My sense, in bringing to art the double criteria of meaning and embodiment, is to bring to art a connection with cognizance: to what is possible and,… - Arthur Coleman Danto

It struck me only recently that nineteenth century painters must have believed that visual truth was defined by photography, however alien to human vision what the camera reproduced often was. A good example of this would have been Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of horses in motion. Painters decided that Muybridge’s images showed what horses really look like when they run, and in effect copied Muybridge’s photographs in their paintings of horses, even though that is not at all the way we see horses when they run. We really don’t see animals move the way Muybridge shows them moving, or else there would have been no need for the photographs in the first place: Muybridge hit upon his awkward but seemingly authoritative experiments that were really designed to answer such questions as whether all four of a horse’s hooves ever touch the ground at the same time—in other words, phenomena the human eye could not perceive.

The body that feels thirst and hunger, passion, desire, and love. The body that we understand when we read the ancients describing men in battle, men and women in love and in grief. The body, I would say, that our artistic tradition dealt with so gloriously for so many centuries, and somewhat less gloriously in a certain kind of performance art today.

Thanks to Descartes and Plato, I will define art as “wakeful dreams.” One wants to explain the universality of art. My sense is that everyone, everywhere, dreams. Usually this requires that we sleep. But wakeful dreams require of us that we be awake. Dreams are made up of appearances, but they have to be appearances of things in their world. True, the different arts in the encyclopedic museum are made by different cultures.