Philosophical Disenfranchisement in Danto's “The End of Art”

In 1984, Arthur C. Danto wrote two papers, both with enormously provocative themes. One, "The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art," is a chronicling of aggressive strategies made against art by philosophy in an effort to contain and control it, and a call for art's re-empowerment. The second, "The End of Art," offers a Hegelian model of art history in which art (necessarily) comes to an end with its own philosophical self-consciousness. Both papers appeared in a volume of Danto's essays in 1986.1 "The End of Art" caused an explosion of almost unanimously negative response in symposia, conferences, papers, and books by a "who's who" of the philosophy of art world that has continued for a decade and a half.2 "The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art" has been met with virtual silence.3 As the smoke begins to clear fifteen years later, a retrospective look at these works engenders a certain amount of bewilderment. First, it is odd that the critical response by the philosophical community has been focused only on "The End of Art." "The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art," with its provocation to defend the discipline of philosophy, should have been an equal candidate for making noise in academic circles. What is more puzzling, though, is that these two papers have not been considered together. That they are seemingly contradictory is interesting enough: art as oppressed by philosophy in one, and in the other, art looking into a mirror and seeing philosophy as its own reflection. Indeed, the same argument appears in and overlaps both papers. For all their seeming disparity, though, it appears that Danto intended them to be taken together. In his introduction to the volume in which they appear, Danto states that these papers "form a natural narrative order, almost as though they were chapters in a single book with an overarching theme."4 This theme, the relation among art, philosophy, and historical consciousness, begins with disenfranchisement but ends with liberation. "The End of Art," claims Danto, is an effort at the re-enfranchisement of art through a forced division between it and philosophy.5 This division, he asserts, will lead to freedom for both. Thus the one paper really cannot be properly assessed without the other. Whatever critiques "The End of Art" has been subject to, and however much Danto's critics think areas of his argument are flawed, their attention has been directed toward showing that whereas Danto thinks art has ended, it really has not.6 The most important question that has not been asked regards the project as a whole: does "The End of Art" succeed in its intended liberatory goal? This essay will pursue that question. After laying out the general thrust of both papers to demonstrate their narrative continuity, I will consider them together in light of this broader claim. But I will argue that "The End of Art" is an astonishing confirmation of Danto's thesis in "The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art." Whatever Danto set out to do, the arguments of "The End of Art" amount to the most comprehensive disenfranchising strategy ever launched against art.