Arthur C. Danto

1924-2013 · American · Aesthetics, Philosophy of Art, Philosophy of History, Action Theory, Philosophy of Mind

Art has come to an end.

When Andy Warhol exhibited his Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery in 1964, Arthur Danto recognized that something philosophically decisive had happened. The boxes were visually indistinguishable from supermarket packaging — same dimensions, same surface — yet one was art and one was not. Whatever made the difference could not be seen. That question became the engine of the most ambitious project in American philosophy of art of the twentieth century.

Topics Arthur C. Danto addresses

• the artworld
• the method of indiscernibles
• the Brillo Box question
• the transfiguration of the commonplace
• aboutness as a property of artworks
• embodied meaning
• the end of art
• post-historical art
• the philosophical disenfranchisement of art
• narrative sentences
• interpretive seeing
• the four-condition definition of art
• works of art and mere real things
• essence and historical variability
• the Hegelian turn in aesthetics
• analytical philosophy of history
• basic action
• mimesis and Plato's banishment of the poets
• surface and deep interpretation
• metaphor, expression, and style
• content and causation
• future and past contingencies
• internal versus external beauty
• the late accommodation of beauty

Converse with Arthur C. Danto on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Arthur C. Danto's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.