ABSTRACT
IN THE SPRING OF 1981, I PARTICIPATED in a panel discussion on the topic of Pluralism, at the School of Visual Arts in New York. It had been organized by the poet David Shapiro, and the other participants were the painters Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe and Denise Green. I was there as a philosopher, my career as an art critic not having begun and not having even been imagined at that time. My book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, which was a philosophy of art, was about to appear, and David, who has always been exceedingly paternal toward me though young enough to be my son, thought my presence there that evening might bring the book to some general attention. My own motives were rather less promotional. Pluralism had become a very charged term in professional philosophy right about then, and I was naturally interested that the same concept should have appeared at about the same time in philosophy and in art, or at least the same word. I had begun to think that the histories of art and philosophy were very closely linked, at least in the West, and to take seriously a thesis of Hegel's that at a certain moment art turns into philosophy, for it seemed to me only in such terms could I make much sense of the recent history of art. And I was already convinced that a complex antagonism had brought art and philosophy inseparably together in Platonic times, in such a way that the two were obliged to work their destinies out in parallel through history. So the fact that Pluralism should at the same moment have seemed urgent for philosophy and for art could scarcely seem accidental to someone who thought about history as I did. I was there that evening more to find out what Pluralism meant to artists than because I had any special intelligence to contribute.
