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As recent interest in the haunting cave art at Chauvet-Pont-D'Arc (and the now apparently older red-dot hand tracings in the cave at El Castillo) attests, philosophical attempts to answer the question 'what is the origin of art?' have ever been bound up with intriguing parallel historical considerations. 1If we ask more specifically about the origin of art in the sense of the Western notion of fine art, that is to say, in the sense of the beaux arts, the schöne Künste, it is striking that, especially since the high water mark of modernism, there have been a number of reflections on the relation between philosophy and art history that suggest a crucial relation between questions of origin and end. Arthur Danto, who holds an essentialist view about the notion of art itself, nonetheless sees the development of Western art as coming to an end in the production of artworks which bear no material difference in comparison with non-artistic works (with Warhol's Brillo boxes being his favourite example). At the other end of the historical spectrum, the art historian Hans Belting, looking at devotional art in the West prior to the year 1400, relates a narrative of the 'before' to Danto's 'after,' offering a 'history of the image before the era of art' (by which he means the era in which images construed as being art or artists construed as being artists, did not figure as such into their production).2
What sort of philosophical account does Hegel offer to the question of the origin of art and to the larger concern with the relation between philosophy and art history? Danto of course often cites Hegel's putative notion of the 'end of art' in this context, 3but there is, I think, a wider story to be told, one that offers a distinctive perspective both on the questions concerning the Western notion of fine art which animate Danto and Belting, as well as the questions about the broader origins of human artistic activity that might occur in response to attempts by Werner Herzog and others to capture what is distinctive about millennia-old products of the human hand. 4
There are many Hegelian issues which...