ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two sources: 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's cogency, two other figures immediately warn from the shadows of theoretic habit that Durkheim — and not Plato — is actually the more unseemly. The chapter argues that the potential to reopen modernist closure is not found in the lax pluralities of many 'posterities' but in the rather more awkward constraints' of Durkheim's notions of solidarity and the normative. The possibility of a less stifling imagery; visual art is not necessarily confined to the subordination of illustration or the repetitive limits of formalism. The chapter suggests the price of both the imagery and the practicality of empiricism. It is essential to see that what is at stake is not a decision for the 'truth' of one or other — as the various schools of theory within both visual art.
