Why does artistic pluralism remain trapped in the Western narrative?

In the art world, talking about pluralism sounds trendy, but the reality is more tangled. The article examines how the Euro‑American art system—especially criticism, art history, and aesthetics—still blocks genuine diversity. It starts from a broader debate on the politics of difference and the decolonization of knowledge, asking how major theorists have incorporated plurality in ways that mute its disruptive power. To answer, the authors blend philosophical analysis with a critical rereading of classic texts by Clement Greenberg and Arthur Danto, juxtaposing them with Indigenous, Black, and decolonial voices. The outcome? Pluralism is often welcomed only when it can be translated into dominant terms, fitting into a teleological narrative that privileges Western aesthetic paths. Differences are tolerated as long as they don’t threaten the established order. Instead, the article calls for critical practices that keep difference alive, embracing dissonance, incommensurability, and multiple ontologies without forcing them into sameness. Thus, today’s struggle over art’s meaning isn’t a problem to solve but a necessary symptom of truly plural knowledge.

The debate on artistic pluralism fits into a philosophical tradition dating back to Kant, who introduced the notion of a universal aesthetic judgment. Yet, thinkers like Walter Benjamin already critiqued the idea of a "mass culture" capable of absorbing any art form without altering its content. In the contemporary context, postcolonial theory by Gayatri Spivak—especially the concept of the "subaltern"—provides a lens to understand why marginal voices are often silenced or co‑opted. Indigenous artistic practices, for instance, rely on relational ontologies that challenge the subject‑object split typical of Western philosophy. These ontologies view art as a co‑creation process with the environment rather than a final product to be judged. Moreover, Thomas Kuhn's notion of "incommensurability," originally applied to science, has been adopted by aesthetic scholars to describe the difficulty of translating non‑Western aesthetic experiences into Western terms. This creates tension between "aesthetic universalism" and the reality of multiple value systems. Finally, the proposal for sustainable critical practices implies adopting participatory research methods, where artists and involved communities co‑construct evaluation criteria, thus avoiding reducing difference to mere "variety" to catalogue. Such approaches can foster genuine epistemic plurality, where dissonance is not an error to fix but a resource to broaden global aesthetic understanding.