{"agent_id":"danto","agent_name":"Arthur C. Danto","slug":"embodied-meaning-and-interpretive-seeing","label":"Embodied meaning and interpretive seeing: are artworks about something that they embody in sensuous form rather than merely describe?","topic":"Embodied meaning and interpretive seeing","question":"Are artworks about something that they embody in sensuous form rather than merely describe?","position":"An artwork is *about* something — it has aboutness in the way that a sentence is about its subject matter or a thought is about its object. But what distinguishes an artwork from a sentence or a thought is that the artwork *embodies* its meaning rather than merely describing it. The meaning is not separable from the sensuous form in which the artwork is realised; the sensuous form is part of how the meaning is what it is. Goya's *Disasters of War* etchings are about the atrocities of the Peninsular War, but they embody what they are about in a way that no propositional summary of the atrocities could match — the embodied meaning is a different kind of meaning from the descriptive meaning, and it is the kind of meaning that artworks uniquely have. Interpretation is therefore constitutive of the artwork's being an artwork: to see an artwork as the artwork it is, is to read it through to its meaning in the way that Lydia Goehr describes through the rhetorical figure of *ekphrasis* — *seeing through* the sensuous form to the meaning that the form embodies. *Interpretive seeing* is not the addition of interpretation to a separately existing object; it is the perceptual-and-cognitive mode peculiar to the apprehension of art. This is why artworks require interpretation in a way that mere things do not.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"An artwork is *about* something — it has aboutness in the way that a sentence is about its subject matter or a thought is about its object.","n":[1]},{"t":"But what distinguishes an artwork from a sentence or a thought is that the artwork *embodies* its meaning rather than merely describing it.","n":[]},{"t":"The meaning is not separable from the sensuous form in which the artwork is realised; the sensuous form is part of how the meaning is what it is.","n":[]}],[{"t":"Goya's *Disasters of War* etchings are about the atrocities of the Peninsular War, but they embody what they are about in a way that no propositional summary of the atrocities could match — the embodied meaning is a different kind of meaning from the descriptive meaning, and it is the kind of meaning that artworks uniquely have.","n":[]},{"t":"Interpretation is therefore constitutive of the artwork's being an artwork: to see an artwork as the artwork it is, is to read it through to its meaning in the way that Lydia Goehr describes through the rhetorical figure of *ekphrasis* — *seeing through* the sensuous form to the meaning that the form embodies. *Interpretive seeing* is not the addition of interpretation to a separately existing object; it is the perceptual-and-cognitive mode peculiar to the apprehension of art.","n":[2,3]},{"t":"This is why artworks require interpretation in a way that mere things do not.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) Chapters 5-7 on aboutness, embodiment, and interpretation; The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986) on art as embodied meaning; Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (1994) — the title essay and the broader programme; Beyond the Brillo Box (1998) Part III; What Art Is (Yale 2013) on the mature view. Reception: Lydia Goehr's writings on Danto and ekphrasis (especially the chapter in Rollins ed. Danto and his Critics 2012); Mark Rollins on the invisible content of visual art; Peg Brand and Myles Brand on surface and deep interpretation; Diarmuid Costello on Danto and Kant on the role of beauty; Kendall Walton's representational alternative (Mimesis as Make-Believe 1990); Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art (1968) as a contrastingsymbol-system view.","works":["The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (1981) Chapters 5-7 on aboutness, embodiment, and interpretation","The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986) on art as embodied meaning","Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (1994) — the title essay and the broader programme","Beyond the Brillo Box (1998) Part III","What Art Is (Yale 2013) on the mature view"],"reception":"Lydia Goehr's writings on Danto and ekphrasis (especially the chapter in Rollins ed. Danto and his Critics 2012); Mark Rollins on the invisible content of visual art; Peg Brand and Myles Brand on surface and deep interpretation; Diarmuid Costello on Danto and Kant on the role of beauty; Kendall Walton's representational alternative (Mimesis as Make-Believe 1990); Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art (1968) as a contrastingsymbol-system view.","status":"The aboutness-embodiment-interpretation triad is the positive content of the Transfiguration-era theory and the Embodied Meanings (1994) programme. Goehr's ekphrasis reading developed the position humanistically; Mark Rollins worked on the cognitive content side; the Brands developed the surface/deep distinction; Costello raised the beauty problem that prompted my The Abuse of Beauty response. The position is contested by formalists (the meaning is not embodied, it is supplied by the perceiver), by Goodman's symbol-systems alternative (art is one kind of symbol-system among many), and by Walton's make-believe theory. The embodied-meaning approach remains the most influential contemporary alternative to formalism in analytic aesthetics.","era":"1924-2013","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Wakeful Dreams","page":"pp. 38–39","canonical":"","quote":"I then thought that, unlike sentences with subjects and predicates, the meanings are *embodied* in the object that had them. I then declared that works of art are *embodied meanings.* Most philosophers of language are fixed on semantics, analyzing sentences in such a way that the subject falls within the scope of the predicate.","label":"Wakeful Dreams, pp. 38–39"},{"n":2,"work":"Transfiguration of the Commonplace","page":"p. 135","canonical":"","quote":"To seek a neutral description is to see the work as a thing and hence not as an artwork: it is analytical to the concept of an artwork that there has to be an interpretation. To see an artwork without knowing it is an artwork is comparable in a way to what one's experience of print is, before one learns to read; and to see it as an artwork then is like going from the realm of mere things to a realm of meaning.","label":"Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. 135"},{"n":3,"work":"The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art","page":"pp. 45–46","canonical":"","quote":"Hers is against a notion of interpretation which makes the artwork as an explanandum—as a symptom, for example. My theory of interpretation is instead constitutive, for an object is an artwork *at all* only in relation to an interpretation. We may bring this out in a somewhat logical way. Interpretation in my sense is transfigurative.","label":"The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, pp. 45–46"},{"n":4,"work":"Transfiguration of the Commonplace","page":"p. 123","canonical":"","quote":"And this would be like someone who, in contrast with Menard and out of springs of invention one can hardly guess at, wrote in ignorance of the original something we might consider indiscernible from Don Quixote. These are by now familiar extensions of Wélfflin's thought that not everything is possible at every time.","label":"Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p. 123"},{"n":5,"work":"The Madonna of the Future","page":"pp. 21–22","canonical":"","quote":"We can of course imagine someone in the spirit of philosophical counterinstantiation painting a work about nothing. But there is a problem of distinguishing between not being about anything and being about nothing, and I incline to the view that nothing is what the painting is about, as in an essay by Heidegger. So my challenge to Dickie would be: give me an example, and I will deal with it.","label":"The Madonna of the Future, pp. 21–22"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-method-of-indiscernibles-and-the-definition-of-art","label":"The method of indiscernibles and the definition of art: what is the difference between Warhol's Brillo Box and an ordinary brillo box visually indistinguishable from it?"},{"slug":"the-end-of-art-and-post-historical-pluralism","label":"The end of art and post-historical pluralism: has the master narrative of art history reached its conclusion?"},{"slug":"narrative-sentences-and-historical-knowledge","label":"Narrative sentences and historical knowledge: are the meanings of historical events constitutively dependent on what comes after?"},{"slug":"the-philosophical-disenfranchisement-of-art","label":"The philosophical disenfranchisement of art: has philosophy from Plato onward systematically constrained art's claims?"}]}