Aesthetic Views of the artist Raphael

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 examp

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hy of art" (39). Notice that the dislodging is between beauty and philosophy, not between beauty and art, though the artist may intend to create not beauty but rather deliberately (philosophical) provocative end product that is also ugly. That is what calls for "critical explanation. People have to be brought to understand the work, and the way in which it is actually beautiful" (Danto 41; emphasis added). Danto notes that "whole artistic traditions have existed in which beauty was never the point at all" (45). Meaning, rather than beauty, has been the point. Thus those who respond to the painting are obliged by the challenge of identifying artistic intention and reasoning their way toward meaning, which may yield the perception of beauty. Explanation, or clarity, may by itself be a pathway to the experience of beauty, clarity about such works as Marcel Duchamp's readymades or the controversial presentations made by Mapplethorpe may be elusive. Just beneath this perplexing challenge is the unavoidable sense that to the degree avant-garde art is provocative, ambiguous, and/or ugly, it derives from social critique. Danto gives the example of the Dadaists, who deliberately "dissociat[ed] the artists from the society they held in co
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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