Arthur Danto's The Abuse of Beauty was a significant contribution to the acclaimed return of beauty that had been taking place since Dave Hickey's 1993 manifesto announced that beauty would be the defining problem of the next decade. One of the most original and important aspects of Danto's look at beauty is that he thought about it as a contribution to art criticism. External aesthetic qualities would be as meaningless as natural beauty intended to play role in conveying a work (...) 's meaning, constitute the aesthetic dimension of the work. For Danto, elegiac beauty can provide political role for the aesthetic quality, but the impossibility of what could be termed an “angry beauty,” capable of outraging people, seriously limits the option of beauty in “angrily political” contemporary art. Danto thought that activist art will try to inflect works with an angry mood in order to turn people against what they are about. (shrink)

A book review of Jon Robson, Aesthetic Testimony: An Optimistic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022, x+166 pp. ISBN 9780192862952.

The Abuse of Beauty can be seen as the beginning of a “turn” in the philosophy of art of Arthur Danto, based on the conceptual divorce between art and aesthetics, through which he has vindicated a significant role for the aesthetic in the art of today. However, Danto is still reluctant to make aesthetics part of the definition of art. The paper analyzes some of his most relevant new concepts and examines their implications for that central thesis of his theory (...) of art. (shrink)