When Danto considers the dominant aesthetic measure of art to be the artist's intention or thought and Hickey considers it as the complement of value judgments that the viewer of art brings to the enterprise of response to the work, one effect of their respective approaches to understanding what constitutes art and why is to set up a seemingly intractable dialectic. The intractability is all the more intense because each critic develops his argument by reaching back as far as the Renaissance to identify attributes of its visual-arts culture that support the conclusion he draws.
Danto (51-2) valorizes the intent that the artist Raphael brought to his Transfiguration as the explanation for the choices made--irrespective of the admiration that Hegel or the contempt that the pre-Raphaelites might have brought to analysis of the same work. Hickey identifies the centrality, so to speak, of wildly diverse artistic responses to works of art as the determinant of aesthetic value and links them with art patrons who were positioned authoritatively over the content of works. He cites the "ideological consistency" (78) that the Church imposed on religiously themed paintings it that it commissioned from the Renaissance masters and the artistic (and, oddly enough, envelope-pushing) innovation that derived from the imposition of limits on the artists.
According to Hickey, modern consumers of art, as consumers, also exert a species of aesthetic authority in their responses to art. For example, today's reasons for admiring Renaissance religious art are bound to be different from what the Churchmen or even the artist originally intended. Indeed, Hickey locates the origins of the beaux-arts tradition in the act of profanation, or "willfully misinterpreting masterworks of sacred and philosophical art as icons of private desire and personal enthusiasm" (79-80). Thus aesthetic sensibilities of post-Renaissance viewers of art provided meanings that migh...