Without that positioning the object is a container; with it, the same visible object is a sculpture. The conferring context is what Danto names the artworld.

(4) The consequence is negative and general. The thesis establishes that no perceptual criterion — beauty, representation, formal organisation, skilful making — can be a necessary condition on art. For any such criterion, the indiscernibility move generates a counterexample: an object meeting the criterion that is not art, or an artwork lacking it. The definitional work is therefore displaced outward, to the institution (Dickie), the historical chain of intentions (Levinson), the cluster of criteria (Gaut), or the anti-essentialist refusal of definition (Weitz).

$\square$

Bridge. Danto's indiscernibility thesis builds toward 34.07.01, where the Kantian claim that judgments of taste are grounded in a shared aesthetic response is shown to presuppose exactly the perceptual linkage that the thesis dissolves: once perceptually indistinguishable objects can differ in artistic status, the universal "feeling of life" that Kant grounds aesthetic judgment in can no longer be assumed to attach to the object as seen. The thesis appears again in 20.04.01, where the same Kant-versus-postmodern tension is reconstructed on the value side rather than the definition side. The foundational reason is that the indiscernibility argument severs the tie between aesthetic properties and observable appearance, and this is exactly the structure that identifies Danto's thesis with Duchamp's readymade and with Greenberg's self-criticism of the medium: each is a move that relocates the defining property of art from the object to the framework — institutional, historical, or formal — that surrounds it. Putting these together, the central insight is that twentieth-century art progressively externalised its own conditions of possibility, and the bridge is between the metaphysical claim (two indistinguishable objects differ in kind) and the institutional claim (the difference is conferred by a social act), with the pattern generalising from sculpture to painting, music, and literature wherever a work refuses to disclose its art-status from its surface alone.

Exercises Intermediate+

Interpretive debates Master

The contemporary philosophy of art is constituted by a sequence of responses to the failure of perceptual-essentialist definitions of art after the readymade and Warhol. Eight named positions define the modern field.

Position 1 — Greenberg 1960, formalist modernism. Clement Greenberg's "Modernist Painting" reads the history of modern art as the progressive self-criticism of each medium, with painting stripping away everything it shares with sculpture to disclose its irreducible essence — the flat picture plane and the delimitation of the picture field. The Kant analogy is explicit: Greenberg claims Kant as the first modernist because the Critique of Pure Reason subjected reason to its own immanent critique, just as Manet subjected painting to its own. The position is the high-water mark of the attempt to define art by an internal formal property.

Position 2 — Weitz 1956, anti-essentialism. Morris Weitz's "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15:1) argues, drawing on Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (1953) on family resemblance and open concepts, that art has no essence and admits no necessary-and-sufficient definition. Each proposed condition has been defeated by a new artistic practice; the concept of art is open, extended by creative decisions rather than fixed by a prior property. Weitz's position is the foil against which all later definitional work defines itself.

Position 3 — Danto 1964/1981, indiscernibility and the artworld. Danto's "The Artworld" introduces the thesis that perceptually indistinguishable objects can differ in art-theoretical status, requiring an "atmosphere of theory" — the artworld — to distinguish them. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) develops the thesis through the gallery-of-red-squares thought experiment and the "is of artistic identification." Danto's position is metaphysical rather than procedural: it diagnoses why the Brillo Box is art (it is embedded in a history of artistic gestures that give it its identity) without proposing a general necessary-and-sufficient definition in Dickie's sense.

Position 4 — Dickie 1974/1984, institutional theory. George Dickie converts Danto's diagnosis into a classificatory procedural definition: art is whatever the artworld confers the status of candidate for appreciation upon. Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (1974) states the definition; The Art Circle (1984) refines it into five circular definitions (artist, artwork, public, artworld, artworld-system) that jointly fix the concept. The position is the most influential procedural definition and the principal target of the historical and cluster theorists.

Position 5 — Levinson 1979, historical-intentional definition. Jerrold Levinson's "Defining Art Historically" (British Journal of Aesthetics 19:3) offers a recursive definition: an object is art at time $t$ if and only if its maker intends it for the same regard that some earlier artwork correctly received. The definition is intentional (it requires the maker's act) and historical (the relevant regard is inherited from earlier art). It avoids the circularity of which Wollheim accused Dickie by anchoring the definition in the maker rather than in the institution, and it handles the boundary case of first art by a separate stipulation.

Position 6 — Wollheim 1968/1980, institutional criticism and the aesthetic. Richard Wollheim's Art and Its Objects (1968, 2nd ed. 1980) attacks Dickie's procedural definition in Supplementary Essay 1, arguing that "conferring status" is either empty or covertly evaluative. Wollheim's own position is a retrieval of the aesthetic: art is constituted by its capacity to sustain a distinctive form of imaginative-cum-perceptual attention, and the institutional theory obscures this. The position prefigures the cluster accounts by insisting on the plurality of art's conditions while resisting the wholesale anti-essentialism of Weitz.

Position 7 — Carroll 2000, historicism and identifying art. Noël Carroll, in "Historical Approaches to Art" and "Identifying Art" (both in Theories of Art Today, 2000), argues that no single definition of art is available but that art can still be reliably identified by tracing narrative connections backward to earlier art. The position is historicist and pluralist: it concedes Weitz's case against essence while preserving the practical possibility of distinguishing art from non-art by historical descent rather than by stipulated criteria.

Position 8 — Gaut 2000, cluster concept. Berys Gaut's " 'Art' as a Cluster Concept" (in Carroll 2000) holds that art is governed by a cluster of ten criteria — positive aesthetic properties, expressiveness of emotion, intellectual challenge, formal complexity, possession of an art-tradition pedigree, intentional regard-as-art, and others — of which enough must be satisfied for an object to count as art. No criterion is individually necessary; the account is anti-essentialist yet still definitional, and it accommodates the open-endedness Weitz emphasised without surrendering the possibility of principled classification.

Synthesis. The eight positions converge on a single finding: after the readymade and Warhol, art cannot be defined by any property intrinsic to the object accessible to perception. The foundational reason is that Danto's indiscernibility argument closed the door on every perceptual-essentialist candidate, and this is exactly the structure that identifies Greenberg's self-criticism of the medium, Duchamp's readymade, and Warhol's Brillo Box as three expressions of the same move — the relocation of the defining property of art from the object's surface to the framework (formal, institutional, historical, or intentional) that surrounds it. Putting these together, the central insight is that the post-1964 definitional debate is a sustained disagreement about which non-perceptual framework does the definitional work: Dickie locates it in institutional conferral, Levinson in historical intention, Carroll in narrative continuity, Gaut in a cluster of overlapping criteria, Danto in the atmosphere of theory, and Weitz denies the work is doable at all.

The pattern recurs on the evaluative side, where the universalism-versus-relativism dispute reproduces the same structure: Kant's claim that judgments of taste demand universal assent is the perceptual-essentialist position on value, and the institutional and historicist positions on the definition side support a corresponding pluralism on the value side. The bridge is between the classificatory question (is this art?) and the evaluative question (is this good?), and the definitional positions of the last sixty years generalise to a value-pluralism in which no single tradition or criterion commands universal assent. This is exactly what Danto meant by the "post-historical" age of art, and the pattern appears again in 34.04.03 for the Renaissance (where Vasari's teleological periodization is the analogue of Greenberg's formalist teleology, and revisionist scholarship plays the role of the post-1964 definitional pluralism), in 34.06.03 for the Bauhaus (whose dissolution of the art/craft/industry distinction is the practical enactment of the institutional relocation Danto theorised), and in 20.04.01 for the philosophy of beauty (where the Kantian universalism this unit presupposes on the value side receives its canonical statement).

Full argument set Master

Proposition (Danto's "end of art" thesis, 1997). The progressive narrative of Western art — a history in which each successive movement stakes its claim on a different answer to the question "what is art?" — reached its terminal point with Warhol's Brillo Boxes in 1964, after which art entered a "post-historical" age characterised by pluralism of style, medium, and purpose rather than by any single developmental direction.

Argument. Four converging considerations support the thesis.

(1) The form of art's prior narrative. On Danto's reading, from Giotto through Abstract Expressionism, Western art was structured by a sequence of self-defining movements — Renaissance naturalism, Mannerism, Baroque drama, Neoclassical order, Romantic expression, Realist mimesis, Impressionist optics, Cubist fragmentation, Abstract Expressionist gesture — each of which declared itself by staking out a new boundary of the artistic. The structure is Hegelian: each movement aufhebt (sublates) its predecessor, preserving what it can and negating what it must. Greenberg's "Modernist Painting" is the last sustained attempt to read this structure as the progressive disclosure of the medium's essence.

(2) The terminal event. Warhol's Brillo Boxes of 1964 defeat any further formal-essentialist answer. Once a perceptually ordinary object is art, no formal property can be necessary for art-status: any proposed property is absent from the Brillo Box and therefore fails as a defining condition. The Greenbergian program, in particular, cannot survive the demonstration that a three-dimensional commercial carton can be sculpture. The narrative of art's formal self-discovery has nowhere left to go.

(3) The post-historical age. After 1964, the arts exhibit the pluralism that Danto names "post-historical": Pop, Minimalism, Conceptual art, performance, installation, video, and the various postmodern practices coexist without any single one claiming to be the next step in a progressive story. No dominant movement succeeds another in the way Mannerism succeeded the High Renaissance. Artists work in simultaneous and incommensurable registers.

(4) The Hegelian provenance. Danto acknowledges that the "end of art" motif is taken from Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (1823-1829), in which art is one form of Absolute Spirit's self-knowledge and is destined to be aufgehoben by religion and philosophy. Danto secularises the thesis: the end is not art's supersession by a higher form of Spirit but the close of art's progressive self-definition. The post-historical age is one in which art continues but its history, in the developmental sense, is complete.

The thesis is contested. Carroll (2000) argues that the narrative of art's progressive self-definition is itself a retrospective construction and that the alleged terminal event is an artefact of that construction rather than a fact about the practice. The revisionist art historians — the same scholarship discussed in 34.04.03 that decentered the Vasarian teleology — would extend the same objection to Danto's Hegelian framing. The thesis survives as a description of the self-understanding of a specific phase of Western art, not as a universal claim about the practice.

$\square$

Proposition (Kant's claim to universal validity is normative, not empirical). When Kant asserts in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790) that a judgment of taste "claims" universal validity, he is asserting that such a judgment demands the assent of every judge, not that such assent is in fact forthcoming. The thesis is a claim about the form of the judgment, not a statistical generalisation about agreement.

Argument. Three considerations from the text.

(1) §§6-9 of the Critique of Judgment distinguish the judgment of taste from both the agreeable (which is merely personal: "everyone has his own taste") and the good (which is determined by a concept of purpose). The judgment of beauty is unlike either: it demands assent without grounding that demand in a concept. Kant names this the "subjective principle of the universal communicability" of the feeling of pleasure. The principle is normative — it governs how the judgment presents itself — not a report on actual agreement.

(2) The deduction of taste (§§30-54) defends the legitimacy of this claim by arguing that the free play of imagination and understanding on which the judgment rests is a condition of cognition generally, and therefore is presupposed in every rational judge. The demand for assent is licensed by a structure common to all finite rational beings. Whether any particular judge in fact assents is a separate empirical question that Kant explicitly leaves open (§38).

(3) The anti-relativist consequence. If the claim to universal validity were empirical, the widespread disagreement about beauty across cultures and individuals would refute Kant. On the normative reading, disagreement is compatible with the thesis: the thesis is that the dissenting judge is wrong in the sense of failing to make a judgment she is in a position to make, not that she will in fact make it. Kant's position is therefore immune to simple relativist counterexample and must be engaged on its own normative ground.

The normative reading is the standard interpretation (Henry Allison's Kant's Theory of Taste, 2001; Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Taste, 1979). It is the reading against which the postmodern and historicist relativisms define themselves: if Kant is claiming only that the judgment demands assent, the relativist's task is to deny the legitimacy of the demand, not to point to the fact of disagreement.

$\square$

Connections Master

• Aesthetics theory: taste, judgment, and culture 34.07.01. This unit is the depth specialisation of the institutional-and-definitional thread opened in 34.07.01. The survey unit establishes the Kantian apparatus of disinterested pleasure, the four moments of the judgment of taste, and the Humean standard of true judges; the present unit takes up the question the survey raises but cannot close — what happens to that apparatus when perceptually indistinguishable objects differ in art-status. The institutional, historical, and cluster definitions surveyed here are the post-1964 answers to that question, and they feed back into the survey's account of taste by complicating the perceptual ground on which taste was supposed to operate.

• Italian Renaissance art: from Giotto to Michelangelo 34.04.03. The Vasarian periodization of Renaissance art analysed in 34.04.03 — a developmental narrative running from Cimabue through Giotto, Masaccio, and Michelangelo to a single apex — is the historical paradigm of the kind of progressive story Danto declares at an end. Reading the two units together shows that Danto's "end of art" thesis is not a claim peculiar to twentieth-century practice but a claim about the form of any teleological art history, of which Vasari's rinascità and Greenberg's self-criticism of the medium are two instances. The revisionist scholarship that decentered the Vasarian apex plays the same role for Danto that Baxandall's social history plays for the Renaissance.

• The Bauhaus: Gropius, Dessau, and the modernist synthesis 34.06.03. The Bauhaus program analysed in 34.06.03 — the deliberate dissolution of the distinctions among fine art, applied art, and industrial production under a single workshop-pedagogy — is the practical enactment, two decades before Warhol, of the relocation of art's defining property that this unit theorises. When Gropius placed a weaving by Anni Albers alongside a teapot by Marianne Brandt as works of equivalent artistic standing, the Bauhaus was already operating on the principle that art-status is conferred by institutional framing rather than read off the object's medium. Warhol's Brillo Box and Danto's artworld are the American philosophical articulation of what the Bauhaus had already practised.

• Aesthetics: beauty, art, and judgment 20.04.01. The Kantian claim to subjective universal validity that this unit presupposes on the value side — and that the universalism-versus-relativism dispute turns on — receives its canonical statement in 20.04.01. Reading the philosophy unit first supplies the four-moment analysis of the judgment of taste, the deduction of §38, and the disinterestedness thesis against which the post-1964 definitional positions define themselves; conversely, this unit shows how Danto's indiscernibility argument and the institutional theory complicate the Kantian framework by severing the perceptual link between the object and the response.

Historical & philosophical context Master

Arthur Coleman Danto (1924-2013), Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, introduced the indiscernibility thesis and the term "artworld" in "The Artworld," The Journal of Philosophy 61:19 (15 October 1964), pp. 571-584 ^[Danto1964], written in the months after his visit to the Stable Gallery exhibition of Warhol's Brillo Boxes in April 1964. Danto developed the thesis into a full metaphysics of art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Harvard University Press, 1981) ^[Danto1981], based on the 1979 Matchette Lectures to the American Philosophical Association; the mature end-of-art thesis is stated in After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton University Press, 1997) ^[Danto1997], based on the 1995 Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California, Irvine. Danto's "end" is a secularised inheritance of Hegel's Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (1823-1829).

George Dickie (1926-2020), Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, converted Danto's diagnosis into a classificatory procedural definition in "Defining Art" (American Philosophical Quarterly 6:3, 1969) and gave the definition its canonical statement in Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (Cornell University Press, 1974) ^[Dickie1974]. Dickie refined and defended the theory against the criticism of Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects, 1968, Supplementary Essay 1) in The Art Circle: A Theory of Art (Haven Publications, 1984) ^[Dickie1984], restating the definition as five interlocking circular clauses.

The intellectual background is Clement Greenberg's "Modernist Painting" (Voice of America forum lecture, 1960; printed in Arts Yearbook 4, 1961) ^{[Greenberg1960]}, the high statement of formalist modernism; Morris Weitz's anti-essentialist "The Role of Theory in Aesthetics" (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 15:1, 1956, pp. 27-35) ^[Weitz1956], which had declared the definitional project closed on Wittgensteinian grounds; and Marcel Duchamp's readymade Fountain (1917), the historical provocation that Weitz's anti-essentialism accommodated and Greenberg's formalism could not. The contemporary extensions are Jerrold Levinson's "Defining Art Historically" (British Journal of Aesthetics 19:3, 1979, pp. 211-220) ^{[Levinson1979]}, the recursive historical-intentional alternative to the institutional theory; Berys Gaut's " 'Art' as a Cluster Concept" (in Noël Carroll ed., Theories of Art Today, University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) ^[Gaut2000]; and Carroll's own historicist "Identifying Art" and "Historical Approaches" in the same volume ^{[Carroll2000]}. The modern monographic synthesis is Stephen Davies, Definitions of Art (Cornell University Press, 1991) ^[Davies1991].

Bibliography Master

Primary sources

@article{Danto1964,
  author = {Danto, Arthur C.},
  title = {The Artworld},
  journal = {The Journal of Philosophy},
  volume = {61},
  number = {19},
  pages = {571--584},
  year = {1964},
}

@book{Danto1981,
  author = {Danto, Arthur C.},
  title = {The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art},
  publisher = {Harvard University Press},
  address = {Cambridge, MA},
  year = {1981},
}

@book{Danto1997,
  author = {Danto, Arthur C.},
  title = {After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History},
  publisher = {Princeton University Press},
  address = {Princeton, NJ},
  year = {1997},
}

@book{Dickie1974,
  author = {Dickie, George},
  title = {Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis},
  publisher = {Cornell University Press},
  address = {Ithaca, NY},
  year = {1974},
}

@book{Dickie1984,
  author = {Dickie, George},
  title = {The Art Circle: A Theory of Art},
  publisher = {Haven Publications},
  address = {New York},
  year = {1984},
}

@incollection{Greenberg1960,
  author = {Greenberg, Clement},
  title = {Modernist Painting},
  year = {1960/1961},
  reprint = {In Francis Frascina (ed.), \emph{Pollock and After: The Critical Debate}, 2nd ed., Harper \& Row, 1985},
}

@article{Weitz1956,
  author = {Weitz, Morris},
  title = {The Role of Theory in Aesthetics},
  journal = {The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism},
  volume = {15},
  number = {1},
  pages = {27--35},
  year = {1956},
}

@article{Levinson1979,
  author = {Levinson, Jerrold},
  title = {Defining Art Historically},
  journal = {British Journal of Aesthetics},
  volume = {19},
  number = {3},
  pages = {211--220},
  year = {1979},
}

@book{Carroll2000,
  editor = {Carroll, No\"{e}l},
  title = {Theories of Art Today},
  publisher = {University of Wisconsin Press},
  address = {Madison, WI},
  year = {2000},
}

@incollection{Gaut2000,
  author = {Gaut, Berys},
  title = {{``Art''} as a Cluster Concept},
  booktitle = {Theories of Art Today},
  editor = {No\"{e}l Carroll},
  publisher = {University of Wisconsin Press},
  address = {Madison, WI},
  pages = {25--44},
  year = {2000},
}

@book{Kant1790,
  author = {Kant, Immanuel},
  title = {Kritik der Urteilskraft},
  year = {1790},
  translation = {Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1987},
}

Secondary scholarship

@book{Wollheim1980,
  author = {Wollheim, Richard},
  title = {Art and Its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics},
  edition = {2nd},
  publisher = {Cambridge University Press},
  address = {Cambridge},
  year = {1980},
  note = {1st ed. 1968; Supplementary Essays added in 2nd ed.},
}

@book{Davies1991,
  author = {Davies, Stephen},
  title = {Definitions of Art},
  publisher = {Cornell University Press},
  address = {Ithaca, NY},
  year = {1991},
}

@book{Kelly1998,
  author = {Kelly, Michael},
  title = {Encyclopedia of Aesthetics},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
  address = {New York},
  year = {1998},
}

@article{RamachandranHirstein1999,
  author = {Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. and Hirstein, William},
  title = {The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience},
  journal = {Journal of Consciousness Studies},
  volume = {6},
  number = {6--7},
  pages = {15--51},
  year = {1999},
}

@book{Carroll1999,
  author = {Carroll, No\"{e}l},
  title = {Philosophy of Art: A Contemporary Introduction},
  publisher = {Routledge},
  address = {London},
  year = {1999},
}

@book{Freeland2001,
  author = {Freeland, Cynthia},
  title = {But Is It Art? An Introduction to Art Theory},
  publisher = {Oxford University Press},
  address = {Oxford},
  year = {2001},
}