Discussed in this essay:
Portraits: John Berger on Artists, by John Berger. Verso. 544 pages. $44.95.
Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency, by Hal Foster. Verso. 208 pages. $26.95.
Strike Art! Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition, by Yates McKee. Verso. 304 pages. $24.95.
Ever since 1964, when Arthur Danto described the art world as a discursive space in which any object, however humble — a soup can, a garden tool, a urinal — might be aesthetically transfigured, philosophers of art have been painting themselves into an increasingly tiny conceptual corner. So-called analytic aesthetics now wallows in a deflationary…
