The pigeon within us all: A reply to three critics

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 39-44

  Danto, Arthur C ^a  

^a Columbia University ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547215381     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0021-8529.00005     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (9)

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part I, trans. Bayard Taylor (Appleton: Century Crofts, 1946).
2. "The Artist will therefore tend to see what he paints rather than to paint what he sees." E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 86. One is not surprised to see Gombrich quoting Nietzsche immediately after this remarkable claim. Nietzsche is the founding father of the theory of human plasticity that has become canonical in our age.
3. See "The Invisible Content of Visual Art" above.
4. John Szarkowski, Photography until Now (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 11.
5. "Carpenter Shih went to Ch'i and saw a serrate oak standing by the village shrine. ... 'It's a worthless tree - there's nothing it can be used for. That's how it got to be that old.'" The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson (Columbia University Press, 1968), pp. 63-64.
6. Richard Wollheim, "Danto's Gallery of Indiscernibles," Danto and His Critics, ed. Mark Rollons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).
7. This is clearly something that goes entirely against the grain of Wollheim's way of experiencing paintings. "I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognize that it took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more to spend looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was" (Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art [Princeton University Press, 1987], p. 8). What indiscernible pictures disclose is what we could see at first glance: that they are not relevantly different under minimal visual criteria. The rest belongs to extended perception, which does not meet the eye.
8. See my "Indiscernibility and Perception: A Reply to Joseph Margolis," The British Journal of Aesthetics 39 (1999): 321-329.
9. See "When Pictures Are Present: Arthur Danto and the Historicity of the Eye," above.