Product Description

Over a decade ago, Arthur Danto announced that art ended in the sixties. Ever since this declaration, he has been at the forefront of a radical critique of the nature of art in our time. After the End of Art presents Danto's first full-scale reformulation of his original insight, showing how, with the eclipse of abstract expressionism, art has deviated irrevocably from the narrative course that Vasari helped define for it in the Renaissance. Moreover, he leads the way to a new type of criticism that can help us understand art in a posthistorical age where, for example, an artist can produce a work in the style of Rembrandt to create a visual pun, and where traditional theories cannot explain the difference between Andy Warhol's Brillo Box and the product found in the grocery store. Here we are engaged in a series of insightful and entertaining conversations on the most relevant aesthetic and philosophical issues of art, conducted by an especially acute observer of the art scene today.

Originally delivered as the prestigious Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts, these writings cover art history, pop art, "people's art," the future role of museums, and the critical contributions of Clement Greenberg--who helped make sense of modernism for viewers over two generations ago through an aesthetics-based criticism. Tracing art history from a mimetic tradition (the idea that art was a progressively more adequate representation of reality) through the modern era of manifestos (when art was defined by the artist's philosophy), Danto shows that it wasn't until the invention of Pop art that the historical understanding of the means and ends of art was nullified. Even modernist art, which tried to break with the past by questioning the ways of producing art, hinged on a narrative.

Traditional notions of aesthetics can no longer apply to contemporary art, argues Danto. Instead he focuses on a philosophy of art criticism that can deal with perhaps the most perplexing feature of contemporary art: that everything is possible.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #199354 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 262 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780691002996
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Art is still dead, according to Arthur Danto, professor at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation. After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History is a collection of Danto's 1995 Mellon Lectures on the Fine Arts. Famous for his radical critiques of the nature of art--he dates the death of art to around 1964 and declares the art museum has replaced the church for the masses--Danto continues to question traditional notions of aesthetics and philosophy in regard to contemporary art. While touching on a variety of art-related topics, the focus of tehse lectures remains the deviation of contemporary art from the great narrative that has defined art throughout history.

From Publishers Weekly
Columbia philosophy professor and Nation art critic Danto has always claimed that there have been three great events in the history of art. First, in the 15th century, art was born when Vasari redescribed what had been the craft of relic- and icon-making as a quest for more and more perfect representations of beauty. Then, in the 1880s, art was reborn: purity, "truth to materials," replaced illusionistic beauty as the progressive artist's Holy Grail. Finally, in 1964, the quest ended with Warhol's Brillo Box, a work that challenged?and existed to challenge?the distinction between art and nonart. Without any single ideal to drive it, art (as it had been known since the Renaissance) died. In these lively essays, written on the occasion of the 1995 A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Danto expands on his customary thesis with chapters on (among other subjects) the criticism of Clement Greenberg, the history of monochrome painting and the future of the museum. Although, in all these inquiries, Danto takes Hegel for his master, the book's most repeated sentence belongs to Dostoevsky: "Everything is permitted." In context, the tag (like the book's title) sounds a little overblown. Danto makes a convincing case in each essay that not everything is permitted: even without any myth of historical inevitability, the "pressures on artists constantly to come up with something new" keep producing art that is smarter or sillier, more or less relevant than other art. As a consequence, the need for critical works such as this one?learned, discerning and refreshingly open-minded?is perhaps greater than ever.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A highly acclaimed Columbia University philosopher, Danto was one of the first to declare in print that art ended in the Sixties. In these insightful, provocative essays first delivered as the 1995 Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Danto explains that today art has "attained narrative closure, and what was now being produced belonged in a post-historical age." There is no longer a Vasarian narrative of mimesis; any and every style is possible and requires no historical or philosophical basis. In addition, Danto usefully reviews the history of the revolution as predicted in the works of Hegel, Duchamp, Dali, and Clement Greenberg, among others. Required reading for anyone seriously interested in late-modern and contemporary art.?Mary Hamel-Schwulst, Towson State Univ., Md.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Stimulating
What does Arthur Danto mean by his title "After the End of Art"? He starts off his stimulating, if rather repetitive book, by discussing the German art historian Hans Belting's book The Image Before the End of Art. That book discusses the history of devotional images and icons before 1400 AD, and how they were produced primarily as icons, and not as art per se. It was only with the beginning of the renaissance that images became part of what could be described as an aesthetic ideology. In the opinion of Vasari and others art, in particular painting, can be seen as a progressive narrative which progresses towards mimesis, or imitation. After the invention of the photograph, accurate imitation became less of a value, and the progressive virtue of this narrative became one of "shape, surface, pigment, and the like as defining painting in its purity." The climax of this ideology came in the great, flawed, critic Clement Greenberg's championing of the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock. But as abstract expressionism exhausted itself in the early sixties, one could no longer define art as a progressive narrative. To use Danto's example, one could no longer produce a theory of art which would disqualify Andy Warhol's Brillo Box as a work of art. Therefore, everything could be a work of art. "Art" or the old "artistic ideology" was dead. There is such a thing as art, says Danto, and there is an inherent essence in it, but it is vastly wider than the progressive development ideology that had previously existed.

At the same time, says Danto, one must take a historicist approach. Very simply, "Manyof the artworks (cave paintings, fetishes, altar pieces) were made in times and places when people had no concept of art to speak of, since they interpreted art in terms of their other beliefs." Danto goes on to discuss how much art of the present day would not have been considered art in the past. He provides some interesting aspects of this historical anomaly. For example there is the 19th century artist Anselm Feuerbach who painted a grand, academically precise picture, the sort that would soon by overtaken by impressionism, of a scene from Plato's Symposium. But he made a mistake in his meticulously accurate historical reconstruction. He includes a painting in the background which portrays Xenophon's variation on the same events. The problem is that the painting is not in the style of a fifth century BC Greek painting. Danto goes on to discuss the inevitable failure of the Vermeer forger Hans Van Meegeren, how Russell Connor combined Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon and Ruben's Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus, and finally ends up with "America's Most Wanted" the painting the Russian artists Komar and Melamid painted after conducting an elaborate opinion poll.

One should be aware of the many criticisms that have been made of this thesis. For example, there is the ironyof having a narrative which amounts to the end of narrative. And as Terry Eagleton sourly puts it "if art these days is a realm without rules, it is so, among other reasons, because there is not really that much at stake. If art mattered socially and politically, rather than just economically, it is unlikely that we would be quite so nonchalant about what qualified for the title." One should also read Perry Anderson's The Origins of Postmodernity for another perspective on the postmodernist moment. Still, this is an important book, and one should pay particular attention to Danto's chapter on the nature of monochrome art. There is also a nuanced chapter on museums and the conflict between them as purveyors of the beautiful and the artistic and the possibilities of anti-museum based community art. There are also discussions of Kant, Heidegger and particularly Hegel; amusingly enough, the last thing in the book is a caricature of Danto showing a Brillo Box to a disconcerted Hegel.

Mistaken: Art is Not Dead
As with many philo-critical texts written about art in the last 35 years, this text has been misread by reviewers. Arthur Danto does not say that art is dead. He says that reduction, narrow-mindedness, and the quest for singular RIGHT meaning is a pursuit of the past. He postulates a world where intellectual inquiry and object-making have more options for rigorous investigation because they are not limited by the strict parameters of historical precedents. This is not a call for a free-for all, but a formulation of the kind of flux-oriented, context-based practice that is particularly relevant in a techocratic, post-modern culture. This type of practice necessarily requires considerably more responsibility, as the practictioner must engage in defining the parameters of his or her practice and constantly pay attention to the way in which decisions affect decisions and so on and so on and so on.

I'm surprised at thoughtful reviewers hearing Danto say Art Is Dead. Did they read the introduction? This text is particularly clear and articulate (a hard-to-find phenomenon in contemporary theoretical texts on art). I found it difficult to MISunderstand.

Art and Individuation
In this valuable book, Danto is not speaking of the death of art as one might speak of the death of God. When he speaks of 'the end of art', he is speaking about the end of art history as we know it and have thought of it; the way of viewing art history that we were taught in 'The History of Western Art 101'.

"To say that history is over is to say that there is no longer a pale of history for works of art to fall outside of. Everything is possible. Anything can be art. And, because the present situation is essentially unstructured, one can no longer fit a master narrative to it....It inaugurates the greatest era of freedom art has ever known. (p.112)"

The history of art up to this point has been a history of exclusion, legitimizing and highlighting only certain works which fall within the pale of this narrative. Danto's point is that there is no longer a pale of history.

But it is possible, I believe, to see something even larger in Danto's analysis, something that would be interesting to pursue by someone with a good grasp of history and culture. One might see further into his thesis and find that the history of art has been one of an evolution of individuation. Starting from the Egyptians, where art was an umbrella covering the entire culture, a culture in which the individual was of little value, to our present age in which art has moved to the opposite extreme, no longer controled by anything or anybody (except perhaps the art industry itself), heralding a new stage ( about 1964 by Danto's reakoning) in the idividuation of the planet.

If, as Teilhard de Chardin says, the impulse of evolution is toward greater consciousness and greater complexity, then what we are seeing at the present time is not something unstructured (as Danto posits), but rather, something of far greater structure, something much more complex than we have witnessed before. A stucture and complexity perhaps presently beyond our comprehension. (Of course, the conservative view of this will be that we are witnessing an encroaching chaos that will destroy civilization as we know it.)

From this new perspective, the present radical pluralism would be, rather than an unstructuring, a further step toward something of a far deeper order, an order we have not seen before, one which reflects an important moment in the individuation of humanity on this planet. Taking Danto's basic thesis, one might write a new history of art from the point of view of the evolution of individuation in art. But then this would be another master narrative and would undermine Danto's thesis. Or would it? For this is not a master narrative of art but of evolution itself as evidenced in art.

And who better to herald this advance than the artists!