A Companion to Arthur C. Danto E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1126

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A Companion to Arthur C. Danto paints a detailed portrait of one the most significant figures in twentieth-century philosophy and art criticism, offering unparalleled coverage of all aspects of Danto's writings, artworks, and thought. Edited by two long-time colleagues of Arthur Danto, this interdisciplinary resource presents more than 40 original essays from both prominent Danto scholars and leading practitioners from various sub-fields of philosophy. The Companion illuminates Danto's many contributions to the artworld, aesthetics, criticism, and philosophy of knowledge, action, science, history, and politics. The essays explore central concepts and intersecting themes in Danto's writings while providing new interventions into the areas of philosophy in which Danto engaged. Topics include Danto's mode of writing and art production, his critical engagement with artists and philosophers, conflicts in Danto's views and in interpretations of his works, and much more. An important addition to Danto studies, A Companion to Arthur C. Danto is essential reading for practitioners, scholars, and advanced students looking for a critical, provocative, and insightful treatment of Danto's philosophy, art, and criticism.

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37. A Companion to Plato

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38. A Companion to Descartes

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49. A Companion to Schopenhauer

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51. A Companion to Foucault

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57. A Companion to David Lewis

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66. A Companion to Wittgenstein

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67. A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir

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68. A Concise Companion to Confucius

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72. A Companion to Adorno

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73. A Companion to Rorty

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77. A Companion to Arthur C. Danto

Edited by Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr

A Companion to Arthur C. Danto

Edited by

Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr

This edition first published 2022

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gilmore, Jonathan, editor. | Goehr, Lydia, editor.

Title: A companion to Arthur C. Danto / edited by Jonathan Gilmore and Lydia Goehr.

Description: Frist edition. | Hoboken : John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2022. |

Series: Blackwell companions to philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021009894 (print) | LCCN 2021009895 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119154211 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119154228 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119154235 (epub) | ISBN 9781119154242 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Danto, Arthur C., 1924-2013--Criticism and interpretation.

Classification: LCC B945.D364 C66 2022 (print) | LCC B945.D364 (ebook) | DDC 191--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009894

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009895

Cover image: © Photograph by D. James Dee

Cover design by Wiley

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Contents

Cover

Series page

Title page

Copyright

Preface

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Five Pieces for Arthur Danto (1924–2013) In memoriam

1 Roquebrune, 1962

2 Boundaries Crossed

3 Writing with Style

4 Sartre, Transparency, and Style

5 Nietzsche and Historical Understanding

6 Pragmatism between Art and Life

7 Danto on Dewey (and Dewey on Danto)

8 Thought Experiments: Art and Ethics

9 A Normative Perspective on Basic Actions

10 Cognitive Science and Art Criticism

11 Perception

12 The Anthropology of Art

13 The Birth of Art

14 The End of Art

15 Representation, Truth, and Historical Reality

16 History and Retrospection

17 Action in the Shadow of Time

18 The Sixties

19 Criticism and the Pale of History

20 Postmodernism and Its Discontents

21 Shakespeare and the Repetition of the Commonplace

22 Engaging Henry James: The Metaphorical Perspective

23 Literature, Philosophy, Persona, Politics

24 Moving Pictures

25 Photography and Danto’s Craft of the Mind

26 Transfiguration/Transubstantiation

27 Embodiment and Medium

28 The Style Matrix

29 Disenfranchisement

30 Definition

31 Danto and Dickie: Artworld and Institution

32 Danto and Wittgenstein: History and Essence

33 Censorship and Subsidy

34 Amnesty International and Human Rights

35 Random Noise, Radical Silence

36 Mad Men and Pop Art

37 Vija Celmins: Nature at Art’s End

38 The Meaning of Ugliness, The Authority of Beauty

39 Feminist Criticism: On Disturbatory Art and Beauty

40 Beauty and Politics

41 Public Art: Monuments, Memorials, and Earthworks

42 On Architecture

43 Aliveness and Aboutness: Yvonne Rainer’s Dance Indiscernibles

44 Arthur and Andy

45 Letter to Posterity

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Figures

Introduction

Figure 1 Danto, “Socrates in a Trance” 1962 detail...

Figure 2 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

Figure 3 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

Figure 4 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

Figure 5 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

Chapter 37

Figure 37.1 Vija Celmins, Untitled (Ocean), 1977. San...

Figure 37.2 Vija Celmins: Two Stones...

Guide

Cover

Series page

Title page

Copyright

Table of Contents

Preface

Notes on Contributors

Begin Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

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Preface

JONATHAN GILMORE AND LYDIA GOEHR

This Companion was conceived following the death of Arthur Coleman Danto in 2013. Its long-standing gestation owes something to the process of commissioning articles, but more deeply reflects our desire, as its editors, to wait a while, to let his death be mourned and his influence be reflected upon. The volume stands apart from the already impressive collections of essays on Danto’s life and work, edited by Randall Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn (in 2013), by Mark Rollins (in 2012), and by Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly (in 2007). (The many contributions outside America to Danto scholarship should also be noted.) The contributors to the present volume, renowned scholars and emerging new voices, were tasked to offer short, essayistic interventions, suggestive of the style in which Danto himself excelled. As Danto borrowed the long-standing idea for his own philosophical outlook: style makes the person just as it renders unique an art work and a thought. The contributions to this volume have not been written therefore as parts of a systematic or unified whole, nor to cover every aspect of Danto’s extensive oeuvre. Instead, with an often-revisionary aim, they capture what the writers—with their unique perspectives—found most compelling. This collection thus truly serves as a companion to a thinker who much enjoyed the wit, eclecticism, variety, and tensions between alternate philosophical methods and traditions. It takes paths that Danto sometimes more tiptoed than trod with well-made steps: into, for example, architecture, dance, and film. Constructed and composed with the marvelous assistance and the refined critical perspectives of Jonathan Fine and Elizabeth Benn, the companion offers a contrapuntal accompaniment to reading Danto, but not, we insist, a substitute.

In his astonishingly capacious intellectual life, Danto wrote on violence in the works of George Sorel, Nietzsche, Sartre, Buddhism, action theory, the history of analytical philosophy, and the philosophies of language, perception, and mind. It was, however, his philosophies of history and art that, in his lifetime, were taken up the most vigorously. If one hears the name Danto, one responds: ah yes—his analytical theory of narrative/historical sentences and his Hegelian thesis for the end of art! And then–how possibly could one make the two stand together? His lifelong attempt to weave Anglo-American, analytical and so-described continental approaches to philosophical thinking, produced fascinating antagonisms, perfectly reflective of the post-War, Cold War, and East-West struggles of the early decades of his long career in the academy. Likewise, his voracious reading in social and cultural history allowed him to assume an overall humanistic perspective and range of views often at odds with the quarrels of self-proclaimed modernists and postmodernists.

Danto liked to recall his accidental introduction to questions in the philosophy of art, when, at the last minute, he was invited to speak at a meeting of the American Philosophical Association. The result was what was to become his enormously influential essay of 1964, “The Artworld.” The accidental character of his address regarded his engagement only with the philosophy of art, not with the arts themselves. Early on, he was a highly-accomplished and ambitious lithographer and printmaker, a period from which many works remain and have recently been exhibited (as readers will learn from his daughter Ginger Danto’s essay in this volume). After his death, an extraordinary number of those prints, plus paintings and drawings, were found covered in dust on the top of a cupboard in his apartment on Riverside Drive.

Why he turned from art-making to reflecting on art is of course a question that demands a more complex answer than his favored quip, that he did it “for the money.” To be sure, he found stability in his tenure as a professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. But it was as a theorist, critic, and commentator on the arts, writing for TheNation magazine, in which he discovered his métier and passion. Writing everyday with unwavering joy, he held to the belief that he had never had the same thought twice. A voracious reader of fiction, he showed how even a rigorous and perspicuous philosophical exposition can possess the style of a literary art. His most influential writings bear the impress of profound changes between the 1960s and the 1990s in art practice, the market, museums, audiences of art, and the role of critics and connoisseurs as guides and gatekeepers. But this body of work also responded to tumultuous changes in society at large in those decades, as we see in his reflections on human and civil rights, public values, dreams of democracy, racism, feminism, and censorship. Many of the essays here offer thoughtful commentaries on these more political and social issues. Danto’s engagement with living artists of his own day allowed him to breathe in the atmosphere to which he appealed as defining what art essentially is. He belonged very much to his century, in ways—following his philosophy of history—that time continues to tell.

Notes on Contributors

Tiziana Andina is Professor of Philosophy at University of Turin, and author of Arthur Danto: Philosopher of Pop.

Frank Ankersmit is Emeritus Professor for Philosophy of History and Intellectual History at Groningen University. He writes on representation in the writing of history and in political and aesthetic representation.

Sondra Bacharach is an Associate Professor and Head of Programme in Philosophy at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Recent research about street art has appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics and The Monist.

Georg W. Bertram is Professor of Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin, and author of Hegels “Phänomenologie des Geistes.” Ein systematischer Kommentar and Art as Human Practice. An Aesthetics.

J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Among his books are: The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury.

Peg Brand Weiser is Laureate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona and Emerita Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Indiana University. Editor of Beauty Matters and Beauty Unlimited, her most recent work focuses on the perception of athletes’ bodies and female agency.

Kyle Bukhari is a dance researcher, educator, and performer, and visiting faculty at Sarah Lawrence College.

Remei Capdevila-Werning, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, is author of Goodman for Architects and several essays in the philosophy of architecture, aesthetics, and preservation.

Taylor Carman is Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, and author of Heidegger’s Analytic and Merleau-Ponty; and coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty.

Matilde Carrasco Barranco is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Theory of Arts in the University of Murcia (Spain). She works on the relation between aesthetics, and beauty, and contemporary art theory.

David Carrier taught philosophy in Pittsburgh and art history in Cleveland. He writes art criticism for Brooklyn Rail and Hyperallergic.

Noël Carroll teaches philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is the author most recently of Humour: A Very Short Introduction and Classics in the Western Philosophy of Art.

Sixto J. Castro, Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Valladolid, is author of En teoría, es arte, Filosofía del arte: El arte pensado, and Teología estética.

Ginger Danto, the youngest daughter of Arthur, is a writer and lives in North Florida.

David Davies is Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. His books include Art as Performance; Aesthetics and Literature and Philosophy of the Performing Arts.

Whitney Davis is George and Helen Pardee Professor of History and Theory of Ancient and Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley. His trilogy on visual culture is A General Theory of Visual Culture, Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective, and Space, Time, and Depiction.

Marlies De Munck, philosopher and journalist, teaches at the University of Antwerp and the Royal Conservatory in Ghent. Her recent publications include: Why Chopin didn’t want to hear the rain; The Flight of the Nightingale: A Philosophical Plea for the Musician; Nearness: Art and Education after COVID-19; and I See Mountains as Mountains, once again.

Rachel Eisendrath, author of Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis and Gallery of Clouds, is Tow Associate Professor of English and chair of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at Barnard College.

Richard Eldridge, Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, lectures now at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His most recent books are Werner Herzog: Filmmaker and Philosopher and Images of History: Kant, Benjamin, Freedom, and the HumanSubject.

Arturo Fontaine is a Chilean novelist and professor of philosophy at University Adolfo Ibáñez and University of Chile. His latest novel is La Vida Doble: A Novel.

Jane Forsey teaches philosophy at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. She is the author of The Aesthetics of Design and coeditor (with Lars Aagaard-Mogensen) of two volumes of essays, On Taste and On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges.

Michalle Gal is a senior faculty member in the Unit of History and Philosophy, Shenkar College. Her recent books are Visual Metaphors and Aesthetics: A Formalist Theory and Introduction to Theory of Design.

Jonathan Gilmore is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College. His most recent book is Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind.

Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Her most recent book, dedicated to Arthur Danto, is Red Sea–Red Square–Red Thread: A Philosophical Detective Story.

Robert Gooding-Williams is the M. Moran Weston/Black Alumni Council Professor of African-American Studies and Professor of Philosophy and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of Zarathustra’s Dionysian Modernism, Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics and In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America.

Adrian Haddock is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, following an Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Research Fellowship at the University of Leipzig. His most recent publication is “The Wonder of Signs,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

Garry Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College. His most recent book is Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood.

Espen Hammer is Professor of Philosophy at Temple University. His most recent book is Adorno’s Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe.

Casey Haskins is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Purchase College, State University of New York. His current book project is on the history of the debate over autonomy in modern aesthetic theory.

Daniel Herwitz is Fredric Huetwell Professor at the University of Michigan. He has written widely in aesthetics, culture and politics, including his early book, Making Theory/Constructing Art, which placed Danto’s philosophy and criticism within the avant-gardes of culture and science.

Gregg M. Horowitz is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Pratt Institute. Previous publications on Arthur C. Danto include The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy, and the Ends of Taste, co-written with Tom Huhn.

F. M. Kamm, Henry Rutgers University Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University, is the author of works in ethical theory and practical ethics, most recently The Trolley Problem Mysteries and Almost Over: Aging, Dying, Dead.

Michael Kelly is Professor of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the OxfordEncyclopedia of Aesthetics, President of the Transdisciplinary Aesthetics Foundation; and author of A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art and of Iconoclasm in Aesthetics.

Karlheinz Lüdeking taught history and theory of art at the University of the Arts in Berlin until he retired in 2017.

Emma Stone Mackinnon is Assistant Professor of the History of Modern Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Emmanuel College. Her work on political theory and the history of human rights has appeared in Political Theory and Humanity.

Bence Nanay is BOF Professor of Philosophy at the University of Antwerp and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University. His books include Between Perception and Action, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception, Aesthetics: A Very Short Introduction, and The Fragmented Mind.

Mark Rollins is Professor of Philosophy and in the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program Program at Washington University in St. Louis. His publications include Mental Imagery: On the limits of Cognitive Science, Danto and His Critics, and “What Monet Meant: Intention and Attention in Understanding Art.”

Sam Rose teaches at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Art and Form and Interpreting Art.

Carol Rovane is Violin Family Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. In addition to articles spanning many areas of philosophy, she has authored two books: The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics and The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism.

Fred Rush is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and author of Irony and Idealism and On Architecture.

Sonia Sedivy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her recent work includes Beauty and the End of Art, Wittgenstein, Plurality and Perception and, as editor, Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy Kendall L. Walton.

Gary Shapiro is Tucker-Boatwright Professor of Humanities and Philosophy, Emeritus, at the University of Richmond. His writings include Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art After Babel; Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying; and Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics.

Sandra Shapshay is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College & the Graduate Center (CUNY); her recent publications include: “What is ‘the Monumental?”, “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime,” and Reconstructing Schopenhauer’s Ethical Thought: Hope, Compassion, and Animal Welfare.

Richard Shusterman is Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities at Florida Atlantic University. His books include Pragmatist Aesthetics, Body Consciousness, and The Adventures of the Man in Gold: A Philosophical Tale, based on his work in performance art.

Brian Soucek is a philosopher of art and professor of law at the University of California, Davis. His recent articles on law and aesthetics, including “Aesthetic Judgment in Law” and “The Constitutional Irrelevance of Art,” are available at http://ssrn.com/author=1828782.

Sue Spaid is author of five books on art and ecology, including The Philosophy of Curatorial Practice: Between Work and World. Recent philosophical papers address urban farming, biodiversity, wellbeing, hydrological justice, degraded lands and stinky food's superpowers.

András Szántó writes on art and serves as a cultural strategy adviser to museums, cultural and educational institutions, and commercial enterprises worldwide; he is the author, most recently, of The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues.

Scott Walden’s research and practice in photography focuses on the intersection between the philosophies of art, mind, and language. He has received multiple grants and prizes for his work.

Introduction: Five Pieces for Arthur Danto (1924–2013) In memoriam

LYDIA GOEHR, DANIEL HERWITZ, FRED RUSH, MICHAEL KELLY, AND JONATHAN GILMORE

Life with Art

Lydia Goehr

Arthur Danto once told me that having been born on the first day of the year (the year was 1924) he felt obliged to do something important. When I asked him what I should then do having been born on January 10th, he replied, “obviously not as much as me.” He did do something important. He stands as one of the four giants of the Anglo-American tradition, with Stanley Cavell, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Wollheim, who together rearticulated the terms for how philosophers should think about the arts as part of a broad philosophical vision each had of the world. Danto held his so-described “analytical philosophy of art” as “of a piece” with his analytical philosophies of history, action, and knowledge. Before achieving world renown for his philosophy of art, he was much admired as a philosopher in these other domains. At first, when writing on art, he intended to write a work titled The Analytical Philosophy of Art to match several of his previous books. But very quickly he found himself turning away from this bland title to one indicative of the transfiguration in his thought that would allow him to escape some of the restrictions of a philosophy to which, however, he remained lifelong devoted. He found a way to enhance analytical philosophy, to bring it to life by engaging in a mode of description, in perfectly crafted and entirely illuminating detours, that would result in his being recognized as the leading philosophical critic of the art, most especially of his own times. With similar conviction, he imported themes he variously drew from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Sartre – he wrote monographs devoted to the latter two – and from a Zen Buddhism whose teachings he experienced at Columbia University. Of his more than thirty books and hundreds of articles and art-critical pieces, his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace marked a turning point in the philosophy of art and in the life of a man whose nickname happened also to be Art. Although he never wanted philosophically to overcome the gap between art and life – everything about his thought was aimed at preserving the difference – he lived his life in the pathways of art with a transformative joy and optimism. He turned what others experienced as nightmares – and there were plenty in the twentieth century to choose from – into dreams for a better human condition liberated from the political and speculative tyrannies of a world that, in different ways, he regarded over, ended, and out of date.

When I first met Arthur, it was on a bus in Sweden, over thirty years ago. The bus was transporting a whole host of eminent philosophers to a conference on the theme of intentionality. Why I was on the bus is irrelevant to the story. But pertinent was the fact that I had just begun my studies in the philosophy of music and finding myself sitting “next to Arthur Danto” gave me the chance to describe the paper I was writing on the relevance of Kripke’s thought to music. Arthur listened with the utmost charity, although little, he later told me, inspired him. But he also told me that he never forgot this encounter. Getting to know him later, I realized that he forgot few persons, that nearly every meeting was special to him in some way. He found something to admire whatever the age or status of his interlocutors.

My next encounter afforded me an opportunity to describe Arthur Danto in public. It was the year, if my memory serves me right, that I offered the history I had written of the American Society for Aesthetics to the Society at their annual meeting. Coming from England, I was naïve about many things to do with America. So when I read in preparation for my speech that Danto was “the art-critic for the Nation,” I assumed that meant that he was akin to “the Poet-Laureate of the United States” (for I did not know then of the magazine to which he would contribute for many years.) So this is how I described him. The audience laughed, but when I learned of my mistake, I was pleased that I had imported a suitably honorific content into what otherwise would have been a true but bland description. My descriptive leap perfectly fitted Danto’s theory of narrative sentences as developed in his philosophy of history, and it equally well suited a person who really did become in America the poet laureate of the philosophy of art.

When twenty years ago I came to teach at Columbia, I became very close to Arthur, although this doesn’t mean that he was always content with my approach to aesthetics. On one occasion, he remarked that my gaze was far too focused on Europe and that I should open my eyes to the world around me – by which he really meant New York. And so, reading between the lines, I began to write about his work, American to the core, although still in deliberate juxtaposition with the work of a German aesthetic theorist, Adorno, in whom I retained a devoted interest. For a decade, I worked tirelessly on Danto and Adorno, even to the point of naming these two figures as one: AdorDanto (and by then I really did adore Danto). My intellectual project was difficult for many reasons, but for this reason in particular: that whereas Adorno felt like a figure of the past, having died in 1969, Danto was very much alive and living next door. Because I wanted to get his views right, it became all too easy for me to call him or pop over to his apartment and ask him what he had had in mind when writing this or that. One morning, he called me on the telephone to tell me that although he was willing to talk to me about everything else in the world, I should, in writing my book, treat him as I was treating Adorno, as unavailable as far as his intentions were concerned. Since I knew Danto was an intentionalist, my first response was to laugh and my second to wonder whether he was offering me a telephone version of the intentionalist fallacy – that all the intentions I needed to know were there to be read from his work, so no telephone call was needed in addition. Finally, however, I came to understand something else: that though Arthur was an intentionalist, intentions had been the last thing he had ever really appealed to in interpreting the art of his contemporaries. Much more, he had drawn on facts of friendship and, more importantly, on “being there” in the right place and time – as he was there to see those Brillo boxes, which, stacked up on the gallery floor, allowed him to take a final stock in his philosophy of art. More even than becoming an eminent critic of contemporary art, he became a storyteller of his life with artists whose company he so much enjoyed. To be an intentionalist might be the stance of the philosopher, but how this translated into an art criticism was never as obvious as Danto sometimes claimed it was. When I finished my book, Danto said almost immediately that he did not recognize his views. I told him that it served him right, that he should have been more forthcoming on the telephone. He laughed and reminded me of how intentionality had been the way our long friendship had begun.

At Columbia, each year and for many years, I offered a year-long, graduate aesthetics course, a survey that was nicknamed “From Plato to Nato.” Nato was, of course, Danto, who generously agreed to come to the last class to present his work. The students sizzled with excitement when he appeared, even to the point where one very sweetly came up to me after class and said, “Oh Professor Goehr, it was so nice to meet a real philosopher face to face.” That Danto was the real thing was true; that he was the culmination of a long road that had begun with Plato was also true; he even, in his early life as a woodcut artist, produced an image that uncannily depicts Socrates as Arthur himself would later look. Artistic depiction always, he argued, transfigures. Even if I was a little miffed by not even being a candidate, in this student’s view, for entry into the philosophical-world, I blamed myself for offering a syllabus that rendered all the philosophers I taught almost indiscernible in appearance. So, as years passed by, I increasingly stressed the teaching to which Danto was most committed, that in the face of indiscernibility, don’t be taken in merely by what you see: work out wherein the differences between things lie. For then, things that look the same will no longer stubbornly be assumed to be the same sort of thing. And when we come to understand that, so many more ways of appearing will be granted entry into the hallowed halls, be they the halls of philosophy or of art.

In the last months, weeks, and days before Arthur’s death, I spent many hours in his company. Often we turned to opera as a medium for communication. I would take my IPad over to his apartment and play him arias from operas. He recalled having heard many of the great singers, but above all, he told me, he loved Amelita Galli Curci. On one of these occasions, Arthur began to sing, in perfect Italian, the opening love duet from La Bohème. The last piece he had read by me was an essay on this opera set into comparison with the red squares with which he had begun his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Not able to hear very well anymore, he watched me listening to the aria and began to describe what he was seeing. He saw me not as listening but as singing to him. I did not know that this would be the last image he would ever have of me and me of him. Two days later, he received the first copies of a book for which he had been waiting a long time: the book that was his life and work, produced by the Library of Living Philosophers. A few hours later, he lost consciousness with the joy of knowing that he had left his world in good order and that he would meet again the friend with whom he had spoken every day for sixty years, Richard Kuhns. Not the belief but the image I have of Art and Dick now again taking a walk somewhere each morning in deep conversation is a comforting one in this time of mourning the loss of two friends who meant so much to me and so very much to each other.

Danto was born the year Puccini died. I had always wanted to write about them both together, which is what I have recently been doing and will continue to do. My book is not about endings and new beginnings, but about beginnings, first lines, which is where Arthur always was, given the excitement with which he woke each day to write. A year or so ago, he called me one morning when writing his last book, What Art Is, to tell me that he had suddenly understood something that he had never understood before: why Warhol with his Brillo Box was so central to him in allowing him as a philosopher to know what art essentially is. I did not dismiss his thought as repetitive; on the contrary, I thought back to how he had begun his Transfiguration with a red square that had been described by the philosopher who had so famously reversed the terms of repetition. Danto’s last thought about art had all the freshness of spring. He named the thought a wakeful dream. He had the ability to look at something so profoundly familiar – almost commonplace – as though he were looking at it for the very first time. His work now stands before us, asking always to be read anew, filled to the philosophical brim with the spirit of Art.

Figure 1 Danto, “Socrates in a Trance” 1962 detail. Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

In Memoriam, Arthur Danto

Daniel Herwitz

Arthur Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1924 and grew up in Detroit. He served in the military during the Second World War, driving trucks in North Africa and Italy. “I had a really great time,” he told me, making me wonder if anything at all could not, given his fascination with life, turn into an adventure. After the war, he studied Art History and Art at Wayne State then in Paris, becoming a printmaker of significance, a maker of images in the manner of German Expressionism, woodblocks with figures articulated in a chaotic swirl of lines, barely discernible in the intensity. At a certain moment in the 1960s, he took the decision to give up art, believing his work out of step with the Zeitgeist. This decision was made on philosophical grounds and without regret, for Arthur was already a philosopher dedicated to thinking through the conditions through which object, performance, and gesture may become art, spinning a theory as intricately inventive as any work of avant-garde art. He had taken the decision to continue at university and gotten a PhD at Columbia, and after a brief stint working in the philosophy of science turned to aesthetics. He was to spend most of the rest of his working life in the classrooms, galleries, and museums of New York, ending up Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia while also serving as art critic for the Nation magazine.

It is well known that Arthur’s eureka moment on the road to Damascus took place at a West 58th Street gallery, the Stable Gallery, where he witnessed an exhibition of oversized Brillo boxes by Andy Warhol. Offered in play as a way of blurring the distinction between industrial and fine art, Arthur transformed Warhol into a philosopher in gel (one who wore his gel lightly). In Arthur’s view, Warhol’s boxes became revelations of the conditions that turn ordinary, real things into works of art. These conditions could not be anything visual since the box in the supermarket was (more or less) visually identical to the one in the gallery, but only the one was fine art. The man in dark glasses and a wig had hit on, with Arthur’s prompting, Leibniz’s problem of indiscernibility: that what makes two virtually identical things different in kind has to be something hidden and abstract. That something, Arthur argued in the Journal of Philosophy in 1964, could only be a background of shared theory: a set of concepts constructing terms for the box in the gallery to “make a statement” to the art world. Warhol could press the limits of the art world (with a supermarket box) and get away with it only because these concepts, at a moment of performance art, abstraction, and pop, were in place. Not that Warhol’s gesture was without controversy. Many took Warhol’s antics to be the attention-grabbing of a drugged-out denizen of the Velvet Underground whose pasty skin bespoke the need for a sunlamp if not a two-week vacation in Miami Beach. But the very fact of controversy proved (to Arthur) that the concepts were in place to allow for the argument.

It only remained for Arthur to articulate all the philosophy he believed implicit in Warhol’s gesture, and thus to complete a long history of avant-garde experimentation. On his reading of the avant-gardes they had always been in the project of self-discovery, which Warhol then brought to completion. Who needed to make expressionist woodcuts when the true thrust of art history had ended up in his lap?

Great aestheticians often stake new philosophy on the art of their time: Roger Fry on Cézanne, Richard Wollheim on British figurative art, Friedrich Nietzsche on Wagner (till he got burned). Arthur’s double was Warhol. When he published his theory of art in the Journal of Philosophy, no one knew what to do with it, exactly in the way no one knew how to take Brillo Box. Arthur’s thinking was ahead of the game. Utterly dedicated to making a contribution to philosophy, he did so in the manner of an avant-garde artist, riding the curl of history and finding it on the streets of New York. It is not fortuitous that the book he would publish after his work on the art world in 1964 would be Nietzsche as Philosopher, which similarly befuddled the New York philosophical world, a world, which at that time believed Nietzsche a freak if not a Nazi. What followed was an endless litany of works in philosophy and art criticism, each filled with dazzling insight and unforgettable philosophical twists.

When he became a critic for the Nation magazine in 1984 (a post he held until 2009), postmodernism was in high swing; he became its most imaginative theorist. Having completed the project of self-discovery, Arthur believed (in a Hegelian manner) that art history was completed, freeing art to pursue a prism of new possibilities in the manner of a thousand flowers blooming. This was, in fact, what was happening in the New York art world, where the intense anxieties of the art historical movement (whose military quarters were the Cedar Bar) were giving way to a kind of populist individualism with each artist free to experiment with any style for any reason, composing paintings in which German expressionism meets Italian Mannerism, Abstraction reacquaints itself with the human figure and Duchamp turns into a TV serial. This efflorescence was tailor-made for Arthur’s abundant generosity; he could be free to like everything or at least find everything fascinating. Not that he was without complaint. In an essay in The Nation called “The Painting of Importance,” Arthur bemoaned the new high seriousness whose point seemed to be to make a work of art seem important rather than be it by carrying the aura of deep meaning and struggle with form while in fact bespeaking no message at all other than size and a lot of scratching on the surface and a deep title taken from the Second World War. Certain bad boy artists of the 1980s he chided as adolescents, the kind who come out of their bedrooms in the American suburbs only to tell their parents to stuff it and return to their television sets (now they would be insulting each other on Facebook). He had the pulse of America just as he had the pulse of art. But he never ceased to be cheerful, for he found each twist in the inscrutable pattern of life a new surprise, giving him something new to think about. The worst thing in life, to twist the words of Warhol, is not having anything to think about.

Arthur’s big mind was a generous one. He welcomed serious thought from all quarters, whether it criticized him or not. I had in 1992 submitted a book for publication that criticized parts of his work, and when he read the manuscript, he wrote to me: “Rather than duking it out, what can I do to help you get this book published.” Two years later, I was coming out of a shop somewhere on the Eastside when I ran into him hurrying to a lecture. His warmth was unmistakable. Not ten seconds after he greeted me, an artist who had been living in Italy sauntered by and was bear-hugged. Arthur immediately introduced this man to me, at which point a third stopped to pay respects, and Arthur said, “Three wonderful people on one day.” When we were seated at the same table with a famous Indian artist after an exhibition at New York University in 1985, the artist went on about painting a canvas ninety-six yards long. “Couldn’t you make it a hundred?” Arthur asked, with dry cheerfulness.

It is not often that a philosopher can achieve a central role in the precipitation of culture and in the most cosmopolitan way. It is not often that a philosopher can move effortlessly through various genres of writing, and with such suave, effervescent prose, prose that inevitably finds a philosophical twist to art, and an art to the way philosophy can be imagined. It is less often still that such a person can be loved, really loved by so many. Arthur was what the Greeks call “great-hearted.” He filled the room while leaving ample space for others. The room is bare without him.

Figure 2 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

Remembering Arthur Danto

Fred Rush

I came to Columbia for graduate work in philosophy in 1989. My plan – if one could call it that – was to concentrate on the areas of ancient philosophy, German philosophy, and the philosophy of art. The last bit, the philosophy of art, was something I was unsure about. I had pursued a musical career with some seriousness after college, and my undergraduate course in philosophy had concentrated on what was at the time the central concern in analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language. It would not have occurred to me to connect contemporary philosophy with art. Philosophy and art were utterly distinct for me; I would not have wanted to sully one with the other.

The degree to which I was open to the philosophy of art was due to having picked up, pretty much at random, a copy of Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace from a bookstore in Atlanta. What commenced as a cautious, half-hearted read developed into an avid one, and I saw for the first time how one might do something exciting and innovative in aesthetics. Still, I did not arrive in New York entirely convinced. I did not meet Arthur until my second year in graduate school. He taught a seminar called, I believe, simply Topics in Aesthetics, which I discovered, in practice, meant “read a book with Professor Danto.” The course consisted entirely of discussing the philosophical issues raised by a book (of Arthur’s choosing) and writing up a paper on some topic covered. I do not remember what book we read that term. I have retained an impression that it was not very good, but that didn’t matter because what I found out was that the book was just a prop for Arthur to discuss his own views. That was much more exciting, of course! Arthur was what Harold Bloom calls a “strong reader,” and his somewhat impetuous and even impertinent style was a chance, in essence, to talk with Arthur about Arthur – about his work. He held forth, seamlessly integrating great chunks of his own aesthetics with both historical views and real-world examples from the visual arts against which one might test the theory. I remember writing a too-long paper on the connection of semantics and ontology in Arthur’s view as I understood it. I hesitated to turn it in. It contained a number of objections, which I thought he might take to be snotty and superficial. The paper, in fact, was the model of politeness, but I thought that he might not like being objected to (as some philosophers do not) and especially not if the source of the objection was a puny graduate student. So, I showed the paper to Sidney Morgenbesser, with whom I had worked a fair amount, and he thought it was OK. So I turned it in and held my breath. As it turned out, Arthur thought they were pretty good objections to some theory, just not to his theory. This was a jovial result for him; he thought it a good effort on my part but that I had misunderstood his views at what he took to be a crucial turn in the argument.

Some things never change. In our last philosophical exchange, this time in print, he still thought I misunderstood what he was driving at. In the intervening years, Arthur had been a co-supervisor of my dissertation, supported me vigorously in getting my career off the ground, gave visiting lectures at the places I taught, and we met many, many times at conferences, at bars, over meals, and at his apartment on Riverside Drive. With my good friend Lydia Goehr, whom Arthur deeply admired and loved, I visited him two days before he died. But the misunderstanding abided.

Arthur resisted my characterization of his view that artworks embody their meaning as a form of social expressivism. I considered this not a criticism at all. The expressivism I had in mind was bound up with what I took to be a Hegel-inspired social externalism about the meanings of artworks, to which I took Arthur to be fully committed. I thought and still think that Arthur’s aesthetic theory both conceptually and historically combines the two major trains of thought that preceded his own account, representationalism and expressivism about content, but in a way that transforms both strands. This faintly Kantian taxonomy appealed to him as a matter of philosophical historiography, but I believe he thought that bringing his views too close to expressivism implied that his account was psychologistic. He preferred a formal way of putting his point that he loosely modeled on Frege’s account of concepts as functions, a formulation that he made in his blockbuster essay “The Artworld” and in altered form in Transfiguration. But Transfiguration had the power it did because it substantially fleshed out the internal structure of his views, and I was concerned that the structure did not cohere quite the way he thought, especially if one took as canon law his rather minimal formal definition of a work. Arthur’s formal side liked to express his view that “interpretations constitute artworks,” by construing interpretation as a “function” that “mapped” art-content onto physical objects. But to my mind this did not rule out an important sense in which a work might be said to express interpretation through content. His connection of content to concepts such as “point of view” and “metaphor” in the later chapters of Transfiguration seemed to me to offer an account of expression, not of artists’ intents through works perhaps, but certainly of the art itself. He came to call this embodiment, but I could not see the difference between that and, coupled with the idea of an artworld and its “atmosphere of theory,” the sense of expression I took to be part of his debt to Hegel. In the end, I guess I thought that the formula Arthur used to represent the relation of interpretation to work was more gesture than substance, a nod to the way analytic philosophy was done in the day but not really much more.

Was Arthur right that I misunderstood his views? Perhaps. Was I right that social externalism was a part of the view? Perhaps. Arthur’s own character was not to belabor disagreement. There was his definitive shoulder shrug, not dismissive but reconciliatory: if we disagreed, so what? The reason I detail the disagreement and its unsettled nature is that it tokens something deeper, I have come to think. In his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud asserted that projection is a process in which one takes negative traits of oneself that are difficult to accept and recognize as such and ascribes them to another in order to both make criticism of the trait possible and reduce anxiety. Subsequent psychoanalytic theory has refined this Freudian understanding somewhat but retains the emphasis on the negative character of what’s projected. This seems too restrictive, for there are plenty of cases where projection operates in tandem with positive self-assessment. Projection of positive qualities can be a function of wanting others to be like oneself or oneself to be like others. Where the other person is someone one finds deeply admirable, even lovable, that seems especially plausible. What my and Arthur’s disagreement about the internal structure of his aesthetic views meant, why I kept coming back to those views and wanting to make sense of them in what I took to be their own terms, was about more than simply settling something philosophically. After all, was I really saying to Arthur: look, I understand your views better than you do?

Perhaps part of what Arthur taught me was the importance of letting go. Philosophical disagreement is not so important finally; it is subservient to imagination and intellectual depth. Sometimes disagreements are productive, sometimes not. And sometimes they are productive for a while and then peter out. The value in letting go is to be able to start over again someplace else, someplace where the philosophical imagination operates with more impetus and range. That Arthur could treat his own work that way, as something he was willing to let go of, expressed a deep trait in him. I know that I must, in time, let go of Arthur, but that has always been a difficult thing to do.

Figure 3 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

Working with Arthur C. Danto

Michael Kelly

I first met Arthur in person when I was being interviewed in 1986 for the Managing Editor position at the Journal of Philosophy at Columbia University (he was President of the Journal). The second, informal interview took place at the December annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association, held that year in Boston. Arthur suggested that we meet at the Institute of Contemporary Art, located at the time next to a fire station on Boylston Street. When I arrived, Arthur was talking to a few friends, so I waited, thinking we would be meeting alone. But he called me over and introduced me to Nelson Goodman and Richard Wollheim, who were standing in front of a contemporary work on paper by David Salle. If Goodman was wondering when the work was art, if it were, and if Wollheim was closely seeing in the work hoping to discern it as whatever the artist intended it to be, Arthur was mischievously disinterested in making any aesthetic judgment of it, though he was already an art critic for The Nation. He was instead trying to understand what could account for the work’s ontological status as art. It embodied meaning, he divined, even if the meaning it embodied were largely to provoke vexing questions about art among some of the world’s leading experts at the time. Whether good or bad, Salle’s work corroborated Arthur’s definition of art as embodied meaning, to which he added “wakeful dreams” as a third criterion in his last, recently published book, What Art Is.

I worked closely and fortunately with Arthur for sixteen years. In the long run, however, he ruined my life as an employee, and I told him this because he was so generous, judicious, and respectful that I came to expect similar treatment everywhere else I have worked since leaving Columbia. If I have not found it in other employment situations, and if I have not developed the same leadership qualities on my own, both are less a criticism of others, myself included, than confirmation of how special Arthur was in this regard. Should there be an afterlife, Arthur should be president, even if work is not required.