ABSTRACT
Two sources shape this chapter: the lucidity of Danto’s summations of the philosophy of visual culture and the fertile complexity of Durkheim’s notion of sui-generic social phenomena.
Danto:
And Plato as metaphysical politician, extrudes the artist both from republic and from reality, to which he is so loosely tethered that imitation gives us less a theory than a powerfully disabling metaphor for impotency. The combination of danger and ineffectiveness sounds contradictory until we recognise that the latter is a philosophical response to the former, for if art can be transferred ontologically to the sphere of the secondary and derivative…we can get people to accept a picture of the world in which the place of art is outside it. And since Plato’s theory of art is his philosophy, and since philosophy down the ages has consisted in placing codicils to the platonic testament, philosophy itself may just be the disenfranchisement of art.1
