The art world's greatest printer's error

One of the most famous essays in the philosophy of art of the last 100 years was Arthur C Danto's The Artworld (The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61, No. 19, [Oct. 15, 1964], pp 571-584.) He advanced the groundbreaking but now commonplace idea that we know something is art not by some innate property of an artwork, but because the art world (critics, academics, curators, artists, dealers) tells us it is art:

To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry - an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.

This is a much-quoted passage. However, it appears that many people do not know the meaning of the word "descry" ("to catch sight of, find out, discover" - Merriam-Webster) or else it is not in their spell-checker, and time and time again in even the most scholarly publications the sentence is given as "something the eye cannot decry".

This has an entirely different meaning: Danto means to say there is something in art that makes it art which cannot be discerned just by looking at it; the quote seems to say there is something in an artwork that no eye can disparage. This error makes Danto appear to assert the supremacy of the visual, something he is in fact denying.

"Descry" may be a slightly obscure word, but it was beloved by the Romantics: we find in used repeatedly by Coleridge, in Christabel

I went and peered, and could descry
No cause for her distressful cry;

The Garden of Boccaccio

Thanks, gentle artist! now I can descry
Thy fair creation with a mastering eye

and elsewhere. Frank Kermode was able to quote it correctly in the 1960s, but many people up to the present day have propagated this error, suggesting a complete failure to understand Danto:

• Gerald L. Bruns, Tragic thoughts at the end of philosophy, Northwestern UP, 1999
• Simon Frith, Performing rites: on the value of popular music, Harvard UP, 1998
• Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, Phaedon, 1998
• Daniel Alan Herwitz and Michael Kelly (eds), Action, art, history: engagements with Arthur C. Danto, Columbia UP, 2007
• James W Manns, Aesthetics, ME Sharpe, 1998
• Joseph Margolis, Interpretation radical but not unruly: the new puzzle of the arts and history, University of California Press, 1995
• James O. Young, Aesthetics: critical concepts in philosophy, McGraw Hill, 2005
• The Critical review, Issue 41, University of Melbourne, 2001

You can find many more on your bookshelf or Google Books.

In fact the gravest fault does not lie with the critics mentioned above: it was even misspelt in the original printing of the article in The Journal of Philosophy, and in reprints such as Joseph Margolis (ed), Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics, third ed, 1987, and Stephen David Ross, Art and its significance: an anthology of aesthetic theory, SUNY Press, 1994. (There is further discussion, not online, in Joseph Margolis, "Farewell to Danto and Goodman", British Journal of Aesthetics (1998) 38 (4): 353-374. doi: 10.1093/bjaesthetics/38.4.353 . Margolis had printed the incorrect version at least twice by this point.)