Arthur C. Danto, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Philosophy has from its origins systematically disenfranchised art, constraining art's claims on truth and significance by subordinating art to philosophy's own project. Plato's Republic Book X is the original and paradigm case. Plato banished the poets from the ideal city because mimetic art is twice removed from the Forms — the bed the carpenter makes is once removed from the Form of the bed; the bed the painter paints is twice removed.
Art is therefore epistemically inferior to philosophy, and its claims on the imagination and the passions are politically dangerous. The original disenfranchisement runs forward through the tradition: Aristotle re-enfranchises poetry under philosophical control in the Poetics but only on philosophy's terms; Hegel completes the project by absorbing art into the developmental dialectic that ends in religion and philosophy (art on the side of its highest vocation is for us a thing of the past).
Contemporary analytical aesthetics has continued the project under new institutional auspices, treating art as raw material for philosophical theorising about meaning, reference, representation, and value. With Warhol's Brillo Boxes in 1964, art reaches its own self-consciousness as philosophy of itself — the disenfranchisement is internalised and overcome from within.
Post-historical art is the period in which art knows itself to be a philosophical practice and no longer requires philosophical adjudication of its status. The disenfranchisement thesis is therefore historical- diagnostic and not nostalgic: it identifies a tradition whose work has been completed.12345
I cannot trace in this essay the structure of such a possible history (but see "The End of Art"). My main concern has been to put into perspective the somewhat shabby history of the philosophy of art as a massive political effort either to emasculate or to supersede art. And to sketch certain of the strategies in this long unedifying career.The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, p. 17
So in the end it did about as much for the ravaged villagers as Auden's poem did for dead Yeats or as Yeats' poem did for his slaughtered patriots, making nothing relevant happen, simply memorializing, en- THE DISENFRANCfflSEMENT OF ART shrining, spiritualizing, constituting a kind of cenotaph to house the fading memories, about at the level of a religious ceremony whose function is to confess the extreme limitation…The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, p. 4
In his curious idiom, the end of history comes w h e n Spirit achieves awareness of its identity as Spirit, not, that is to say, alienated from itself by ignorance of its proper nature, but united to itself through itself: by recognizing that it is in this one instance of the same substance as its object, since consciousness of consciousness is consciousness.The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, pp. 16–17
Now it is my thought that we cannot arrive at an assessment of what art is nor what art can and cannot do, nor where in the political plane its natural locus is, until we have archeologized these disenfranchising theories.The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, pp. 5–6
And on the other side, a relaxation of the forces that make for deviousness, so that not everything one writes is a real risk taken. But even a minor relaxation on either side means a convergence, or the beginning of one, politically, psychologically, morally. Art is internally enough connected with the rest of life that a change in it must mean a change in everything else.Beyond the Brillo Box, pp. 194–195
The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (1986) is the foundational text. The thesis has been widely engaged: Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992) develops the pragmatist alternative (transfiguration via ritual, not ontology); Carlin Romano's writings construe the philosopher-critic role as a pragmatist activism; Lydia Goehr's humanistic reading places the disenfranchisement thesis within a broader concern with humanistic value beyond ontology; the broader continental tradition (Adorno, the Frankfurt School, French theory) runs partly parallel to the disenfranchisement diagnosis. The thesis is more accepted in the art-critical community and the continental tradition than in analytical aesthetics, where the disenfranchisement is sometimes itself being practised by the critics.