Abstract

By pitting John Cage against Andy Warhol, Arthur Danto shows how the arts themselves were gripped by a progressive logic that aimed at only one goal: to overcome the gap between art and life. The non‐tautological reading preserves a fundamental, philosophical difference between commonplace and art objects. The semantical space accounts for the aboutness of the work and is thus the necessary condition for something to be an artwork. Together with other Pop artists, Rauschenberg transformed the Artworld, while Cage aimed at a re‐enfranchisement of the commonplace. Danto writes that his Buddhist phase came to an end when he, as a philosopher, felt the need for theories. The works of Fluxus and Cage, in the end, accepted asylum within the sanctuary of the Artworld, where they became less radical, and perhaps less radical than Pop.