one thing should be art when another thing that was apparently very much like it was not art. At that point, art had gone, in Danto's opinion, as far as it could go. The answers to Warhol's question would have to come from philosophy. What Warhol showed was that "the difference between art and non-art cannot rest in what they have in common--and that will be everything that strikes the eye."3 Thus, something's status as art is not dependent on its observable properties but on how the something fits a theory that must be "compatible with all possible sets of manifest possibilities."4
Thus the exclusionary tendency of the essentialisms of modernist schools who define art as X and nothing else resulted in an art world and, to some extent, a general public that believed that "something's status as art is something that has to be defended, indeed is part of what something is in the art world of modernity . . . whereas the question never could have arisen before the nineteenth century."5 This attitude was problematic for Danto and signaled an
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