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By Root 903 0

create art, regardless of how bad it might look, as long as that child creates it spontaneously. Second, many art critics and philosophers of art are not willing to admit that well-done forgeries are artworks in their own right. Yet sometimes forgeries appear to be works of art in their own right. One example of this phenomenon is when Dr. Seuss painted a faux-modernist painting in the mid-fifties. Seuss’s parody of modernist art began when his friend Edward Longstreth, a patron of the La Jolla Museum of Art and a lover of modern art, gave him a condescending lecture about modern art. He decided to trick his friend by concocting a story about a great Mexican modernist named Escarobus. He then told Longstreth that he owned five original Escarobus paintings. Upon hearing that news, Longstreth asked to see one of Seuss’s Escarobus paintings. Since none existed at the time, Seuss had to create them from scratch. So in one night, Seuss created the first original Escarobus using the following method: He “peeled the wood off a soft pencil, scraped the lead lengthwise across art paper, dipped small hunks of bread in the vodka he was drinking, and dragged the soggy bread across the paper. Next he painted [Lady] Godivas on the smudges, bisecting and trisecting them so that it was impossible to tell that they were naked ladies.”8 Longstreth liked the first Escarobus painting so much that he purchased it for $550 and wanted to buy the other four original paintings. Seuss’s first wife had to stop him from playing along with Longstreth and selling him the “remaining” four. I take this incident as evidence that a forgery can be considered a work of art in its own right.

Why Seuss’s Art Is Art: Danto’s Philosophy of Art

Even though many of the consequences of accepting Beardsley’s aesthetic theory are fine, there is a consequence of Beardsley’s aesthetic theory that I think we should reject. That is, his theory would occasionally require us to regard some things that are normally considered artworks as being nonart. Indeed, it sometimes would require us to regard some artworks that are epoch-making artworks as nonart. For example, Michel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) would be an epoch-making artwork that would no longer be considered art if we accepted Beardsley’s aesthetic theory. I think this is a sufficient reason to introduce a second philosophy of art that can account for things like Duchamp’s ready-mades being artworks. So we now turn to Arthur Danto’s philosophy of art.

Danto’s philosophy of art is built on an insight he had in the early sixties; namely, that evoking an aesthetic experience is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for an object to be art. This would allow us to claim that Duchamp’s Fountain is an artwork. He reaches this conclusion by studying the philosophical significance of the pop art movement of the sixties. As Danto attended the exhibit of Andy Warhol’s boxes in New York, he noticed that the Brillo Box Warhol created was visually indistinguishable from the large Brillo boxes used to ship Brillos from the warehouse to the supermarket. Both boxes had attention-grabbing, aesthetically pleasing designs; yet only Warhol’s Brillo Box was considered art.

That fact led Danto to reject the idea that evoking an aesthetic experience is a necessary condition for an object to be art. Danto has dedicated most of his philosophical career after the sixties to formulating a philosophical definition of art that would admit that two outwardly indistinguishable objects could have different statuses—one could be considered art whereas the other could not be.

Danto’s insight is the result of his idiosyncratic art history.9 For Danto, art history began in the fifteenth century when some Renaissance art critics claimed that the arts are essentially mimetic activities. That is to say, the goal of the arts is to represent people, events, and things as realistically as possible. The visual arts became the paradigm for the arts because they seemed to represent people, events, and things more realistically than the nonvisual arts.