Dear Derek,

First may I say my last reply had been completed before I had fully taken on board Malraux's argument, and I have now explored this a little more fully.  As a result, whilst I have not changed on the question of emotion,  I have moved closer towards Malraux's view that ancient artifacts exhibited as works of art alienate them from their telos and raison d'etre.  However, whilst the western concept of art is an imagined one, the qualities they perceive in the artifacts are not.  As such, I believe this argment concerns the concepts of ontology and telos in terms of substance and change and potentiality and actuality.  

1.  In terms of the artifact's telos and reason to be the western concept of art is an alien one that creates a different sort of thing, and in Heidegerrian terms the artifact's do not exist as themselves. 

2.  In terms of substance and change and potentiality and actuality the qualities that the western concept of art now values in these artifacts existed as potential qualities in the original artifacts. 

3.  However, the process of change from potentiality to actuality concerns the condition of stability in terms of a thing's telos - and the concept of art cannot satisfy this condition. 

4.  Therefore, the western concept of art is an imagined one - in the sense that it metemorphises the artifacts into a different sort of thing. 

My view of is that this process of change concerns the progression or focus of our metaphorical 'gaze'  ie where we happen to be standing within the context of historical contingencies, and how that influences our actions and values.  And this is how I interpret  Velazquez's Las Meninas, in the sense that certain values and ways of seeing the world around us are hidden from our view, only to re-emerge when our perceptual or conceptual gaze changes to a different position as a result of different dynamic influences.  But these values and actualities don't disappear as such, they are merely obscured, including those humankind has yet to discover. I also understand Foucault's analogy in terms of our pre-occupation with the physical and scientific whilst largely dismissing its metaphysical aspects that nonetheless exist independently of our contemporary view.   

I also take this view concerning the contemporary stance on essential qualities -  eg beauty, truth, form and colour -  inasmuch that the whole (of existence) is more than the sum of its parts.   Although the contemporary concept of art no longer embraces these elements because our values have changed the purpose of art into a different sort of thing, logically these qualties must   persist, merely they are hidden from our conceptual gaze.

Dilys