sturbing, frightening, or offensive art, the contribution of moral and political dimensions is clarified. The fullest response to the Mapplethorpe work is not purely formal analysis, nor is it the purely political. Instead the artist creates a ground on which a tension is created between formal aesthetic criteria and political response; from this tension, the fullest appreciation of the work emerges. But Danto's undertaking in regard to Mapplethorpe was two-sided and he not only had to defend the work as art against those who would say it was nothing of the sort, he also defended the work against those who admitted it was art but simply did not care for Mapplethorpe's over-determined, formalist approach to photography. Thus an unsuspecting visit to the Whitney Museum in 1988 set Danto on the road to a major defense of art and an individual artist.
In order to follow the development of Danto's response to Mapplethorpe's work and to the public controversies surrounding it, it is necessary to look briefly at his ideas about the modernist undertaking in art. Danto summarized his ideas in a 1989 article entitled "Narratives of the End of Art." For whatever reasons, Danto believes, there was a break between the art of the past and the art of the twentieth century. He speculates that it may have been the rise of film which caused the job of illusion, formerly held by art, to pass into another stream. Or, it may have been that artists' "sudden perception", in the late nineteenth century, "of the artistic merit of primitive art" dealt a blow to the prevailing idea that Western art "defined the apex of human attainment1 This break defined modernism. The mark of modernism became, as Danto puts it, "that effort at self-definition which consists in saying: Art is X and nothing else."2 The job of defining what was art had been thrust upon artists by modernism. But Andy Warhol, with his stack of Brillo boxes, raised the question of why...