Cognitive penetration and the gallery of indiscernibles

Here is Danto’s gallery of indiscernibles thought experiment (Danto, 1981, p.1)—a thought experiment that radically transformed the kind of questions aesthetics and the philosophy of art asks today. Imagine a gallery of indiscernible canvases that are all monochrome red of the same shade and of the same size. While the observable properties of all these artworks are the same, their “meaning” and aesthetic value can be very different: if one of the paintings, made by a counterrevolutionary Russian émigré is called “Red Square” and the other one is called “The Israelites crossing the Red Sea,” then these two paintings, in spite of being indistinguishable, will have very different aesthetic value. Thus, aesthetic value is only loosely (if at all) related to perception. Let us examine this argument more closely. First, I need to introduce a bit of terminology: I call a property “aesthetically relevant” if attending to this property changes one’s aesthetic evaluation (Nanay, 2015). Aesthetically relevant properties are abundant. If I attend to the arrangement of the small red patches in a Corot landscape, it can change my experience and assessment of the balance of the picture. And if I attend to the second violin in a string quartet, it can also change my experience of the entire movement. Danto’s argument is supposed to establish that there is only a loose connection between aesthetically relevant properties and perception. Danto oscillates between two arguments in his exposition of the gallery of indiscernibles, one weaker and unproblematic (and somewhat trivial), the other stronger and problematic. Here is the weaker one (I take P1 to be the painting by the counterrevolutionary Russian émigré, “Red Square” and P2 to be the painting called “The Israelites crossing the Red Sea”):