Abstract

Can the meaning of an artwork change over time? ;A standard account suggests that an artwork's meaning remains constant over time. If anything has changed, we have. We have simply made new discoveries about what it meant all along. Our epistemic access to the work's meaning expands, but the work itself does not. ;Against the standard view, my dissertation advances a strong historicist account according to which the meaning of artworks is determined in part by its art-historical context. Strong historicism allows for an artwork's meaning to change as art history evolves. An artwork itself can acquire new meanings in virtue of entering into new causal relations with works that appear later in art history. ;I make my case for the foregoing in the context of defending Arthur Danto from several well-known misinterpretations of his influential philosophy of art history. On some major issues, however, I take issue with him---his well-known thesis that art history has ended, for instance. ;Strong historicism provides a novel way of explaining how an artwork's stylistic predicates emerge and evolve over time. Because an artwork's features evolve as new artworks emerge, our conception of art will evolve as well. Arthur Danto had originally proposed what he called a "Style Matrix" to explain this phenomenon, but later rejected it as simultaneously both overly historicist and overly ahistoricist. But, I argue that the problem with the Style Matrix lies with Danto's account of art, rather than with his conception of a Style Matrix. So, strong historicism can save the Style Matrix from these criticisms. This reveals an important sense in which the philosophy of art is intimately tied to the history of art. ;Strong historicism also explains how our conception of art seems to expand with each new movement in art. It grants that the features of art may change and evolve, and thereby allows for an explanation of the natural intuition that we now see artworks differently than before: new artworks bring with them a new vocabulary with which to understand art, and allow us to appreciate previous art in ways we could not have before