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The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art

Arthur C. Danto

4.12 · Rating details · 356 ratings · 21 reviews

Arthur C. Danto argues that recent developments in the art world, in particular the production of works of art that cannot be told from ordinary things, make urgent the need for a new theory of art and make plain the factors such a theory can and cannot involve. In the course of constructing such a theory, he seeks to demonstrate the relationship between philosophy and art ...more

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Paperback, 224 pages

Published March 15th 1983 by Harvard University Press (first published 1981)

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Nov 26, 2013 Jee Koh rated it really liked it

In this work of philosophy, Danto wishes to define art, and to show why contemporary art, having attained self-consciousness, is asking the same questions as philosophy. His approach throughout the book is to compare artworks with what he calls mere real things, when both are indiscernibly alike. The two classes of things, as he argues, belong to different ontological realms, hence, the title of his book. The artist performs a transfiguration of the commonplace when he makes of his materials a w In this work of philosophy, Danto wishes to define art, and to show why contemporary art, having attained self-consciousness, is asking the same questions as philosophy. His approach throughout the book is to compare artworks with what he calls mere real things, when both are indiscernibly alike. The two classes of things, as he argues, belong to different ontological realms, hence, the title of his book. The artist performs a transfiguration of the commonplace when he makes of his materials a work of art. Danto has been criticized for his belief in duality, underlined by the Christian or Catholic figure of transfiguration, and reiterated throughout the book in his references to the body and the soul. I am not sure if the two ontological realms are as separate as his tropes imply, for his argument proceeds by making nice distinctions between, first, a representation and an object, and, then, between a representation and an artistic representation. If the categories are finally different, they are also procedurally nested in one another.

Very roughly, if I understand him rightly, the difference between a representation and an object is that the former is intended. The difference between a representation and an artistic representation is that the latter is artistically intended, meaning, the artist, with his knowledge of the artworld and art history, intends to make a work of art. So Andy Warhol's Brillo Box is a different thing from the Brillo box in the supermarket even though they look indiscernibly the same. In order for the viewer to grasp the artistic intention behind the art work, the viewer must know or come to understand the meanings that the artist infused into the work. The structure of the artwork is thus very close to the structure of a metaphor.

So the artwork is constituted as a transfigurative representation rather than a representation tout court, and I think this is true of artworks, when representations, in general, whether this is achieved self-consciously, as in the arch work I have been discussing, or naively, when the artist simply happens to vest his subject with surprising yet penetrating attributes. To understand the artwork is to grasp the metaphor that is, I think, always there. (172)

Danto draws out many implications from the last statement, one of which has to do with the limits of art criticism:

The first is that if the structure of artworks is, or is very close to the structure of metaphors, then no paraphrase or summary of the artwork can engage the participatory mind in at all the ways that it can; and no critical account of the internal metaphor of the work can substitute for the work inasmuch as the description of a metaphor simply does not have the power of the metaphor it describes, just as a description of a cry of anguish does not activate the same response as the cry of anguish itself. (173)

The task of art criticism is not only to interpret the metaphor but to provide the viewer with the necessary information to respond to the artwork, information lost to time or unknown due to place.

Criticism then, which consists in interpreting metaphor in this extended sense, cannot be intended as a substitute for the work. Its function rather is to equip the reader or viewer with the information needed to respond to the work's power which, after all, can be lost as concepts change or be inaccessible because of the outward difficulties of the work, which the received cultural equipment is insufficient to accommodate. It is not just, as is so often said, that metaphors go stale; they go dead in a way that sometimes require scholarly resurrection. And it is the great value of such disciplines as the history of art and literature to make such works approachable again. (174)

The argument about art leads Danto to expound on a view about man.

My view, in brief, is an expansion of the Peircian thesis that "the man is the sum total of his language, because man is a sign. . . . it is not merely what a man represents, but is the way in which he represents it, which has to be invoked to explain the structures of his mind. This way of representing whatever he does represent is what I have in mind by style. If a man is a system of representations, his style is the style of these. The style of a man is, to use the beautiful thought of Schopenhauer, "the physiognomy of the soul."

...more

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Aug 24, 2017 Dora rated it it was amazing

Shelves: art-history-books, phd

I think it goes without saying that this is one of the capital works in the field of the theory of art. However, what I found most valuable were the examples Danto provides in his unique, creative yet extremely logical and well-founded manner. By concentrating on several controversial artworks and giving a philosophical background, he challenges the definition of art but also provides acceptable alternatives. And he manages to do all of this in an entertaining way!

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Nov 25, 2012 Drenda rated it really liked it

Danto is asking an interesting question in Transfiguration of the Commonplace: what is it that we are responding to when we have an aesthetic experience? He pursues this question by investigating two identical objects, one’s an art object while the other is not. In the history of art, artists have asked similar questions by dragging everyday objects into the museum, think of Duchamp and Warhol, but Danto’s imagined examples make the question even purer. We have three art objects, ( all art objec Danto is asking an interesting question in Transfiguration of the Commonplace: what is it that we are responding to when we have an aesthetic experience? He pursues this question by investigating two identical objects, one’s an art object while the other is not. In the history of art, artists have asked similar questions by dragging everyday objects into the museum, think of Duchamp and Warhol, but Danto’s imagined examples make the question even purer. We have three art objects, ( all art object examples are Danto’s) the first a canvas of red rectangles, one next to each other, with the title ”Kierkegaard’s Mood”, because the artist was a fan of the existentialist who commented that all the turmoil of his agonized soul filtered down into a mood, a single color. The next is a canvas of red rectangles, and in fact looks exactly like the first, but this artist was from Moscow, and in calling his painting “Red Square”, produced an abstract landscape of his native city. The third art object appears indistinguishable from the other two, but this artist has read Indian philosophy and knows that the Samsara world is fondly called Red Dust in certain quarters, and it has the title “Nirvana”. Then there is the canvas in our garage since my high school art class, that I primed with red paint but never committed to painting. While this last looks exactly like the other three, it is not an art object, just a thing in the world. These examples nicely make the point that an art work is what it is because of the traditions surrounding it, what the world was like around it, all this knowledge building to our attitude toward it. How much difference does the object itself make? If we carry this example far enough, it makes no difference at all.

One of the first thoughts one might have after this sort of exercise is ‘but is this not relevant only to modern, non-representational art?’ Danto would say no, that no art is truly ‘realistic’ in its depiction, being no mirror image of a thing in the world. He would say that anything that was ever considered art was embedded in the viewpoints and possibilities of its time: a portrait always says more about the artist and his milieu than the sitter. Moreover, Danto would maintain that all art, representational or not, has been tending this way since before, but especially since, the time when a main theme of art became the investigation of itself, what some would call the onset of Modernism. The point is that Danto’s thrust is not to in anyway limit the contributions of artists in producing these infinitely interesting and manipulated art objects; the question becomes one of what the object needs to be, at a minimum, to be an art object.

One of the essential statements in Transfiguration is to the effect that one must know that something is art before you can respond to it as art. What is this saying? I believe his intention is grasped when, after laying the appropriate groundwork, he supplies this definition of an artwork: ‘works of art, in categorical contrast with mere representations, use the means of representation in a way that is not exhaustively specified when one has exhaustively specified what is being represented.‘ (p. 147). The way I translate this statement is to say that once you have said everything that could be said in everyday, non-aesthetic discourse about the art object, it is still not fixed by such language, that no one who enjoys the art object finds it described by such language. In order to adequately convey what the art object presents, one must learn when to drop everyday language and adopt the language of the art world.

Danto gives us a very good example of such language in the use of the word ‘powerful’ when describing a canvas, say, a powerful painting of flowers. I think of Redon. One would never say of an actual flower that it was powerful but a picture of a flower can be. Consider a youngster from a rural background with a relative who wishes to introduce him to the city. When taken to the museum, the child can only supply the language of everyday objects to the artwork, and the only pictures to which he can apply the word powerful are those with imposing contents: Titians, battle scenes, Hudson River School waterfalls. But slowly, after many examples supplied by his aunt, the youngster learns that pictures of nonspectacular things can be powerful, things like a wilted flower. When he stands in front of an object, he is beginning to be able to choose which language to use; another way to say it, whether to use an aesthetic attitude or an everyday attitude.

Danto has a great deal of regard for Andy Warhol-his latest book being entirely about that artist-and he has described how he experienced something of an epiphany when first viewing Brillo Boxes. These look, of course, exactly like the boxes in the cleaning section of our local supermarket. Needless to say, many influences and conditions attributed to Warhol’s productions: he came from a commercial art background and took (either ironically or not) glee in popular culture. Indeed, Danto tells us that Warhol truly liked Campbell soups. But whether Warhol was conscious of it or not, Danto suggests that he helped to make art and philosophy conscious that the art object could be whatever the artist wished to make use of, because it is how the art world receives it that makes that production an artwork. The term “art world” is defined as those who have been educated to interpret art.

Reading Danto was made especially interesting by having read The Sovereignty of Art by Christoph Menke not long before. Certainly, the two books share many basic premises, the autonomy of art from everyday discourse being the most basic. Beyond that, they share the belief that the aesthetic response “ targets the status of an object rather than its features”.(Menke, p. 228 ) Since the aesthetic response is an attitude not dependent on the features of the object, Menke builds to the possibility of transferring that aesthetic attitude to other arenas, to other discourses. Danto does not appear to share this concern but builds, instead, to the sense of equalitarianism that results from placing the emphasis on aesthetic experience rather than aesthetic production. Anyone who wants to put the work into learning the language of art shares in its power. It does not depend on talents or any other gift but the ability to learn. In this there is some irony, as an essay by Danto provided the fodder for what is termed the Institutional Theory of Art. Roughly stated, this argues that anything is art that museum directors and academics say it is, the job for the rest of us to supply the adulation. However, Danto’s point is much more extreme than this. He is talking about the differences between worlds rather than institutions and might be summarized with a point made by Wittgenstein: you can’t have a private language and you can’t have a private world, art world included. Gaining entrance to the art world demands socialization into its form of life, into a new language. Moreover, to a unique form of life, the only one that allows and perhaps encourages semantic deferral.

Supposing that I have provided at least a minimally satisfactory description of Danto’s book, I can feel sympathy with a reader who might suggest that the elitism of the Institutional theory is only expanded here to include anyone who has been educated enough in the great Western tradition to participate in its thought. And is not that tradition mostly created by, and based on the assumptions of, white males with enough socio-economic ease to produce the canon? Any critic who relies a great deal on that canon, Harold Bloom being an obvious example, might be open to outsider criticism without the concession that the features of the art object, which the tradition has polished and analyzed to ultimate refinement, is yet not the basis of its status as an art object. If, in the last analysis, the result of aesthetic responding is an attitude, a stance, then the features that helped to produce that stance can be rejected. This makes it ppossible, for example, that many feminists were produced by absorbing male dominated literature. These same works, however, could encourage sexist rigidity in any reader fixated on its content. Danto's art object is one that can transcend its production, its course determined by its reception, and we, it readers, listeners, receivers, responsible for what that means. ...more

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May 13, 2018 Crito rated it really liked it

Shelves: aesthetics, philosophy, favorites

Danto is refreshing because he's a philosopher who actually knows his shit when it comes to art, as opposed to one who is "intrinsically philistine" and “singularly insensitive to art” like Kant (Danto's words, not mine), or other figures like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who were consumers and admirers of art but fell short of a true art theory or art history understanding of it. More admirable still is he's an Analytic but he defies the unfair caricature of analytics as unpersonable gremlins wri Danto is refreshing because he's a philosopher who actually knows his shit when it comes to art, as opposed to one who is "intrinsically philistine" and “singularly insensitive to art” like Kant (Danto's words, not mine), or other figures like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche who were consumers and admirers of art but fell short of a true art theory or art history understanding of it. More admirable still is he's an Analytic but he defies the unfair caricature of analytics as unpersonable gremlins writing entire books in notation; in fact you could likely not even know until you reach the last chapter when he really shows his powerlevel, which is still approachable in its own right. He's consistently engaging and always has examples and scenarios to illustrate the problems and arguments he concerns himself with.
Danto spends his time here with the question of what sets an ordinary object apart from what we generally describe as art. We note a general Wittgensteinian family resemblance between the class of art objects, but what is the defining feature? It can't be material. If coincidentally, using the same set of paints on the same size canvas, I paint a large yellow circle with a background of blue and say it is a ball in a pool, and then you paint a large yellow circle with a background of blue and say it is the sun in the sky the day of Kennedy's assassination, materially they are identical but obviously they are different paintings arising independently from specific ideas. Even the type of representation is entirely different; mine is some ball in some pool, and yours is very specific, the sun in the sky in one particular point in time and history. And just for one final addition say there's a camp counselor painting a target for darts, she paints a large yellow circle on a blue background so the target sticks out, but before she can paint the interior of the target she gets word from the higher-ups that they don't want kids playing with darts after what happened last year, so the project is abandoned. You would never mistake this for our respective pool and assassination artworks, this is a "mere thing." It does not have that dimension the artworks have, in the same way a spasm of the hand doesn't have the dimension of waving hi to someone.
So the question is what is "that" dimension which separates ball from sun, and those from dartboard. Danto doesn't think "representation" is comprehensive enough because, perhaps atomically, not everything in the work, be it every note or brushstroke, can have a one to one correlation in a representative fashion (there's far more to it, but this will suffice). Danto thinks it is closer to say it's a mode of expression, in which there is a joining between metaphor, rhetoric, and style. "Expression" tickles my confirmation bias because that's the word I've always liked to use, but I'm not sure if this ends up as completely satisfying an explanation. Or at least it isn't compelling as Danto's elaborations of the problems and arguments against what art can't be. That's really the best part, and Danto engages with a really wide and diverse range of thinkers on the subject. And it's peppered with small funny little observations, like when people mistake describing a painting for a value judgement on it (sure that story is dark, brooding, and ominous, but is it good?). Overall this was great, it's a deliberate antidote to the pre-20th century understandings of art, both in terms of philosophers and of common regressive perspectives. I'll be sure to check out more Danto soon. Strong Recommendation. ...more

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Aug 29, 2020 Henrique Iwao rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: filosofia-contemporânea

Terminei de reler, agora em português e muito detidamente, nessa bela edição, essa obra prima da filosofia da arte. Escrito na década de 80 mas mergulhado na cena da arte pop dos Estados Unidos da década de 60-70, especialmente da pintura, o livro propõe uma ontologia da obra de arte própria, em torna da ideia de que uma obra de arte tem um assunto, colocado de modo representacional e sob um certo estilo, convidando-nos à prática da interpretação, a partir de um contexto artístico. As obras se c Terminei de reler, agora em português e muito detidamente, nessa bela edição, essa obra prima da filosofia da arte. Escrito na década de 80 mas mergulhado na cena da arte pop dos Estados Unidos da década de 60-70, especialmente da pintura, o livro propõe uma ontologia da obra de arte própria, em torna da ideia de que uma obra de arte tem um assunto, colocado de modo representacional e sob um certo estilo, convidando-nos à prática da interpretação, a partir de um contexto artístico. As obras se colocam num mundo da arte, e portanto, são objetos intencionais (que incorporam seu conteúdo) que por tal, saiem do nossa realidade cotidiana, separam-se da maneira como trataríamos objetos cotidianos.

Aqui Danto avança seu famoso método dos indiscerníveis e procura dar alcance máximo à seu representacionalismo. A condução do livro é muito interessante, supostamente baseada em Diderot (Jacques, o fatalista) e inspirada por diálogos platônicos. É divertida de ler, com uma camada que não exige tanto do leitor desavisado/artista, ao mesmo tempo que numa leitura detida apresenta ideias intrincadas e passagens complexas. Geralmente propõe uma situação imaginária, com elementos reais ou puramente de experimento mental, e assim traz à luz um problema quanto à natureza da arte, que discute e argumenta em torno, para avançar algum ponto ou arquitetar um recúo estratégico a fim de avançar mais em seguida. Assim, no fluxo da leitura, com os exemplos especialmente preparados, resgates históricos (também de filosofia: Poética e Retórica de Aristóteles, Íon de Platão, O nascimento da tragédia, de Nietzsche etc), é bastante convincente, e independentemente das suas pretensões universais, certamente nos ilumina sobre a arte contemporânea e o impulso artístico em geral, especialmente quando pensamos nos desdobramentos do seu exemplo predileto: aquele de dois objetos perceptivamente idênticos, um dos quais é arte e o outro não.

Também é interessante como o livro dialoga com o Linguagens da Arte, do Nelson Goodman, que também recomendo muito, embora mais explicitamente técnico. ...more

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Sep 04, 2019 Zo rated it it was amazing

I was fairly skeptical of this text at first because so much of the initial discussion seemed concerned with questions of definition that rested on unfair assumptions about conceptual rigidity. But even in those early pages Danto's thought is full of fascinating connections between different areas of philosophy/art, and his use of thought-experiments is always stimulating. And as the text progressed I thought it stopped spending too much time on those assumptions and turned into an incredibly ri ...more

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May 11, 2020 Teodora Lovin rated it it was amazing

Citită imediat după cartea lui de Duve (deși a fost scrisă cu câțiva ani înaintea ei), cartea lui Arthur C. Danto caută să dea o definiție artei luând prin eliminare elementele compoziționale, stilistice și, de ce nu, metafizice ce creează o operă de artă.
Privit în paralel cu "În numele artei", studiul său e ceva mai compact și mai bine centrat pe ceea ce îl interesează pe el - arta modernă, de la Duchamp încoace, și problematica unui element definitoriu pentru ceea ce (mai) înseamnă arta în ge ...more

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Oct 10, 2014 Ann Michael rated it it was amazing

I was not, I admit, expecting to enjoy this book but just to learn from it. Danto, however, is a surprisingly entertaining philosophical writer. I love that he takes his title from a fictional book (from Muriel Sparks' The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie). As a philosophy of Art, Danto's theories work quite well as a groundwork for thinking about what art "is" or may be, and what it is not, and where the difficulties lie in discerning between those purported opposites.

My favorite chapters are 4 and 5 ...more

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Jun 23, 2013 Harvey rated it really liked it

- Duchamp was the first to perform the subtle miracle of transforming, into works of art, objects from commonplace existance (a bicycle wheel, a pipe, a urinal, etc) and Warhol was probably the best known (his Brillo Boxes for example) but artists such as these (and hundreds like them, and inspired by them) have made the art world revisit the age-old adage "What is art?"
- Danto is a brilliant academic (Art Critic for The Nation Magazine, Professor of Philosophy/Art/History), and I don't for a s ...more

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Oct 11, 2009 Lauren Albert rated it it was amazing

Shelves: art-history-and-criticism

A wonderful book. My copy is now peppered with post-it flags. I wish I had a Kindle copy so that I could easily copy quotes. Anyway, whether you agree or disagree with Danto, his discussions of what makes art, art are smart and comprehensive. He is also that rare thing--a philosopher who gives examples! He brings abstractions about art down-to-earth using real or hypothetical examples. There are definitely more difficult parts but I found it a lot more readable than most contemporary philosophy. ...more

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Feb 01, 2017 Andreas Antoniou rated it liked it

A good book about art (Danto emphasizes on visual arts), from the view of analytic philosophy. It has some very interesting arguments about the questions of imitation in art or the cognitive power of the work of art.
The only thing that really didn't like is that the book is so dedicated to clarify the details of the relation between knowledge and art, that it forgets to include the aesthetic part of it. Considering the fact that art is a primary aesthetic phaenomenon, the book fails (in my opin ...more

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Dec 27, 2010 Michael rated it really liked it

Danto is a great explainer of art. I recently started teaching an Art Appreciation class at ITT for our Multimedia/Visual Communications students, and I was surprised at how much of Danto's understanding and approach to art have been incorporated into my fundamental understanding of how to look at and understand art. ...more

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Aug 04, 2008 Lynn marked it as to-read

Shelves: i-ll-die-before-i-finish-this-one

Eek. I need a dictionary and a notebook for this one but Danto articulates and defends his philosophy of art very concisely. More to come but it might take a while. Although thin, this one is hefty...

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May 12, 2007 Damion added it

The fundamental question this book addresses is "What is art?" Danto provides a few answers, but leaves the field open for interpretation. I expected to be infuriated by his ideas but ended up completely devoted. Any book that makes you want to make is a good one. ...more

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May 08, 2012 Jess rated it really liked it

I find Danto's theories to be, at times, problematic, but he is an engaging writer (something of a rarity amongst most art philosophers these days, I find) and although I initially borrowed this for what proved to be a rather tiresome essay, I enjoyed reading it. ...more

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Dec 19, 2013 Luke Echo added it

hmmm.. i'm not sure I agree with Danto. ...more

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Sep 10, 2009 Ryder rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophical

The first art philosophy book I read that seemed to make sense.

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Dec 24, 2008 Ryan rated it it was amazing

I had an Aesthetics course this semester past, and though this text mis-translates a Borges story, it still manages to be very good. (Wow, this shows just how long ago I've looked at this site.) ...more

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Mar 05, 2007 gabrielle rated it really liked it

I think his theory leaves a lot to be desired, and has several holes. But, overall, it is a good read and fairly entertaining.

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Dec 03, 2010 John Herman rated it it was amazing

Shelves: philosophy

Revolutionary book. Philsosophy finally caught up with 20th century art.

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About Arthur C. Danto

Arthur C. Danto

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Arthur C. Danto was Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation. He was the author of numerous books, including Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life, After the End of Art, and Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective.