In his review of Michael Kelly's Iconoclasm and Aesthetics J.M. Bernstein says that Kelly contends that iconoclasm - understood as a "combination of disinterest and distrust in art that stems from a tendency to inscribe a deficiency into the very conception (or ontology) of art" - is a pervasive effect of the way in which even philosophers apparently sympathetic to art conceptualize it. Bernstein adds:

Hence, the way in which Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida, and Danto are interested in art turns into a systematic and corrosive disinterest. More precisely, the philosophical interest in the universality of art - interest in its truth or essence or meaning or transcendental conditioning or definition - becomes for these philosophers constitutive of art, overwhelming other considerations and leading them to abstract art from its historical condition. But insofar as art is conditioned by its historical particularity, then to abstract art from those conditions is equivalent to disinterest in art. Iconoclasm, then, is the upshot of a systematic dehistoricizing of art in the name of a putative universality the philosopher brings to his encounter with art.

Kelly pointedly triangulates each philosopher with both an artist and an art critic or historian in order to demonstrate exactly how a philosophical interest can reveal itself, in a concrete and specific instance, as disinterest, which can thus stand for the iconoclasm of that position generally.Bernstein says that:

More tendentiously, Kelly construes Benjamin Buchloh's famous 1986 interview with Gerhard Richter as a dialogue between an Adornoian theorist and a skeptical practitioner, with Richter parrying each of Buchloh's extreme analyses of his paintings (as end-of-art anti-paintings) with quiet demurs and denials.

Bernstein rightly comments that Buchloh's ascription of a systematically negative practice of painting to Richter cannot easily be aligned with the Adorno of Aesthetic Theory since there, as everywhere, negation dialectically turns into affirmation, art's materialist promise of happiness.

So whats going on here?

Bernstein says that Kelly's argument about philosophy's iconoclasm as a refinement and extension of Danto's idea that every encounter between art and philosophy becomes a philosophical disenfranchisement of art, and that indeed historically philosophy has assured itself of its authority through its dissolution of the authority of art. Philosophical universalism comes to trump artistic particularity. However I agree with Bernstein when he says that the above philosophers turn:

to art precisely because it represents something that is constitutively deficient, that is, finite, sensuous, material, non-self-sufficient, ephemeral, opaque, mortal, indeterminate. Where Kelly sees the inscription of a deficiency to be overcome, I see the deficiency itself as the attraction, as what is to be affirmed: art stands for precisely what traditionally and dominantly philosophy has sought to repudiate, and hence the transformation of philosophy can best occur by the theoretical appreciation of art and the assimilation, as appropriate, of philosophy to art.