ABSTRACT
The interlacing of normativity and innovative projection implicit in Michael Fried's open concept of artistic practice sponsors an approach both to the criticism of contemporary work and to the study of the history of art that can be usefully compared with dramatic emplotment. The strategy of reconstruction of motivational complexes evinced in the early essay on Stella remains a constant across Fried's work, as can be shown with respect to the groundbreaking essay on "Gericault's Romanticism" from Another Light. Although Friedrich Schiller holds it to be deducible from the concept of reason, this thesis constitutes a bold and surprising stroke of the theoretical imagination, the thrust of which is inextricably to unite artistic achievement with the highest aspirations of human life. Like Denis Diderot, Schiller is concerned to align the very complexion of the aesthetic object—not simply its represented content—with nature, but the path he cuts toward this conceptual end does not run via the idea of the causal nexus constitutive of nature as totality.
